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*Your favourite record and what it means to you!

Exodus - first album that got me into reggae. I used to play it on a loop on a tape recorder round about when it came out , when I was around 15. It was my erstwhile (if that's the word I want) hippy mum's tape. Natural mystic was the opening number & I love that opening

Nice thread.
 
Porcupine Tree - Trains

It doesn't matter what mood I'm in, or what's happened, somehow this song fits. I've listened to it literally thousands of times over the years and I never get bored of it.

Always the summers are slipping away...
 
Harvest - Neil Young.

I discovered it at the same time I discovered I had to grow the fuck up as a young obnoxious cunt. I can this smell the sea air from where I was living when it all happened. That and the Johnston's magnolia paint I was throwing up to earn a living.

Shortly after I packed it in and bought a pick up (Volkswagen LT van) and took it down to LA (Sennen Cove). Surfed the winter through and went back home to me Ma and ended my running off down south to bury my head in the sand. That's when I got Floyd.

She definitely loved me all up :D
 
Levitation by Hawkwind.

In 1984, I was 14. My self and my friends spent the summer prowling the streets, drumming houses, schools and sometimes prowling the deserted steets at night robbing cars, must have done at least 150 cars that summer. We spent our gains on designer clothes, if we could not rob them and acid, speed and hash.

A friends older sister was 26, she was really cool, she knew alot about drugs and life, we used to skin up in her front room and listen to Hawkwind, her husband was a Hells Angel doing life for stabbing someone to death in the Swan in Stockwell.

I remember taking acid listening to Levitation by Hawkwind, it was amazing, the colours, the sounds, the whole journey.

It was a great summer, I went from my first kiss to losing my virginity to my mates sister in the space of a week, happy innocent times.

In the darkness I will shine
Cast not shadows or define
Walk on water float on air
There is no other to compare

[Chorus:]
I have this fascination
No cause for a deviation
It's called levitation

There is no cause to start and scream
Nor rub your eyes this is no dream
Although I sit upon this chair
I rise and float up in the air

[Chorus]

Magnetic force repel attract
Once it starts there's no turning back
I offer you this chance to learn
Take it now there's no return
 
The The - Giant. Listening to Soul Mining while sitting on the red dirt at the side of the Nullarbor Highway in the baking heat trying to hitch a lift to Sydney. A blue scrapper Holden pulls up and Aussie Wayne saves my bacon and takes me on a 3 day treck across the outback. He got all my c90 tapes at the end of the trip for his decency. Every time I listen to it I always drift back to those crazy days as a 19 year old being out n about.
 
dirty dingus said:
The The - Giant. Listening to Soul Mining while sitting on the red dirt at the side of the Nullarbor Highway in the baking heat trying to hitch a lift to Sydney. A blue scrapper Holden pulls up and Aussie Wayne saves my bacon and takes me on a 3 day treck across the outback. He got all my c90 tapes at the end of the trip for his decency. Every time I listen to it I always drift back to those crazy days as a 19 year old being out n about.
Click to expand...
Have you heard the Pilooski re-edit of it?
 
Don't know about "favourite" (because that changes according to my mood), but this is a seriously wonderful song. I have to fight back the tears when I hear this one;



I first heard it about a year ago on Paul Gambacchini's Saturday evening show on Radio 2. After it had finished playing he said, "You can't follow that one, but here's the next record anyway." I think he was probably right. The world is at least a little bit better because that song exists and gets played and heard.
 
Mos Def - Black On Both Sides (1999)

Bought it purely because it got a good review in NME (9/10). Hadn't really listened to that much rap or hip hop and only really liked indie at the time.

This album has so many great motown and old skool hip hop samples and his rhymes flow really smoothly.

Favourite tunes are Fear Not of Man

Hip Hop

Ms Fat Booty

Know That


Don't really like wanking on about music too much, I just like these tunes a lot and have listened to them probably more than any other album so I chose this. My second favourite is S&M by Metallica because it's like a best of, but better. I love grandiose epic sounding music and I think the symphony complemented their sound perfectly, No Leaf Clover is my favourite on it, so powerful and great lyrics too.



Stopped regularly listening to albums in their entirety about five years ago. Why listen to filler when you can easily compile amazing playlists?


Shortlist:
S&M - Metallica
Incesticide - Nirvana
The Mouse & The Mask - Dangerdoom
RATM - RATM
Sigh No More - Mumford & Sons
The Bends - Radiohead
Grace - Jeff Buckley
I Speak Because I Can - Laura Marling
Morning Glory - Oasis
Lungs - Florence + The Machine
Deftones - Adrenaline
Begin To Hope - Regina Spektor
 


This whole album never fails to move me - since I first heard the Burundi drummers on "Boho Dance" on the radio in 1976 .. very little of the music I listen to has lyrics - partly due to the perfection I find in these - and the subject matter would usually leave me cold - I dislike literature generally and especially tales of power and wealth and social mores ... but before the summer is out, I am likely to be encountered singing along to the whole album on my way home from a bike ride.
 


