I’ve always had two constants in my life: music and football.
It doesn’t matter what has been happening to me; they’re the markers by which my history is measured. Certain football matches or periods carried me through tough times or iced the cake of my perfect existence at the time. Music is the same. Some albums just hit me like a snooker ball in a sock, whilst others have provided a basis around which my entire music taste is based today.
I’m really sad that so few people listen to full albums now. Bands put albums out, but quite often, they’re just a collection of songs to many people. Smaller bands will put out one or two singles from their new album to hook you in, then release the album to almost say, ‘Look what else we can do.’ Fans of that band leave their shows clutching limited edition vinyl, but I feel the album itself, no matter how good, has evolved into something a bit different.
The albums I listed were certainly different to me. Some opened my eyes to music, others revealed to me things I knew about myself, but didn’t see in others. Some just nursed me through the very lowest periods in my life. I’ve listed them in terms of importance, with the most influential album I’ve ever listened to at number one.
All of them are fucking brilliant. Enjoy, especially if they’re albums you’ve never heard of before.
7. Shotter’s Nation – Babyshambles
I’m starting with one a bit controversial, perhaps. Pete Doherty was a figure of hate for many during the early part of this century, with his drug habit, Mark Blanco death and everything else that came with him. He epitomised what many felt was wrong with the youth of the day, and I kinda get why.
The thing is, he always made bloody great music. I got on the Libertines train a bit late, catching the tail end of their popularity as they broke up. Babyshambles was different, I followed them from their first single Killamangiro, onwards.
Shotter’s Nation came out as I faced a crossroad in my life, three paths extending in front of me. It helped guide me down path number two, which led to the right destination but took me on a four-year detour that wasn’t the right way. Still, I saw the future for myself in songs such as Baddie’s Boogie and a little of the present in You Talk.
I still listen to Doherty and Babyshambles now, because when you strip away all of the media hate, you’re left with one of the most talented lyricists and performers of our time.
6. Different Class, Pulp
Britpop: the junction at which a boy called Gary turned into a man called Gary. 1996 was a huge year for me, leaving school, getting a job, Euro 96, it felt like a modern ‘summer of love’ It started in 1995, when Britpop spread its tentacles around the UK and began to squeeze, forcing out all the young, angry kids wanting something different like blackheads popping out of a greasy nose.
We had Oasis, the laddish, Parker-wearing Mancs representing the north. We had Blur, the art-school intellectuals representing the south. In Lincoln, neither here nor there, you adopted one or the other. I was Blur, but in May 1995, a third player entered the scene.
Whilst Oasis sang about white lines and Blur about country houses, Pulp resonated with me the most. I came a little late to the party (again) – my mate Johnny brought His n’ Hers to my house, and I dismissed it at first. Then Common People dropped, and it just popped me out of that greasy nose of mediocrity. I felt those lyrics; I could feel not the desperation of being a common person, but the beauty in it. It was this lyric that really sealed it –
“You’ll never watch your life slide out of view
And then dance, and drink, and screw
Because there’s nothing else to do.”
Jarvis opened the gate to his music with that release, which I bought on CD single (and still have). Everything that followed up was neither north nor south, it was Sheffield, Midlands, and it could be appropriated to Lincoln. Oasis claimed to sing about what was real, but Pulp were the ones that got closest to me and my mindset, and when Different Class dropped, I got my favourite so-called Britpop album. Whilst Noel cosied up to a war criminal in 10 Downing Street, Jarvis wiggled his ass on stage at everything wrong with music. Poetic.
5. 1992 The Love Album, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine
Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine pre-dates Britpop. It arrived in my life during my time at school, when the little boy became a wannabe man. You know, the period when the music stops just being what your parents listen to, where Bruno Brookes at 6 pm on a Sunday doesn’t entirely cut it anymore. It is a time when you want to be you, not whatever version of you has been slowly climbing out of the cocoon. So, when my friend Stuart Goodacre came into school with Carter lyrics for a school project, I wanted to hear more.
It wasn’t easy. They weren’t getting played on the radio I could listen to, so a copied tape was the best I could get until I spied a copy of 1992, The Love Album in a second-hand CD shop on Monks Road in Lincoln. It had writing on it (I later learned that was the band’s signature), but I played it anyway. Wow.
I never realised music could be so lyrically clever. We had a physics teacher, Mr Hordley, an old-school punk who loved the Clash and the Pistols. He saw me doing an IT project on lyrics and read Is Wrestling Fixed, pointing out they were clever lyrics. We swapped albums, and unwittingly, Carter became a gateway for the Clash for me.
I still love Carter now – at the time, it was perhaps seen as scenester synth pop crap with no future by the uninitiated, but it’s aged incredibly well, and the topics resonate today, from Do Re Me, So Far So Good to While You Were Out. They were the original Britpop kings who remain uncrowned, taking on pop’s plastic generation while Oasis were still learning their three chords.
4. Dookie – Green Day
Getting ready for school was always a chore, and I used to have MTV on in the lounge whilst eating breakfast. I don’t know what I hoped to see; I didn’t have a clear music pathway at the time. I used to keep a VHS cassette in the recorder, and if a song came on I liked, I’d record it. Along with my friend Craig, we’d sit watching MTV for hours, recording the songs we watched. I never had the tape in the player in the morning.
