What’s the best album you’ve never heard? Last week, Björk finally confirmed a rumour that has rumbled through the music biz for years. That, shortly before releasing Homogenic, she had collaborated on some tracks with the Wu-Tang Clan. “Magic” was how she described these unheard songs. That idea of the Shaolin swordsmen and the ice maiden jamming together at their respective peaks is certainly delicious. But could the reality ever stack up? After all, there is already a sort-of prototype out there, in the Clan’s bizarre fascination with UK drivetime stalwarts Texas. So arresting was this unlikely match to the 90s hipster mind that Sharleen Spiteri and Method Man were pictured together on the cover of style mag the Face. The music itself? Precisely, algebraically, the sum of its parts. Texas swoon. Wu jabber. It was inert. No alchemy was created.
Perhaps it is better for these songs to remain mythical. As the music industry has ram-raided its back catalogues for cashflow, many more “famous” never-released albums have trickled out. Brian Wilson’s Smile is the most obvious example. Prince has more than one: The Dream Factory, Camille and the so-called Black Album. But while Smile was a critics’ fave, and the Black Album has its fans, none were ever as legendary as their reputations. Art must have its legends. Like the memoirs that Byron’s friends burned upon his death; like the Pete & Dud tapes erased by the Beeb, they allow us to widen the aperture of our mind’s eye.
It’s a feeling familiar to anyone who used to read NME’s Single of the Week, then go out and buy it unheard. Often, the new Future of Everything hymned in blushing purple prose was something that turned out to be Alfie with a cowbell. The smell of music, unencumbered by melody or rhythm, is often better than music itself. How could the Helter Skelter album that Dr Dre and Ice Cube shelved be better than the one that already exists in the heads of fans? How could the extra Queen and David Bowie collabs whose existence only came to light last year be better than the ones you can cheaply and conveniently imagine? Or the MC Hammer and Tupac jams that Death Row are still sitting on? Weezer’s Songs From the Black Hole; Jeff Beck’s Motown album; Britney’s aborted Mona Lisa – all masterpieces of missing.
Not that everything automatically fires the imagination. Before she hit 25, Adele scrapped another album because, she said, she realised writing about having a baby “wasn’t interesting”. The world will not long mourn the Radio 2 warbler’s lost Mumsnet tapes.
Björk-Tang Clan is not out now
