Oasis - 'Definitely Maybe'

It's odd, but sometimes music can evoke the strangest memories.

Everything that this record brings back has nothing to do with Oasis, and everything to do with me. Being a student, living in a shared house in Leeds, playing this record after excitedly buying it, and wondering if it was just me, or whether it really did sound like Status Quo with a bit more attitude. Would it be the second record I'd taken back on the basis of simply not being good enough (the first one was the debut Lionrock album, which I took back and theatrically demanded a refund for 'for just being shit').

I remember playing the whole album through, and then going back and trying to find the good bits, desperately dropping the needle on the record increasingly randomly, then just giving up.

Oasis have written some great songs, but have also released some crappy albums.

Blur - 'Blur'

Having listened to this album, I'd thought of something clever to write about it, but then realised that Blur had beaten me to it by calling this album 'Blur'. This is the sound of Blur being Blur without any thematic conceit driving their creativity.

In the battle of Britpop, it was often said that Oasis were The Beatles, mainly because they ripped off so many of their songs. The truth is, The Beatles never really had 'a sound' in the way that The Rolling Stones did. What marks The Beatles out is their restless creativity, which surely peaked with 'Yellow Submarine'.

I'm kidding of course . To quote the late, great Bill Hick's, 'they were so high they even let Ringo sing'. It's hard to know if with their later albums, The Beatles reached a creative plateau, and never fulfilled their potential of becoming the band they could have been. Although according to Alan Partridge, that was the band 'Wings'.

It's impossible for this record not to be swept away by 'Song 2', a mosh-pit anthem for the blipvert generation. So when this comes on, I'm reminded of dancing to it in sweaty clubs in Leeds. And I don't mean just as a punter, but also as a DJ. And I don't really mean dancing, I mean jumping up and down, with my fists clenched and my arms outstretched, feeling every little bit stress leave my body as I make myself one with the heaving mass of dancers, all screaming in unison, WOO HOO!

Catharsis. It feels good.

Eat - 'Sell Me A God'

I love this record so much. It's not just that it's a great record - and it is - but this is one of those records that I looked for for years before I found it. It seems impossible now, in the age of the internet and immediate downloads, but once upon a time, you actually had to hunt out music. You had to go to big cities to find better record shops, or visit record fairs on the offchance of them having what you wanted. Crazy times.

Musically, this is a proto-Britpop record, marking a time between the guitar-scrubbing of Ned's Atomic Dustbin and the swooning, swooping hysteria of Suede. If you've never heard it, you should check it out - you can probably download it for pennies.

This reminds me so much of a friend from Salisbury, Robert, who I worked with in catering for a few years, on and off. He was a rabid Eat fan, and was also one of the funniest guys I've ever known - really clever, capable and sharp, with a great eye for the absurd. He could also play air guitar and drums like no-one I've ever met. We did the adult access course together at Salisbury College, and went our seperate ways at the end of it. I hope he's OK - like many clever, funny people, he had a sort of underlying malaise that suggested he was never comfortable with himself. Maybe education helped him find his niche.

The Cure - 'Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me'

It's easy to forget what an awesome, world-conquering band The Cure once were. And although they are styled as being a none-more-Goth act, on their later albums, they are closer to vaudeville storytellers than adolescent doom-mongers.

I'm pretty sure I got this when it came out in 1987. It reminds be of being the sort of obnoxious, self-assured Goth-haired teenager that only gets produced in small towns. It's something to do with being so cocooned from the rest of the world that your home town becomes the entire universe. Wanting to be a big fish in a small pond, unaware that you will eventually be released into the ocean. And the ocean is big, cold, and full of things that, as pond life, you can't begin to understand. I think I might have stretched that aquatic metaphor to near-breaking point.

It was unfortunate that Salisbury was a garrison town, because my particular blend of sartorial statement (printed velvet trousers, huge white tail shirt) didn't go down well with the squaaddies in town on R&R - mostly Paras, unfortunately. A shove in the back, and a shaven-headed face asking 'does your mum know you've got her clothes on?' tends to focus the mind.

Happy days.

Echo and The Bunnymen - 'Ocean Rain'

What an epic record. What a great title. What a great cover. It's hard to believe that this record is over 25 years old - not only does it have a soaring, fresh energy to it, but it sounds of youth, of arrogance, of endless energy and possibility.

In fact, I'll go even further - this record is the sound of immortality. It perfectly captures the swagger of youth, disbelieving of the certainty that it will eventually become tired of the fight, and inevitably mellow with age. That said, the last time I saw Ian McCullough on stage, he looked like a total badass who still fighting that fight.

