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which ten albums or ten songs , really grabbed you by the bollocks, when u was young
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Hunter T Wolfe
Hunter T Wolfe
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Re: which ten albums or ten songs , really grabbed you by the bollocks, when u was young
Feb 26, 2008, 18:59
1. Since Yesterday, by Strawberry Switchblade.
The first single I bought, apart from The Bucket of Water Song, which was just cos I was a massive Tiswas fan, and This Vicious Cabaret by David J, which is very cool but was just cos of the tie-in to V for Vendetta and I was a comics nerd rather than a music nerd at this point. So Since Yesterday was the first record I bought soloely for the music. Why the air of bittersweet melancholy, longing and regret should appeal to a 13 year old, with nothing really to regret and everything to look forward to, according to popular convention, I don't know, but that was certainly the quality that drew me to this song... I had eaten the apple of adolescence and was suddenly filled with self-consciousness, sexual guilt and confusion, and a feeling that I was now locked out of the garden of my childhood and severely ill-equipped for whatever was coming next.

2. Born in the USA, by Bruce Springsteen.
The first album I bought, not so much for the monotonous and ugly title track as for the haunting and melancholy (spot a theme?) 'I'm on Fire' and hymn to masturbation (which I had just furtively discovered) 'Dancing in the Dark,' which also pretty neatly summed up my aforementioned adolescent self-consciousness and identity crisis in the lines "I'm just tired and bored with myself" and "I wanna change my hair, my clothes, my face," and "There's a joke here somewhere and it's on me." I was also rather in need of a love reaction. Zodiac Mindwarp incidentally is not on this list, but he could be. Elsewhere, the exuberant 2 car garage pop of 'Cover Me' and 'No Surrender' and more melancholy in 'Downbound Train,' and oh, you know... rock n' roll.

3. Darkness on the Edge of Town, by Bruce Springsteen.
£10 got me a cheap imitation walkman from Asda; another £3 got me a tape of this. Together they got me through those long carbound family holidays in the Scottish rain. Jesus, 'Candy's Room' through the headphones- what a great, urgent, tense song. And the whole album, an emotional widescreen adolescent classic. And Bruce looked skinny and hip for once on the cover, too.

4. Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, by Bruce Springsteen.
Just one more from the boss, I promise... as on his debut he looks back and romanticises his teenage growing up years in New Jersey, so I listen in Yorkshire with all those adventures to look forward to, romanticising and inflating my emotions equally. I fell in love for the first time to 'Mary Queen of Arkansas' and 'For You' and 'Spirit in the Night.' But I was listening on the headphones, and she never heard.

5. I Want You, by Elvis Costello
Oh yeah, that first love... it didn't work out. This is what I listened to as my heart broke. Again and again.

6. Love Missile F1-11, by Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
So there I was, listening to Gary 'young free and single' Davis count down the charts on Radio 1 that Tuesday lunchtime, and straight in at number four I heard... The Future. It blew my mind. I didn't go back to school but listened to the radio the whole rest of the day hoping to hear it again. It sure wasn't Springsteen.

7. Rise, by Public Image Limited.
Top of the Pops. Anger is an Energy. Damn right it is. Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates or whoever it was taking the piss out of John Lydon afterwards. Punk's not dead! I dyed my hair an unconvincing shade of green immediately afterwards.

8. Bela Lugosi's Dead, by Bauhaus.
Annie Nightingale played this. Again, I had never heard anything like it. It was like Gary Glitter gone dub reggae and somebody scratching on a coffin lid and a whole horror movie in one huge epic nine minute song. So I bought it on 12" blue vinyl and walked home from town and it was a still, boiling hot day and I was coming down with something and by the time I got in and was allowed to play it on the big old family radiogram I had a fever and felt distinctly queasy, which of course only amplified the effect of this magnificent piece of music.

9. First and Last and Always, by the Sisters of Mercy
Gentle reader, I became a goth. Suddenly, the sisters were like everything I'd been looking for. They had the repetitive electronic dance beat of the best disco records, and they had melancholy minor key twelve string guitars like the best folk-rock, and they had these dark, tortured vocals and ironic angst-filled lyrics, and came shrouded in a sense of mystery that allowed a young HP Lovecraft-reading, Dungeons and Dragons playing, Keats and Coleridge studying northern mixed-up kid's imagination full rein. Unfortunately by the time I discovered them they'd split up, and I had to go see The Mission instead.

10. Easter, by Patti Smith
A guy my mum worked with gave me a cassette with this on one side and the best of Leonard Cohen on the other- possibly determined to educate the callow young goth on where his music came from! Needless to say, both sides floored me, but Easter stood out. I couldn't believe the ferocity of 'Rock n' Roll Nigger,' or that she could get away with all that blatantly sexual gasping and yelling at the end of 'Space Monkey.' And it was all great. And I checked out the rest of Patti's stuff in short order. And then, and then...

And I didn't even mention hearing The Velvet Underground for the first time on a free Sounds EP, or The Art of Falling Apart by Soft Cell, or The Jesus and Mary Chain, or 'Rules and Regulations' by We've Got a Fuzzbox and We're Going to Use It, or The Psycho Surgeons, or whatever hardcore punk band (Xpozez?) did 'Factory Fodder,' or everything on Jason A Parkes' list which was maybe the next chapter for me...
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which ten albums or ten songs , really grabbed you by the bollocks, when u was young (the dude)
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