The 5 best break-up albums

Chris Martin, at the  Royal Albert Hall on 1-2 July to tour for Ghost Stories , is no stranger to heartbreak. Here are five of the best albums inspired by break-ups

In many ways it was a very twenty-­first­-century split: on 26 March, the actress Gwyneth Paltrow posted a message on her lifestyle website Goop to announce that she and her husband, Coldplay singer Chris Martin, were separating. Now, just two months later, Coldplay’s new album Ghost Stories has been released. If the broken heart on the record sleeve wasn’t enough of a giveaway, then the downbeat music and many of the lyrics – ‘tell me you love me, if you don’t then lie’ – position Ghost Stories within a tradition of break-­up albums that’s almost as old as rock music itself. Bob Dylan may not have used the phrase ‘conscious uncoupling’ (the now notorious subject line on that Goop post), but like Martin, he and many others have poured their emotional turmoil into song. Here are five of the best break­up records from the pre-­Goop era that are guaranteed to help you wallow if you too are going through an uncoupling – conscious or otherwise.

 Albums for heartbreak

1. Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks

Dylan has repeatedly protested that despite the recent breakdown of his relationship with his wife Sara, this majestically sad 1975 LP wasn’t intended as a work of autobiography. But the couple’s son Jakob, who had just turned five at the time, has since said that ‘when I'm listening to Blood On The Tracks, that's about my parents’ – and it’s not hard to see why, as the songs elide the love of the past into the regret of the present (and even, on "You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go", the future). ‘Our separation, it pierced me to the heart,’ Dylan sings on "If You See Her, Say Hello", and it certainly doesn’t sound like a work of fiction.

2. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – The Boatman’s Call

Breaking up, as Neil Sedaka sang, is hard to do - especially when you’re contending with a heroin habit and dating PJ Harvey at the same time. Nick Cave’s marriage with Brazilian stylist and art director Viviane Carneiro ended in 1996. Released the next year, The Boatman’s Call was the most consistently downbeat and stripped-­back record Cave had made to date: a piano confessional that included some decidedly Dylanesque track titles ("Where Do We Go Now but Nowhere?") and some of Cave’s purest songwriting.

3. The Cure – Disintegration

Alright, this one’s a bit of a cheat: Robert Smith, leader of the Cure, has been in a happy relationship with his wife Mary Poole since they were teenagers. But you wouldn’t guess that from listening to Disintegration, the sprawling monster of an album that The Cure released in 1989, and which included songs such as "Pictures of You" and the title track which have helped lovelorn goths through messy break-­ups for the last twenty-­five years.

4. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago

The story of Justin Vernon’s retreat to his dad’s cabin in Wisconsin – sick and suffering the recent break­-ups of both a band and a relationship – has entered modern indie folklore. ‘I knew that I wanted to be alone and I knew that I wanted to be where it was cold,’ Vernon has said, and the result was the first album under Vernon’s Bon Iver pseudonym, a collection of demos recorded in the cabin and originally self­-released in 2007 with a run of 500 copies. It’s since sold tens of thousands of copies, thanks to its raw, complex, cathartic dissection of a love gone bad: ‘This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization, / It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away.’

5. Fleetwood Mac – Rumours

Is this the greatest break­-up album ever made? If so, it would make sense: as well as industrial quantities of cocaine, Fleetwood Mac were powered during the creation of Rumours by total personal chaos. Bassist John and keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie were recently divorced; singer Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, another in-­band couple, fought constantly; and the last remaining member, drummer Mick Fleetwood, was divorced, married and divorced again from his wife Jenny Boyd three times in the space of a year. It’s no wonder that practically every song on the record deals with the fall-­out, from the first lines of "Second Hand News" (‘I know there's nothing to say / Someone has taken my place’) to the closing track "Gold Dust Woman" (‘Is it over now? / Do you know how? / Pick up the pieces and go home’). Not coincidentally, Rumours is one of the best­selling albums ever. This music, classic as it is, is abiding proof (were it needed!) of humans’ hard­wired fascination with other people’s heartache.

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