Or was it?

In the summer of 1967, the most scrutinised songwriter on earth went into a basement in upstate New York and made music that was never meant to be heard.

That is the first thing to understand about Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread. The second is that it may be the silliest thing Dylan ever committed to tape. The third is that silliness, in his hands, is rarely as empty as it looks.

The house was full of scripture at the time. Dylan’s mother, Beatty Zimmerman, visiting Woodstock, recalled a vast Bible propped open on a stand in his study, consulted more than anything on his shelves. You can hear it all through John Wesley Harding, the austere album taking shape alongside these sessions. You can hear it, more surprisingly, in The Basement Tapes too. Not only in grave songs like This Wheel’s on Fire and the non-album track I Shall Be Released, but in the throwaways.

Which brings us to that opening word. “Yea” is King James English, and in Genesis 3 it is the first word the serpent speaks to Eve. Evil enters creation on a “yea”. It is tempting to go further: to hear “Yea! Heavy” as a garbled Jehovah, or to note that a few chapters later Abraham sends Hagar into the wilderness with bread and a bottle of water.

Tempting, and almost certainly nonsense.

The refrain owes far more to Long John Silver than to Abraham. “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” was everywhere in Dylan’s boyhood, revived by a 1950s film and a television series that reached as far as Duluth.

The rest of the lyric refuses to cooperate. The narrator and a comic book board a bus. A chauffeur is laid up with an unpleasant nasal complaint. There is meat to pack, a trout to catch, a drummer who deserves a pie in the face. The lines are steered less by meaning than by the nearest available rhyme, bus begetting pus, out begetting trout, and they arrive in the brisk imperative Dylan was using across the sessions.

Tiny Montgomery works the same way: commands that sound urgent and mean nothing, like the mock examples of catachresis Alexander Pope lampooned in 1728.

This is free association, the method Freud adopted after abandoning hypnosis, and which he later conceded may have been planted in him by Ludwig Börne’s 1823 essay on becoming an original writer in three days. Write down everything that enters your head, Börne advised, without falsification. Börne was joking. Freud seems to have missed it. The surrealists didn’t care either way, and half the 20th Century followed them through that door: Breton, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lennon and his eggman.

The pleasure lies in the autopsy afterwards. Where on earth did that come from?

Put this song on the couch and a single pattern emerges. Every verse is a departure. The bus, then Wichita, then a plea to be taken down to California. A cherry-picking analyst would diagnose a young father, withdrawn from the world after his motorcycle accident, itching to escape the domestic quiet he had chosen. Perhaps. Or perhaps Wichita scanned.

What the recording captures is a room. Dylan sings with an audible grin. The piano plinks along on two chords, three if you’re generous. The backing vocals trail half a step behind, as though The Band is still working out what he has just made up, and a cavernous bass voice lands on the final “bread” like a punchline.

Two minutes, then gone. A sorbet between heavier courses.

It never enjoyed the afterlife of its siblings. Manfred Mann took Quinn the Eskimo to the top of the British charts. The Byrds claimed You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere. Fairport Convention had Million Dollar Bash. Nobody queued for this one. Dylan left it alone for decades, until a Brixton Academy residency in 2003, where the crowd greeted the opening bars like a lottery win. For the setlist obsessives, it was.

Perhaps that is the song’s real meaning. Not scripture, not pirates, not Freud. Proof that the man everyone wanted to be a prophet could still sit in a basement and be gloriously, deliberately foolish. Revelation, it turns out, can arrive in a pie that smells.

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The Most Ridiculous Song Bob Dylan Ever Wrote was originally published in PubBeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Somewhere in the 1980s, the Western world was told to fear the top of the bottle. The cream that once settled at the neck of the glass, a gold collar the milkman left on the doorstep, was reclassified overnight as a hazard.

Fridges filled with cartons in nervous pastel shades. Words such as “lite” and “low fat” appeared, spelled like apologies. Full cream milk did not argue, protest or rebrand. It waited on the bottom shelf for everyone to come to their senses.

