| |
|
OK, finally, here we go;
1.The Beach Boys – I Get Around
My first solid musical memory is from when I was maybe 7 or 8 or 9 years old and I decided I wanted to listen to pop music. I’d only experienced it on children’s TV whilst waiting for the cartoons to come on, and I didn’t really understand what was up with it, but it had a certain kind of weird appeal, and older kids and teenagers were all into it, and I really wanted to be like a cool teenager, so finding out what it was all about was a bit of a scary and exciting prospect. So my parents bought me a really cheap walkman and took me to Woolworths on a Saturday morning to buy a tape. And I didn’t know anything about pop music and had no idea what to go for, so my mum, in an absolutely inspired decision, told me I should get the Beach Boys ‘Summer Dreams’ compilation – and it totally was and is absolutely the most genius POP music ever! I listened to it so much that I still have every note of every Beach Boys hit single memorised in my head ready for playback. I liked the lyrics, even though I probably didn’t understand the stuff about picking up girls etc. – I just liked the idea of these crazy kids cruising around in a mad hotrod car (as depicted on the sleeve of the tape!) having adventures and stuff. The New Kids on the Block were popular at the time and had their own cartoon series, and I totally hated it and wished that the Beach Boys had a cartoon instead. Bizarrely, the only other tape I had at this time was one by Merle Haggard that my dad gave me – I liked the anthemic quality of the songs and the fact that they kind of had stories (and the fact that they were sung by a cowboy), but mercifully my walkman chewed up that tape before it really had time to sink in.
2. Aerosmith – Sweet Emotion
This represents my early obsession with hair metal which began in my last year of primary school when I made a new friend who was into it, and we’d swap tapes and stuff. The seminal influence of my copy of “The Best Rock Album in the World.. Ever” cannot be overestimated. During my first few years in Secondary School I really dug Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Judas Priest, Ugly Kid Joe, Whitesnake and whatever junk was being played on Virgin radio. Oddly, I don’t recall there being any logical reasoning behind why this music appealed to me so much.. I never thought about why I liked it – I just.. did. I remember listening to a ‘100 best songs ever!’ countdown that Virgin radio did on a bank holiday weekend with aforementioned friend, and showing appropriate respect for Pink Floyd, Led Zep, Queen, Genesis etc. as his rocker dad told us all about them.
Number #4 in this top 100 countdown was the first time I heard…
3. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
the stuff written about this song’s importance tends to concentrate on it’s significance as the first record by an ‘underground’ band to be a huge mainstream hit and it’s sociological importance etc., but obviously I was completely unaware of all that baloney when I heard it, and the primal power of this song shouldn’t be forgotten – it was like it rocked more than anything else I’d ever heard by a factor of a thousand, and was a thousand times louder and more aggressive and .. generally better. We’d play it over and over again in the classroom during breaktime, and everyone was so caught up in it that we’d just do absurd things – we’d work out different ways to react to the song in advance – we’d sort of walk up and down pretending to be miserable pedestrians during the quiet bits, and then when the loud bits hit, we’d just be MENTAL, air guitaring and leaping off desks and screaming with complete abandon.. we must have been at a stage of development where we had just a basic connection with the Rock Power, but no notions of self-consciousness to stop us from just acting like fools.. I think that if we’d been exposed to something like Black Flag or the Stooges during this period we’d actually have exploded. And it was just this one song – I must have owned by tape of ‘Nevermind’ for at least two years before I bothered listening past the first three tracks. A few years later of course I rediscovered it and started listening to it in more detail and bought Nirvana’s other albums and became a complete Nirvana fanatic at just about the right time for teenage angst to kick in..
4.Suede – Stay Together
And this is where I turned ‘indie’. The first two ‘grown-up’ / non-metal tapes I bought were this and ‘Saturn 5’ by the Inspiral Carpets, for 99p each. I still think this song sounds amazing – it just had an awful lot of sounds in it that I’d never heard before and it sounded totally sinister and glamorous. The Inspiral Carpets song on the other hand just had a stupidly catchy keyboard riff and lyrics about a spaceship. I think this was not all that long before ‘Brit-Pop Summer’ when I got a job in a Spar shop and bought my first CD player, and spent the summer listening to Oasis, Blur, Sleeper, Pulp et al. Annoyingly though, none of my friends shared this interest – they’d all switched to listening to dance music and superclub compilation albums and stuff, which needless to say I couldn’t get with.
