According to Facebook memories, we had apparently reached the point in Covid lockdown three years ago where there was some meme going round of what your ten most influential albums were… being me, I decided to post them all in one hit rather than over ten days like other, more sensible people were doing; and, being me, I thought it might be interesting to repost them here. In no particular order.

The 1998 box set expansion of the legendary 1972 compilation Nuggets. I always loved mid- to late-60s music when I was younger, but I think this was when I really started going down some of the more obscure by-ways of that era.

The Beatles Box (which we had on cassette, still do somewhere). As good a Beatles best-of, all eight vinyl records or six tapes of it, as you could still hope for.

Black Sabbath, Paranoid. Probably my first heavy metal album when I was 17? Probably. The weird thing is, even though I considered myself an atheist already by that age, I still found myself unnerved by the whole Satanism thing, something seemed dangerous about it. Took me years to realise how silly it actually was…

Edgar(d) Varèse, going back to first year of university. I did first year music at UNSW and one part of the course was the many listening examples we were expected to be able to identify in the tests… and M. Varèse’s Ionisation was one of those in the last part of the course when we were doing twentieth century music. The UNSW library had it on a somewhat crusty old 1959 LP, so I got that out and… boom. After months of not being terribly excited by what I’d been hearing in class, this… thing just suddenly spoke to (or screamed at) me in a way most of the other stsuff we’d been doing hadn’t done. Varèse kind of blew the 20th century open for me, and I must say, most of what I do now enjoy from earlier centuries I like in spite of, not because of, that class. I was delighted to find this very album on CD a few years later (alas, I’ve never seen the follow-up album on CD).

The Doors, Classics, which I now realise is a truly perplexing collection (I mean, look at that track selection). What sort of Doors best-of would leave out “Light My Fire”? This one. But I was 15 and I’d suddenly become obsessed with that song (thanks Triple M) and wanted to hear more by them, and this was what Brash’s at Eastgardens (yeah, that‘s how long ago it was) had immediately available and I didn’t know any better… and, strange as the track choices are in hindsight, a lot of them are actually still some of my favourites by them.

Brian Eno, Music for Airports. I remember the local library having this on cassette (again, that‘s how long ago this was). It took a surprising amount of effort, but it became one of my favourites eventually.

Glenn Gould’s 1955 Goldberg Variations. Much like how the Varèse album opened me up to “modern” music, this kind of opened me up to much earlier music, a lot of which I’d frankly found quite dull before this. You cannot accuse this of being a “historically informed performance” in any way, but I felt there was more music in this than in most of the “informed” period instrument recordings I’d heard by that time. I’ve come around to HIP recordings as I’ve aged, of course, but I still find this vital.

Sex Pistols, Bollocks, Baby’s first punk album.

Pink Floyd, Relics. I recall one of the postmen at Matraville Post Office when Mum was there (yet again, that‘s how long ago this was) giving me a loan of this on cassette (it had that particular cover, too)… a slightly odd collection of pre-1970 stuff, singles, B-sides, a few album tracks, one unreleased song, and I loved it. You never heard anything on radio at that time which predated Dark Side, so this was my first exposure to any of that early stuff.

Keith Jarrett, The Köln Concert. Another library find I remember taking a random punt on (this time they had it on CD, not tape), I don’t know why but good thing I did. I spent a certain part of my late teens and early twenties trying to get my head around jazz (which is something I’m only really starting to succeed at now) and I’m glad I found this as my first Jarrett album; I soon discovered I only really like him when he’s doing solo piano improv (I make an exception for Hymns/Spheres, which is solo organ improv). If I’d picked up one of his standards albums or other ensemble works or other instrument works (again excepting Hymns/Spheres) and not liked that, I might’ve been put off trying this afterwards. My loss.