I took part recently in the Facebook meme about albums that influenced my taste in music. The ‘rules’ suggested posting only a photo of the sleeve, with no explanations etc, but frankly where is the fun in that? I want to know why people pick particular things and the thinking that’s gone into it. So here are my twenty. Dates are year of original release, and not necessarily when they influenced my taste.
1 – Abba ‘Greatest Hits’ (1976)
No, I was not listening to Punk in 1976, and it was not until 1977 when my friend Graeme Milligan bunked off school to buy a copy of ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ that I had even a vague notion about what it was. No, instead I was, like most of my peers, in thrall to ABBA and thank goodness for that. I have foolishly denied my love of ABBA at various points in the intervening years, which tells you nothing about the music and everything about my insecurities and the need to be seen to be following the correct trends appropriate to whatever might be deemed ‘cool’ in whatever circles I might have imagined myself to belong. My first pick for this entry was actually 1977’s ‘The Album’ which in hindsight may been even more counter-cool cool, and I do remember excitedly queuing up to see ‘The Movie’ at the Orient cinema in Ayr. In truth though it would be this ‘Greatest Hits’ collection that I would have listened to most; the one with Agnetha and Bjorn looking a bit sulky on one side of the gatefold and Frida and Benny snogging on the other. In hindsight it’s a truly great photograph, the two ends of the bench and two sides of the gatefold capturing the gamut of emotional treasure contained within the songs. Of course I was unaware of this at the time. I just thought it was perfect Pop music. And it was. And it is.
2 – The Jam ‘All Mod Cons’ (1978)
It strikes me that the majority of the albums/records that influence one’s musical taste by default come from a time when one is most easily influenced. Which is to say, largely, though not exclusively, when one is young and impressionable. In all truth the records that had the most influence on my own developing taste in my youth were singles, mostly heard on the radio, so mostly contemporary with my age. However I’m also certain that up to a point that taste was as much informed by the sound of scratchy 7″ singles that had belonged to my mum’s sister. Singles from the ’50s: Elvis. Lonnie Donegan. Anthony Newley. The Teddy Bears. All played on a mono Marconiphone record player. That tinny, thin, trebly kind of sound somehow connected and informed, I am sure, my musical preferences in later years. The Jam, though, would be the first contemporary group who made a significant impression, and whilst they were primarily a singles group, the albums weren’t half bad either. I chose ‘Setting Sons’ in the ’20 Albums That Changed My Life’ meme, so ‘All Mod Cons’ gets the nod here.
3 – The Photos ‘The Photos’ (1980)
This is the first album in this meme of ’20 albums that influenced my musical taste’ that I’d struggle to listen to all the way through nowadays. Yet it was one of the first albums I chose to buy for myself and I played it an awful lot at the time. Did the music press of the time label them (disparagingly) as a Brummie Blondie? I’m sure they must have, yet I owned this and not ‘Parallel Lines’ (that I taped from a friend – I don’t think they were bothered about a tape of this in trade…) so it gets my nod for being an album that influenced my taste for guitar driven punk/pop songs with a somewhat nasal female vocal (Carrie would call them whiny girlie singers).
4 – P.i.L ‘Metal Box’ (1979)
My friend Alan Penman bought ‘Metal Box’ when it was released and I have a vivid memory of borrowing it to tape on my dad’s stereo system. That memory involves me sitting in my dad’s armchair, headphones tight on my head, and a feeling of utter bewilderment filling my head in the spaces left by the, ahem, ‘music’ I was hearing. This was the first time I can remember hearing music that I truly did not understand, had no reference points to latch on to, but that was undeniably mesmerising and seductively Other. I was too young and too diverted by a multitude of other things to explore any of the contextual musical avenues pointed out by P.i.L. at the time (and in all honesty, much preferred the short Pop thrills of the Top 40), but I’m sure that hearing ‘Metal Box’ at the age of 13 allowed me to be more receptive to the music that influenced it when I came across it in later life.
