Music
7 albums that made 1997 a classic year for music
20 years have passed, but these records haven't aged a day. Relive these unforgettable classics.
Remember 1997? A new children's show named Tellytubbies was new on TV, a fresh-faced politician named Bertie Ahern was settling into the role of Taoiseach, and music – well, music was in the middle of a golden age.
These seven classic albums haven't aged a day – so whether you're nostalgic for the '90s, or you're too young to remember, it's time to click play.
Chemical Brothers – Dig Your Own Hole
Formerly DJs at London’s influential Heavenly Social, by 1997 Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands were the underground dance duo right on the verge of the UK mainstream. Their 1995 debut Exit Planet Dust had won them friends including The Prodigy and Oasis’ Noel Gallagher, and a collaboration with the latter – a cut of Beatles influenced electronic psychedelia titled Setting Son – gave the Chemical Brothers their first No.1.
Electronic music doesn’t always date that well, but the hard electronic funk of Dig Your Own Hole – a high-speed collision of rave energy and Public Enemy-style machine funk – still sounds unstoppable.
The Prodigy – Fat Of The Land
If you knew your underground dance music, you knew all about The Prodigy. But it was the video for Firestarter – reverse Mohican-sporting madman Keith Flint larking about in an abandoned London Underground station – that really made the Essex ravers household names. Liam Howlett’s production on Diesel Power and Breathe were impossibly heavy fusions of hardcore dance, punk rock and heavy metal, and the Kool Keith-sampling Smack My Bitch Up further stoked the controversy. It was a hit both sides of the Atlantic, hitting No.1 on the US chart.
Radiohead – OK Computer
It takes a special confidence to launch an album with a six-and-a-half minute prog rock song about the fall of the Roman Empire. But Radiohead had a lot to be confident about as OK Computer found its way to the shelves, and Paranoid Android was not even the oddest track (that would be Fitter Happier, a spoken word piece read by a Macintosh speech program). This might have been a heavily conceptual collection, a dark and angst-ridden survey of the information age, but it also hit more consistently than most singles collections, with the likes of Airbag and Karma Police consistently rated amongst the band’s best.
Björk – Homogenic
Much like Radiohead, 1997 found Björk moving her art into stranger, more conceptual territory. Tracks like Jóga and Immature tackled relationships and lost love, but a suite of unconventional instruments – including accordion, glass harmonica, chilly strings from the Icelandic String Octet and electronic textures from LFO’s Mark Bell – gave these songs strange and beautiful layers that shifted like a kaleidoscope.
Björk would follow this up with a remarkable run of records including 2001’s Vespertine and 2004’s Medúlla, but Homogenic is a perfect fusion between human warmth and sonic experimentation – it still sounds like her masterpiece.
Daft Punk – Homework
Before they were world-straddling disco robots, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were members of the Parisian indie rock group Darlin’. But a review in Melody Maker describing Darlin’s sound as a “daft punky thrash” suggested the group were going nowhere, and the pair decided to regroup as a production duo with a new, electro-disco sound.
The tracks on Homework were designed to be “a load of singles”, as Bangalter put it, so it’s pretty incredible just how well Homework hangs together as an album. Of course they’d top it with 2001’s Discovery, but Daft Punk’s debut still feels like a minor classic.
Wu-Tang Clan – Wu-Tang Forever
The Wu’s debut album Enter The 36 Chambers went deep, but Wu-Tang Forever was straight-up massive – a 29-track double album that found Staten Island’s finest pulling out everything they had. Still present are the martial arts samples, the B-movie dialogue, the booming bass lines that evoke some underground dive bar where glasses rattle to each vibration. But there’s room to breathe this time too, and a new cinematic quality that runs through everything, from the Ghostface-led Impossible to head-spinning crew epic Deadly Melody. New York City hip-hop at its finest.
Roni Size and Reprazent – New Forms
In the mid-‘90s, jungle found its way out of London and headed west to Bristol, where the style intermingled with local sound system culture. Perhaps this fusion’s crowning achievement was New Forms, the debut album by Roni Size and his collective Reprazent.
This was slicker, jazzier and more soulful than much of the music by Reprazent’s d&b contemporaries, but New Forms achieved that without watering down the music itself; on the contrary, tracks like Brown Paper Bag feel like the pinnacle of something, complex and funky as hell.