Albums that influenced your taste in music

[Nearly Sane]

On FB, Khatru, ex of this parish, nominated me me to put up 10 album covers that influenced my taste in music. It was meant to be without comment but I don't follow those sort of rules that well. So this was the comment on the last of the albums I selected Joan Armatrading's Steppin Out - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppin%27_Out_(Joan_Armatrading_album) . I would be interested in the thoughts of others.


'So last? In the 10 albums that shaped my taste in music. Now I know that one of the rules is no explanation but pish tush I say to such rules. When I started I thought that I would keep to albums I listened to before going to university as by that stage it was effectively formed. I find that the 10 take me up being 15. I have a theory, not that it could be bunnies, but that 14/15 you hear music differently. The hormones, the dizzy change. There certainly isn't one damn new song that can make me break down and cry as songs did then - though Jessie Buckley singing Glasgow had a damn good try.

I realise that this isn't a list filled with obscure gems but that isn't what formed my taste. I had the albums in the house and 3 of these 10 represent my 3 sisters influence on me. And then there is the stuff you buy and share, and my addiction then was books above music.

I missed Love and Affection on its initial release  not completely but enough, and then 1 afternoon in 1979 I somehow was back early in the afternoon from school and Tony Blackburn played it, and I broke into a jigsaw of emotions. I went to buy an album with it on it the next day, and ended up with this utterly amazing live album.

I am considering continuing as there are things missed, things that I found in retrospect, and things that still managed to change that tall lost callow youth.'

[Steve H]

'America' and 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' made me love Simon and Carbuncle.
Beethoven's Symphonies by L'Orchestre de la Suisse Roamnde, conducted by Ernest Ansermet. I collected the LPs one at a time.
A compilation LP of tracks by Reinhardt, Grappelli, and the Hot Club de France, which I got as a Christmas present 40-odd years ago, turned me on to gypsy jazz.
Joan Baez - various albums. I worshipped the ground she walked on in my late teens and early 20s.
Pentangle "Light Flight" and others interested me in folk-rock and folk generally.

[Nearly Sane]

'America' and 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' made me love Simon and Carbuncle.
Beethoven's Symphonies by L'Orchestre de la Suisse Roamnde, conducted by Ernest Ansermet. I collected the LPs one at a time.
A compilation LP of tracks by Reinhardt, Grappelli, and the Hot Club de France, which I got as a Christmas present 40-odd years ago, turned me on to gypsy jazz.
Joan Baez - various albums. I worshipped the ground she walked on in my late teens and early 20s.
Pentangle "Light Flight" and others interested me in folk-rock and folk generally.

I like those serendipities of compilation LPs that open up music areas

[Harrowby Hall]

 I suspect my tastes in music had been established long before I bought my first album - at about the age of 5 I remember being entranced by a piece of film music  - The Dream of Olwen. At the age of 7, on holiday in Great Yarmouth, I went on-stage when the band master asked for volunteers from the audience and sang Bless You (it was an Ink Spots number). My uncle, who was a trumpet player in the band, said that my performance was perfect.

When I was about 12 I recall seeing a performance of the Waltz of the Flowers (from The Nutcracker) being performed by a Russian orchestra on TV and being transformed.

My parents did not have a record player - I bought one when I left school and started work. Among my early purchases were the soundtrack album of South Pacific; Elgar's Enigma Variations coupled with VW's Tallis Fantasia (under Malcolm Sargent) and an early Beatles disc. Thus began my lifelong affair with musical theatre and the sound of the symphony orchestra. (Thomas Beecham once said that the English do not understand music  but they love the noise it makes.)

I think that the early Beatles disc may been She Loves You, but nothing prepared me for the experience of playing, for the first time, the Sergeant Pepper album.