1. David BowieAladdin Sane
I’ll always say it was a beautiful, beautiful fluke. It was Christmas. In the early 70s there were these little tape recorders with a handle, you could record, and you could also play cassettes. For my present I got one of them and Aladdin Sane, which I think had just come out. I looked at it and thought, ‘What the fuck’s that?’ My dad said ‘I was in the alehouse last night, I just picked it [at random].” I said, ‘OK’. But when I played it, I loved it. And after a few plays I couldn’t believe it. The songs! I had only really grown up with the radio and country and western, but this was everything. The lyrics, the structure of the songs, the fucking drama… Even the lads and girls older than me – even the press – they didn’t know what to make of David Bowie. And because it was the first of his albums I heard, it’s always stuck with me. My brother was four years younger than me and he loved it too. It was a beautiful fluke that that was my Christmas present.
As I got older and punk kicked in, I still kept tabs on Bowie. Every time a single came out, ‘Heroes’, ‘Ashes To Ashes’, they were all just classics. ‘Sound And Vision’ always reminds of one summer when I was falling in love. Every time I hear that song I get transported back to that summer, and to her.
