10) Demon Days – Gorillaz  (May 2005 – Parlaphone)

Surprisingly enough, Demon Days is the only album in the top ten to be the product of a cartoon band.  The concept? that Gorillaz is a group of four animated characters who create and perform music. Of course 2D, Noodle and their cronies are not really creators, but the brainchild of one half of the Gorillaz project, artist Jamie Hewlett.  Hewlett’s creative partner is former Blur front man Damon Albarn, and it is he who is responsible for the majestic sounds of Demon Days. 

Throughout the record, Albarn displays his abilities as one of his generation’s greatest tunesmiths, with his folk-inspired melodies enhanced by his fifty-a-day vocals.  The songs amalgamate a series of influences, from dub-reggae to hip-hop to trip-hop to be-bop, fashioning a quirky and energetic sound world. The record features a host of guest appearances including De la Soul, Ike Turner and Shaun Ryder, yet this plethora of genres and artists doesn’t detract from the album’s focus and cohesion.  A nod must go to wunderkind producer Dangermouse who beautifully fractures the sonic texture with vinyl crackle and analogue hiss, helping to make this Albarn’s finest work to date. 

9) Since I left You – The Avalanches  (November 2000 – Modular)

The Australian band’s two members worked separately when creating Since I left You.  In two identical studios, Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann used mainly Yamaha Promix 01 and Akai S2000 samplers (relatively rudimentary equipment) and ferreted through their expansive record collections looking for sample-able sound bites with little concern for copyright.  Once an idea was spawned it was sent to the other half of the band to expand, and all the time the central concept was developed: ‘the international search for love from country to country’.  The first master copy, made up entirely of audio snippets from other sources, had within it around 3500 samples none of which had been approved by its author.  And so began the task of seeking licence, and due to legal difficulties the album was stripped back significantly before its official release.  Such audio absence is unnoticeable however, and the record, which is as uplifting an album as you’ll hear, remains, sadly, the band’s only full-length release. 

8) Up the Bracket – The Libertines  (October 2002 – Rough Trade)

What with Pete Doherty’s increasingly boring excursions into drugs, tabloids and the law, it’s easy to dismiss his musical output as insignificant.  It’s not, and this album proves it.  Up the Bracket, whose title alludes to a phrase from 1950s radio comedy Hancock’s Half Hour, triggered a new era in guitar-driven indie music with its counter-culture lyrics, disorganised we-won’t-pretend-to-be-good-at-guitar performances and under-produced finish.  Even if Doherty’s subsequent work doesn’t cut the mustard, his first offering is definitely worth a listen.

7) The Black Album – Jay Z  (November 2003 – Roc-A-Fella Records)

With production contributions from the likes of Timbaland, The Neptunes and Kanye West, The Black Album, which at the time of creation was to be Jay Z’s last, was never going to be anything other than a hip hop classic.  As one of the genre’s cardinal albums, Jay Z’s eighth is sometimes credited with the propulsion of hip-hop further into the mainstream.  It was perhaps here that hip-hop ceased to be the domain of just the American hood; middle class kids in suburban bedrooms now had an equal share in the genre that a few years later would attract the masses at Glastonbury Festival.  As you’d expect, Jay Z’s lyrics are sublime on this offering, one of the greatest in the hip-hop canon. 

6) Arular – MIA  (March 2005 – XL Records)

It has been said that ‘anything with a beat’ influenced MIA’s debut album – a dance album that failed to perform commer

cially but left critics hungry for more. Perhaps the biggest influence on the album is MIA’s father Mathangi Arulpragasam, a Tamil activist with the codename Arular.  His revolutionary ideals informed the thematic basis of the record, the product of MIA’s objective to create a dance album ‘that addressed important issues.’  The opus features appearances from the likes of Diplo and Switch, helping to retain the relentless energy that emits throughout.

