Classic bargain
Charles Spencer
G"'January is depressing but as I sit here, working on a gloomy Sunday morning, I experience a rare glow of pleasure. I have just seen three adorable green parakeets in the garden (no, I'm not on the booze again, there is a famous flock of them living wild in my part of suburban Surrey) and I am about to bring a little happiness into your lives.
You may remember that in December's column I advised you to pop into an HMV record shop, spend £20 on Christmas presents, and pick up the little booklets they were dishing out offering discount vouchers usable during the first three months of 2004. One voucher in particular offers £20 off if you spend a hundred quid, and all of them are valid on items already substantially reduced in the HMV New Year sale.
I'm now going to suggest how you should spend that £100, which of course will only work out at £80. Don't fret too much if you failed to heed my advice about the vouchers — the savings are still enormous thanks to the sale. And, in my view, every one of the following discs deserves a place in any self-respecting pop collection. All my recommended choices were available at HMV Oxford Circus at the end of last week, but most of them should also be available in any of HMV's 160 shops nationwide. If they are not, ask the manager why.
The Definitive Ray Charles (2 CDs, £9.99, reduced from £16,99) is a blinding 46-track collection of the genius at his greatest, ranging through soul (which he more or less invented), gospel, country, rhythm and blues and pop. It is a staggeringly fine collection, offering conclusive proof that Charles is one of the most consistently entertaining and original giants of popular music. If you don't get a thrill out of 'What'd I Say', you are probably dead.
The Look of Love — the Burt Bacharach Collection (2 CDs, £9.99, reduced from £18.99) is another two-and-a-half hours of heaven, containing 50 of his finest songs, performed by their greatest interpreters — Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield and Aretha Franklin among many others. This is easy listening with lashings of class and barely a smidgen of cheesiriess about it. And don't miss Frank Sinatra's hippest album, Songs for Swinging Lovers (£6.99, reduced from £8.99).
For those dipping a tentative toe into jazz, two discs you shouldn't be without — Miles Davis's sublime and dreamy Kind of Blue (15.99, reduced from £8.99), the jazz record that even jazz-haters love. and Ella Fitzgerald offering the best of her great Songbook series in Essential Ella (£8.99,
reduced from £15.99) with peerless interpretations of hits by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. Look out, too, for Lady Sings the Blues (£9.99, reduced from £18.99), a stunning double-CD collection of songs by soul, jazz and pop divas ranging from Billie Holiday to Eva Cassidy via Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Nina Simone and countless others. Perfect late-night listening.
Among those included on Lady Sings the Blues is the magnificent soul-belter Etta James, superbly showcased on a Chess collection accurately titled Her Best (£5.99, reduced from £8.99), which includes her incomparable version of `I'd Rather Go Blind'. There's similarly intense stuff on Heavy Picks (£5.99, reduced from £10.99) by the criminally underrated Robert Cray, a great blues guitarist with a voice of infinite soul.
Getting rockier, you won't want to be without How the West Was Won (£11.99, reduced from £19.99), a double disc of live Led Zeppelin recorded at their swaggering zenith in 1972, or the superb career-spanning Pink Floyd retrospective Echoes (2 CDs. £10.99, reduced from £20,99). And don't miss either Roxy Music's best album, For Your Pleasure (£4.99, reduced from £8.99), and that endlessly rewarding masterpiece of British folk rock, Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief (£4.99, reduced from £10.99). Finally, two records that can't fail to cheer you up during even the darkest, dreariest days of winter. Bluegrass Bonanza (£9.99, reduced from £16.99 in the splendid ProperBox series) is a wonderful fourCD collection of string-driven American country music dating from 1927 to 1950 featuring the virtuosic likes of Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs. It unfailingly brings the sunshine out. And for sublimely innocent comic pleasure there are few acts to beat Flanders & Swann. whose Transport of Delight collection costs a mere £3.99 (reduced from £8.99) and includes such classics as 'The Gnu Song', 'The Gasman Cometh' and 'Madeira M'Dear'.
This tremendous selection, touching on almost every classic style of popular music, and with every album exhaustively tried and tested by yours truly, comprises 21 generously filled CDs. At full price, they would set you back £187.87, at sale price £103.87, and with the £20 discount voucher, a mere £83.87. That works out at an astonishing £3.99 a disc for some of the most enjoyable music you will ever hear and a whopping total saving of more than a hundred smackers. Happy hunting — and listening!
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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