The Cure - Disintegration
The Cure was one of the first bands I liked. My stepbrother lived in Cornwall and I remember family holidays and stuff like 'Catch' and 'Boys Don't Cry' and thinking, fuck, those melodies are amazing! My sister was really into them and she got Disintegration, and the songs had got massively long guitar intros, which was quite a bold move at the time. You've got two minutes of guitar before the vocals come in. It's an amazing album and it does sound like it's disintegrating - I think I had it on tape and it just got heavily mashed by the tape heads so the sound quality degraded the more I listened to it.

There are such strong melodies. You know when you hear melodies that couldn't really be anything else at all? It's like they've just unearthed it. They've dug it up and it's always been there or something. The Cure reminds me of Thatcher's shitty England, Our Price and closed Ryman shops. So British.