5) Takk – Sigur Ros  (September 2005 – EMI)

The Icelandic band’s fourth album brought with it a new accessible sound; this is as close to bubble-gum pop that Sigur Ros is likely to get.  Granted, this band’s ‘pop’ is always going to be more Squarepusher than Coldplay, but the band’s adoption of the visceral to counterbalance the cerebral is plain for all to hear.  The album combines the macro with the micro; expansive guitar-walls juxtapose beautifully with intimate string quartet minimalism, achieving a euphoric aesthetic which is more familiar to the masses than the masses would think. Much of the music has been used by the BBC: as well as underpinning Planet Earth’s trailers, various tracks have become ubiquitous on Top Gear.  Fortunately, not even the image of Clarkson, Hammond and May kicking back to a bit of Sigur Ros is enough to put us off the record, the band’s magnum opus. 

4) The Love Below/Speakerboxxx – Outkast  (September 2003 – LaFace Records)

This quirky double album from the enigmatic duo Andre 3000 and Big Boi contains a bit of something for everyone.  In fact, it’s a safe(ish) bet that everyone is capable of singing a verse from the duo’s fifth studio album: it is, of course, the work that brought us pop classics ‘Hey Ya’ and ‘Roses’.  There is no typical track on this album – a coalescence of Outkast’s two halves’ solo projects – as influences vary from straight jazz to geeky Aphex Twin-style electronica.  Moreover, it is the diversity that such influences bring that defines the album.  Not many records from the last decade juxtapose a short play starring American rapper Fonzworth Bentley, a prayer to God in which the protagonist asks for a ‘sweet bitch’, and a breakneck improvisation based on ‘My Favourite Things’.  Despite the constant change of mood, both halves of the record feel like song cycles from which you could remove nothing without damaging the framework.  This was the first Parental Advisory labelled album to win an album-of-the-year Grammy.  After one listen, we can tell why. 

3) You Forgot It in People – Broken Social Scene  (October 2002 – Arts & Crafts)

‘You Forgot It in People’ isn’t the album most would expect a band of nineteen people to make.  Rather than an hour-long cacophony with a bunch of guitars giving it some, the record presents us with an intricate sonic experience.   The songs, which are glossed with a chaotic production, juxtapose traditional structures with adventurous instrumentation; sudden shifts in texture and boy-girl vocals add to the freshness of this work, the brilliance of which cannot be overstated.  The highlight of the album is fan-favourite ‘Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ which encapsulates BSS’ creativity with its digitally modified vocals over-pinning layers of simple but effective instrumental lines.  There is no weak track on the record – even the instrumentals that bookend the work sound relevant. Baroque-pop at its best.

2) From Here We Go Sublime – The Field  (April 2007 – Kompakt)

Despite being one of the lesser-known albums in the top ten, From Here We Go Sublime is one of the most justified. A product of prestigious German label Kompakt, the record was ubiquitous on ‘best of’ lists at the end of 2007, and was noted for its reluctance to conform to the pervasive techno trends of the time.

‘The Field’ is the moniker of Swede Axel Willner, who, for this album produced music which falls somewhere between minimal techno and trance.  Despite its dance aesthetic, the music is not such that would be heard in club; the record feels more natural through headphones or a bedroom hi-fi – this adding to its unique charm.  With its simple structures, the pieces borrow from Reich-like minimalism: small cells of sound (samples from the likes of Lionel Richie and The Four Tops constitute the bed of the record) repeat and repeat, gradually undergoing Willner’s subtle transformations.  With a sense of propulsion supplied by glitchy, softsynth beats, the music surges and retracts resulting in one of the most hypnotic aural experiences we could hope to experience. 

1) Kid A – Radiohead  (October 2000 – Parlaphone)

In the aftermath of the band’s previous release, Radiohead seemingly abandoned their previous influences.  No longer listening to Nivarna and REM, the quintet instead devoured the electronica of Warp Records’ back catalogue, immersed itself in contemporary classical music and developed an academic interest in Jazz; these influences combined to create an ethereal sound world on Kid A.   The opening track ‘Everything in its Right Place’, utilises solely synthetic instrumental forces, with Yorke’s mutated voice more another layer in the tapestry than a centre-piece.  ‘Idioteque’ samples one of the earliest ever pieces of electronic music, creating a beat driven lament on modern society.  The record’s standout track ‘The National Anthem’ spawns out of a short bass riff that permeates throughout, underpinning a Charles Mingus-like brass section constructed to sound ‘like a traffic jam’.

