Les 50 Albums Les Plus Drogués De Tous Les Temps (NME)

Annotation :

"Rock Rule #3975: for the sake of your sanity, avoid the château. It might sound like the isolated Dukedom where you can knuckle down to your new album free of distractions, dealers and A&R ne’er-do-wells, but it might well end up a prison of paranoia, self-destruction and parties you can never leave.

When Pink Floyd picked Studio Miraval in a remote French château to record ‘The Wall’, it led to a terrifying claustrophobia and an irreversible split in the band. When Muse picked the same location for ‘Black Holes & Revelations’ they grew beards, tortured insects and started believing the world had ended without anybody telling them.


But by far the most classic example of châteaumania occurred in Villa Nellcôte in the south of France in the summer of 1971, when The Rolling Stones somehow pieced together ‘Exile…’ in the middle of scenes that Keith Richards would later describe as a cross between Hitler’s bunker, Versailles and Dante’s Inferno.

Amid a tsunami of heroin, “drunks and junkies” and celebrities – Gram Parsons, William S Burroughs, Anita Pallenberg – the permanently-wankered band (when they managed to turn up) recorded day and night in the villa’s sweltering basement while the groupies and dealers ran riot upstairs. At one point, so open-house and loud was the 24-hour party, country-rock legend Parsons was kicked out after partying there for a full month, and local drug dealers apparently walked out in broad daylight with half of the band’s instruments as ‘payment’ for Richards’ smack debts.

The Stones eventually vacated Nellcôte with the French plod’s boot up their arses, a couple of drug convictions and a two-year ban from the country. Oh, and one of the greatest rock’n’roll stories ever."

Annotation :

"Forty minutes, 13 seconds of jolting, messy, jaw-gnawing darkness.

Famously, Sterling Morrison said the band were all “dragging ourselves off a cliff... but at least we were all heading in the same direction”."

Annotation :

"The theme was the death of ‘60s idealism, and Sly was his own test subject, getting off his bonce on angel dust and making it sound like the best-ever time in the process."

Annotation :

"The album once destined to be known as ‘I Hate Myself And I Want To Die’ records Kurt’s much-wallowed misery in being impaled on the barbed spike of heroin addiction.

Eight months later Kurt decided he couldn’t live with the gut-rotting pain that heroin had brought to his door."

Annotation :

"The Fab Four’s seventh album was a revolutionary step forward, featuring string octets (‘Eleanor Rigby’), backwards guitars (‘I’m Only Sleeping’), high distortion (‘She Said She Said’) and pioneering tape loops (‘Tomorrow Never Knows’).

Mostly inspired by their burgeoning psychedelic experiences on acid, which reportedly developed after Lennon and Harrison had their coffee spiked during a dinner with a dentist."

Annotation :

"The apogee of cool, a dinner-party classic, and the biggest–selling jazz album of all time, made by a man who chipped smack throughout his career.

Which might also explain 1970’s ‘Bitches Brew’ – jazz-fusion’s insane, filthy, skronky Year Zero, inspired equally by Jimi Hendrix’s wah-wah and having half of Afghanistan in your system."

Annotation :

"Codeine found its way into hip-hop in Texas, where Houston natives have long been in the habit of dosing-up on a blend of prescription cough medicine and soda.

Three 6 Mafia’s ‘Sippin’ On Some Syrup’ brought the trend to national attention, while the late DJ Screw rose to fame thanks to his mixtapes, which slowed down popular hits of the day so they sound reeeallly gooood on syrup. But the best-known advocate of ‘purple drank’ is, of course, Lil Wayne.

Seldom seen without his tell-tale Styrofoam cup, Weezy’s slurred flow is shaped by his choice of refreshment. And while in later years, he’s talked of kicking the habit, his commercial breakthrough, ‘Tha Carter III’, still speaks of his predilection for sizzurp. “I’m used to promethazine, in two cups, I’m screwed up,” he rhymes on ‘Phone Home’."

Annotation :

"No matter how much LSD you take, turquoise satin bell-bottoms are never a good idea."