Skim milk was the remaster nobody asked for. Someone went into the studio with good intentions and a spreadsheet, took out everything that made the thing warm, and handed it back thinner, brighter and faintly blue around the edges. The bass was gone. So was the room. Technically it was still milk, in the way a karaoke backing track is technically the song.

Then came the sequel, and it was worse. Full cream is now being quietly shown the door by a new generation of alternatives: soy, almond, oat, and whatever else can be persuaded to stand still in a blender. Cafés charge extra for the real thing, as if it were the substitute.

Some of these drinks are perfectly good, and for the lactose intolerant or the vegan they are a fair solution to a real problem. But almond milk is largely water that was once introduced to an almond at a party, and oat milk is porridge that has been talked into a carton. They are covers of the original, performed by very earnest session musicians.

Full cream, by contrast, is the original pressing. It has body. It coats the glass on the way down and leaves evidence. It makes tea taste like tea rather than hot regret, and it turns a bowl of cereal from a chore into something approaching a ritual.

It is the difference between a flat white and a flat apology.

Pour it over porridge on a cold winter morning and you’ll understand why the word “comfort” was invented, and wonder why anyone bothered to invent a low-fat version of it. Every milkshake ever served frothing over the lip of a steel cup was built on it.

Nobody has ever ordered a skim chocolate malt. Some things are simply not done.

The science, as science tends to, has since wandered back around. The fat that was meant to be ruining us turns out to be rather more complicated than the cartons claimed, and the dietitians who once waved it away now speak of it in the careful tones of people revising an old review.

Full cream has accepted the reassessment with the grace of an artist who never changed the record and patiently outlasted the critics.

There is a lesson in that for anyone who has ever been told to tone it down, or to be swapped out for something trendier. Full cream milk was asked to be less of itself for 40 years, and then asked to step aside altogether. It declined, politely, every morning. It stayed rich, stayed unfashionable, and stayed in the fridge of everyone’s grandmother, which is where the truth usually keeps.

Its one weakness is the use-by date. Full cream does not age gracefully; it turns, abruptly and without negotiation, and anyone who has taken a confident swig from a carton three days past its prime knows the particular betrayal involved. But even that, in its way, feels honest.

Skim milk goes off too. It just takes you longer to notice the difference.

This is the first in a series reissuing the forgotten classics of daily life: former chart-toppers, all but deleted, overdue for a deluxe edition.

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Top 3 milk songs

No Milk Today by Herman’s Hermits

Milk by Garbage

Milkcow Blues Boogie by Elvis Presley

In Praise Of The Original Pressing was originally published in Reviewsday Tuesday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Björk’s second album turned a move to London into 11 dispatches, each in a different musical language

Most people who move to London send a few postcards home. Björk sent 11, and each arrived in different handwriting.

Post landed in 1995, two years after Debut had put a respectable distance between her and the shambolic art-punk of The Sugarcubes. Debut was the sound of someone discovering the club. Post is the sound of someone who has stopped going home afterwards.

The Icelander had swapped Reykjavík’s sparse light for the noise and neon of a city that never quite switched off, and the album captures that disorientation without trying to cure it. She described its protagonist as the wide-eyed girl from the country who has been in the city a while, consuming it as it consumes her. Nobody has summarised the record better since.

The sessions began somewhere considerably less grey. At Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, Björk ran microphone leads down to the shoreline and into caves, letting the ocean have a say in the arrangements. It sounds like an affectation. It was closer to a principle: that a voice should be allowed to breathe somewhere other than a booth. Back in London she kept adding — harps, brass, dulcimers, bagpipes, strings — until productions already straining at the seams had nowhere left to go but outward.

The title does double duty. These are dispatches, and most are addressed to someone. Army of Me is tough love for a younger brother who needed to stop feeling sorry for himself, delivered over a rhythm that sounds like a forklift reversing into a steelworks. Enjoy prowls London after dark with the lights dimmed and the pulse quickening. Possibly Maybe picks over the wreckage of a romance with the forensic calm of someone who already knows the verdict. Headphones and Cover Me turn toward her collaborators, part thank-you note and part dare.