Now, the opus is unanimously seen as a classic, but at the time of release, the fans’ and critics’ reactions were luke-warm.  Furthermore, at the time of recording, not even all the band members were in favour of the change of direction. The camp was split into two factions during the sessions in a wintry Copenhagen: those who wanted three minute pop songs and those who wanted anything but.

Unlike the band’s previous works, Kid A didn’t provoke a superfluity of cheap imitations.  Even the most ambitious of plagiarists recognised the methods of construction used were too complex, the sphere of influence too expansive and the overarching vision too unique to warrant an attempt at emulating the sound.  No other band could have made this record: the decade’s finest.

Let’s get this established straight off: there is not that much wrong with Wolf Hall. Indeed, its success can only be a good thing: in a bestsellers chart containing Dan Brown’s latest thrilling ride through the Microsoft Word thesaurus, another dose of mawkishness from Audrey Niffenegger and a pararomance by some American woman called Stephanie Meyer, Mantel is about the only literary author holding her own. This book deserves its commercial pulling power.

We follow the rise and rise of Henry VIII’s adviser Thomas Cromwell, later the Earl of Essex, from a position literally face-down in the Putney dirt to the very top of the greasy pole of the Tudor court. Mantel strolls through sixteenth-century England like a master-gardener through an arboretum, breathing life everywhere she steps: Wolf Hall teems with richness and curiosity like a lovingly-tended period garden. Cromwell’s own character is robust and irresistibly likeable, and by his side we meet some skillfully drawn background figures, most notably a stormy Henry Tudor and a Thomas More who has received a total overhaul since A Man for All Seasons and reappears as a cruel, manipulative and yet oddly sympathetic player in the great game. There are fun cameos, too, from the the likes of the poet Thomas Wyatt and the painter Hans Holbein. The subtle clockwork mechanisms of court politics click and whirr around brilliant components, and the conversation alternately crackles with static energy or purrs with smoothness. Mantel has fine-tuned her machine beautifully.

This same niceness and vivacity run throughout the storytelling. There is no grandstanding here: when Cromwell’s young family is obliterated by the sweating-sickness, the pathos is of a variety so delicate as to be almost mundane. The tale progresses like music, with an adroit mastery of tone – sadness bleeding into bittersweet humour fluttering into menace – and of focus, as the intensely personal suddenly jerks into the greater scheme of the nation before slipping back to a small child again. This is all told in a prose style that will admit no commonplaces: Mantel can be blunt, she can be poetic, she can be complex, but she is always elegant and entertaining.

And yet – and yet. If you are just looking for a good read, you should probably stop reading this review now and go and buy the book. Still reading? Then hear me out, because, for all its many virtues – and you’ve heard me sing ’em tunefully enough – Wolf Hall just doesn’t quite satisfy. This is for two reasons. The first is that if Mantel does not write commonplaces, she thinks commonplaces: you’ll learn nothing new here. Wolf Hall makes no intellectual demands on the reader, and so offers no intellectual profit. Mantel has written a modern book about the sixteenth century that casts little light on the the Tudors or on us. The book is not “meticulously researched,” as one reviewer raves, but merely adequately researched. Mantel catches the social moment well enough – as we would expect from the author who spent nigh on twenty years preparing her French Revolution novel A Place of Greater Safety – but passes the Renaissance by. The correspondence between More and Erasmus, the Italy of Pacioli and da Vinci, even the theological fulminations of Luther: all are so much ambient background, and no more. Wolf Hall doesn’t feel like its period. To judge by the way the characters think, speak and act, they are twenty-first century men under sixteenth-century constraints – Cromwell himself is anachronistically liberal in his personal outlook.

