[The track on Ochs' first album, "All the News That's Fit To Sing,"] that attracted the most attention was "Lou Marsh," a sombre ballad relating the life and death of one Lou March, a New York Youth Board worker killed while trying to prevent a gang war.

Pete Seeger described the song's chorus as being the best he's ever heard in a topical song, while Sing Out magazine decreed that the album "will be as important in 1964 as Bob Dylan's 'Freewheelin'' album was in 1963."

It wasn't to be however, although it did bring Phil's work to the notice of other contemporary singer songwriters, and Joan Baez was later to take Phil's "There But For Fortune," and make that song his biggest success to date, in '65.

That same year saw the release of the second album "I Ain't Marching Any More," and the sardonic attitude of the first album had solidified into a deep-rooted hatred of the corrupt system and sick society all around him….

When Ochs finally [resurfaced], in late 1967, it was with a new record label,… a new batch of songs, and a totally new style, revealing a startling degree of musicality that's nowhere evident on [the] first three … albums.

Phil's liner notes to "Pleasures Of The Harbour," written in the form of a poem, serve as pointers to the new approach.

"… In such an ugly time the true protest is beauty," he writes, and certainly it's a beautiful album, almost majestically so, with great sweeping strings washing across the stereo mix, woodwinds weaving around the vocal lines, and the courtly piano of Lincoln Mayorga.

The old sarcasm is still present, however, most notably on "Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends" which roundly condemns apathy present on all levels, but most markedly in the case of the supposedly liberated new young; "smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer / But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years / Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody 'Why'0' / But demonstrations are a drag, besides, we're much too high."…

Most shattering of all was the nine-minute-long album closer, "Crucifixion," opening with eerie glissando of strings, discords abounding.

Forget folk music for a while, this was positively avantgarde….

The sleeve of "Rehearsals For Retirement" … signifies the death of the whole revolutionary cause. It depicts a tombstone, bearing the inscription "Phil Ochs (American). Born: El Paso, Texas, 1940; Died: Chicago, Illinois, 1968."

A weary liner note admits "I realise these last days, these trials and tragedies were after all only our rehearsals for retirement."

Here the songs were mostly less specific. There were exceptions, however, like "I Kill Therefore I Am" a ruthless expose of the raison d'être of the average all-American boy.

Somehow it seemed as though Phil was finally coming to terms with his own belief of long-standing that the song was more important than the message….

"Greatest Hits" is lyrically the most lightweight thing he's ever done, but in terms of the actual song construction is probably his finest achievement.

Featuring mostly country-influenced rock, everything is tight and precise, apart from "Ten Cents A Coup" which is recorded live and is a singalong poke at the White House.

This was 1970, remember, but Ochs already had his finger well on the negligence that was to become apparent to all some three years later. "I dreamed Nixon died of a suntan," sings Phil with typical droll humour on "Ten Cents."

Personally, I think that "One Way Ticket Home" which opens the album, cuts almost any rock song recorded this century. Anybody who can write a chorus line like "Elvis Presley is the king, I was at his crowning" has to be in line for some sort of poet laureate award.