5 – Simple Minds ‘New Gold Dream (81, 82, 83, 84)’ (1982)
Would I have been receptive to Simple Minds’ albums like ‘Empires and Dance’, ‘Reel to Real’ or ‘Sons and Fascination’ if I had not first been primed by ‘Metal Box’ as a thirteen year old? It’s a moot point, but I suspect those records would have connected regardless, and certainly with ‘Empires…’ and ‘Reel…’ there was a similar sense of them feeling strange and otherwordly. By the time of ‘New Gold Dream’ then I was already very much in thrall to Simple Minds, so it might be argued that it is an album that did not influence my musical tastes so much as reinforce them. Yet I would argue (with myself if no-one else) that the influence it held for me was as much to do with what followed, and the growing sense of what I did NOT like/want as much as what I did. As is well documented, the group’s trajectory after ‘New Gold Dream’ was to Stadiums and Big Rock Anthems, and certainly the roots of that are in ‘New Gold Dream’. Yet ‘Dream’ tempers that grandiloquence with a spacious spirituality, a reverence for the previous strangeness that had led them to this jumping off point. ‘New Gold Dream’ then in hindsight is an album where I understood the weighing up of personal interest versus group loyalty; started to grasp the idea of ‘this, this, this and this, but not that.’ A valuable lesson.
6 – Aztec Camera ‘High Land, Hard Rain’ (1983)
‘High Land, Hard Rain’ would be the album that firmly established my taste for melodic (and for want of a better word) jangly guitar Pop music. There would be something of a flood of other artists making similar sounds in the/my years to follow, but I am pretty confident in saying that this is the text from which everything, for me, flowed. The David Band design for the cover was highly influential too, as was the very similar Fraser Taylor work for The Bluebells and Friends Again, whose ‘Trapped and Unwrapped’ LP from a year later was also vying for inclusion here. Heady days.
7 – The Smiths ‘Hatful of Hollow’ (1984)
I thought relatively long and hard about whether to include ‘Hatful of Hollow’ in the list of albums that have influenced my musical taste and finally decided it would be churlish not to. It could be said that The Smiths were not significantly different to the sound forged by Aztec Camera and so arguably their records merely cemented a love for a certain aesthetic that Roddy Frame and his gang had established in my heart. And yet, those early Smiths singles did somehow stand apart… By the time ‘Hatful…’ was released of course I was fully conversant with everything collected there, either from the singles or the sessions taped from the radio so I’m not sure that, strictly speaking, the album itself was much of an influence, but the cultural reference points contained within its songs and aesthetic certainly were.
It’s not a record that I would, or even could, listen to again now. Morrissey’s vocal deliveries have grated for a long time, and lyrically much of it now feels very deliberately posed, which of course explains its success in connecting so strongly with disaffected young adults. A small part of me is rather ashamed at being taken in by it all, but I’m sure that a larger part of the 19 year old me would be ashamed of my present self, so that’s hardly worth bothering about…
8 – Weekend ‘La Variete’ (1982)
On reflection I think this one ought to have come before The Smiths’ record because it was probably my most played and loved album through the summer of 1983 and arguably hinted at treasures lying behind many more musical doors than, say, ‘Hatful of Hollow’ ever did (I’m not denying here the invaluable other cultural doors that The Smiths ushered me through). It’s an album I have come back to, and continue to come back to, on a fairly regular basis, and it always sounds sublime. An older fellow student at the Mackintosh School sneered when he saw it on my drawing board in the studio back in 1983 and called it ‘faux jazz’. I didn’t really know what he meant at the time, but he was wrong anyway.
Everything about this album feels perfect to me, from Wendy Smith’s cover art to the label design to the music itself. Easy listening for uneasy listeners sure enough.