...the song I sing to myself under my breath to keep me on my feet whenever I feel that everything's completely and irrevocably fucked.
 
I don't think there has been a better album than this. every single track is perfect and it sounds just as good now. It was probably the first time I understood what 'cool' really was:

Blondie - Parallel Lines
 
I hope it's okay to add a voice for a classical record: Shostacovitch 5th symphony. I can see all life in there: fear, paranoia, happiness, certainty, beauty, impatience, self-doubt.... I love it, and that's before I discovered the circumstances under which it was written (composer facing a possible deportation to Stalin's gulags)

I also discovered it at a very difficult time in my life, and I go back and back to it

Even if you've never listened to anything classical, I recommend giving it a go.
 
The Chameleons - Script Of The Bridge coz they were from Langley which is an overspill estate to the north of manchester and the street signs up there are the same as a lot of the places I hung about as a kid. Same design of houses as well. Plus the singer out of the Chameleons said he got his inspiration for a lot of his songs from taking acid and walking round this place called Tandle Hill Park where you could look down on the orange bathed beauty of most of the north manchester suburbs. Me and my mates did that. We never wrote any songs though.
 
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Those in the know will be able to tell from my username I'm a fan.

And a music fan.

And out of every album, this is the one that had the most profound, revelatory, punched-in-the-gut, life-affirming effect upon me. (and also on the people sat in the room the first time we all heard it)

Bizarrely at the time, I had bought this album via a strange route. I had read a review in Melody Maker/ NME/either/both of the bands first single...a 22 minute 3 phased meandering epic wonderfully titled 'SCUM' - The reviewer totally flummoxed by the complexities and nuances of it (apparently)...recorded in a crypt, under a church, in inner city London.

Just reading his almost desperately lost for words description of it, the fact that it had the best song title ever, the fact that they had released a single 22 minutes long (?!?), the fact that Bark Psychosis is just such a fucking great name for a band. I had to find out more. The finding out more was a random purchase of HEX when it came out.

To set the scene. Its 1994. There has been a party for the last 5 years. Drugs are getting harder. Comedowns are getting longer. But there is a sense of beauty and peace and reflection. An appreciation of music. Simply because we were all taking that comedown time to properly listen to it again.

Post-club night, all back to mine, drop a few papers, roll a few other papers, room full of folks. I stick it on, not even heard it before, none of us. By the end of the haunting, tear-inducing piano introduction of The Loom, that whole room was transfixed - and taken away for the duration of the album.

I'm still as lost for words as that first reviewer I read. Its a night time album. Its a journey that never stays on track. Its film-noir and streetlights and drizzle. Its heart tuggingly tender and wrist-slittingly angsty. Its wrapped in off-kilter, minor-chord weirdness and and lurches between bombastically triumphant and depressingly introspective. But for every low swing there is hope.

"You gotta go on!"

Nobody knew WTF had just occurred at the end, we just went back to track one and did it all again.

and again

and again.

Once I fell in love, and started to find out more.

These were a bunch of 17-19 year old kids!!!??

They did record under a church ?!??

They started out doing Napalm Death covers and utter white noise experiments??!!

And like all good bands - they pretty much fell apart making this masterpiece - an album that Simon Reynolds piece in the Melody Maker credited as the starting point for the whole new genre-to-be - 'Post-Rock'

As an aside almost. Shortly after its release I was on a mission to see this played live. They were on tour, I had the crew from that room and an extra couple of car loads of randoms convinced by all our babbling about this band - and we all pulled up outside the Princess Charlotte in Leicester. Plenty of drinks, etc, and a good buzz of expectancy.

Support band comes on, we get some guy on a keyboard and few lights playing THE most smashing DRUM AND BASS we have heard in a while. Everybody is totally hyped.

We wait

...and wait...

Then get kicked out of the pub by the staff.???

"We came to see Bark Psychosis!"

A quick chat to the drum and bass guy sets us straight.

He is Graham Sutton, the main man in Bark Psychosis, who pretty much split up in the van on the way down. Show must go on. He has become Boymerang that afternoon. And will take a ten year hiatus in D&B before the second coming of Bark Psychosis with 2004's Codename Dustsucker, an album which makes the wonder of Hex happen all over again.

Please seek. Turn the lights off. Imbibe. Headphones only. See you on the other side.

By the way...it is dark, it is majestic, it is cold, it is confusing, it is so beautiful it cuddles you, but never relax in the cuddle - cos it will fuck you in the face. Then cuddle you again.



From my shortlist..

Screamadelica - Primal Scream
100th Window - Massive Attack
Every Man and Woman Is A Star - Ultramarine
Infected/Soul Mining - The The
Specials - Specials
Odelay - Beck
Audience With The Mind - House of Love
Shape Of Punk To Come - Refused
Ladies and Gentlemen, We are Floating In Space - Spiritualised
Kisses/Fractures - Dolium
Gargantuan - Spooky
DubNoBassWithMyHeadMan - Underworld
The Sun Is Often Out - Longpigs
 
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