I couldn’t possibly have reacted quickly enough to Basket Case when it came on. I’d heard nothing of Green Day before; their airplay had been minimal, but this three-minute explosion of colour and sound interrupted my breakfast and instantly changed my life. There’s no other way to describe how that song landed; it changed my life. That evening, I sat for hours waiting for it to come back on so I could record it and show it to Craig. I did, and eventually, the tape we used wore out through playing it so much. True story.
Basket Case led to Dookie, an album I championed across my school. Over those early years, I became known as a Green Day fan; I had t-shirts, albums, and vinyl (but no vinyl player), and they were the first band I ever saw. I got picture discs, CDs imported from Australia, everything I could. That lasted throughout Insomniac, but my love of the band faded a little after Nimrod.
I still love this 90s-era Green Day, full of teenage angst and songs about confusion, unrequited love and being utterly bored. They don’t resonate now as they did then – like Green Day I grew up, and when I did, they went in a different direction, but we’ll always have Dookie.
3. Levelling The Land, The Levellers
It is hilarious for me to have Levellers ahead of Green Day. Back in the 90s, my mate Jason and I used to fall out over these bands. He was a Levellers fan, and we’d argue whose band was better. He’d wear his t-shirt and call my band silly American punks. I’d wear my t-shirt and claim the Levellers were crusty spongers sleeping in ditches. Oh, how the worm turned. In 2009 (ish) I saw Jason again and he told me he knew he’d been wrong – Green Day were the better band. I told him I knew I’d been wrong. I was right (if that makes sense).
I never appreciated the Levellers for what they were. I was angry, full of teenage aggression and confusion; I didn’t care about politics, socialists or human rights. I wanted to hear songs that talked to me, not talked to everyone. That changed as I got older, and (this is shameful to admit) it was 2008 before I picked up Levelling the Land again.
Luckily, it’s been firmly up there on my playlist for more than a decade and a half. Everything I like now, from Ferocious Dog to Millie Manders, has stemmed from the Levellers, from their shows and, in some cases, their influence. I value music that matters, music that is made with a purpose other than just selling records. That’s Levelling the Land, and that’s what I love now.
Plus, as I’ve got older, my love of a fiddle in a song has gone beyond what I’d ever dreamed it would.
2. Save The World, Get The Girl, The King Blues
Save The World, Get The Girl. It’s hard for me to find the right words for this album because I found it retrospectively. I didn’t follow the King Blues; my first exposure to them was a song called Headbutt, which many of their hardcore fans feel was the beginning of the end. it got Radio One airplay, and like Basket Case, it came out of the blue for me. I was in London on a job, and it just sprang out of the speakers and started lasing me around the head like a bear clawing at its prey.
There was no streaming back then, so I went into a CD store and bought this album the next day, despite being skint. It remained in my car and my CD player for weeks afterwards. It was catchy, dare I say a little poppy, but full of anger at the world. I was full of anger at the world. I was single and trapped in a low-paying job with a high-interest mortgage. I never went out. I was just existing. I watched the world burning around me, wars that seemed pointless, with manufactured pop rubbish suffocating real music. The X-Factor had put our nation in a cultural chokehold, and I felt there was no escape.
Then Itch began singing to me. That’s how it felt. The out-and-out rebellion of squatting, living the alternative life, hating the establishment – it made me feel alive. It made me feel like there were kindred spirits out there, that my anger wasn’t one little voice on it’s own. It was this album, oddly, that led me back to the Levellers, not in terms of genre (ska-punk to folk-punk), but in terms of wanting to hear something I believed in, not that I was just supposed to buy.
1. And Out Come The Wolves, Rancid
And Out Come The Wolves didn’t climb out of a speaker or jump out of a television. It came to me in a way that feel disingenuous, but also represents the hunger Basket Case had given me for musical discovery. I went into town with Craig, as we often did, and sought to spend all of our money on CDs. I was looking to order something from Green Day, probably a single in a green case with a number on, and as I waited I browsed the other albums.
The black and red motif on the cover was one I recognised from a review that said the album was good, so I just bought it. I hadn’t heard any Rancid before, they didn’t get airtime on MTV, all I had was the CD cover and literally nothing else. I just thought ‘fuck it, why not’, parted with £12 or so and went home wondering what to expect.
I didn’t expect an opening like Maxwell Murder, which left me feeling dazed by its ferocity. It felt like everything was 100 miles an hour, and by the time Time Bomb had bounced through my ears, I was on the phone with Craig. He needed to come and listen to this. Despite our similarities with music, Rancid never really landed with him, or Jason, or any of my mates, but since that first listen, it’s been like a tattoo on my soul. This was the album that made me love punk, that made me go backwards and find the Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, the Pistols, literally anything I could. It’s an album I still put on to blow away cobwebs – I can run to it, drive to it and still it feels as fresh as the late autumn day in 1995 that I brought it home from Sonic Sounds.
Undoubtedly, it is my favourite album of all time.