As disused stations are, one imagines, to the railway enthusiast, or unrealised sketches to the art historian, so lost albums hold an irresistible mystique to the music fan. The less definitive their track listings, the sketch-ier the circumstances of their disappearance, the stronger the fascination they hold.

Having collected several of them over the years, it was more in hope than expectation that I took the idea of celebrating some of them to Radio 4. Calls were returned, plans hatched, musicians contacted, and Lost Albums begins next Tuesday with the songs that Elton John recorded with the Stylistics producer Thom Bell in 1977, blue-eyed soul cuts that remained largely unheard until 2003, when one of the songs, Are You Ready for Love, hit No 1.

Why the appeal of lost albums over ones that came out as planned? It’s because if one is a full stop, the other is a question mark. When albums actually appear, it’s the end of the story. Can I be the only person who felt a twinge of disappointment when Brian Wilson finally got around to finishing Smile? However, like many Beach Boys fans, I switched my attentions to what had taken the place of Smile as the new Great Lost Album By A Beach Boy. Dennis Wilson’s Bamboo should keep the fantasy track-listing brigade amused for years to come – having died in 1983, Dennis is in no position to follow in his brother’s footsteps and finish the job.

For the lost-albums enthusiast, generous credit has to be directed towards the main fa-cilitator of our fetish. The maligned bootlegger cops the blame for lost industry revenue, but the best illicitly circulated material has allowed fans to shine a light of love on abortive projects whose creators had long forgotten them.

When I set about planning the series, the record at the top of my list was Robin Gibb’s Sing Slowly Sisters. But given that the 57-year-old Bee Gee has hardly alluded to these 1970 recordings, it seemed optimistic to imagine that he might want to talk about them now. You could hardly blame him. Recorded almost a year after the Bee Gees split (and a year before they reformed), even the fifth-generation murk of boot-leg cassettes can’t conceal the turmoil of a man estranged from his brothers.

More importantly, though, Gibb was also fully realising his flair for the sort of achingly melancholy pop that yielded hits such as I Started a Joke. The title track to Sing Slowly Sistersis the sort of baroque wartime lament more commonly associated with Scott Walker, while C’est la vie, au revoir seemed to pré-cis Gibb’s existential outlook in five prettily embroidered lines: “When we were young/ We’d sing in spring/ A sweet lovely song/ You made me feel like a king/ Where did I go wrong?”

But it turned out that Gibb was happy to talk about Sing Slowly Sisters. Not only did he do so (in detail and with considerable humour) but he sanctioned the first airing of these songs.

Sing Slowly Sisters fell by the wayside after the reformed Bee Gees elected to wipe the karmic slate clean, but altogether more mystifying was the nonappearance of the group’s 1973 fully finished opus A Kick in the Head is Worth Eight in the Pants.

Listening to the album, it’s hard to fathom what the Gibbs or their record company might have deemed sub-standard about epics such as Losers & Lovers and Wouldn’t I be Someone. But then, even if the finished article sounds fine to us, who knows how much it might have paled in comparison with the way it sounded in its creators’ heads? Definitions of what constitutes a lost album can vary. Lal & Mike Waterson’s 1972 folk masterpiece Bright Phoebus made it as far as the shops, but a bitter copyright dispute has prevented the record from reaching an audience who wouldn’t hesitate to take its haunting agrarian shadow-world to its heart.

Is an album lost if it existed only in demo form and the minds of the musicians who conceived it? Prefab Sprout’s Paddy McAloon has written albums about Michael Jack-son (Behind the Veil) and world history (Earth: The Story So Far), but, without the funds to do justice to the-vision, he says the albums are unlikely to be recorded.

An album called Green Jacket Grey by Aztec Camera made it on to the release schedule of the legendary Scottish indie label Postcard. But when the group built around the prodigious teenage talent of Roddy Frame finally got around to putting out their debut it was 1983, the label was Rough Trade and the record was High Land Hard Rain.

By that time Frame had written a new bunch of songs – but bootlegs reveal that Green Jacket Grey would have been a different, no less exceptional, record. Imagine Arthur Lee’s Love transplanted to the rain-lashed suburbs of East Kilbride, with a postpunk Django Reinhardt on lead guitar, and you might be some way to imagining its odd beauty.

Records that remain hidden, be it as a result of their creators’ choosing or through mere circumstance, have a strange allure – even when they’ve been recorded by people you don’t particularly like. Take, for instance, Jean-Michel Jarre. In 1983, the prince of synth made an album entitled Music for Supermarkets – and pressed up just one copy. His point, apparently, was that music is an artistic enterprise, and a great album is no less a work of art than something hanging in the Louvre. Accordingly, Music for Supermarkets sold to the highest bidder for $10,000 (£5,000).

Of course, there are several Jean-Michel Jarre albums available to buy, but the only one I’m really interested in hearing is the one that, to all intents and purposes, I can’t. That’s the thing about lost albums. Even if there’s every chance that they’ll turn out to be boring, they remain oddly interesting. Lost Albums, Radio 4, Tues, 1.30pm

Missing in action: more lost classics

Bruce Springsteen: The Ties that Bind Intended for release in 1979, the best cuts were on The River a year later.

Neil Young: Homegrown Recorded in 1975, the uncomfortably personal nature of the material apparently led to Young having second thoughts.

Guns ’N Roses: Chinese Democracy Just a little more fine-tuning – and look, there go ten more years.

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