Is Mantel, then, holding up what another reviewer calls “a dark mirror…to our own world”? Not really, unless you mean that she is being brutally honest about realpolitik and, yes, that realpolitik happens nowadays too. Even then, the unflappably humane Cromwell bears more resemblance to Merlin than to Malcolm Tucker; Wolf Hall is hardly a satire on contemporary politics or society. It professes to depict a world in which homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man – hence the title – a world of “inveterate scrappers. Wolves snapping over a carcase. Lions fighting over Christians”, and yet these wolves are tame even in comparison to a Frank Herbert novel. Mantel isn’t trying to say anything significant; rather, she is simply fascinated by her characters and her story.

The second reason why Wolf Hall grates is its construction. Frankly, it has no plot to speak of, just an endless succession of problems and solutions. Can Cromwell fix it? Yes, once again, he can. Cardinal Wolsey’s slide from grace at the start of the novel seems to augur tragedy on the most massive scale – as does the opening quote from Vitruvius, drawing the distinction between tragedy, comedy and the satyr play – but we finish in 1534, six years short of Cromwell’s execution, with his star firmly in the ascendant. Cromwell, moreover, has no real defects, and only develops in the most superficial fashion. The first two hundred pages are gripping, but I was really quite pleased with myself for making it through the next four hundred. Word has it that Mantel is planning a sequel to cover the latter half of Cromwell’s career, but if this book is read alone – and it was as a standalone book that it was awarded the super-duper-prestigious Booker Prize – it’s a bit uneventful, to be quite candid.

So take it as you will. If you want something undemanding to read on the train or between classes or whatever that will whisk you away to another world, Wolf Hall is a sterling piece of narrative written with impeccable good taste. Yet this good taste is all that stops it from being just another thriller: the difference between Mantel and, say, John Grisham is quality of writing, not quality of thought. The book deserves to be a commercial success, but perhaps not a succes d’estime. You might want to think of it as a really good biography instead. Measured against the best modern historical novels, however – works with a real sense of the dynamic between now and then, like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain – Wolf Hall lacks muscle and bite, for all its sleek grace.

Sitting in Belfast’s first (deserted) Argentine café on a cold Friday morning just before Christmas, I wonder what to expect of Lucy Caldwell – the playwright whose rather impressive résumé I have been studying for a couple of weeks. Caldwell has two full-length, three short and two radio plays to her name, among them Leaves, which was awarded the 2006 George Devine Award and short-listed for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She also wrote a Dylan Thomas Prize and Waverton Good Read short-listed novel as well as a novella, short stories and articles for The Independent. This is no mean feat, especially for a person still in their twenties. Lucy, however, is very honest and open about her success.

She is particularly insistent about her debt to playwright Chris Hannan (the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Drama Fellow during her second year at Cambridge). ‘He was so encouraging and he would think nothing of sitting for hours in Café Nero going through your script with you. He was brilliant,’ she tells me, describing her first ‘poor attempts at a play’. Given that her first novel, Where They Were Missed, was entirely written during her university years, her modesty seems a little unnecessary. ‘I started to write a story for the May Anthologies…and it just didn’t stop and about 10,000 words in I suddenly thought – oh my goodness, I’m writing a novel,’ she explains. It’s almost as if, at times, she takes herself by surprise.

This is not to say it has all been plain sailing. Lucy may

have enjoyed success others her age can only dream of but, when asked what she attributes this to, her response is instantaneous – ‘hard work’. Then she quotes Chekhov, one of her favourite dramatists, ‘I used to think it was fame that matters, but I’ve realised that all that matters is the ability to endure.’ The public nature of theatre makes writing for the stage particularly terrifying. She says, ‘It’s horrible actually. It’s really, really horrible. You are so powerless. You’re just sitting there and watching people review your work; it’s the most naked feeling.’ Her advice to the winners of the New Writing Festival, who will go through this for the first time in the seventh week of Hilary is to ‘have a good stiff whisky lined up for afterwards – maybe a couple before as well.’

Another thing which always takes her by surprise is her readers’/audiences’ desire to label her work as autobiographical. ‘To you that’s a sort of silly question because of course it isn’t, but people do assume all sorts of things.’ She does admit there ‘has to be some middle ground where you connect, I think, or [the characters] won’t live. Anne Enright has a lovely way of putting it – she says that her characters are ‘the sloughed skins of a snake’ – the people she wasn’t, the paths she didn’t take.’

