Top 41 Albums and yet more Musical Hidden Gems from our voting panel

We’re featuring our Top 41 Albums of all time through the summer, as voted on by our judging panel of top procurement professionals. Don’t forget to add your vote – we’re looking for your top 10 out of this list (see below) PLUS you can nominate your own three favourites that aren’t here.

Do that as a “Comment” or send me an email to psmith (at) spendmatters.com.  And there’ll be an event in the Autumn when we announce the overall results, and if you vote, there might just be something in it for you….!

We’re also featuring our voting panels’ less well known choices. So today we’ll have three from Mr F (our judges insisted on staying anonymous for fear of reprisals…), an ex very senior civil servant CPO and a little bit of a hippie perhaps?

His first choice is the seminal "After Bathing at Baxters" by Jefferson Airplane, the first 60s psychedelic band to achieve mainstream success.  As AllMusic.com put it; "After Bathing at Baxter's was among the purest of rock's psychedelic albums, offering few concessions to popular taste and none to the needs of AM radio, which made it nowhere remotely as successful as its predecessor, but it was also a lot more daring".  Here's "Martha" from that album and a bit of a Saturday morning chill-out.

Now we have Electric Music for the Mind and Body by Country Joe and the Fish. Here's allmusic.com again: "Electric Music for the Mind and Body was released in February of 1967, and it was embraced as a work of genius by those who heard it, a bold, powerful mix of blues, jazz, classical, folk, and rock elements, all with a mesmerizing psychedelic glow.." Strangely, that album also contains a song with "Martha" in the title, "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine", and here it is from the Woodstock Festival.

Now, just to prove our judge isn't purely an old hippie, his third choice - and I'm not sure it is really an unknown album - is the Eminem Show by Eminem. We'll include it because I suspect a lot of rock music fans don't really listen to Eminem, when they probably should - give it a go if you haven't already. A very clever songwriter, and genius lyricist. Here's "Sing for the Moment".

And here again is our top 41. Don't forget to vote!