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Album Discoveries That Changed Your Musical Direction.

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In 1998 or thereabouts, I first heard Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset. From this and investigations of the other musicians around him I heard trumpeter Nils-Petter Molvær and keyboard player Bugge Wesseltoft. Scandi-jazz, as it soon become known, intrigued me. From there it was an easy hop into the ECM catalogue and all it’s treasures and the German ACT label.
But “Electronique Noir” was the starting point.

What were your starting points?

2

Comments

  1. Ooh – good one.

    Without a doubt, the most dramatic one was the Island sampler called Nice Enough To Eat. As a long-term Beatles fan I’d just started buying Melody Maker and beginning to hear aout all these so-called ‘underground’ bands (I think this was a precursor to the term, ‘progressive’. I’d seen a small photo on the front page, showing Robert Fripp with a frizzy perm, over which it said something about King Crimson. This led me to believe that Fripp actually was King Crimson and was probably an American soul artist. 😀 Then I began to read reports about truly terrifying noises emanating from a cellar on Fulham Palace Road, accompanied by mentions of some kind of demon instrument of torture called a Mellotron. All this talk of underground bands suddenly began to seem very covert and exciting – and then this album appeared at the very affordable price of 14 shillings and sixpence.

    It began with Cajun Woman by Fairport Convention – a very nice track I’m sure, but not really what I wanted to hear.
    The same with the Mott The Hoople track that followed, which was just a rather ponderous Bob Dylan rip-off and actually rather dated.
    Next up was Spooky Tooth, a band I’d never heard of, with Better By You, Better Than Me. Was this ‘underground’? It certainly had a dark and forboding feel about it, with an echoey production that sounded as if it was recorded in an empty vault.
    Then a band who were definitely underground, because Melody Maker said so. Jethro Tull’s We Used To Know’ came from an album with woodcut-effect cover depicting a band of dodgy-looking undesirables of the type we would probably call ‘Crusties’ a few years ahead. It was a flat yet plaintive sound, rather mysterious yet subdued, but then came the guitar solo, which out-wow-wowed even Hendrix. Duly bookmarked for future reference.
    Next track – Woman, by Free. I liked the bass-heavy sound and the trilling guitar, yet the vocals sound a bit old-hat to me –a bit too much like the American soul-shouters (grunters) on first hearing.
    Heavy Jelly closed the side with a long and rambling track which was inoffensive but too long.
    Flip it over and play Blodwyn Pig – again, nothing really new and it had brass in it, which made it an immediate no-no.
    What followed though was weird indeed and nothing like I’d ever heard before. I was familiar with Steve Winwood’s voice, which I didn’t particularly like, but at least this was beginning to sound a bit dangerous because even at my tender age I could sense that these people might be on DRUGS.
    Time Has Told Me, by Nick Drake, confused me, because although I could immediately tell that this was something very good indeed, I didn’t know what to make of the rather Country-influenced guitar playing in the background. It made it sound too American, which to my mind made it deeply uncool. Even so, it was one of the tracks that I did keep going back to.
    BUT THEN … the wheezing sound of an asthmatic old steam engine emerging from a tunnel, followed by … What the hell! This was truly the sound of Hell itself, with instruments I couldn’t identify and somebody playing a couple of biscuit tins as drums. Now I’d heard of the supposedly terrifying Mellotron and probably attributed it to what was actually Fripp’s guitar solo. It was noisy, dirty and nasty – and it threw my brain into complete disarray. I’d never heard anything remotely like it in all my life. Now this was the kind of revelation I’d been looking for. And as for the little illustration of its front cover …
    After that, Quintessence just sounded rather odd. Dr Strangely Strange were quite intriguing, with a pleasant song sung by the kind of person who sounded as if they were someone who you definitely shouldn’t accept sweets from.
    But it was that King Crimson moment which changed my life. I saved up my pocket money to buy the album but then felt ripped off because of the long, doodly, boring bit of Moonchild. Still, after hearing the title track, at least I now knew what a Mellotron sounded like. Actually, listening to it again while writing this, I’ve only just realised that the what I’d always assumed was a vocal preset is is simply a double-tracked Greg Lake vocal. Another illusion shattered.

