Various - Now That's What I Call Music! 34
This might seem like cheating, but for me, it's a legitimate album in my life. It was the first album I ever got. What I used to do, as a kid, was... my mum was really into dance music, and we'd listen to all these dance tracks on Pete Tong and I used to go and buy them in the record shop. All these strange tapes, as well. I was quite good at football when I was a kid and every time I scored a hat trick for my team, they used to give us a fiver. Which really pushed me on, and I used to poach goals off people, stuff like that, to get a fiver so I could buy CDs and tapes for £2.99 or £1.99. And this one I saved up for, for ages. It was 1996 and I was ten years old. There's a theory that the brain learns to understand music between the ages of about 10 and 13. The brain begins to connect music to emotion around that time. So a lot of the music you hear around that time strikes an emotional chord like no other. It doesn't even matter what it is. It could be the cheesiest, worst song of all time, but it will always be very powerful because it's your first experience of emotion and music. On this album, I remember Josh Wink - 'Higher State Of Consciousness', which is brilliant. And JX, and Underworld. But obviously I also liked the Spice Girls when I was 10 years old. But I remember on the Now compilations, the last few songs were dance songs, like this one's got Robert Miles - 'Children' on it, and that was my way into dance music, and from that into weird, obscure styles from around the world. You'd get other genres too: 'Wonderwall' by Oasis was on here, and Suede and Blur, which was quite complex for a 10-year-old, and that was very formative. My aunty, who was 17, would say, "Do you like Suede?" and I'd say, "Yeah!" And 'Don't Stop Movin'' by Livin' Joy, which is my first memory of getting pleasure from singing, singing along to that and realising that I was good, and I could sing it like the woman. That and Shola Ama, 'You Might Need Somebody', I remember singing along to that too, and realising I could sing.