Then there is It’s Oh So Quiet, the big-band blast that made Björk a household name in households that otherwise had no use for her. She plays it as a woman ambushed by her own pulse, whispering one bar and shrieking the next. It is, of course, a cover of a 1951 Betty Hutton recording. The album’s most famous song is the one she didn’t write, which suits a record so determined to shrug off ownership of any single style.

Post refuses to sit still. Industrial clatter gives way to string-drenched balladry, trip-hop murk gives way to jungle, and nobody bothers to warn you. One moment you are lost in a glitchy techno labyrinth; the next, a harp is quietly tidying up after it. Nellee Hooper steered most of the production, with Tricky, Graham Massey and Howie B leaving fingerprints of their own, and the mid-90s studio sheen is audible throughout. It doesn’t date the record, largely because the technology always serves the feeling rather than the other way round.

The standard line is that Post is eclectic. That undersells it. Eclecticism implies a buffet; Post argues that the buffet is the meal. Its scattershot sequencing mirrors the way a city actually arrives at you — in fragments, at volume, out of order. Critics now like to call it a prophecy of the playlist era. Perhaps. But playlists are assembled by algorithms that want you to keep listening. Post was assembled by someone who wanted you to keep up.

Holding it together is the voice. Björk moves from trip-hop whisper to full-throated roar to something that sounds barely human, treating the instrument as both narrator and special effect. The implication is that identity need not be fixed. It can bend to fit the room, or the city, or whoever is waiting at the other end of the postcard.

Homogenic and Vespertine are more coherent records, and there is a decent case that they are better ones. But neither exists without Post, which gave Björk — and her audience — permission to treat contradiction as a method rather than a flaw.

Pop in 1995 was busy perfecting its formulas. Post took them apart to see what else they could hold, and was in no particular hurry to put them back together.

Three decades on, it still reads like mail from somewhere you haven’t been. The address keeps changing. The handwriting is unmistakable.

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Did You Know?

1. Army Of Me and The Modern Things, were written before her first album, Debut, but she held on to them because she thought Debut was a quote “more gentle energy and Post was more raw, more brutal” end quote

2. Tricky agreed to be a co-producer on two conditions: one, he would work on just two tracks and, two, she would contribute two vocals for his next album. And those songs were Keep Your Mouth Shut and Yoga, which appeared on 1996’s Nearly God.

3. The vocals to Cover Me were recorded in a cave full of bats.

4. The jacket Björk wears on the cover was inspired by Royal Mail airmail envelopes, referencing the album title.

5. During the album’s commercial peak, Björk was affected by media attention and Post’s promotional tour. She assaulted a reporter and survived a murder attempt and subsequently relocated to Spain.

6. A remix album titled Telegram came out in 1996.

7. In 2020, Rolling Stone placed the album at № 289 on its list of the 500 greatest ever recorded.

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Love Over Gold by Dire Straits

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Album Review | ‘Post’ by Björk was originally published in Rock On on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are moments in music history when everything aligns — the artist, the collaborators, the cultural moment — and something almost unreasonable happens.

Elton John’s three years between 1970 and 1972 is one of those moments. In the space of just 36 months, he released six albums, conquered two continents, and transformed himself from a slightly awkward unknown with bad glasses into one of the biggest rock stars on the planet. Not gradually. Not incrementally. In one sustained, jaw-dropping sprint.

To understand just how astonishing this run was, it helps to remember where he started. Empty Sky, released in 1969, was the work of a man still searching for himself. There were flickers of promise, hints of what was coming, but it was tentative, exploratory — an apprenticeship album. Not many people bought it, which, in hindsight, was probably a blessing. It gave John room to fail quietly, and then come back swinging.

And swing he did.

The quantum leap

Rarely has any artist taken a more dramatic leap between their first and second albums. Elton John, released in April 1970, landed on the world like an orchestrated thunderclap. Where Empty Sky had been uncertain, this was breathtakingly self-assured. The difference wasn’t just in the songs — it was in the entire architecture of the record.

The key was collaboration. Producer Steve Brown, recognising his own limitations after Empty Sky, had the wisdom and humility to step aside and bring in Gus Dudgeon, fresh from producing David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Dudgeon then brought in arranger Paul Buckmaster, and suddenly the team that would define Elton John’s classic sound was complete.