  2. I love it when this happens, when something new totally changes your perspective on your music taste. I always find for a while I can’t bear to listen to anything else.

    The biggest one, and most obvious, would be the Beatles. I heard Sgt Pepper as a teenager and it just rewired my brain. All music followed from there.

    Much later, hearing The Incredible String Band for the first time unlocked a doorway in my mind that led to offbeat folk and acoustic music and made me pick up a guitar again for the first time in years.

    And then, just at the start of last year actually, I got into classical music. Well, a narrow vein of three early 20th century composers in particular: Vaughan Williams, Delius and Sibelius.

    • My dad had A Hard Day’s Night on LP – B&W sleeve, beat-group contents. I went round a friend’s house to avoid a cross-country run during our double PE lesson, and we played his mum’s tape of Sgt Pepper. It was like that bit in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy clicks her heels and it all turns into Technicolour. My brain was buzzing by the end. We splashed some hot water around our faces and ran back to school, tagging on to the tail end of the runners.

    • I need to mention Tubular Bells, as I maybe run the risk of underplaying the impact on me. It’s maybe not the same kind of impact as we are talking about here because I don’t really think it led to anything else or unlocked anything. I still think nothing much else sounds like it or captures the same feeling (apart from Mike Oldfield’s other early albums).

      I first heard Tubular Bells when I was really young. I’m guessing I must have been about 10 or 11, but I have a distinct memory of a long boring Sunday afternoon when I was sitting staring out of the window in our living room and my dad put it on his record player. I was just transfixed and I remember getting genuine hallucinations, staring out of the window and seeing all sorts of strange creatures moving about in response to the music. I lost track of time and became confused about the song being so long: I remember my dad laughing when I asked him “is this still the same song?” and couldn’t understand why there weren’t other songs on the LP like on his other LPs.

      Something in me was definitely unlocked that day. But, as with anyone else’s childhood, other interests kicked in and I didn’t really explore Tubular Bells any further, nor did I really seek out any other music. (Although I always responded to film music I liked – I loved John Barry, John Williams and Ennio Morricone).

      Tubular Bells didn’t really crop up again and I didn’t hear it for years. In the UK of course, The Exorcist film was banned, so it didn’t really seep into our culture as a horror movie soundtrack like it has done in other countries.

      And then, I distinctly remember one Christmas period – it was 1989, when I was 16. I was up late watching a stupid Christmas movie: Weird Science, would you believe. And in one scene, they play the beginning of Tubular Bells as a kind of jokey reference to The Exorcist. Of course I didn’t get the connection to The Exorcist, but that little piano riff just went DING!!! in my brain and the memory of hearing it five/six years earlier came rushing back to me. I scoured the end credits of the film to find out what the music was, and it jumped out: Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield.

      That was actually the same Christmas period I got into Sgt Pepper, and also around that same time a couple of other albums that have stuck with me like Queen and The Rolling Stones. So a very illustrious time for my musical taste. I also started playing guitar around that time, and returned to the piano after getting fed up after Grade 2 a few years earlier. By the end of that year I had shoulder length hair and carried my guitar with me everywhere.

      Ah, memories!

  4. Yo! Bum Rush the Show. It had been out for a few months during which I’d started listening to hip-hop with Beastie Boys, Run DMC and LL Cool J on heavy rotation.

    This however was something else: I’d been waiting for it without even realising it. Quite a lot of the album makes very little concession to being anything other than noise – MPE’s main sample is a fragment of raggedly distorted guitar made to sound like a powertool, possibly being used for terrible purposes in a video nasty. Those voices – Chuck D’s tombstone boom immediately making all of his contemporaries sound like mewling children: the gnomic, staccato interjections of Flavor Flav like a Long Island Mark E Smith. Car tyres squeal and glass is crunched underfoot in an urban nightmare of bleak futurism laced with fragments of outlaw funk.

    Intellectually I fully accept that the next two (possibly three) PE albums are better: but Yo! is my favourite for spiritual reasons.

    Kick that shit!

    • Another vote for this one. I had heard you’re Gonna Get Yours on the Kick It! Def Jam sampler that came out earlier in the year and that led me to buy the album. For a few months in 1987, I was genuinely hip, I had the Rebel Without a Pause 12′ and everything. I still have the 12′ but haven’t been remotely hip since that time.