9 – R.E.M. ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’ (1985)
In 1985 ‘Fables/Reconstruction’ was the first R.E.M. album I heard and I found it remarkably seductive. Again, this was a record for which I had few reference points, mostly because I simply had no real musical education in terms of the things that were influencing the artists making these records. Even in 1985 I was not reading ‘the music press’ aside from ‘Smash Hits’ (something that in hindsight I’m quite thankful for) so I had no notion of the ‘scenes’ that were feeding the music that I found myself enjoying. One of my brother’s friends was, however, very much into ‘the American Scene’, and after listening to ‘Fables’ I quickly borrowed the previous R.E.M. albums, plus records by groups like The Rain Parade, Green On Red, Replacements etc. Those other groups would only more fully appeal to me in later years, but I found those R.E.M. records to be remarkably strange yet effortlessly accessible. Not understanding was, I think, a large part of the appeal. There was an opaqueness to their records at this time that hinted at outsider folk mythology, and although I couldn’t have identified it as such at the time, perhaps instinctively I felt drawn to elements of those threads even as a more visible part of me recoiled against anything that might be described as ‘hippie nonsense’. ‘Fables’ then not only opened avenues into ‘American Rock’ but also into a multitude of other peculiarities. I still listen to it on occasion and whilst it makes a great deal more sense to me now than it did in 1985, it retains, I think, a sense of keeping some mysteries cloaked, and that is certainly to its credit.
10 – Various Artists ‘Motown 20th Anniversary Album’ (1980)
I wish I could post, say, a Kent label compilation as the album that influenced my taste in music to take in Soul stylings, but the reality is that it was this Motown 20th Anniversary compilation that I bought ostensibly as a birthday present for my dad that I remember as a way in. In truth, Soul is not the musical genre that I would personally turn to by default when looking for something to listen to, but whenever I do hear something from, say, those Dave Godin Deep Soul Treasures compilations, it is pretty much overpoweringly magnificent. There is a strong argument to be made for compilations generally being the prime mover in terms of albums that influenced my taste.
11 – Various Artists ’20 Town and Country Greats’ (1974)
The first draft of this list of 20 albums that influenced my taste in music included ‘Grievous Angel’ by Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris as the album that opened my ears to the pleasures of Country music. Whilst that album undoubtedly was a crucial factor (and would have been way cooler to include here), on further reflection I decided that K-Tel’s ’20 Town and Country Greats’ from 1974 ought to represent the Country genre. It was my dad’s album, one of very few ‘contemporary’ records that we had in the house (record listening almost entirely restricted, as I’ve previously mentioned, to my mum’s late sister’s collection of 45s and EP boxes from the 1950s) and appropriately I posted this entry to FB on fathers’ day.
It would be misleading to suggest that as a youngster the music on this album made me a lifelong lover of Country music, and indeed if pressed as a teenager I would have disparagingly told you that it was, literally, ‘Dad Music’ and not my thing at all. Equally true, however, would be the fact that frequent exposure to these numbers by Johnny Cash, June Carter, Marty Robbins, Charlie Rich etc would have subconsciously laid the foundations on which later discovery of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris (and a host of others) would build.
12 – Fairport Convention ‘Unhalfbricking’ (1969)
There were moments in my piecemeal musical, ah, ‘education’ when what might be classified as Folk Music came to my attention, and when they did they almost always hit the spot. I have said this before, but primarily I remember a mixtape that Rob Young (then of Poppyheads, later author of the epic ‘Electric Eden’ book) made for me back in the summer of 1988. That tape introduced me to Bert Jansch, Bridget St John, John Renbourn, Nick Drake even (who I had never heard until that point). I think there was even a Fairport Convention track on there, yet it was not until years later that I felt the urge to fully listen to any of the Fairport albums and ‘Unhalfbricking’ was the one that really hooked me. As with, say, The Kinks, it is something of a shame that the early albums tend to get all the continued attention/reverence because Fairport Convention too made some great records through the 1970s and 80s that tend to be overlooked. Yet I remember that the sorely missed Neil Kulkarni thought that the run of four albums they released in 1968 and 1969 were pretty much a perfect body of work that rivals anything by anyone. As with many things, he was spot on.