Buckmaster’s strings weren’t afterthoughts bolted on in post-production — they were recorded live with the band, integral to the process, responding and inspiring in real time. The result was an organic cohesion, a sense of unified purpose, that no amount of studio trickery could have manufactured.

The album announced itself with Sixty Years On — 90 seconds of swirling strings and harp before Elton even opened his mouth, as if the songs themselves demanded reverence. Then Your Song arrived: a single so unassuming and so perfect that it felt less like a pop record and more like a letter slipped under your door. It reached №7 in the UK and №8 in the US. Elton John had a hit on his hands.

Remarkably, the critics largely missed what they were hearing. Most reviews were lukewarm. Almost every one of themhas since recanted. History has been considerably kinder than the initial press: Elton John now sits comfortably in his top five records, the album that didn’t just launch a career but established a blueprint for how sophisticated music could connect with broad audiences without sacrificing emotional directness.

The timing, too, was almost cosmically perfect. The Beatles announced their break-up the very week the album hit shelves. The world was ready for a new rock god. Elton — vulnerable yet confident, theatrical yet grounded — was more than ready to fill the vacancy. The world just hadn’t caught up yet.

The Wild West and the road not taken

Before 1970 was even out, John had released a third album. Tumbleweed Connection arrived in October — and nobody could have predicted it. This wasn’t the natural follow-up to a breakthrough hit record. Instead, John and lyricist Bernie Taupin made a sharp left turn into American roots music, creating something so steeped in Americana that listeners could easily forget these were two young Englishmen who had never set foot in the places they sang about.

Taupin’s obsession with an imagined American landscape — Civil War memories, frontier towns, gospel fires, dusty roads that never truly existed yet felt completely lived in — gave the album its mythic, romantic tone. John used this canvas to deliver some of his most soulful early vocals. Gone were Buckmaster’s sweeping orchestrations. In their place: something grittier, earthier, more rooted in country, blues, and gospel. The album had no singles. None. For a newly minted star who still needed radio to sustain momentum, this was an act of almost reckless artistic courage.

It paid off. Tumbleweed Connection went Top 2 in the UK and Top 5 in the US. Writing in the LA Times, Robert Hillburn called it “that near-perfect album that artists often spend a whole career trying to produce”. It was Elton John’s third record.

The album’s genius lay in how it functioned as a complete work rather than a collection of songs — a concept album in mood and atmosphere rather than plot, creating a sustained feeling of a particular time and place filtered through two British imaginations. Songs like My Father’s Gun — which Bob Dylan singled out for personal admiration — didn’t trivialise the Civil War experience. They inhabited it, painting scenes of loss and misguided hope with genuine reverence. That sincerity was precisely what allowed the album to transcend pastiche.

In the context of John’s eventual superstardom, Tumbleweed Connection stands apart as a road not taken — a glimpse of an alternate career trajectory where artistic vision consistently trumped commercial calculation. It is an album that refuses to pander, demands attention, and rewards patience. And it has aged beautifully, retaining a timeless quality while much of John’s later, more overtly commercial work feels dated by comparison.

The Dark Album

1971 brought Madman Across the Water, and a change of temperature. Where Tumbleweed Connection had been expansive and mythic, Madman turned inward. Themes of isolation, alienation, and emotional instability moved to the foreground. Buckmaster’s strings returned, darker and more haunting than before, lending the record a gothic grandeur that suited the material perfectly.

It opened with a one-two punch that remains one of the most extraordinary back-to-back tracks in rock history. Tiny Dancer — Taupin’s tender, wide-eyed portrait of life on the American road, built around a melody of such luminous simplicity it seems to have always existed — was followed immediately by Levon, a brooding, hypnotic character study that John sells with complete conviction. Neither song charted particularly well at the time. Tiny Dancer barely cracked the US Top 40 and it wasn’t until Cameron Crowe used it in Almost Famous in 2000 that it became the universally loved classic it deserved to be all along.

Madman Across the Water was not without its challenges. John still couldn’t use his own touring band — label executives and producer Dudgeon remained unconvinced — and the album was, by John’s own later admission, squeezed out under pressure. “It was very painful,” he said. “It was done under pressure and really tortured out of us, and I think it’s remarkable that it turned out as well as it did.”

