4. Bob DylanThe Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
This isn’t my favourite Dylan album but it’s where it all started. I couldn’t really choose a Dylan album because he’s sort of everything to me. This is his second album technically but it’s his first one where he wrote everything. A friend of mine, Jim, said to me once when we were driving around as teenagers listening to this, “Isn’t it amazing that this is just a guy and a guitar and a harmonica, creating all these worlds”. I always think about him saying that. Dylan is just such an incredible storyteller. Neither my mum nor my dad were into Dylan, so it was my sister how I got into him. I’ve got this on cassette and I’ve got Slow Train Coming on cassette, which were the two albums I stole off her. You couldn’t have two more different albums. I love them both. Highway 61 Revisited would’ve been the other one I would’ve picked, but then I love Planet Waves and Street Legal, albums that are not thought of as his classics. All the bootleg recordings as well. What can you say about Dylan?
It was when I first started choosing what sort of music to listen to, but it was based on somebody else’s taste. My sister’s four years older than me. This is when she was probably in sixth form college, so she’d have been 17 to 19 and I would’ve been 13 to 15. The bands of my sister’s that I’d have been listening to were probably Dylan, Pixies, The Cure, Half Man Half Biscuit. All of those bands almost made the list as well, but that was more my sister’s music.
