February 2012
22 posts
Carl Yaxley
The first gig. It’s a rite of passage for any teenage music obsessive. It was 1982 and Stiff Little Fingers were at the UEA in Norwich. I was approaching my 14th birthday and SLF (alongwith The Jam) were my reason for being. My mate Charlie and I sandwiched geography and maths with giddy analysis of Fingers’ lyrics and chord changes weeks before Jake Burns and the boys popped...
Kat Brown
Before spending my teenage years surgically attached to Shine 5, I lived in a musical wilderness populated almost entirely by Classic FM compilations, Dirty Dancing and the Phil Collins best-of tape that lived in my dad’s Montego.
Clueless about modern pop music, I did what every country child did in the 90s and went to my local Woolworths. I bought a copy of Smash Hits 1993 and ...
Rob Bingham
As everyone knows, 1979 was the best year in the history of pop music. Coincidentally it was also the year I got my first radio. Previously all music in the house had come from my dad’s record collection and the Radio 2 playlist. With the new radio I was suddenly given access to a whole new world of music. As soon as I got in from school I ran to my room, shut the door and turned on...
Ellie Blow
I was eight years old. The Spice Girls had just released ‘Wannabe’ and set feminism back twenty years with their own personal brand of “Girl Power”, which apparently mostly involved wearing very tight dresses, making peace signs and hobbling about in platform trainers. I was standing in the playground with my friend Vicky, whose mum had taken her to see Take That twice, and who was...
Jamie Whitehead
Having spent my formative years raised on a steady (or not so steady) diet of Bon Jovi and Meat Loaf (alright, I’ll be honest, I was utterly OBSESSED), by my teenage years, I’d gravitated my musical leanings to things that could be considered ‘cooler’. By this I mean Korn, Green Day and the like. So probably not that cool. At 17 and with an array of punk and metal...
Kit Lovelace
I was 13 when Billie’s Because We Want To came out and, though I had being trying hard to carve out a niche for myself as the serious indie kid of my class, such was my crush on Billie that I couldn’t stop myself from signing up to her fan club. Three times. The first time I signed up, I lied on the form. I had heard that Billie was 15 and, reasoning that a 15 year old popstar...
Jon Myers
In 2004 I was 16, which, as everybody knows, is the most important age for any music fan, probably. When I was 16 I fell in love with bands, albums, singles as deeply as I fell in love with any girl who was willing to talk to me for more than five minutes at a party. And while I may boast of the time I spent with the beautiful Franz Ferdinand or the elusive Libertines, it’s about time I...
Samuel Breen
It’s alleged that when you’re young the world is a lot simpler. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. That kind of thing. It’s much more conceivable that life is so bewildering at that age we can seldom assess what is going on around us. Our minds retaining only the most extreme scenarios of synthesis: tears, joy, fear, laughter, etc. When you’re ten all music melts into...
Debbieanne O’Donovan
It was 1995 in the Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, 5th row of the stalls. After hearing such melodic mantras as ‘Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble’, ‘Our Radio Rocks’ and ‘If I Give You My Number’, I fell hook, line and sinker into obsessive oblivion with PJ & Duncan (or as we now know them, Ant & Dec).
And so it began. The bedroom; every millimetre of wall, ceiling and doors covered in posters...
Miranda Thompson
I was four when I got hooked on Jimmy Nail. Something about his 1992 Number One hit ‘Ain’t No Doubt’ struck a chord within me - the muttered, sardonic vocals under the joyous tooting of a saxophone were far preferable to the tape of nursery rhymes we would chant along to in the car. But it was at the pre-school equivalent of an Ibizan clubnight that my Jimmy love really blossomed. As my sister...
John Williamson
I started buying records, aged 9, in late 1977. I’d never knowingly heard The Beatles or the Sex Pistols: the former because my dad’s limited record collection was a typically West of Scotland brew of (mainly bad) country, the latter as he switched over to Radio 2 when they came on the chart rundown on Sunday nights. It was the voice of Tom Browne on the same chart show that first introduced...
Dorian Lynskey
My relationship with pop started well. My first single was the 12-inch of A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’ and my first gigs were Pet Shop Boys and the Jesus & Mary Chain. My more erratic decisions came later, due to a constellation of factors that must be unimaginable to any 21st century teenager with a broadband connection. Firstly, none of my friends had much money for records so we forged a kind...
Seán McGann
All of a sudden I feel like I’m in an AA meeting, well what better way to start: Hi, my name is Seán and I’m a Smurf Addict. I was sitting in the smoking area of a bar in Dublin with two friends and the topic of “What your first album was” came up. My two friends admitted to Kylie Minogue and Blue (both were male, by the way). I went on to say that my first album was...
