The Rolling Stones - The Rolling Stones
I was 13 in November 1963, and this album came out in early 1964, so that's literally when everything changed for us kids. It was a big deal to invest in something like that; we didn't have money to throw away on frivolous things. And that Stones album, I now know, was an enormous education. You've got songs on there by Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed, you've got Slim Harpo, you've got Rufus Thomas, I mean you've got all the stuff! And gradually we put together the Stones and The Beatles - because The Beatles did 'Twist And Shout', which is The Isley Brothers and 'Roll Over Beethoven', Chuck Berry, and the Stones had 'Carol', a Chuck Berry song - so the education in these records, especially the Stones one, was enormous. "We found out that there was a precedent for all this, and it was all music by black artists from America. And I think we preferred the way English bands did it, compared with the American way. You could relate to it a lot easier than someone from Alabama, who you would rarely be able to hear anyway, because there was so little of it around, so these records were like precious objects." But there they were, fully available by the Stones, The Beatles and all the others that followed, and that made complete sense to a 13-year-old kid.