February 2012
23 posts
Dean Taylor
Up until the age of 11, I’d happily inherited pop music from my older sister. Together we’d learn the words (via Disco 45) to all the top 40. Word perfect on Ay Ay Ay Moosey (Modern Romance)? Of course. Every vocal inflection on Eight Day (by proto Gaga Hazel O’Connor)? Oh yes. Perfect imitation of the sax solo on Baker Street - you betcha. This pop training had stood me in good stead in...
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...