This record doesn't recall remind of anything specific in my life, just the power and beauty of youth and, inevitably, the maxim that youth is wasted on the young.

U2 - 'Zooropa'

I got really excited when I pulled this out - Zoo TV, Bono as Macphisto, telephone calls to world leaders and cultural bigwigs live from stage every night. It was U2 embracing postmodernism, going slightly mad, and reinventing themselves (again). Sadly, this is the boring zoo TV album - 'Achtung Baby' is the exciting one. This is a bit turgid and, if you were a U2 fan, you would have found it revolutionary at the time. Maybe it was, but it sounds tired now.

Maybe I feel like that because all it reminds me of is watching Zoo TV on telly. Maybe if I'd got off the sofa, gone out and engaged with it, it might mean more to me.

Hmm, have I only just realised that this music loving lark is two-way street?

The Breeders - 'Last Splash'

This reminds me of my friend Ali. Partly because when I moved home from New York and formed a band with him on drums, he was really into The Breeders' first album 'Pod'. But also because we went to see The Breeders play at Leeds University. That was a fun night for so many reasons, reasons that mostly aren't suitable for public airing. But two events stick out.

The first is getting on stage and dancing with support act Luscious Jackson. I wasn't a stage invader - there's one song where they invite people up onto the stage, and I managed to do so in Leeds, Manchester, New York, and at the Glastonbury festival in 1994.

The other thing that happened that night was that we were followed around by a couple of girls who giggled behind their hands whenever we happened to look at them, which we did fequently, mainly to see if they'd stopped following us around. This went on for far too long, and only stopped after they disappeared off to the toilets. We knew they'd been to the toilets, because one of them had managed to trap the toilet roll under her skirt, and was walking round with five feet of it dangling behind her. We couldn't help but laugh and, mortified, they left us alone after that.

Happily, it's a great album too.

Adam and the Ants - 'Kings of the Wild Frontier'

What a cracking album. Even 30 years after its release, it still has a vitality, freshness and a uniqueness to it that makes it sound as thought it's been beamed in from another planet. I'm not saying that this is an epoch-defining album in the way that, say, Sgt Pepper's has become - it isn't - but as a piece of conceptual pop-art, it's pretty great.

Of course, I'm totally biased. This is the first album I ever bought, and so has a special place in my heart. I can remember going to WH Smiths in Salisbury with my dad and buying it, and the little round price sticker that I carefully peeled off (£2.99). I can remember playing it over and over on my parents' little Dansette-style record player - well, of course I did, it was the the only album I had.

As I just flipped the record over and played the start of side two, the tribal drumming at the start of the track 'Kings of the Wild Frontier' kicked in. My 18 month old son looked delighted and started jumping up and down, and whirling like a dervish, so maybe this record really does stand the test of time.

Chameleons UK - 'Script of the Bridge'

This is yet another record that I bought from a thrift store on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. The observant among you will have immediately noticed the fact that the band are called 'Chameleons UK', no doubt because there was already a band called Chameleons practising their art in the US.

I almost certainly bought this because it reminded me of my brother. When I saw the cover, it was him that I thought of, taken back to his front room in Salisbury, with a vague recollection of him talking about the mellow guitar work on this album. Maybe I was homesick when I bought it.

I didn't know anything about the band then, and surprisingly to me, I don't now. This is definitely the first time that I've played this, as I expecting some sort of chilled out, Ry Cooder-esque exploration of smoky, slide guitars and sweeping atmospherics. Instead, it's a slightly rowdy new wave racket with faintly new romantic pretensions.

My brother has always had ropey taste in music.

U2 - 'The Joshua Tree'

God knows when I bought this. I'd guess it's another record I brought back from New York with me - the fanmail info address is in NYC. And God knows why I bought it - listening to it know, and looking at the Ansell Adams-styled cover shot, where the band are attempting to recast themselves as white boy soul icons, I would, to paraphrase Frankie Boyle, quite happily punch every one of them in the face.

Does it remind me of anything? It reminds me that U2 have made some great records. But for me, this is quite far down the list.

Radiohead - 'OK Computer'

What an amazing record. What a massive, mindblowing, perfect record. All the way through, I keep thinking 'this is the best bit of the record yet', time and time again. It's a rock record filtered through every studio device and human foible imaginable, and what emerges at the other end is damn near perfect.

