Baker's Dozen

Artists discuss the 13 records that shaped their lives

2. Whitney HoustonWhitney Houston

It’s 1985 and I was an impressionable six-year-old who didn’t own a record player and only had a cassette recorder. My older sister used to let me in her room to use her record player while she was out on her roller skates and I would listen to my Michael Jackson records and dance in front of her full-length mirror with a hair brush. Saturday evening I was fingering through her small stash of LPs and found a record that not only confirmed my sexuality but also gave me my first erection. It was a garish orange cover with an Amazonian beauty queen on the front cover. Flip it over and you are met with a bright white bikini-clad sex goddess. Putting my headphones on gingerly and turning my big volume knob up I lay back on the bunk bed and fell into this swampy love-soaked sun-kissed bliss. I would love to say that it was the lush synth magic, the soaring vocal melodies or the heavily-processed drum machines, which gave me the goose bumps. But to be brutally honest it was much more than that. It was the cover. That cover.
Rhys Llewellyn

Selected in other Baker’s Dozens: Ibibio Sound Machine
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