      • Rebel Without a Pause originally went out as a b-side…. Bring the Noise was originally released on the not-exactly-Citizen Kane film of Less Than Zero. When PE finally came to the UK that November they were third on the bill below LL Cool J and Eric B & Rakim (who were genius of course, but a completely bobbins live act). I think Rush/ Def Jam didn’t know what they had.

  5. “Rock n Jazz”, a 99p compilation from 1974 (I got it 1976, when I was 15) moved me from arty-glam, progressive and heavy rock to explore jazz. It comprised:

    1. Eddie Harris – Is It In
    2. Jan Hammer/ Jerry Goodman – Topeka
    3. Miroslav Vituos – Infinite Search
    4. Stanley Clarke – Life Suite Part I
    5. Passport (2) – Homunculus
    6. Billy Cobham – Stratus Part I
    7. Herbie Mann – Do It Again
    8. Joe Zawinul – In A Silent Way
    9. Chick Corea – Inner Space

    45 years on, I’m still a massive fusion fan. I was particularly keen on the Chick Corea track here, which is straight ahead jazz, rather than fusion as such:

  6. I would say that rather than albums changing my musical direction its been clubs. Specifically the time when I went back to the Hacienda in 1989 and it was full to the brim of ravers having the time of their lives. Though slightly too old (24) and with a job to participate in the full clubber lifestyle the Ritz and Hac in Manchester, along with the Co-op Hall (Oxford), The Welly (Hull and so on changed my musical direction from its goth and indie 80s core. What was really exciting was then hearing the Happy Mondays, 808 State, Guy Called Gerald and so on with the same sound you heard when going out.

    Pretty soon afterwards Loaded came out with the Weatherall remix, Fools Gold…never looked back in getting into house, rave and so on. Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches, Screamadelica… within 3 years there were albums a go go but it was clubs first, then singles, then albums.

  7. Its heard to recall exactly which albums introduced me to which genres but the below albums I think were formative:

    Steeleye Span – Below the salt – introduced me to Richard and Linda, Liege and Lief and John Martyn

    Leonard Cohen introduced me to Arlo Guthrie, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Melanie, James Taylor, Jackson Browne.

    Sly and Robbie Language Barrier introduced me to elements of hip hop; Skatalites, Clint Eastwood, Grace Jones

    Mahavishnu Orchestra introduced me to Billy Cobham ,Stanley Clarke, Weather report, Miles Davis,Wayne Shorter.

  8. It’s happened to me 3 times I guess. The first was when I was about 10 or 11, at my Nan’s. Her record collection was all classical or easy listening, but for some reason she had the Beatles Red album. By this age I had played my parents’ modest record collection to death. Their one Beatles track was I Want To Hold Your Hand. I loved that song, hated the b-side (I was 10, it sounded really old fashioned – I, of course, saw the error of my ways within a couple of years). I can’t honestly remember if I knew any other Beatles tracks. I’ll have known Yellow Submarine, cos we sang it at school, but now sure I’d have known any others. Although I used to listen to Jimmy Savile’s show on Sunday lunchtimes, so maybe I heard some on that. Either way, I took an instant liking to the album, played it so many times over the week we were at my Nan’s (she lived at the seaside, Robin Hood’s Bay) and when we left for home it went with me. Over the coming years a serious Beatles obsession took hold.

    The next time was an album that probably had a similar impact on quite a few AWers, the Uncut Sounds From the New West cover CD. There were 20 acts on that CD and within a few weeks I had albums by half of them, The Pernice Brothers being the pick of the bunch, I was to fall headlong into Americana, become a regular at gigs at the Borderline (I’d been a regular on Wednesday nights in the heady days of Britpop!) watching Whiskeytown, Neal Casal, Joe Pernice loads of times, etc. In a few years around the turn of the millennium there were some brilliant albums.

    The third time was January 5 years ago, when I’d seen loads of rave reviews for Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, so I thought I’d have a listen to see what the fuss was all about. It had quite an effect on me…

  9. There were two, I can’t remember which came first, I was about 14 at the time.

    The first was The Blues Vol.1, a terrific Chess sampler that I got for writing a Star Letter to Melody Maker. It had what have become the usual suspects on it – Muddy, Sonny Boy, Howlin’ etc (double whammy of Smokestack Lightning and Spoonful knocked me sideways). And this, from Buddy Guy.