It's odd that I think all this, and have absolutely no desire to go and see them live. I happily watched them tear the roof off the universe when they played Glastonbury, but I did it on TV, from my sofa, possibly from the far end of a bottle of really good white wine. I wonder why that is? Maybe if I don't go and share the experience with thousands of others, then Radiohead still belong to me, and me alone. No one else really understands them like I do. I LOVE YOU RADIOHEAD!

Anyway, as awesome as this album is, it reminds very clearly of one road trip that Rob, Aidan and I made from Leeds to Salisbury. We'd each made a mixtape for the journey, and at the time, Rob and I were really going to town on ours, using samplers to loop bits, overlay several tracks and so on. About halway through Rob's mix, the familiar computer-generated vocal of 'Fitter, Happier' started up. After a few lines of the acual lyrics, just as the mournful piano starts and the synths start to smother themselves to death, something weird happened. The voice started to go off message: 'when the seagulls follow the trawler...an elephant with his trunk stuck up his own dung funnel...' and so on. Basically, Rob had performed a slavish recreation of the track, and then changed the vocal into meaningless drivel from the end of the 20th century. The effect was uproar: I remember wiping away tears of laughter and looking at Aidan doing the same, while he somehow managed to keep driving and not kill us all, with Rob in the back seat looking delighted and laughing at our reaction. It was the most brilliant, perfectly-timed and unlikely cover version I think I'm ever going to hear.

Killdozer - 'Uncompromising War On Art Under A Proletarian Dictatorship'

What a great title. What a great cover. Surely it can only go downhill from here?

Well, yes and no. Musically, this is now a pretty unappealing record, sounding a bit like Tom Waits fronting a shoegaze Cardiacs - cement-mixer vocals over wall of guitar noise, tempo shifts and angular guitar lines aplenty. And if you don't get the joke (such as it is, that the band are a group of disaffected communists seeking to overthrow the system via sludge-rock), then this isn't a very good album. Actually, I get the joke, and I still don't think it's a very good album.

But the thing that totally redeems them for me is when they played at Salisbury Arts Centre, mid-90s. They came bounding on stage and launched into a note perfect interpretation of 'Unbelievable' by EMF. The place went mental, and in terms of an unexpected icebreaker cover to start a gig with, it was inspired, the lollopping bassline with the gravelly vocals over the top. And Then they launched into one of the tracks from this album, and it all went a bit less mental.

Good concept, average execution.

Cat No: TG82A

Tracks: Final Market. Knuckles The Dog (Who Helps People). Turkey Shoot. Grandma Smith Said A Curious Thing. Hot 'N' Nasty. Enemy Of The People. Earl Scheib. Das Kapital. The Pig Was Cool. Working Hard, or Hardly Working?

Lou Reed - 'Rock n Roll Animal'

I've no idea when, where or why I bought this. I'm not a huge Lou Reed fan. I mean, I love 'Transformer', but who doesn't? I think I just like the idea of Lou Reed more than the reallity of buying his records, although I have listened to 'Metal Machine Music' all through, once, just to see if it was rubbish as people said (it is). And I read William Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' for pretty much the same reason, but at least Naked Lunch has the redeeming feature of being horribly perverted. 'Metal Machine Music' is just noise.

I don't get this album at all - it pretends to be all nihilisitc, but it has the most god-awful stadium-prog feel to it. In fact, I'd guess this is only the second time I've played it - and possible the last.

Next.

Tracks: Intro/Sweet Jane. Heroin. White Light/White Heat. Lady Day. Rock n Roll

Cat No: NL83664

The Verve - 'Urban Hymns'

I don't get Richard Ashcroft. I know that to many people he's like some modern rock shaman, chanellling the spirit of Jim Morrisson, wild, tortured and half-mad, but I don't see it. I see a lot of swagger and some good songs staggering under the weight of the enormous chip on his shoulder. This may or may not be influenced by the fact that even my good lady appears to have a soft spot for him. Watch it Ashcroft, she's mine.

I think I've only played this a handful of times, but for me the stand-out track by miles is 'Catching the Butterfly', which is the sort of naggingly beautiful but slightly weird production that people used to put on the b-side of a seven inch single. I've no idea why I bought it - it's not my thing at all. It reminds me of being in my room on Brudenell Road, Leeds, playing this record and thinking 'why have I bought this piece of crap?', which is all a bit literal, but perhaps indicative of how little emotional connection I've managed to make with this record.

Catalogue Number: HUTLP45

Tracks: Bitter Sweet Symphony. Sonnet. The Rolling People. The Drugs Don't Work. Catching the Butterfly. Neon Wilderness. Space and Time. Weeping Willow. Lucky Man. One Day. This Time. Velvet Morning. Come On.