Those Were The Days [Box set]

And yet, they were bloody brilliant. I was a deeply gawky teenager when I first listened to this stuff in the early 80s, a time when nobody - but nobody! - of my age group was listening to anything made before 1977, with the possible exception of the Doors. (And if you liked the Doors that meant that you were probably into D*R*U*G*S. If you liked Cream, all it meant was that you were into weird obscure bands from the 60s.) This set contains almost everything they ever recorded - complete versions of the doomy, bluesy first album, the purple-hazy second album, the gloriously sui generis third album and the oddly Beatleoid fourth album, plus all the live cuts ever officially released, with the exception of the "Goodbye" live version of "Politician" - which , to be honest, I'm not missing. Get this and the startlingly rocking "BBC Sessions" and you have all the Cream any sensible person needs.

For anyone who wasn't around at the time, Cream's reputation has been forever posthumous, and has existed in the shadow of the mighty Jimi. You have to feel a little bit sorry for Eric Clapton in the mid-sixties - he's only 21 or so, he's from Surrey, he's the king of the hill for about eighteen months, and then this hyper-hip black dude blows in from the chitlin circuit and rewrites the rulebook. To be sure, Hendrix took his band into outer space and beyond, and did more for the electric guitar than anyone since Charlie Christian. But to listen to this album is to hear Clapton's talent progress from being that of a superior white bluesman into a balls-to-the-wall, take-no-prisoners lead weapon. Hendrix was spacey, he had the Surround-Sound Technicolor Armageddon thing going on, but Cream had something else, which involves turning the word "mundane" upside-down and seeing it as a hymn to the power of gravity. Cream understood a lot about silence - check out "Sweet Wine" or the original studio version of "Spoonful". They are a remorselessly physical-sounding band. I don't know of a better cure for the jim-jams than their cover of Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign" - funky, sleazy, laid-back, wry, funny and yet also passionate. (They also tended to be better-recorded than Hendrix, and kudos is due to both Tom Dowd and Felix Pappalardi for producing the original recordings and the guys who remixed and remastered the stuff for CD.) Their most characteristic mood is one of threat and menace; you may think of "Sunshine of Your Love" as a stoner anthem, but listen to the feel of the song and it sounds a lot less cuddly than you remember - small wonder that Scorsese chose it for the moment in "Goodfellas" when De Niro decides to start killing everyone in sight.

The live stuff? Some of it is stunning. "Crossroads" still raises the hairs on the back of the neck, and "Traintime" is a tribute to the power of Jack Bruce's lungs, as well as being endlessly gripping from a rhythmic point of view. Some of the rest of it you probably have to be in the right mood for. At their finest, this band could truly destroy; to round off the Hendrix-motif in this review, recall that Jimi interrupted a performance on Lulu's TV show to do an impromptu cover of "Sunshine of Your Love" in commemoration of this short-lived band of genius that ripped itself apart before it ever got even close to sucking. Oh, and Clapton and George Harrison also wrote "Badge", a song I want played at my funeral.

There's a generous handful of demoes (this band was only together for two years, they didn't have time to do a lot of unreleased stuff), but my favourite unreleased track is a sublime moment of rock indignity, a commercial for Falstaff beer in which the band riffs doomily while Jack Bruce sings "FALSTAAAAAAFF! The THIRST-QUENCHERRRRR!" See, Led Zeppelin would never let something like that get back into circulation. Cream were truly special, and if Clapton achieved genuine transcendence only with Derek and the Dominoes, he still deserves to be toasted along with his bandmates for the hours of surging, up-your-ass rock in this collection. All together now: "Ba ba ba ba-ba-ba..."