The second half dips slightly, the ambition occasionally outrunning the execution. But the title track alone — serpentine, minor-key, menacing — stands among the most haunting things he ever recorded. Madman Across the Water wasn’t a massive commercial success, but it closed a chapter. The next one would be something else entirely.

The party starts

In January 1972, John found himself in France. Word had come in about Château d’Hérouville — a large 18th-century country house outside Paris where Van Gogh had painted and Chopin had conducted a mad love affair. It seemed, John decided, like the perfect place to make his fifth album.

Honky Château was the moment everything came together. For the first time, John was free to record with his full band — bassist Dee Murray, drummer Nigel Olsson, and new guitarist Davey Johnstone, who had been quietly brought into the fold during Madman. Free from label pressure and the intrusions of session men, in a rambling French country house with just producer Dudgeon for company, the album was recorded in a single, unhurried month.

The looseness showed — and it was glorious. Honky Château sounded freer, more intimate, more instinctively alive than anything John had previously recorded. Rocket Man — finished on his very first day at the château — sent him spaceward. Honky Cat got the party started. I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself managed the remarkable trick of being simultaneously the most morbid and most joyously rollicking song on the record, a music-hall satire complete with tap-dancing interlude. Then, tucked away on side two, Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters — Taupin’s portrait of New York, written after hearing a gunshot outside his hotel room window — quietly stole the entire album: beautiful, unhurried, tender, and impossible to forget.

Elton John himself said Honky Château did for him what Revolver did for the Beatles — pried open the gilded gates and lifted him onto a higher plane. The record topped the American charts. It was the first of seven consecutive US №1 albums. The streak that followed — Don’t Shoot Me, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Caribou, Captain Fantastic — constitutes one of the great sustained commercial and artistic runs in popular music history. None of it happens without these three foundational years.

What it all meant

Step back from the individual albums for a moment and look at the shape of it. In three years, John had released four records of remarkable consistency — each one different from the last, each one taking a creative risk that lesser artists wouldn’t have dared. A lush orchestral ballad record. A rootsy American concept album with no singles. A dark, inward-facing prog-inflected mood piece. And then a loose, joyous, band record that sent him stratospheric. The range is extraordinary.

And, it’s also worth pointing out he also recorded the soundtrack to 1971’s Friends and put out a live album. So that’s six albums!

What made it possible was the partnership with Taupin — a genuinely unique songwriting collaboration in which two people who rarely occupied the same room at the same time produced some of the most emotionally direct and lyrically ambitious pop music of the era. Taupin would write the words. John would set them to music. The process sounds almost mechanical in description. The results were anything but.

By the end of 1972, Elton John was a superstar. The slightly awkward young man with bad glasses and acne on the cover of his second album — the last photograph of a pre-fame life — was gone. In his place stood one of the defining artists of the decade that was just getting started.

He was 25 years old. And he was only just beginning.

Question without notice

Were 1970–72 actually Elton’s greatest years? The case for 1972–74 is formidable: Don’t Shoot Me delivered his first US №1 single; Goodbye Yellow Brick Road — 17 songs written in two and a half weeks — contained Candle in the Wind, Bennie and the Jets, and what might be the best song he ever sang in the title track. Even the relatively rushed Caribou went to №1 on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then there is 1973–75, bookended by Captain Fantastic and Rock of the Westies — two albums that achieved the then-unprecedented feat of entering the US charts at №1. The commercial dominance was almost incomprehensible.

But the 1970–72 period has something the others don’t: it was formative. These were albums made before superstardom gave him permission to do anything he liked — records of genuine artistic courage with no commercial safety net. There is a hunger in them that the later work, brilliant as it often is, cannot replicate.

The later peaks were higher. But this was where Elton John learned to climb.

• Tumbleweed Connection was released on this day in 1970.

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How Elton John Rewrote The Rules In Three Astonishing Years was originally published in Music For Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Elton John (1970) ★★★★★

Study the cover before you drop the needle. A young man stares back: awkward haircut, thick unfashionable glasses, unremarkable in every way. Within months that face would vanish under sequins and platform boots. Elton John is the last document of the before.