    The other was a Lightning Hopkins elpee, lent to me by a groovy art teacher. Blues in My Bottle was a completely different kettle of blues fish from The Blues Vol.1, but together they added up to a terrific education, both in listening and guitar playing. Not singing, sadly.

  10. I had the obligatory Marley live in London but my reggae collection stopped there. On a whim I bought Burning Spear’s Man In The Hills from a bargain bin. Reggae hadn’t really taken a grip down here. Whoah ! That trance like voice, that heavy heavy groove. I don’t think he has done a bad album but this is one of his best.
    3 years later I was in Africa working and the groove continued.

  11. Altho’ I knew the big singles by the Byrds and actually bought Si Tu Dois Partir when it charted, it was History of the Byrds and History of Fairport Convention, both early 70s double LPs that threw me off an ELP shaped track into the twin paths of country and folk.

  12. 20 Fantastic Hits By The Original Artists, Volume 2, 1972, of course. I was 8 years old, and this was the beginnings of the K-Tel, Ronco compilation album days, though this one was on Arcade Records.
    I was a Radio One obsessive, feigning ‘having a cough’ to stay off school and listen to Blackburn, Walker, and even Jimmy ‘What’s the recipe today, Jim?!’ Young. Apart from Blackburn’s Golden Hour, though, they tended to just play what was current and in the charts or ‘chartbound’ as they’d say.
    This compilation, no doubt put together on the basis of ‘what’s cheap and available’, was mainly mainstream fare – The Sweet’s Little Willy, The New Seekers’ ILTTTWTS, Mary Hopkin’s TWTD, Knock Three Times by Dawn – but amidst all that there were five tracks that suggested very different routes. ‘Take Me Back ‘Ome’ by Slade was familiar to me, but it was still thrillingly scary. ‘Layla’ by D& The Ds vaguely rang a bell, but there’d been no performances of it on TOTP so it led to a real sense of wondering what this band might look like. The Staple Singers’ ‘I’ll Take You There’ and Frederick Knight’s ‘I’ve Been Lonely For So Long’ introduced a soul and gospel mix that thrilled me. And then there was Delta Lady by Joe Cocker, which I’d never heard (apparently it had been released in 1969 which was, like, hundreds of years before). And there was a picture on the sleeve of Cocker, who, to an 8 year old, looked, I imagined, like one of the ‘drug pushers’ my dad talked about. Marvellous.

  13. The gig/dance was the light-seeing moment really, but Blowzabella had just brought out their live album Dance, so it really fits the bill. The moment I walked into the dance tent at Shrewsbury and heard the perfect fusion of box and fiddle with the drone of pipes and gurdy, I knew this music had been waiting for me all my life. I honestly believe that if I’d heard them at the age of 12, I would have loved this band. Now that would have been tricky, ’cause they didn’t form for another 8 years, but the whole wealth of European traditional dance music was already there in all its spiralling diversity.

    Nine years later, I have still barely scratched the surface in terms of buying material in the genre, but I have consumed plenty live. But the more remarkable change of musical direction was that I became a dance teacher – how the hell did that happen? It also pleases me immensely that that day at Shrewsbury FF in August 2012 led directly to yesterday, with my colleagues wondering how on earth they’d ended up on a train in Hazel Grove Carriage Sidings with this galoot bouncing down the train singing in breton.

  14. Not so much change my direction, more like kickstart it. We didn’t have a record player when I was really young, or even much in the way of records (I did have a terrible kids toy record player and a couple of Pinky and Perky singles, as well as a couple of Rolf Harris singles…I know) so when my Mum was given a Cassette Player for Christmas 1974 we needed some stuff to play on it. In the New Year Dad came home from work with a tape one of his colleagues had done for him with Sgt Pepper on one side and Elton John’s Greatest Hits on the other. From first hearing I loved both, but slightly preferring The Beatles. Pepper is so obviously brilliant it doesn’t need further explanation…even for a youngster you could tell this was an amazing thing and as I grew up more I eventually forgot about poor old Elton as he was never that cool in my circle. Other Beatles albums came, often via birthdays, and were equally loved. Over the years, I am probably at the point where Pepper isn’t even my fav Fabs album but I have listened to Elton’s Greatest Hits a few times recently and it gives me a nostalgic pang every time, evoking as it does memories of the brown and orange decor we had and the happy aroma of fish fingers and chips followed by Arctic Roll for dessert. God I loved being a kid in the seventies…

