While debating the greatest guitar solos ever with Alex and Sue last week, I suggested that the absolute best is Prince’s one-off live performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Prince played alongside George Harrison’s son Dhani, ELO’s Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and more. This set me down a rabbit hole to find the best-ever version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Dave Letorey has an Isolation Station project where he’s interviewing industry people about their favourite music in a Desert Island Discs style. Last Friday he asked me to join him to talk about some music which is important to me. It was a fun forty minutes.

To celebrate the launch of my Code ♠ Shirts ♠ Rock tees tomorrow, here are my top five rock albums of all time.

Sue and I were driving home last Sunday when I realised that on Tuesday this week we would’ve seen Motörhead live at the Manchester Apollo.

Let me start this list of my top five country music albums of 2015 with a confession. Although country’s been by far my most listened to genre again this year, I haven’t listened to it as much as I have the past few years. In the latter part of the year, I’ve taken several musical diversions. The last one’s been Electric Light Orchestra, a band that I’ve loved since my teens. But, with the possible exception of their Wild West Hero, they couldn’t be further from county.

I know that my taste in country music’s mainstream. Mainstream enough that some country aficionados might criticise my ‘this Englishman’s’ lists for not straying far enough from the top of the country charts. The truth is, I like catchy country pop, and while next year I will try harder to discover music that’s further from the stereotypical southern dirt road, this year I’m happy to listen to songs about beer, cut-off jeans and cowboy boots, fishing in lakes and trucks and tractors.

Eclipsed by most of the nonsense going on at the Grammys—Honestly, people actually like Daft Punk?—were two good country music wins.

Related to my This Englishman’s top five country music albums of 2013, Alex sent me a link to this, on YouTube, Grady Smith’s ‘Why Country Music Was Awful in 2013.’

This time last year I didn’t feel much like sharing, so went without a run down of top country music albums of 2012. Looking back now, that was probably a wise choice as the musical year seemed epitomised by Lionel Ritchie, yes ‘that’ Lionel Ritchie’s truly, truly terrible Tuskegee. No link because, ‘Sail On!’