The leap from Empty Sky is one of pop’s most startling transformations. Gus Dudgeon, fresh from Bowie’s Space Oddity, gave the songs room to breathe. Paul Buckmaster gave them muscle, with strings that grieve and insist rather than decorate, recorded live with the band. Bernie Taupin’s lyrics find their first full flowering, and Elton meets each one with uncanny melodic generosity.

Your Song gets the headlines, rightly. But Sixty Years On has a desolate grandeur, and Border Song a gospel conviction, that mark this as a statement rather than a single.

The Beatles broke up the week it arrived. The world needed a new voice. Here it was.

Tumbleweed Connection (1970) ★★★★★

John had barely become a star when he walked back into Trident Studios to make a record with no singles. Two young Englishmen who barely knew America conjured Civil War soldiers, frontier towns and gospel fires, and made them feel more lived-in than the real thing.

The audacity is breathtaking.

The Band’s shadow falls long, but John and Taupin don’t dabble. They immerse. Taupin’s mythologised America is romantic, violent, occasionally troubling, and Elton’s melodies unfold in movements rather than tidy choruses. Buckmaster now serves mood rather than spectacle, and the result plays like an unmade Western about loyalty and loss.

My Father’s Gun inhabits its war rather than trivialising it. The album never winks, and that sincerity saves it from pastiche.

The sepia cover, two young men in costume at a weathered station, is the whole philosophy made visual.

A road not taken. And what a road it was.

Friends (Original Soundtrack, 1971) ★★★

Elton told Rolling Stone in 1973 that he regretted giving Honey Roll and Can I Put You On to a forgotten French film. He wanted them on a proper album. That tension, between what Friends is and what it might have been, runs through every groove.

It was a commission taken before the hits arrived, finished in four frantic weeks and padded with orchestral interludes to reach album length. The wonder is that it holds together.

Buckmaster is again the secret weapon. Variations on Michelle’s Song, all flute and French horn, achieves a pastoral beauty with nothing to prove. Seasons is the loveliest of the vocal tracks, tender and unhurried, while Can I Put You On crackles with real rock and roll blood.

Friends is not essential, but it shows two young men meeting an obligation with more craft than it deserved.

Bread and butter work, occasionally transcendent. That’s enough.

17–11–70 (1971) ★★★★

Nobody planned this. The label released it because bootleggers were already selling it.

Strip away the orchestras, Buckmaster’s strings and Dudgeon’s careful production. What remains, on a November night in New York before a small, lucky studio audience and a much larger one on WABC-FM, is simply a young man at a piano with Dee Murray on bass and Nigel Olsson on drums, playing like the building is on fire.

Take Me to the Pilot sets the temperature, rawer than the studio take. Sixty Years On sheds its grandeur and turns naked. Then Burn Down the Mission swallows My Baby Left Me and Get Back, the sound of a pianist raised on Little Richard allowed to go all the way. The Honky Tonk Women cover is presumptuous. He gets away with it.

This is the Elton underneath the rhinestones. Wilder, hungrier, more dangerous.

The bootleggers understood first. They usually do.

Madman Across the Water (1971) ★★★★

Three albums in less than a year should have broken him. Instead, exhaustion produced some of the darkest, most honest music of his early career. The imagined West is gone, replaced by isolation and the peculiar loneliness of becoming famous in someone else’s country.

Buckmaster’s strings no longer soar. They coil and brood. The title track, rescued from the Tumbleweed sessions with a young Davey Johnstone on guitar, is among the most haunting things Elton ever recorded. Nobody has quite decoded it. Nobody needs to.

Tiny Dancer waited decades for Almost Famous to make it an anthem, yet six minutes pass like two. Levon very nearly matches it.

There are weaknesses. The back half sags under orchestral weight, Rotten Peaches is busier than it needs to be, and the choir on All the Nasties overshoots.

But Goodbye, 100 seconds of piano and apology, closes everything perfectly.

He needn’t have bothered.

Honky Château (1972) ★★★★★

A French country house. His own band in the studio at last. A producer who knew when to step back. For the first time in his recording life, John was comfortable, and comfort suited him magnificently.