5.Beck – Sissyneck
It may seem a cliché so say so, but when I first heard Odelay it just sounded like .. music from another planet. I didn’t know anything about hip-hop or sampling or funk or folk or any of the other things he was referencing / mixing together, and having previously only really listened to straightforward rock and pop, it was just like .. this music is made by a complete mental person.. obviously I loved the killer tunes, and the surrealist lyrics really connected with my interest in weird books and films and paintings in a way that other music hadn’t, and my reaction was just “Yes! This is music for crazy people – this is my kind of music!” It was my most played CD for about two years or something. I thought the way he’d drop in spoken world samples and transform songs halfway through into something completely different was just the best thing ever. And it seems odd in retrospect, but it really freaked out my friends and family – they were like “what the hell is this? Some kind of weird country n’ western rap thing?? Turn it off!”
6.Helen Love – Does Your Heart Go Boom?
The brit-pop thing helped turn me into an avid Steve Lamacq listener, and by the year I did my GCSEs I was completely hooked. My local town didn’t (and doesn’t) have anywhere that sold records, let alone records of the dodgy indie variety, so I just recorded all my favourite songs off the radio. And still do actually, although obviously my choice of radio show has changed. Most of the stuff I recorded consisted of absolutely forgettable indie fodder crap, but some of it, like this track, was absolutely BRILLIANT; a hyperactive DIY casio imitation of happy hardcore topped with punky thrash guitar fuzz and a girl singing about bombing Kula Shaker concerts – yes!! And when I found out she/they came from Swansea, I was just .. worshipful. And still am! I should have sought them out and pledged eternal devotion, but I assumed that since they’d been played on the radio they’d be dead famous and have loads of fans. Obviously They didn’t, and they’d probably have been .. quite scared. Also worth a mention are Urusei Yatsura and iDLEWiLD who helped crystallise my love fucked up guitar noise and punky chaos (being unaware of their obvious influences - Sonic Youth, Pavement, Jesus & Mary Chain etc. - I thought they were just the coolest), and the largely non-existent ‘brat-pop’ scene, as publicised by the Melody Maker and ‘spearheaded’ by the likes of Gel, Vyvyan, Cheetera and the Chicks, whose records I didn’t have a chance in hell of finding (I’m still looking!); all these girls and boys not much older than me done up in glam-indie fanzine chic playing fucked up, amateurish pop music – just impossibly cool..
7.Ramones – each and every Ramones song
I don’t think there was anything particularly special about how I discovered the Ramones. I just thought they sounded cool and bought one of their CDs.
No explanation necessary – direct hit to the centre of my brain – these guys are God!
8. The Pixies – Bone Machine
I have many, many memories of sitting on my own on the shitty bus ride to and from college blasting ‘Surfer Rosa’ at top volume, confident in the knowledge that none of those fuckers were listening to anything this cool. The Pixies are really weird, and really rock, and wrote fantastic songs and, well, what more is there to say? I think I initially got into them because they were Kurt Cobain’s favourite band. For a month or two I literally listened to nothing but Pixies.
9.The Dead Kennedys – Holiday in Cambodia
Heard this on the radio and was completely floored by it. Bought ‘Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death’ the following week. Tapped directly into my increasingly anarcho politicals, my militant geek outsider complex and the strain of misanthropic humour I was rocking at that particular moment. I’ve always thought of the Ramones primarily as a pop band, so it was the DKs that really introduced me to the notion of punk as an ideology, and of music as direct cultural resistance, and of the importance of righteous ire and so on.
10.Sonic Youth – Kotten Krown
My decision to investigate Sonic Youth was completely deliberate and premeditated. Having absorbed the complete works of Nirvana and the Pixies, I wanted more, and they just seemed like the logical next step. Grant was nice enough to send me a tape of selections from their 80s albums and .. well the first time I listened to it it didn’t connect with it all that much really .. but it did sound really interesting and scary and cool and different, so I gave it a few more listens, and I think this is the track that was playing when it finally clicked – the moment at which the beautiful , trippy, folk melody from the first half of the song slowly reemerges from the spiralling storm of twisted electric hiss and atonal distortion, like the most triumphant, pure, cool thing.. the standard sounds and structures of rock music torn apart and reconstructed into something that sounds like all the glass in a skyscraper shattering in blinding sunlight. Yeah.
And this brings us to about my 18th birthday.. from there onwards I could easily write another ten; Jesus & Mary Chain, Velvet Underground, And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Wu-Tang Clan, Stooges, Pavement, Mogwai, Bikini Kill, Melt Banana, Patti Smith, Cat Power, the Flaming Lips, Neil Young.. the list is practically endless.. |
|
|