  15. Mentioned it on here before but it’s so good I’m going to mention it again. When I was 19 I was into classic rock / indie, then I bought a copy of the Soul Survivors compilation:
    https://www.discogs.com/Various-Soul-Survivors-40-Northern-Soul-Anthems/release/3006509

    In the late 90s Northern Soul was undergoing a reissues boom courtesy of CDs and was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it would become within a few years. I’d never heard music like this, 20 odd years later I must have 100 compilations of the stuff. I dread to think how much that initial purchase (£14.99) actually ended up costing me, but it was worth every penny.

  16. In 1982 someone played me Joy Division’s Closer for the first time. Up to that point, as a confirmed rocker, I’d viewed all things post punk as ephemeral and more than a bit suspect. In my mind there was nothing sufficiently meat-and-potatoes about synths, for example; and music played by pale young men in overcoats seemed overly mannered and insufficiently authentic.

    Closer completely shifted my perceptions. This was as much down to the physical object of the LP and sleeve as the music. It exuded mystery and gravitas. then once I heard it, I found the songs to be emotionally raw and exposed. It chimed perfectly with my own 18 year-old sense of feeling unmoored and uncertain. It helped me reinvent myself and it sparked my musical curiosity.

    Soon I was listening to a far more diverse selection of music than heavy/trad rock, including: The Birthday Party, The Gun Club, Scritti Politti, Psychedelic Furs, Black Uhuru, Misty In Roots etc.

    It also led me to explore older music that I’d more or less completely missed out on: The Stooges, Velvet Underground, Talking Heads etc.

    However, what age has taught me is that there’s more than enough room for a wide appreciation of music, that in embracing new discoveries, you don’t have to let go of the stuff you’re familiar with. Back in the 70s and 80s, music was far more tribal and it felt like I needed to commit to one thing at the expense of another.

    The thing I do recognise now is that I’ll never have enough time to listen to everything.

    • Interesting. I do think there is some truth to the idea however that someone gets a deeper understanding by sticking to one or two genres. That it’s impossible to truly appreciate a wide variety of different genres as what you gain in breadth of taste you lose in depth of taste. I do think I believe that.

      I heard a theory once, well an observation based on experience, and I can’t for the life of me remember who said it unfortunately. It might have been someone on here! Basically, this person was talking about people who are deep classical music buffs, with a real depth of understanding of classical music. This person found in their experience that buffs like that always seemed to have a corresponding cluelessness about pop music. They might have a deep love of Mahler, but then they also seemed to prefer Barry Manilow to the Beatles, for example.

      I do think I find that with folk musicians as well. Once they have their “folk head” on, they just can’t get their head round, say, hip hop.

      I find this myself as well. I think I appreciate a wide range of music, but I can’t jump from Miles Davis to DJ Shadow – my head just doesn’t accept it. Like mixing two foods that don’t go together. Having a glass of Merlot with a bacon roll!

      • I’ve definitely got favourite genres and artists, and I can be something of a serial enthusiast, so I’ll find myself compelled to listen one artist’s catalogue extensively for a period of time, just because something’s suddenly piqued my interest. This doesn’t just apply to new discoveries – I’ll suddenly go all forensic on music I’ve owned for quite a while.

        I quite like a jarring juxtaposition, doom metal and African blues, English folk and 80s US hardcore etc.

        • True that about classical music and pop music.

          Always made me think, ‘if your fave pop group is Bucks Fizz, how can I take anything you say about classical music seriously?’

          • I wish I could remember who pointed this out. If it was someone on here I’d like to give them credit for it! THinking about it, it may actually have been David Hepworth…..