The previous albums had been remarkable but constrained. Here the anxiety evaporates, replaced by something looser and warmer: rock, soul, gospel, music hall and science fiction sharing the same unhurried air.

Rocket Man takes Ray Bradbury’s astronaut father and makes the cosmic domestic. Its loneliness is not dramatic. It is the loneliness of routine. Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, born of Taupin’s first disillusioned visit to New York, is set to bare piano and mandolin, among the most unguarded moments of Elton’s career.

No filler here. Honky Cat bounces with New Orleans mischief, and Susie (Dramas) remains overlooked.

It became his first American №1 album.

He would not look back for years.

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Elton John: Three years powered by rocket fuel was originally published in Rock n’ Heavy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Somewhere, an English teacher is still reaching for the red pen. Pop has always been suspicious of the dictionary, and the misspelt title is its most efficient act of rebellion: a single word mangled on a record sleeve can signal youth, menace, wit or simple impatience before a note has played.

Sometimes it is a pun hiding in plain sight. Sometimes it is a phonetic shout from the terraces, or a text message from a man who knows where you live. Occasionally it is a purple signature.

The seven songs gathered here span more than four decades and almost every genre, from glam to gangsta rap, yet each treats spelling as one more instrument to play slightly out of tune.

1. Look Wot You Dun by Slade (1972)

Teachers complained. In January 1972 the band’s phonetic spelling became a matter of national pedagogy, which says plenty about Slade’s gift for annoying exactly the right people. Look Wot You Dun followed the chart-topping Coz I Luv You and stopped at №4, a near-miss that sounds, in hindsight, like a band clearing its throat before 1973.

It is stranger and sadder than its stomp suggests. Jim Lea and Don Powell built most of it before Noddy Holder added his share, and the lyric is less terrace chant than coming-of-age catechism: question after question about disorientation, beginnings and being torn apart, set against a promise that the years ahead hold fresh thrills and fresh damage alike. Powell, from behind the kit, supplies the chorus’s heavy breathing. Dave Hill, his own guitar stranded by Christmas weather, plays Peter Frampton’s.

Chas Chandler keeps the production lean, and the song never found a studio album home, surfacing instead on the 1973 compilation Sladest. That suits it. A song about searching rather than arriving was always going to live between albums, not on one.

2. D’Yer Mak’er by Led Zeppelin (1973)

Say “Jamaica” in a broad enough English accent and it becomes a bawdy question, which is the joke behind the title. American listeners, ignoring the apostrophes, settled on something closer to dire maker, and a couple of reviewers at the time appeared to agree.

The song began at Stargroves in 1972 with John Bonham playing a doo-wop beat and nudging it fractionally off its axis until reggae fell out. Three microphones set well back from the kit gave that drum sound its cavernous weight. Lyrically it is pure 1950s pleading: a letter, the bad news it carries, anger, sorrow, refusal to let go. The tribute to Rosie and the Originals on the first pressing gives the game away.

John Paul Jones called it an unconsidered studio joke. Robert Plant wanted it out as a British single; the band said no, leaving promo copies as collector’s items while America took it to №20. Critics heard parody. Axl Rose heard his way into heavy rock. Both were listening to the same thing: four men, all credited, discovering that heaviness and silliness can share a groove.

3. Nite Klub by The Specials (1979)

Every provincial town had one: a carpeted room with a dress code, a bouncer and the faint promise that tonight might be different. Coventry in 1979 was no exception, and on The Specials’ debut, produced by Elvis Costello for Jerry Dammers’ 2 Tone label, Nite Klub props its narrator at the bar of one, counting his reasons for being there and finding none.

The song works as a self-portrait in negative. He sleeps through daylight, calls himself a parasite, explains unemployment with a shrug that is half boast and half indictment, and flaunts a membership he plainly despises. The vulgar verse, delivered with a sneer, insults the venue and its patrons in equal measure, yet he keeps paying. That contradiction is the point. Ska’s original sunshine has been swapped for fluorescent tubes and sticky floors.

