NOBODY'S PERFECT

Not even the greatest musicians in the world can produce golden hits all the time. Kevin EG Perry reaches for his earplugs as he lists moments when it all went horribly wrong

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To be a truly creative artist, you have to be prepared to fail. For musicians who dedicate their lives to dreaming up something new and astounding, pushing the envelope and trying to move the art form beyond its accepted limits goes with the territory. It's in the nature of experiments that not all of them will prove successful. Music, after all, is like all art – inherently subjective. The same song that moves one listener to tears of joy might send another scrambling for the nearest exit.

That’s why it shouldn’t be a surprise that even musical geniuses sometimes end up releasing utterly unlistenable garbage. In some ways, we should salute these noble failures: without the risk-taking spirit that inspired these awful songs, we’d never have had all the groundbreaking music that turned these musicians into legends. Still, all that said, we’d prefer not to be trapped in an enclosed space with the following wretched playlist stuck on repeat.

Featuring tracks by Prince, Lady Gaga and Elvis Presley, here is our pick of the most terrible songs ever released by some of the greatest musicians in history...

13. The Beatles, ‘Revolution 9’ (1968)

Music fans who came of age in the era of personalised playlists may not realise the lengths older listeners had to go to in order to remove unwanted songs from a favourite album. When I was growing up, my dad swore by his treasured copy of The Beatles’ White Album, which he’d painstakingly taped to cassette specifically so that he could excise “Revolution 9”.

The bizarre and unsettling eight-and-a-half-minute avant-garde soundscape, said to be influenced by the work of composers Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen, may well be musically significant and groundbreaking, but it’s also undoubtedly