Her approach to the production of her own plays is not overly possessive. ‘Some writers can happily direct their own work but I just can’t.’ Caldwell prefers to be involved at the casting and workshopping stages before giving the actors time to experiment. ‘My French translator has a lovely way of putting it – she says the actors need to incorporate the words, to literally take them into their own bodies and make the parts theirs.’ She acknowledges she’s ‘been really lucky to work with directors who [she] get[s] on with.’ For Caldwell, unlike some of her playwright friends, the ‘drama has been limited to the stage.’

One thing which strikes me is Lucy’s incredible versatility as a writer – not only in the variety of forms she works with, but even within her dramatic output. The writers she identifies as most influential are certainly diverse – apart from Chekhov, there is Brian Friel, Caryl Churchill, Tennessee Williams, Marina Carr and Mike Bartlett. Lucy’s plays include Carnival, a spectacular circus tent affair, as well as several pieces written for the radio. I ask her if it is the aural or visual aspects of theatre which she finds most important. ‘Well, personally, aural. I played a lot of music when I was younger and I always hear the rhythms of things.’ She once worked with an actress who could tell her whether a line needed to gain or lose syllables to let it ‘zing’. ‘I’m very good at being able to pick up on the rhythms or the patterns of someone’s speech. I always find that getting a hold on the way someone speaks is the key to making them come to life as a character.’

The variety of her creative work is perhaps key to Lucy’s productivity, ‘After finishing a novel you feel exhausted and drained and the thought of starting another novel is impossible but the thought of starting another play, bizarrely, isn’t. It’s a different kind of energy – a different kind of work. I think each form has its own limitations and abilities. And you have to be very much in control of your own form and know what you can do and you can’t do.’ In England she finds that her status as a novelist/playwright is viewed as something of an anomaly, ‘I get that a lot more in England than here. I think, in Ireland, people can be both – Edna O’Brien, Sebastian Barry or Beckett. Writers will work confidently across a lot of mediums, whereas in England you get a few – Michael Frayn for example – but it seems a lot more divided.’

It is in the tradition of an Irish storyteller which Lucy seems to find herself, ‘It was only when I left that I started considering myself as Irish. I suddenly felt that I wasn’t British or English. I only discovered that when I was with English people. I started saying I was Irish and I started writing about Ireland and, at the beginning, slightly resenting that I was setting my novel in Belfast, as if it was being set in Belfast without my consent. I think once you leave home you suddenly have this dynamic about home – what it is, whether you can return.’ Lucy now spends most of her time in London but says she feels ‘very torn’. The Belfast theatrical scene still has need for a lot of improvement, ‘It’ll be fantastic when the new Lyric opens [Belfast’s Lyric Theatre has been undergoing extensive renovation] and we have plays on; we need to have a big theatre that can stand up to the Abbey [in Dublin] or to the best regional theatres.’

Yet, aside from the Irish tradition, Lucy is also a part of the ‘explosion’ of new writing for stage the last decade has enjoyed. Jack Thorne and Ben Musgrave (both now successful playwrights) were also under Chris Hannan’s tutelage at Cambridge and Lucy has been involved with the Royal Court’s Young Writers’ Programme (a centre for new drama), ‘The Royal Court’s programme, especially the Young Writers’ programme, is absolutely fantastic. I can’t rave about it enough. It’s open for anyone under the age of 26 and there’s a negligible fee for an eight week course.’ For Lucy, good writing is key for the continuing success of the theatre, ‘now there’s a lot of devised theatre, collaborative theatre but I, personally, feel that nothing can ever unseat the writer. I think writing is the most important thing…but then I would say that.’

I ask if she has any advice for those considering a career in writing for the stage, ‘What’s particularly hard at the start is showing people your work for the first time – trust who you give your work to.’ She admits that, despite her success, ‘in a weird way it doesn’t get any easier’ but, with a draft of her second novel nearing completion, a new play at the Birmingham Rep next year and commissions to attend to, it doesn’t look like Lucy Caldwell will be stopping any time soon. ‘Putting one word in front of another is all you can ever do,’ she concludes.