Annotation :

"On the Floyd’s debut Syd Barrett constructed glorious fantasies, spurred on by LSD consumption that could be described as ‘gargantuan’.

What would later become stomach-churning drug clichés are here startlingly original: childlike whimsy (‘Matilda Mother’), space-rock (‘Interstellar Overdrive’) and eastern mysticism (‘Chapter 24’)."

Annotation :

"Proof (if proof were indeed needed) that cokeheads really love the existentialist philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first part of Mazza’s mom-baiting trilogy expressed as its theme the hope that we could all learn to become more self-involved.

And stick dildos up our arses. And other shit."

Annotation :

"B-Real might have sounded like he’d been puffing on a zeppelin-sized helium balloon, but it was the industrial levels of Grade A sticky-icky the band were inhaling that turned the Hill’s second outing into an jittery soup of shotgun murders and murky bong water.

Eighteen years on, we still have no idea why Sen Dog sounds like he’s curling out a mammoth shit on half his verses, though."

Annotation :

"“Eating up the scum/Is the hardest thing for me to do…” Yes, the wracked ‘Psychocandy’ is a landmark album, a regular in Best Of lists and one of the greatest debuts of all time.

But hey, Reid brothers Jim and William, are these brilliantly lacerating odes about girls – “honey-dripping beehives” and all – or drugs? And does it really matter? "

Annotation :

"Just say no. That has always been Jason Pierce’s tactic when asked to talk drugs. Invited to take them, Spiritualized’s leader chooses a different line, this album suggests. What’s that he’s singing on ‘Come Together’? “Little J’s a fucking mess but when he’s offered just says YES”.


It’s no surprise. Pierce is a veteran of Spacemen 3: masters of the unsubtle drug reference who titled an early song ‘OD Catastrophe’. They weren’t posing, either. In Erik Morse’s band biography, Creation Records supremo Alan McGee declares: “The only band that took
more drugs than Spacemen 3 were Happy Mondays.”


With Spiritualized, Pierce reached new commercial heights – but old habits die hard. Packaged like medicine, ‘Ladies And Gentlemen...’ teems with narcotic allusions: to scary hallucinogen DMT, “my spike in my arm and my spoon” , “breakfast right off of a mirror”, and “a hole in my arm where all the money goes”. Sensing any patterns here?"

Annotation :

"Hanging around with David Bowie in 1973 was not for the faint of nostril.

The resulting Dave-helmed record accordingly sounds like it was mixed by people who were hanging round in a white-lined studio at 4am, going, “Fuck it. Why can’t we just turn EVERYTHING up?”

Annotation :

"Here’s something to ponder.

If you holed yourself up in a crumbling Victorian mansion and ingested enough Class As to precipitate ego death, perhaps you too could produce an album that sounds as decadent, and as brilliant, as Brett Anderson’s bloated masterpiece.

But you’d probably just die."

Annotation :

"Perhaps the more accurate alternate title, ‘Madman Passed Out Across The Coke-Dusted Coffee Table’ got shelved by the suits.

Reg’s 1971 classic launched him into a Force 12 blizzard of ’70s cocaine – the kind of don’t-make-’em-like-that-anymore excess that would ultimately see him phoning a hotel reception to get the wind turned off and thinking it was, like, a really good idea to get married to a woman. "

Annotation :

"The nebulous, half-formed structures of ‘Loveless’, where things swirl around warm and woozy, swimming in and out of focus and suddenly assembling into fascinating patterns before dissipating again, is mushrooms on toast.

Meanwhile, its dissipated sexiness, full of love but much too-fried-out-to-actually-shag, is ecstasy all over."

Annotation :

"In another, parallel, universe, ‘…Yes Please!’ was different. There, Tony Wilson sent the Mondays to a drug-free Singapore. There, they stayed relatively clean, got on, and made a workmanlike fourth that kept them churning out minor hits throughout Britpop.

In this alternate world, Factory Records still exists. Maybe even Tony is still healthy. It could so easily have been otherwise. After all, we all know how many tragic maybes there were within the recording process.

