What more needs to be said about this beautiful, despair-soaked bag of grooves? It’s on countless best-ever lists, and it remains a very strange-sounding album, drenched in strings and reverb and mellotron, but it has a few dazzling moments when the sun shines through the clouds and his voice pierces the heart – ‘What’s Happening Brother’ – ‘how in the world have you been?’ I put it on sometimes just to hear 'Mercy Mercy Me'.