            I think it’s actually the same for jazzheads as well, or at least certain type of people who are into jazz. I once knew a guy who was a jazz bass player and although he gave me long, lyrical appraisals of Coltrane and stuff like that, he just couldn’t get his head round pop music. The most he would admit about the Beatles was that The Long and Winding Road was a “nice tune”, and he was probably seeing it from the perspective of a jazz standard.

            • Not an absolute truth I’m sure, but in my experience people who did Music at school and university seemed to do it as a chore rather than through a love of it.

              Our music class at school – 50% would get 7s, 50% would fail, there was no in between – was taught by a guy c. 1980 (so post-Beatles, post-Dylan etc.) who physically shivered if anyone even mentioned pop music.

              My bet is that it is the failures in that class, myself included, who have lived and breathed music far more than the half who got 7s.
              Difficult to prove, but that would be my hunch.

              • In the same vein, I’m amazed at competent classical musicians who just cannot ‘busk’ to songs. They need sheet music in front of them and seem to have no capacity at all for just playing by ear.

                • That’s the result of bad training.
                  They don’t get taught how to properly listen as they play, because the emphasis is all on technique, following the dots on the pages and doing as you are told, rather than thinking for yourself or just feeling the music.
                  The best classical players can be improvisers and these days quite a lot of them are. They just need to do it, make mistakes and learn.

                  • This came up in another thread quite recently – interesting thread here: https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-more-classical-musicians-improvise?share=1

                    One exception is the cadenzas in piano concertos, where very often the composer specifies that at a certain point (usually at the end of the first movement) orchestras are to shut up and performers are on their own to improvise around the theme of the preceding movement. They can of course play somebody else’s cadenza if they want – I don’t know how many pianists actually improvise.

      • Classical music buffs, composers etc. are usually complimentary about The Beatles. In the sixties they were praised for their aeolian cadences and daring chord progressions and such like, not realising they didn’t read music and that it was instinctive. Lennon and McCartney were compared to Schubert among others. Classical musicians may well prefer listening to pop because playing in an orchestra is their day job, what they trained for, they may not actually enjoy hearing that stuff. The orchestra who played on Day In The Life were apparently quite sniffy about it, not thinking it had any worth but that could be that they didn’t get what the band were trying to do and may have been more favourable looking back later. I don’t think it’s much of a theory. It depends on how open minded a person is.

  17. It was a gig for me really. Had no particular interest in dance/electronica at the time but I found myself watching The Prodigy at Santa Pod in 1994. I wouldn’t say it changed my life but it flipped a switch that has remained on since then. I bought ‘Experience’ the week after the gig. It’s great when you just get switched on to a whole genre at a time when it was incredibly creative and just exploding in all directions.

  18. Having enthusiastically embraced the progressive music of the late sixties – scattered across all genres from soul to rock via singer songwriters and all points in between, by 1970 I already had a huge wants-list of things to hear and buy. Early exposure to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee via the BBC in the late fifties had also led me into the same waters that Jagger & Richards swam; I was accumulating a decent set of Wolf, Muddy and other’s works, and I’d discovered the money pit that was the Yazoo label – with various Blinds and Reverends – the titles were hard to get but always worth the effort. I figured that by around the year 2035 I’d have a decent record collection if I bought everything on my lists.

    One blind spot was jazz – which until the turn of the decade I imagined consisted largely of scratchy Django sides, tunes by George Chisholm and Acker Bilk, who turned up on the telly regularly, and unfathomably dense lo-fi recordings from the 1930s of the big American jazz bands. I was rather indifferent to the possibilities in the jazz world. Indifferent but still curious..

    And then I heard this album, and my wants-list rapidly grew to truly enormous proportions, condemning me to a lifetime of record buying that, on current estimates, will only take me until the year 2855 to work through. Of course, with every year the assymptotic extension of the list will inevitably and finally deny me the ultimate pleasure of completion. What fun I’ve had along the way though…

    This was the LP that opened that door for me. Blew me away. It’s a shame that somewhere along the way I have lost the little pink balloon from within the small pink envelope glued onto the cover, but I still have the vinyl, and more recently I have a nice CD remaster to listen to as well.

    A few months later, I bought a copy of Elastic Rock by Nucleus. And off I went again…

  20. Uncle Meat for me. The most ambitious and out there rock record I had heard. It creates its own world and is difficult to describe if you haven’t heard it.

