John Lennon - Shaved Fish

Shaved Fish was the only collection of John Lennon's solo work released in his lifetime, a 1975 sweep through the singles that defined his first years after The Beatles.

Lennon assembled it as he stepped away from the music business to focus on family, gathering his singles from 1969 onward, including several that had never appeared on an album at that point. The cover gives each song its own illustrated panel, a neat visual index to an extraordinary run of protest anthems, love songs and raw confessionals.

Instant Karma! still hits like a thunderclap, all pounding piano and cavernous echo, while Cold Turkey grinds through the agony of withdrawal on jagged, distorted guitar. Mind Games floats on a dreamy, layered production, and #9 Dream drifts into gorgeous, hazy psychedelia, one of the loveliest things he ever recorded.

Many of the songs appear in their original single edits, which gives the record a punchy, radio-ready momentum, and the sequencing moves smartly between the political fire of his early solo years and the more reflective mood that followed.

As a one-disc portrait of Lennon outside the band that made him famous, Shaved Fish remains hard to beat, a compact reminder of how restless, funny and fearless he could be on record.