Although Steely Dan are routinely hailed as one of the last century’s most subversively brilliant bands, when their second album Countdown To Ecstasy was released 50 years ago the UK remained largely unmoved by its virtuoso complexity, hyper-intelligent broadsides and luminous confessionals.
Following 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill debut with another Brit-flop, it took years to be recognised as the evocative crystalisation of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s idiosyncratic visions of jazz-charged contemporary rock, digging deeper lyrically and musically within NY’s classic pop framework.