    It also pointed me towards Stravinsky (yay), Eric Dolphy (yay) and Varese (hmm).

    • Frank Zappa was a fantastic curator of culture for a cohort of youngsters. So many things I would not have discovered if it wasn’t for him. Bowie was good like that, too. David Byrne kind of keeps it going. Does Stormzy or Ed Sheeran provide a booklist or a selection of cultural possibilities in this way?

  21. Six years old. My Dad travelled a lot, so the family vinyl had been abandoned for a small box of tapes for easy transportation. A new purchase appeared one day: big-ass headphones with the curly cord. After a rummage through the light fare like the Seekers and John Denver, I took an afternoon to listen to The Beach Boys’ 20 Golden Greats with the cans on. When it got to Heroes and Villains I had my tiny mind blown.

    11 Years old. Kids at my school were big into Asia (the prog-pop supergroup) and, we were told, a similar band was going to be on the telly. Watching Annie Nightingale introduce the 90125-era Yes on TV, I was impressed enough to head to town to buy a tape by these Synth-tastic bemulleted 80s chaps. For reasons I’ll never explain, I plumped for Close to the Edge. Again, on headphones (Seiko ‘Walkman’ this time), again mind blown. I was destined to be in a gang of one who liked this stuff, it transpired, but I gave not one shit.

    19 Years old. A college friend had taped something for me (Screamadelica?) and thoughtfully put their own choice on the other side. One Sunday morning, after a particularly heavy night out, the tape machine clicked into auto-reverse and I was treated to Steve Wonder’s Talking Book. I’d enjoyed Motown compilations enough but had never dipped into soul albums proper. As I Believe (When I Fall In Love) hit its stride, I shed a hungover tear or two. I’d never heard a suite of music this affecting, this real before. Thanks, Hans.

    Other epiphanies came in clubs and pubs, sometimes live (The Replacements) sometimes a single song on a jukebox set me on a new course (I Am The Resurrection) but those three albums were something else.

  22. It has to be The Story Of The Blues, Paul Oliver’s compilation, and accompanying book. I heard it first at a friend’s home. His dad was a film director, and a very cool guy. He put it on, and warned me that the the quality of some of the recordings was ‘a bit hairy’. I was spellbound from the first track (Fra-Fra Tribesmen in Northern Ghana) to the last (Johnny Shines) via Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie McTell, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lead Belly, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Memphis Minnie, Big Bill Broonzy and many more that I still love, to Otis Spann and Elmore James. Oddly, no Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters, but a gatefold sleeve packed with dense text, from which I learned of the death of Robert Johnson, and that Memphis Minnie played Me And My Chauffeur Blues with her third husband on second guitar. I learned the story of the blues. I got my own copy for Christmas 1969. Every track listed all the musicians, so I noted Louis Armstrong playing on Chippie Hill’s Pratt City, Willie Dixon playing bass with Johnny Shines, Memphis Slim accompanying Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry’s harp with Blind Boy Fuller. I already played guitar, but learnt to play Hurt’s Stack O’ Lee Blues, Minnie’s Me And My Chauffeur, and many more. I taught myself to play the piano by working out Jimmy Yancey’s ‘habanera’ style accompaniment to Faber Smith’s East St Louis Blues. That same Christmas I also received the first Led Zeppelin album. I saw Willie Dixon credited as composer of You Shook Me, and I Can’t Quit You Baby. I started to make connections, and my musical life had changed forever. I had assumed Paul Oliver was American. I later discovered that he was English, and only when he died in 2017 did I find that he was an eminent architectural historian from Pinner!

  23. For me it would have been a late 80s compilation called Funk in Yo Face. Looking back there was precious little funk on Irish radio while I was growing up. I vaguely knew who James Brown was but as a genre it was unknown territory. I now realise that Talking Heads, Orange Juice and other SOYS bands were priming me for the real thing. The key track on the tape was Supernatural Thing by Ben E King. I knew and absolutely love Siouxsie and the Banshees version but had no idea the Stand by Me man did the original. Other great tracks included Shack Up by Banbara, Express Yourself and even late Little Richard. It opened my eyes and ears to a huge new world. It’s possibly my favourite music now but that was totally my gateway.

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