JAVID QUANTICK LIKES

To write a column for Record Collector. Yay Best Known Album Syndrome

It is a truth well-known but rarely acknowledged that some artists will forever be associated in the public mind with one album. It doesn't matter how extensive their output – in fact, the more extensive the output the more select the association for many bands and singers, they will forever be known as the band or singer who did one album and one album alone. Which is at least better than being known for one song alone, or for nothing at all.

We're discounting one-album bands here, obviously - by which I mean the likes of the Sex Pistols with one real LP, Never Mind The Bollocks, and Lauryn Hill, with The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill - because we're talking about artists with a fair few records under their belts. Let's name a few. Meat Loaf will always be the man who made Bat Out Of Hell. This is fair enough, to be honest, since all Meat Loaf's albums were either Bat Out Of Hell Revisited (with Jim Steinman contributing songs, or just watching as his songs were sung) or Bat Out Of Hell Not Revisited (with songs not by Jim Steinman). The same applies to Jim Steinman's own solo work, which was a masterpiece of recycling where songs written for musicals or other groups would be folded back into variants on BOOH.