Sarah Hornsey
It was 1981 and I was 8 years old and it was a warm spring evening and my mum got me out of bed to watch the final of the Eurovision song contest (I had already watched Bucks Fizz perform earlier in the evening). And they won! Wow, I was so happy - this meant I got to see that awesome dance routine again! Wow!
Yes, I wanted to be like Cheryl Baker OR Jay Aston - I loved them - I thought...
Lucy Moore
The first tape that I ever owned was ‘The Best of Buddy Holly and the Crickets’, which I begged my Mum to purchase after a visit to Rock Circus, during which I had become strangely mesmerised by the Buddy Holly waxwork. I also got a mug which I still enjoy tea from. It was my seventh birthday. Nowadays that story makes me sound cool and 50’s revivalist. It also hides the gaping vortex of shame...
Michael Duncan
Having discovered P-Rock TV on SKY around 2002 after reading Gary Bushell’s TV page in The People, I was introduced to a few bands I wouldn’t normally have heard, such as The Distillers, Box Car Racer, Rancid and the reason why I’m writing here: Canadian pop-punkers Simple Plan, with their song ‘Addicted’ and the line “I’m a dick, I’m addicted...
Andy Welch
Most music lovers have an epiphany; a moment when the Panini stickers or Sylvanian Families are put away to gather dust in the corner, and bedroom walls become more than essential features that hold up a ceiling, but vehicles to display pictures of popstars your parents with hopefully disapprove of.
For those of a certain age, that moment might have been Mick Ronson putting his arm around...
Joe Rivers
At the age of 14, as 2001 began, it became clear at school that liking the music they played on Radio 1 just wasn’t going to cut it any longer. You may remember 2001 as the year The Strokes took the music world by storm, but their stylish, New York swagger didn’t really hold much weight in our village comprehensive on the outskirts of Ipswich. For us, you either tucked your jeans into your...
Ruth Mortimer
There is no-one as deluded as a teenage girl with a crush on a popstar. And there was no-one more deluded in the 1980s than me. I was passionate about Queen singer Freddie Mercury.
Despite all the evidence that he was a raging homosexual - moustache, sex parties and er, boyfriends - I maintained a firm belief that Mercury was just shagging men because he hadn’t encountered the love of his life....
Chris Snapes
Sat on the sofa aged 12/13 (-ish) with Popfessions lady Laura Snapes (sister) doing our daily flick through the music channels on Sky. Nothing out of the ordinary going on until such point that she came across MTV2, which happened to be playing ‘MMMbop’ courtesy of Hanson. Prior to us reaching MTV2 Laura had been asking me if I found particular (FEMALE, I MUST STRESS THIS) singers...
Sebastien Dehesdin
My first encounter with music was through my parents’ stereo whilst we were on holidays in Brittany. They kept listening to the same two or three albums: the best of the Doors, William Sheller and Daniel Balavoine. The Doors were freaking me out (especially ‘Strange Days’) and to this day, I still don’t believe they are a suitable listen for a 10-year-old. William Sheller was a bit...
John Murphy
It was 1986, and I was a teenager. If I’d been cool, I’d have been buying The Queen Is Dead, Licensed To Ill and Lifes Rich Pageant. But I wasn’t cool. I was 14 years old and, at that time, I genuinely believed Curiosity Killed The Cat to be the best pop group that had ever existed. The lead singer was named Ben Volpierre-Pierrot (memorably renamed by Smash Hits as Ben...
January 2012
54 posts
Gareth Dorrian
It’s 1991 and I beg my mother to get me a pair of boxer shorts: Matt Goss of Bros wears them.
I’m in my early teens and they are my first pair, my underclothes until now have been purely functional, working class, lacking even a junior portion of popstar gravitas. Before Bros I wore pants which guaranteed I would avoid serious accidents at all costs, lest hospital staff got a glimpse.
...
Rob Fitzpatrick
In 1984 I was 14 years old and looking for a pop thrill I could call my own. I’d done The Beatles and The Police and Human League and Iron Maiden and Rush, but they were all things I’d either got from my elder brother or had long since squeezed the pleasure pips out of. Mentally I was ripe for the plucking. Twenty-eight years later I can’t even really recall where I first came across the...
Edward Cumming
In the spring of 1999 I went to Venice on a school choir trip. (It was that sort of school, and I was that sort of 12-year old.) Even by the standards of a city built on water, it was a wet week. Rain came down in thick sheets, and the tide swelled from below. After a couple of days St Mark’s Square was a foot-deep lake. Splashing about was quite good fun (at least until you ran out of dry...