Musically it lurches rather than skanks, guitar pushed forward in the way the album rewrote the Jamaican template, with Chrissie Hynde among the backing voices. The joke lands, then slowly curdles. In Thatcher’s Britain, the club was the only room left with the lights on.

4. Wot by Captain Sensible (1982)

At five in the morning, somewhere in America, a pile driver went to work outside a hotel housing the Damned. Captain Sensible did what any self-respecting punk would do: he taped it, carried the evidence to reception and lodged a complaint. He was wished a nice day. He did not get one.

Home again, producer Tony Mansfield turned the recording into a loop in 10 minutes, and the song, briefly titled Cap’s Rap, was built on top of it. Sensible’s description of the process amounted to piling junk onto a racket, which undersells it slightly. The verses recount the sleepless morning, wander off into bawdy filler and stop for a pantomime jab at a pirate called Adam [Ant]; few listeners in 1982 needed the reference explaining. Dolly Mixture’s backing vocals turn the call-and-response chorus into a playground chant that refuses to end.

Britain gave it a respectable chart run. Continental Europe took it to heart. Rap had barely crossed the Atlantic, and one of its earliest British send-ups arrived courtesy of a building site and a man who wanted a lie-in.

5. Gett Off by Prince (1991)

Prince celebrated turning 33 by giving nightclubs a present: a 12-inch pressing of a song nobody could buy, stretched to almost 10 minutes. The response was loud enough that Gett Off became a single, then forced its way onto Diamonds and Pearls so late that its title was scrawled in red over the track it replaced.

It had been assembled from spare parts. A chorus from Lovesexy’s Glam Slam, lines borrowed from Graffiti Bridge, fragments of a B-side: Prince recycled the way other people breathe. What emerged, with the minted New Power Generation behind him, Eric Leeds’s flute darting through the bass and a guitar solo for good measure, was the most brazen thing he had released in years. The lyric opens with mock politeness, offers a numbered menu of positions, migrates to a parking meter and detours through a James Brown homage.

Rolling Stone’s David Fricke summed it up as “Dirty Mind goes house”. America stalled it at №21; Britain sent it to №4. The man had been away from the gutter for a while. He knew the way back.

6. Check Yo Self by Ice Cube (1993)

In 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five used a slow, sticky bassline to describe a city closing in on its residents. Eleven years later Ice Cube borrowed the same groove to describe what he would do to anyone who got in his way. Context is everything; so, apparently, is a hook.

Check Yo Self arrived in July 1993 as the third and final single from The Predator, with Das EFX supplying the stammering, sewer-dwelling cadence that turns the title into a schoolyard taunt. The original mix leaned on a Sweet Inspirations sample and a snatch of the Beastie Boys; the remix, built on The Message, is the one radio remembers. It topped Billboard’s rap and R&B charts and cracked the Hot 100’s top 20.

The verses are harder to love. Car theft, firearms, prison-rape threats and a closing tirade against women sit uneasily beneath that bouncing chorus, and no amount of wordplay disguises the contempt. Yet the warning outlived its author’s menace: Chuck D re-cut it, Snoop Dogg covered it, Hollywood licensed it. Threats age badly. Catchphrases are bulletproof.

7. We No Who U R by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (2012)

A title spelt like a text message, from a man who once wrote murder ballads in the cadence of the King James Bible. Nick Cave introduced Push the Sky Away with its most deceptive gesture: a lead single, released in December 2012, that sounds too quiet to contain anything at all.

Listen closer. The lyric moves through a landscape that does not care about us: trees indifferent to birdsong, morning dew, hands raised in supplication, then scorched. Forgiveness is repeatedly declared unnecessary, which is either grace or a verdict. Only at the end does the refrain arrive, and its intimacy tips into surveillance. Knowing someone’s name and address is the stuff of love letters and threats alike, and Cave refuses to say which this is.

Recorded in a Provençal mansion with Nick Launay, and without Mick Harvey for the first time, the band let Warren Ellis’s loops, flute and hushed harmonies do the work Grinderman once did with volume.

The album became their first Australian №1. Not bad for a whisper that sounds like it is reading your mail.

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Seven Songs That Didn’t Use Spellcheck was originally published in Hot List Energy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.