Mulholland has now turned his curious form of uncool/cool to albums, a revisionist history of the long player if you will. The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk And Disco, a book that will make you wonderfully mad, confirms what all of us critics (I mean lovers and protectors of good music) have felt for a long time: we are irrelevant.

Totally irrelevant. It's not just the millions of blogs, fansites, podcasts, MySpaces, YouTubes, etc, etc that have made it so. The iPod has not only succeeded in rendering albums anachronistic, they are the new singles charts. The record company doesn't choose them anymore. You do.

But this is all good, as Mulholland suggests, because although the humble album has seen better days, it is now returning to a more digestible form. He's right.

Since the invention of the 33rpm record (over 40 minutes) and then the CD (almost 80 minutes) albums have become progressively longer and, it has to be said, more boring. Before the iPod you had no choice but to invest a lot of time in albums with a lot of fat on them.

Sometimes it was worth it, but mostly not.

The book is subtitled "Fear Of Music" for a good reason. Mulholland recounts a conversation he had with a TV presenter who would only play Oasis, Stereophonics, etc on his show. He asked him why. The presenter said he was afraid of the established music formulated by white, straight males. "Critics turned jazz into academia, " writes Mulholland. "If we're not careful we'll turn everything previously thrilling, irresponsible and gloriously, stupidly shaggable about pop into one enormous library of alphabetised lists of private ponderings on the meaning contained within Bob Dylan's bum note at the beginning of 'Positively 4th Street'.

Mulholland kicks off his chronological list of albums with the Ramones' self-titled debut. If ever there was a year zero in pop (albeit punk pop) it was 1976. If the Ramones proved that "the simple things are all complicated", Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers cemented the arrival of geek rock into the quasi-mainstream. David Bowie's Low, one of the decade's greatest albums, is given its due, along with Television's Marquee Moon. Now if ever there was an album to strike fear into the heart of every music lover that has a hole in his musical knowledge the size of the port tunnel this is it. Ironically, Mulholland points out that Tom Verlaine's classic almost post rock/punk rock masterpiece (universally and exclusively revered among men), is "the least Classic Bloke Rock album in existence".

Passion The passion with which Mulholland writes makes you want to go out and buy these records now just to hear what he heard. He goes back to the Ramones again, saying they "threw a comforting arm around society's rejects" and proved that "rock was invented by weirdos. . . not hippy narcissists".

Kraftwerk, "the technocrat Fab Four", make a couple of entries and make the case that when in career doubt "make like a robot".

He explains why it's okay not to be afraid of punk. It's not a dirty word, he argues, but an aesthetically smart, intellectual reaction to the torpor of the late 1960s/early 1970s. No band embodied this more than Talking Heads for whom "being clean cut was an absolute statement in 1977". The Americans, as is there wont, rebranded punk (which was "too off-putting") and called it New Wave. Cue bands like XTC who "invented angular guitar".

If one band and one album epitomised the end of the era (and served as a frightening portent of the 1980s) it was The Police and their second album Reggatta de Blanc. This album (which translated means "white boat race") signalled "the beginning of the big empty din that we needed in the 1980s to drown out the big empty din of ourselves selling out". Counterbalancing this, as always, were The Clash . . . "the biggest argument against the notion that showbiz is about the ego. Bad showbiz is about the ego. Good showbiz is about humility."

As Mulholland's history continues into the '80s he admits to a number of guilty pleasures, including Duran Duran, who "destroyed the inspiration of rebellion and embraced Thatcher and Reagan. It could have sounded evil but they made it sound tough and delicious."

Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, the album that tore apart mainstream notions of The Boss and would "subvert the musical and thematic preoccupations of the previous ones". The Smiths are all over the book too, their debut being the first genuine "like punk never happened" record.

As you would expect from someone who was born in 1963, Mulholland's entries during the '80s are much thinner than the golden age of the late 1970s. You can imagine this same book being written in 10 years' time with a full focus on the '80s. Or maybe not.

REM, The Prodigy and Radiohead are given their due even if The Bends, and Radiohead in general, are (dis)credited with propagating the falsehood that "intelligence and lack of humour are the same thing".

Mulholland's entries thin to a trickle towards the end of the 1990s and early into the new millennium. PJ Harvey, Air, The Strokes and The White Stripes merely confirm that his love of music, like most people's, is rooted in the sanguine hope of youth.

'The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk And Disco (Fear Of Music)' by Garry Mulholland is out now on Orion Books GARRY'S CHOICE: ALBUMS YOU CAN'T DO WITHOUT 11978: The Best Of Earth Wind & Fire ". . . adored by almost everyone who loved black music in the '70s" 11981: Dare by The Human League ". . . made teens everywhere believe that life was more thrilling than the previous generation could ever have thought possible" 11987: Sign 'O' The Times by Prince ". . . the gender confusion sexplay. . . made old Bowie sound clumsy" 11995: Post by Bjork ". . . restless and recklessly individual" 22001: Toxicity by System Of A Down "a hysterical assault on corporate American power"