Of course I’m excited about the imminent Led Zeppelin reunion. But it’s an excitement with strings attached – a tingle tempered by an acceptance that I won’t actually hear my favourite song pass from the lips of Robert Plant. The reason for that is that Big Log isn’t, strictly speaking, a Zep tune. It was a solo hit for Plant in July 1983 – a point at which, aged 13, I had never heard a note by Led Zeppelin.

Isn’t this how most of us get into 20th-century rock monoliths? Backwards and haphazardly? I’ll never know what it was like when Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out, but that might be a good thing. With no Beatles baggage to declare, my entry point into John Lennon’s work was the allegedly past-his-peak (Just Like) Starting Over. In the weeks after he died, his story was one I traced in reverse, from that song. To this day, I’ll still take the unalloyed rapture of (Just Like) Starting Over over Imagine or Cold Turkey.

This was a time when vintage Dylan albums such as Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks meant nothing to me. My interest in Bob was piqued by the Mark Knopfler-produced Jokerman video, in which he holds forth like an asthmatic oracle, reeling off quasi-religious imagery. Few Bobsessives would suggest starting the Dylan journey with Jokerman, but that’s what I did, and with every passing year I’m more grateful for it.

Unburdened by the weight of history and the received wisdom that goes with it, I can spot a good song when I hear one. The first time I heard Neil Young, he was on The Old Grey Whistle Test. His hair was short, his shades were of the wraparound variety and he was singing a brilliant song called Computer Age through a vocoder. For a brief period of my life, Neil Young was a futuristic cyborg.

Sonic Youth went on to cover Computer Age, but in a world where the critical consensus had already been established, the accompanying album, Trans – with its 21st-century rendition of his Buffalo Spring-field tune Mr Soul – didn’t stand a chance. Only when Young returned to cantankerous dad-rock mode with Freedomwas he judged by critics to have rediscovered his mojo.

On the Doors’ Five to One, Jim Morrison addressed his generation by singing: “They’ve got the guns, but we’ve got the numbers.” It might have been a neat rallying cry for countercultural times, but the problem is they’ve still got the numbers.

This consensus may seem innocuous but, in many respects, it informs the terms we use to describe music. A good song by the Beatles is a classic. A good song by Paul McCartney, on the other hand, is a guilty pleasure. But just as there are some crap Beatles songs – Savoy Truffle, What Goes On– there’s no shortage of great solo Paul moments. Some of the first Macca songs I ever heard – Waterfalls, Coming Up – were singles culled from an album, McCartney II, which, for its close, cocooned, electronic ambience, sounded like a mellower older brother to Radiohead’s Kid A. If that sounds a farfetched comparison, listen to Temporary Secretary, a wonky glitch-disco treat whose DNA has spread to the music of latterday envelope-pushers such as Air, Justice and LCD Soundsystem.

The tragedy comes when artists start to believe that their early efforts constituted a classic era, or that they are fated never to overturn the view that they will always be defined by their earliest material. While still a teenager, Epic Soundtracks played with the Midlands punk combo Swell Maps. Their influence spread quickly to the American indie scene from which the likes of Sonic Youth, Pavement and Nirvana sprang.

In the interim, Soundtracks grew up, learnt to play piano and score and arrange his own songs. He released a stunning chamber-pop opus entitled Rise Above, featuring cameos from J Mascis, Bad Seeds and Sonic Youth. Had it been his debut, it would have surely stopped the critical traffic. Ironically, Rise Above appeared at the apex of grunge – the movement whose seeds he had inadvertently helped to sow. But in 1992, no one wanted chamber pop, and Epic Soundtracks carried on with his day job at Record & Tape Exchange in London. Five years later he was found dead in his flat.

The Pixies’ Black Francis is more philosophical. By reforming the band for which he shall forever be known, he can bankroll his regular solo albums. Released four years ago, the singer’s postdivorce album Show Me Your Tears ran the stylistic gamut from country to rock’n’ roll – in the process yielding the most emotionally engaging album of his life. His last album, Bluefinger, an 11-song rhapsody for the Dutch painter Herman Brood, would be nuzzling up against bands half his age in the end-of-year polls – had Francis been in one of those bands. There’s something heroic about the way Francis has given over a part of himself to indie nostalgists who want him to do quiet-loud-quiet-loud in perpetuity – while, all the time, consistently improving as a songwriter.

It suggests a certain pragmatism of someone who has realised that there’s more to this business than how your last album did and how the next one is going to do. Talking to The Times earlier this year, he confirmed as much. “Do you know what my favourite song is at the moment? It’s by an American jazz violinist called Stuff Smith, and its title is T’Ain’t No Use. I don’t know if it was popular or unpopular when it came out; if people said he was past his peak or just coming into his peak. I just know that, 72 years later, people like me are still listening to it. That’s the best you can hope for.”

Late discoveries

John Lennon Just Like Starting Over (Double Fantasy, 1980)
Bob Dylan Jokerman (Infidels, 1983)
Neil Young Computer Age (Trans, 1982)
Paul McCartney Temporary Secretary (Paul McCartney II, 1980)
David Bowie Loving the Alien (Tonight, 1985)
Mick Jagger Sweet Thing (Wandering Spirit, 1993)

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