13 – Archie Shepp/John Coltrane ‘New Thing At Newport’ (1966)
If ‘La Variete’ by Weekend made me at least receptive to the idea of Jazz in 1983, then it has also to be admitted that it took many more years before I even dipped a toe in the wider waters. Perhaps predictably, John Coltrane was the artist I’d decided I was going to check out, but the only two albums I could find in Glasgow’s Tower Records store in 1991 (I picked up Ultramarine’s ‘Every Man And Woman’ and a spare copy of Emily’s ‘Rub-Al-Khali’ on the same trip – both albums which could equally be said to have influenced my broader musical taste) were ‘Ballads’ and this split LP with Archie Shepp. The ‘Ballads’ LP was/is lovely, but this blew my mind. The Archie Shepp side in particular still sounds incredibly challenging and to a degree impenetrable but is wildly exciting. A bunch of Blue Note compilations later expanded my awareness and perhaps could have been included in this meme, but it’s this ‘New Thing At Newport’ album that really pushed me onto those.
14 – The Orb ‘The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ (1991)
In the previous entry I mentioned picking up ‘Every Man And Woman Is A Star’ by Ultramarine back in 1991, and it was initially my pick for the album that influenced my taste in music to take in the electronic sounds of the late 1980s and early 90s. On further reflection however I’ve opted to go for ‘The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ because I think the album, more than any other, captures my attraction to the idea of music as collage, as something that (in this case literally) picks elements from a multitude of sources and puts them together to make something new and otherworldly. If at the time of its release (and for a number of years thereafter) I would have denied in myself the appeal of what are undeniably Prog influences and references, then that was my loss (yet also, I would argue, for the time, my benefit).
15 – Omni Trio ‘The Deepest Cut Vol 1’ (1995)
The idea of a drum’n’bass album being the record that would influence my musical taste rather cuts against the grain of the genre, which was/is exemplified by 12″ singles. Those singles were something of a revelation to me in the mid 1990s and there was a period there when I was listening to little else. The records sounded more exciting and thrillingly new than anything I’d ever heard, my lack of ‘training’ as it were from the more hardcore end of the techno genre (and my not being a clubber) perhaps being a factor in that. The singles collected on Omni Trio’s ‘Vol 1’ double LP were already hard to find by the time I got switched on, so it’s 1995 release was perfect timing. ‘Shadowplay’, ‘Thru The Vibe’, ‘Together’ and especially the magnificent ‘Renegade Snares’ sounded like a whole new universe opening up, as indeed it was. The records still sound splendid, and if a little of the lustre has worn off that is perhaps as it ought to be for music that was so spectacularly of its time. It also points to the fact that the d’n’b sound so quickly became ubiquitous and consumed by the mainstream, but that’s the price of ‘success’ I suppose.
16 – Bruce Springsteen ‘Born To Run’ (1975)
It is nine years since something clicked with me and The Boss, allowing me to rather gleefully turn my back on beliefs I had held for decades. Springsteen wasn’t a bombastic boor and American Rock could be a marvellous beast. Who knew? Pretty much everyone else but me, as it turns out, but No Regrets and all that. There are other Springsteen albums I prefer to this (‘Darkness…’ and ‘The River’ nose ahead for me) but ‘Born To Run’, on its 40th anniversary was the one that eventually cut through the crap and cut me to the quick.
17 – One Man Bannister ‘Rubber Solo’ (2019)
I wrote about this album (a version of The Beatles’ ‘Rubber Soul’ by Matthew Bannister, formerly of beloved Flying Nun band Sneaky Feelings) on its release back in 2019, and I’m interested to see, on re-reading the piece that even five years ago I was still somewhat hesitant to admit an appreciation for The Beatles. So whilst clearly ‘Rubber Solo’ was not the album that influenced my musical tastes sufficiently to make me perform an abrupt volte-face, it certainly played a significant part in changing my mind. Another significant player in that easing of my barriers was Unpopular’s Texas correspondent William Crain (formerly of The Soft Set and an erstwhile Tangents contributor), whose drip drip feeding of cuts on his excellent ‘The Sound The Past Makes’ blog certainly chipped away at my defences. In the past four years or so then I have certainly enjoyed much of The Beatles’ catalogue, including some of the subsequent solo work. I have even read books about them, which would have been utterly unthinkable prior to 2019. I retain reservations about the mediated repetitions of The Beatles ‘significance’ and the need to feed the capitalist beast of the industry, but I concede that this can be detached to an extent from the music, the songs, the records, the films. There are still groups from the same era whose work I rate higher (The Kinks, notably) but, as with Springsteen, I have finally given myself permission to enjoy The Beatles, and that feels fine.
