I can't hear Al Green's music without thinking of the image of these trousers, the cover photo for the Greatest Hits album. Probably made of deerskin and perhaps modeled after a Sioux or Cherokee garment, they're a celebration of hedonistic sexuality from the early 70s. They hybridize Native American tradition, black soul, and white psychedelia, casually mixing signifiers with an irresponsible freedom that feels exhilarating twenty-five years on. As with the trousers, I always found this early Al Green music a little unsettling. It was so unashamedly sensual in its arrangements, the vocal line so unbearably expressive, that it undermined any secure sense of masculinity. It paraded itself as flamboyant, swooning, and pathetically exposed, just as I was figuring out these weren't going to be qualities guaranteed to make a twenty-year old's Edinburgh life any easier.

Al Green's songs are of that long insecure period before the first punk singles starting hitting the record shops in early 1977, bringing the energy of avant-garde iconoclasm and its traditional dream of wiping the slate clean, confidently claiming a new start without personal or social history. For a couple of years what was musically exciting was local and immediate. You knew who was making the music and participated yourself. I think in some ways Punk's aggressivity legitimized the way its lyrics and arrangements often dealt with insecurities that didn't belong in rock music. Here then was Al Green's content returning to find an assured voice in a home-grown idiom, and for me it was liberating.