I’m a sucker for concept albums. They’ve long been denigrated as unfortunate symptoms of ’70s rock excess, but this is a very stupid attitude: The concept album, done well, can be one of pop’s most elevated forms. Sure, 14 separate self-contained musical ideas can be fun and all, but what if you could successfully connect ’em to form bigger, stronger thematic ideas? Even that most hidebound of rock genres—punk—eventually embraced the concept album with Green Day’s American Idiot, and Beyoncé brought the medium into a new dimension with the full-album film for Lemonade.
But the concept album’s heyday was in the ’70s, when countless ambitious musicians tried their hand at album-length narratives in the wake of breakthroughs like the Who’s Tommy and the original recording of Jesus Christ Superstar. One of the latter’s performers even released a concept album of his own in 1972: Nigel Lived, by Murray Head, who’d sung the role of Judas Iscariot and would later have a huge hit with “One Night in Bangkok.”