18 – Trappist Afterland ’Se(VII)en’ (2018)
I had not heard of Adam Geoffrey Cole’s Trappist Afterland prior to venturing into the wilds of Totnes one evening in 2018 with Phil Wilson to see him/them perform a show. Also on the bill were Keith Christmas, who was terrific, and Nigel Mazlyn Jones, who was astonishingly good. Trappist Afterland, however, sounded and felt completely otherworldly and I was utterly captivated, so much so that when I got home I immediately bought all of the music then available (via Bandcamp) and played them on continuous loop for the next week whilst I decorated the living/dining room during the Easter school holidays. The 2018 LP ‘Se(VII)en’ then is the album that influenced my taste in music to take in that deliciously peculiar realm of mystical folk that dwells in the borderlands where the demons of Prog regularly make dawn raids to plunder and leave their dark marks. There is a new Trappist Afterland LP due later this year and there are few things I am as eager to hear.
19 – Genesis ‘Selling England By The Pound’ (1973)
The penultimate entry in the ’20 albums that influenced my taste in music’ meme is courtesy of Genesis. ‘Selling England By The Pound’ first came to my attention, I think, around 1974 or ’75 when I was eight or nine. It was during an Art class at Troon Primary School and I have this vague notion that it was all to do with one of my classmates wanting to draw something like the cover illustration. I suspect that they had borrowed the album from an older brother’s collection and were seduced by the image, but it did little for me then and whilst I like Betty Swanwick’s work for London Transport, it still does not really float my boat. The same might be said of the music, and whilst I am fairly certain I did not actually hear the record in 1974, by the time I was getting interested in music thanks to Punk and the New Wave, ‘Selling England By The Pound’ was assuredly the stuff that we were supposed to detest, and so detest it I did. It sits here then as an example of something that influenced my taste in so much as it fell into the category of what I did not like for many years. The whole realm of Prog indeed felt eminently resist-able in spite of the nudges made by the likes of The Orb, and in more recent years by that discovery of Nigel Mazlyn Jones and the contemporary mystical folk contingent, whose music nods quite heavily in the direction of Prog, I think. The Cherry Red box sets of progressive sounds from the 1970s have also had a part to play in opening my mind and ‘Selling England By The Pound’ at last sounds like something I can enjoy. It’s only taken half a century.
20 – ‘Celibidache Conducts Ravel’ (2018)
Chatting with my brother about this whole ‘albums that influenced my taste in music’ thing, we agreed that one of the key factors in discovering music in our youths through the late 1970s and 1980s (and indeed beyond into the early 1990s) was via cassette tapes. These would either be as a means of making a copy of an album a friend had but that we did not, or in the form of compilation tapes (I don’t think anyone in the UK called them ‘mixtapes’ until the Internet age). These tapes were vital forms of communication and combined with fanzines and letters were, for me at least, more essential that the inky music press or radio (which I seldom listened to). From this conversation we wondered what the contemporary equivalent would be? Snatches of music on The TikTok perhaps? Podcasts? Mixcloud playlists? Friends posting tracks on their social media feed? Certainly that’s how I discovered ‘Celibidache Conducts Ravel’. It was a click through from one of John Darnielle’s postings which appeared at one of those points in time when for whatever reason nothing in our libraries of music is doing it for us and we feel like a change, if only we knew what that change sounded like. And this time it was Ravel, which is something in my ignorance of Classical music that I never thought I would say, but there we are. My mum’s cousin David loved Classical and particularly Opera and would play albums when we visited him in Kilmarnock when I was young. It is a vivid memory, despite (or because of) the fact that I never understood the appeal. Nor am I entirely certain that I have the headspace to investigate much further at the moment, but this performance at the very least has teased open both the door and my mind. Here’s to another 20 previously unknown albums performing the same feat in the future.