Chris Thomas
Before I fell on the side of Oasis in the battle of Britpop, my final year of junior school (1993/94) was spent focused on music with its origin a lot further west than Manchester.
I joined the charts in swaying gently to the varying successes of Chaka Demus & Pliers, Bitty McClean et al, quickly realising that the obligatory smattering of such hits on the latest Now That’s What I Call...
Stefan Jackson
The scene: It’s spring 1998, the sun is out, Britpop is in full flow (well, actually it’s on it’s last legs but at the time we were blissfully unaware of this) and the local gang of LAAAAADS and I are bunking off from 6th form lessons to see if we can get served in the pub and doing things young people our age at that time did. That late teens period can be so difficult; a not a girl, not yet a...
Steve Earley
The thing that makes me laugh most about being 13 was that it was the age I tried so eagerly and failed so spectTACularly to fit in, that I secretly abandoned all effort and spent the rest of my teens enjoying a punch-line that only I really got. Turns out that straight boys don’t express their crush on Mariah Carey by writing the lyrics to ‘Hero’ on their school bags. Nor do they talk about...
Michael Hogan
I “discovered” Howard Jones on Top Of The Pops, miming along to his debut hit, ‘New Song’. He had spiky two-tone hair, a Roland keyboard and a Marcel Marceau-meets-Bez dancer named Jed, who mimed the lyrics by literally “throwing off his mental chains”. Naturally, I was smitten. Come Saturday, I took my paper-round wages into town and bought the 7-inch from this hip little record shop I...
Amy Ronge
I was born in 1987, meaning I really missed the glory days of Bananarama – my mum being a big fan. When the Greatest Hits Collection album was released in 1988, I was one-year-old. Still not quite old enough to properly appreciate the tunes, but somewhere, Bananarama was subliminally affecting me. Fast forward a few more years to the early 1990s and I was Bananarama’s biggest fan. After hearing...
Nathan Jolly
I was in a second-hand record store in Newcastle. It was the summer of 2003, I was about to turn 21 and it was a swinging, swaggering time. My hair was long and shaggy like Keith Moon (photographic evidence suggests it was actually closer to David Cassidy), I only listened to Sixties music, and had discovered all there was to unearth from this era. I was very easy to dislike. A friend and...
Tom Bromley
I owe my first relationship to Climie Fisher, the feather-light late eighties duo who made Go West seem the very height of manliness.
I fancied this girl in my German class at school called Emma, and rather than learning which was the best way to the bahnhof, we had one of those faux-flirty arguments over Climie Fisher’s debut single, ‘Rise to the Occasion’: Emma claimed it started with someone...
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Sumach Ecks (Gonjasufi)
My popfession? I’m too embarrassed to say. OK, here goes..
It was Milli Vanill. Milli Vanilli and Kris Kross. All or Nothing, that first Mili Vanilla album, was hard as fuck. Hard as fuck man! Did they have a second? Who gives a fuck?! Milli Vanilla was the shit. I’d bump that shit out right now.
It’s still just embarrassing to be a Milli fan. Tights, makeup, earring on...
Jamie Smy
Autumn 2003: I moved to university in Brighton for three years of sexual awakening, mind-altering drug experiences and a media BA. I only got the latter, as I was far-too insecure, immature and, let’s face it, uncool to achieve either of the first two. As well as debut albums by The Streets and, er, S Club Juniors, the album which defined my first year was Busted’s self-titled...
John Lucas
If venerable lads mag FHM is to be believed, Louise Redknapp was the sexiest woman of the 90s. Throughout her longer-than-you-remember-it-being pop career she consistently appeared near the top of their annual totty countdown. The funny thing is, I don’t remember many of my straight friends being all that interested in her. However, as an increasingly sexually conflicted teenager growing...
Bridget Orr
I liked early Westlife. Unlike the gradually getting skeevier Boyzone with the parodic vocal tag team of club style Ronan Keating, sweet Stephen Gately and the already pretty skeevy ones who just shuffled and harmonised in the background and clearly HAAAATED it, there was something attractive about Westlife’s uniform dynamic and how they were nowhere near the stubble, bad piercings...
James Edwards
In October 1999, I turned 7. You’re old huh? Coincidentally, that was also the month that 5ive laid waste to the charts with the unquestionably brilliant Keep On Movin‘. Now as a little pigeon-chested 7 year old, I had had very little interest in pop music, preferring to spend my waking hours playing with the dog (he was called Jason, and he was brilliant too) and shouting, leaving me very...
