Musical Musings: Top 30 Albums of the 1990s Pt 3

The finale. Three weeks ago a fake “Rolling Stone top albums of the 90s” graphic went round on X with Alice in Chains at number one, my guest Sughosh dismissed it in a word — “Meh” — and I asked for his own thirty instead, chronological, one track from each, with his promise that the list “would summarily ignore popular culture of the time.” Two shows and twenty-three albums later he has kept his word: no Seattle, no Britpop big three, five albums from 1994 and none from 1995, one record made in a garden shed in Swindon and one at Karekare. This Friday at three we finish the decade — 1997 to 1999, the last seven — and then comes the reckoning: the final count of how many of his thirty appear on Rolling Stone’s real hundred best albums of the 90s, the omissions people have been shouting at him about, and the question he’s been dodging by putting the list in date order. I’m going to make him pick a number one.

As ever we’re keeping the seven titles to ourselves, but here’s the shape of it. Four of the seven are from 1998. Only one is from 1997, and it’s the one album on the entire list that Sughosh, the real Rolling Stone and even the fake graphic all agree on — though he’s chosen a track from it that was never a single and that only became a hit last year, twenty-eight years after release, thanks to TikTok. There’s a song named after the record-company boss who signed Madonna and the Ramones, about turning him down. There’s the biggest-selling record on the whole list, made in a flat in Stoke Newington on no money, which took three years to reach number one. There’s a bishop’s son from Enniskillen writing about the Troubles in the months around the Good Friday Agreement, a band coming back with a forty-piece orchestra after a seven-year strike against their label, and a three-CD set that was conceived in a piano bar and was meant to be a hundred songs long. And a thread that’s been running since show two finally pays off.

Broadcast 25 September 2026