Shaun Ryder had enough methadone to make it through the month without smack. That is, before he accidentally smashed all his jars of the stuff at Manchester airport. Tony Wilson chose Barbados as the recording location because it was free of heroin. But no-one had warned the Factory boss that it was the gateway to America’s crack trade. To cut a long, expensive story short: Ryder becomes a one-man rock epidemic.

Sells Eddy Grant’s furniture. Forgets to write any lyrics. Holds the master tapes ransom until Factory give him more drug-wonga. Ultimately turns in the sound of five Mancunians going beyond the druggy-woozy sound of E into the druggy-crazy blank, confusing boredom of listening to crackheads jabber about nothing.

Massive flop. Label goes bust. Ryder dines out on the anecdotes for the next 20 years."

Annotation :

"An album that owes its inspiration to plant food, simultaneously the best (briefly) legal high ever and a chemical gateway into hell, a substance that rips away your inhibitions like flimsy lace knickers and leaves you a raving mess of libido, monomania and naked id.

The dead-eyed intensity of ‘Lying’ and ‘A Wooden Box’, are the perfect soundtrack; lust that sounds like rage, or rage that sounds like lust."

Annotation :

"Considering that Bowie spent the run-up to writing this coked-to-the-point-of-psychosis in Los Angeles, not sleeping for six days at a time, eating only red and green peppers and milk and filming the alienated sci-fi masterpiece The Man Who Fell To Earth, it’s not surprising that it sounds whacked.

Cold, ambitious and disconnected, it’s a fascinating, psychotically deep album, with much to be read between the white lines."

Annotation :

"The Heartbreakers were so fond of smack that they sung about it, and got Sid Vicious hooked on it. When Thunders finally OD’d he was so contorted that he looked “like a pretzel”, apparently."

Annotation :

"Identifying a drug-free Spacemen 3 album would be the real challenge, but this collection of early demos finds Peter ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember and Jason Pierce employing psychedelia and repetition with the focus of one who lives outside that conformist straightjacket of, like, knowing what day it is and stuff."

Annotation :

"Student party staple ‘Got Your Money’ notwithstanding, the second ODB album is primarily constructed from the late Wu-Tanger’s unhinged freeform rants.

And his arrest for possession around this time rather tells its own story."

Annotation :

"The album that spawned ‘White Rabbit’ – the 159th counter-cultural love-poem to Alice In Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, and the song that made generations yearn to throw the TV in the bathtub just as it peaked.

Altogether now: “One pill makes you larger…”

Annotation :

"The amount of LSD imbibed by Butthole figurehead Gibby Haynes reputedly made him an utter nightmare.

It also helped to fuel this album, also an utter nightmare."

Annotation :

"OK, so we detune a couple of guitars and lean them against these massive amps so that the feedback moves the strings and the guitars literally play themselves and that turns out over an hour of deafening electronic noise that’ll be lauded as classical music alongside Beethoven and Stockhausen and invent industrial rock and My Bloody Valentine and not just sound like two angry space stations fucking, I swear…"

Annotation :

"So weed makes you lazy and depressed, does it? Try telling that to Snoop Doggy Dog (as he was called back then). He smokes shitloads, and couldn’t be happier.

Here he is, extolling the virtues of his “fat dick”, pumping “slugs dead in your chest” and quite horrible-sounding group sex: “It ain’t no fun, if the homies can’t have none”. His true love is, of course, the chronic.

As he seductively whispers to his enormous bag of weed, “I promise I’ll smoke chronic ’til the day I die”. Bless ’im, the old gun-toting, willy-waggling romantic."

Annotation :

"Riding out a mess of cocaine abuse and intra-band groping, the Mac were so high that they thought it would be a good idea to name an album after their drummer’s slang for his nob."

Annotation :

"There’s a noise on opening track ‘Leave Home’ that goes “NNNNNNRRRWHUMP. NRRRRRWHUMP’. It is exactly the noise of coming up.

Ridiculously bug-eyed intensity on the first half of the album gradually winds down into the early-hours melancholy serenity of ‘Alive Alone’, perfectly the sound of finally staggering home, tired but happy in a morning that looks impossibly bright and beautiful because your pupils are the size of dinner plates."