Douglas Burgess
It was 1991 and, for the first time, I was allowed to buy any tape I wanted from Woolworths in Sheerness. I was in a state of excitement and fear, mostly because I had no idea how to choose a record. I didn’t know what I wanted, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get my parents to give me five entire pounds to get something I wanted. So… I knew I liked Dire Straits, but not...
Paula Edwards
New Kids On The Block (NKOTB) were the best thing since sliced bread when I was 13 or 14 (1989 or 1990). I had posters on every available area of my bedroom wall (so many in fact I forgot what my wallpaper looked like for a short time) and even a few on the ceiling above my bed. Donnie Wahlberg was my preferred choice and Jordan Knight was that of my then-best-friend so it worked well. She would...
Wendy Wason
WHAM! Really? No. It was more than that. From the age of eight, I lived in Dubai. Until 12, a vast array of my popular culture came from music that was only available on bootleg tapes sold in the souq. I had no idea what was cool. In Dubai I used to ice-skate competitively. We did ice shows. I skated to crowd pleasers like ‘In the Mood’ and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. Older girls...
Jamie Otsa
As a middle class white boy from a quiet seaside town, you can imagine the hardships and prejudice I faced as a teenager. The world at large just DIDN’T UNDERSTAND. Back in 2001 when I was 15 years old, I went to see The Offspring at the MEN arena in Manchester based solely on my love for my CD single of Pretty Fly For A White Guy. We used to travel to Manchester a lot because most of the...
Adrian Michaels
I hope you set a frequency limit for submissions. I hardly know which one to get off my chest first but we should probably start with Mark Knopfler. It’s about 1985 and I’m 15, staying in an apartment in Portugal with my parents on a summer holiday. There is a cleaner, female, that comes round daily. I don’t recall whether she is attractive or not. Probably middle-aged,...
Charlotte Otter
My stock answer to the question “What was the first album you brought?” is The Best Of James. A band with just the right amount of indie cool to get an appreciative nod from the asker combined with an album which displays a certain lack of imagination that only a 12-year-old can display when faced with the entire music rack at Woolworths.
All in all, a safe, ‘classic’ reply, for a...
James Farrelly
In a not-too-distant past before I became the well adjusted, married and upstanding member of society, I was once a fan of anything acoustic, miserable and emo. I remember the first time I heard the nasal warblings of the quaffed emo-troubadour known as Dashboard Confessional. I had just been dumped by the latest in a stream of girls who were more interested in the ‘hardcore type’,...
Mic Wright
At the age of 11, I was already certain of one thing: ‘The Safety Dance’ by Men Without Hats is one of the finest songs ever laid down on tape. While I publicly threw myself into the Blur/Oasis grudge match – it was wise to plump for Oasis in our form as the bigger lads liked them despite the obvious tedium of ‘Roll With It’ – I was secretly celebrating the joy of this tinny, repetitive little...
Ben Cardew
My Popfession is about Pet Shop Boys – hardly the most embarrassing subject, you might think. And indeed it wouldn’t be had my devotion to the electronic duo back in the summer of 1987 taken any kind of normal form. In my defence, it was 1987, slap bang in the middle of the group’s Imperial Phase: ‘It’s A Sin’ had just topped the charts and ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’ was all over the...
Anna Walsh
For my school trip to Belgium in 1993, I took a small plastic bin filled with chocolate biscuits and marshmallows, several Sweater Shop jumpers, and two tapes for my Saisho walkman. One of these tapes was the UB40 version of ‘I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You’, which I was disappointed to later find was a cover, and the other was REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’.
On the bus...
John Duffy
I am a fan of prog. But not just prog alone. Would that it were only that. But it’s worse, for I am a massive fan of Yes. They were my very first music crush and continue to be my favourite band still.
And now having confessed my sins, and before I do my penance, I feel that I must at least attempt to place some mitigating factors before you. My route into this seedy, murky backwater of music...
Edmund Kevill-Davies
When I was eleven I pretended I was a massive Grateful Dead fan and took the lie to such an extreme degree that I sported their merchandise and tie dyed my socks, not to mention all my other clothing - even my beloved Super Mario t-shirt. I, to this day could cannot name a single Grateful Dead song, not even one.
It all started in August 1995 when I was on holiday in America with my family in the...
Luke Moore
In the summer of 1989, aged eight, I discovered musical phenomenon that changed my life. For a bit. “What was it?” I hear you ask, “The Stone Roses eponymous debut? The seminal Doolittle by Pixies?” Er, no, it wasn’t either of those. It was ‘Hangin’ Tough’, by New Kids on the Block. I remember hearing the title track on the radio in the back room of our house...