A possible idea for another Slow Review article, one of these daunting days: Great opening runs by recording artists. It's admittedly not a crucial estimate of a musician's or band's worth, ignoring as it does the slow climb to greatness, the mid-period masterpiece etc; but there's something about the 1-2-3-4 count-in of first album mastery, somehow sustained, that thrills me nonetheless. More than any other art form, popular music is a field dominated by the young, who do their best work at a shamingly early stage of existence. At a guess, 85% of the great work categorisable under that catch-all "popular music" is and was done by people yet to hit thirty, an age that for most novelists, filmmakers, and painters is merely the beginning of the (hopefully) long journey.

This great opening run is thrilling for the way it extends the typical narrative of a stunning first album followed by a mediocre to 'good enough' second and third (and so on). This sad tale, told by a million recording artists (your De La Soul is his Strokes is their Wu-Tang Clan), bears no further comment, and is also, cynicism aside, a wholly comprehensible phenomenon. Once hunger and dedication are replaced by pressure and the necessary maintenance of success, the game changes, and artistry has to hold firm on some very strong original principles to not change with it. Beyond that, of course, there's also the far more humbling and mysterious manner of the muse, which is prone to flight at the most inconvenient moment.

This series of records tends not to be the province of the Greats, who need no naming. It's not that December's Children (And Everybody Else's) isn't a gem, but that it withers into mere quality when lined up next to the epochal Let It Bleed. Also, true artists tend towards unpredictability, never sure of quality control or the exact nature of 'the magic', and are likely to follow up a great record with a dud. This is another necessary narrative of fandom: the comeback, the return to form, the puzzling release that only makes sense in retrospect. These are the ebbs and flows of producers and consumers alike.

In place of this familiar artistic structure, the opening run is a miraculous holding-of-breath from people who afterwards never find such form again. Again, there are various reasons for this. Two examples suffice here, the second being, after this longer-than-anticipated opening, my whole reason for being with you fine readers today.

Example One: Wire. From 1977s Pink Flag to 1979s 154, what a latecomer like myself (born around the time Wire's stunning Map Ref. 41°N 93°W was playing nowhere near my home) is faced with is three albums of perfection, albeit of a different type each time around, from Pink Flag's jagged sophist punk to 154's cerebral, chilly elegance. The shocking thing about Wire was that they agreed they'd run short of ideas and a significant desire to keep on pumping out content after these three records, and called it quits for close to a decade — a move close to unprecedented in a form not given over to artists with much self-awareness about retirement and contingent notions of dignity. Wire's difference lies not just in this 'career move', then, but also in the startling difference of the music they made when they reformed — wholly new, as if by different musicians, but of exceptionally high quality. Quite frankly, their recent work seems to not be aiming for the brass ring greatness of the early work, or even to be concerned with said forms. What matters here is that, in the hip-hop parlance, they didn't fall off. They just changed. The later work doesn't disgrace them, or function as a convenient excuse for another tour (hello Mick and Keef!), but sits comfortable away from their initial glory, busying itself with other matters.

Example Two: Randy Newman. Or, in the words of a girl I until quite recently worked with, "You mean the guy who writes the songs for the Pixar movies?" She is not alone in that estimation, of course, and after many decades of acceptable-to-wonderful soundtrack work for terrible-to-superb films, it's hard not to sympathise. Unless a cool uncle (or a proselytising workmate with a poor work ethic) introduces said co-worker to the glory that is Randy Newman's sublime four-studio-album run that covers his 1968 debut (Randy Newman Creates Something New Under the Sun) to 1974's Good Old Boys, how could she know any better?

Now, like most musos who suffer the caprices of artistic inspiration, Newman is a trooper rather than a Wire-like quitter (and subsequent Wire-like reinventer). He's been writing the same kind of songs for more than 40 years now, with the simple fact being that the new ones aren't as good as the old ones, even when the new ones are better than we might have expected. The reason for this is simple: the early ones are as good as popular music gets, wholly unique, and the reason I'm not writing about these at length right now is that I'd need a lot more time to do him justice, not to mention a thesaurus to stop my hyperbolic praise wearing its wordpower out. For now, let me consider the anomaly in Newman's early catalogue, a record clearly part of his revered 'opening run' yet also distinctive, different, unappreciated.