70's: hard to remember really...i do remember my first cassette was billy joel's Glass Houses and being kinda upset that it didn't have "that song from Bosom Buddies" on it.

80's: tears for fears > U2, REM

90's: stone roses, pavement

00's: wilco

10's: we'll see...so far it's probably still wilco, with iron & wine and my morning jacket giving chase.

00s - Spoon

90s - Copyright, although Ween and Frank Black are right there too

80s - The Mats

70s - The Dolls

60s - Freddie and the Dreamers - even though the correct answer is the Beatles because of their omnipresence, I was way too young to really listen to or appreciate their music or, for that matter, notice the profound effect they were having on my perception. The only band I latched onto in any way during those single digit years was Freddie and the Dreamers. And had little to do with the music, and a lot to do with Freddie being one annoyingly silly motherfucker who made a little kid laugh.

I grab the opportunity to reminisce with both hands since I have nothing else to do.

1970's. I was born in 1974. I remember the punks (my scandalized Gran would make comments of disgust about them if we saw them hanging about corners) but I have no contemporary memory of punk music. The first song that I actually remembering hearing was Hot Gossip - I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper which came out in early 1978. If you know who Hot Gossip were you might think it was an inauspicious start in life. They were a dance troop lead by Sarah Brightman and the track was a sort of Star Wars themed disco track. It's a terrible record but one of those great terrible records that instead of offending you is hilariously of its time and utterly daft. The video was also erotically outre in those days so it may have been my first encounter with the torrid and steamy sexuality of womankind.

1980's. The 80's are difficult to boil down to one artist or band. I went from being 6 years old to be a teenager so obviously my tastes altered radically. Music didn't really play a huge part in my early life, I and every other boy, spent the entire time in bed, at school or out playing soccer. The only music I was really exposed to was on Top of the Pops or in my dads car, ie eighties pop music or seventies rock. My dad had reasonable tastes - Rolling Stones, Kraftwerk, lots of soul music, and it's where I picked up my love of Steely Dan. As a younger teenager I started listening to heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Judas Priest and so forth but that was just a short lived phase.

My picked artist of the eighties is going to be from the very end of the decade. It's Mudhoney - Superfuzz Bigmuff. By the age of 14 or 15 I had developed an independent streak and demonstrated it best by pretending to, but not actually going to school anymore. I had no money (I never got any pocket money, it was a poor house) but I'd hang out at Treasure Island amusement arcade on Jamaica Street watching the machine demos or other people playing until I was thrown out. Then I'd go round the corner to Tower Records. Tower Records was a huge store that was catastrophically under staffed. Whole levels had no staff on them and you were supposed to take your purchase down to a level that did have. No wonder they went bust because it was a teenage delinquents dream. It was the easiest thing in the world to put a cassette in your pocket and walk out. Of course lots of cassettes didn't have the actual cassette in the box, they were kept behind the counter. But this is the crucial point, the American import cassettes, sealed in some kind of wrap did have the cassettes in them, so it was these that my light fingered self grabbed. The first one I stole was Mudhoney. Then bands like the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, The Melvins, The Misfits, Nirvana's 'Bleach'. I know it was wrong, I feel slightly ashamed now, perhaps I could justify it as coming from the oppressed working class the mere trifle of taking of cassette here and there from a corporate giant was justified from a moral and political point of view. But actually I did it because it was an amazing thrill. I was a quiet and polite boy. It was so out of character and almost like living a secret life. It was fantastic risking the wrath of the police, the childrens panel and my parents over something as stupid as long haired drongos like Mudhoney. The very memory of it sends me sky high even now! Perhaps some of that incredible feeling of risk and excitement lives on in my attitude to music.

1990's. By the early nineties I'd left school and worked as a postman. Finally with some cash to spend I had legitimate record purchasing power. I worked morning and nights and went to college during the day. This was a time of a Scottish music renaissance. Lots of bands, local bands, were getting a lot of attention - Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, The Pastels, The Vaselines, Soup Dragons, BMX Bandits and loads of others. I'd went (well not went!) to a pretty culturally bereft working class school but there were 'cool kids' at college and for the first time I got to hang out with people with interests that extended beyond being brutish. It was the thing to do to walk around with a vinyl album under your arm to display to the world what you were listening to that that week and to display your 'cool'. Very overt, like the whole badge culture of the same time. I have to admit I kind of like how upfront people were then, now people are a bit more reticent. I started reading indie fanzines and a name I'd never heard before kept coming up. Orange Juice. Musicians and music scene types talked in reverence about them yet you couldn't get or hear their records any where, they were all deleted or sold out a decade before. I was intrigued by this mysterious Orange Juice and the myth of Postcard grew in my mind. Then one day, I suppose about '92 I was in a second hand record shop and something amazing happened. I found Orange Juice 'Simply Thrilled Honey'. I had to buy it. It was fate. This record had been pressed and I had been born so that we could find each other. I swear there was some kind of magnetic energy coming off it. The train home was an agony. I almost had a sort of mini nervous breakdown when I became convinced the train would derail and I would die with out every getting to hear this record. It didn't derail, I did get to hear it, and not only did it live up to the years-in-the-waiting build up, it was better than I could possibly ever have expected. I have most of the Postcard vinyl now and they mean more to me than any other material object. Perhaps I'm a hairs breadth from having 'bonkers' written on some medical report somewhere but I genuinely love them as if they were living things.

PART TWO COMING MAYBE.

80s-The Cure: My brother is nine years older than me and pretty much 100% responsible for my musical development. Growing up the majority of my time was spent sitting on the floor of his room reading comic books with him and listening to records. I remember listening to Lionel Richie, MJ, Duran Duran, and other pop stuff from the time for a while. The year I started school though, I believe was when he started high school (1985) and I can remember him completely changing. All of the sudden he was dressing different, grew like five inches, went from reading Spider Man to Heavy Metal, and was always bringing home these crazy records. Of all of the stuff he started listening to I remember The Cure more than anything though (this is still his favorite band to this day). I didn't mind it. We weren't hanging out mimicking the Thriller dance anymore, but he would put this stuff on and still dance with me and let me hang out in his room with him and that was all that mattered to me. Pretty good times for sure.

90s-Sonic Youth: Again this is completely my brother's doing. He came home from college one summer and brought all of these tapes with him of stuff I had never heard. I was immediately drawn to Goo because the cover looked like a comic book (also really liked the Sugar Cubes tape he brought home because I thought Eat the Menu was funny). He left me that tape when he went back to school and my now almost twenty year love affair with the band began. It was my only full length tape and I wore it out completely. A few years later when I moved in with him I can remember weekends dominated by repeated listenings of Washing Machine and Experimental Jetset played vulgarly loud (also remember him trying to shove My Bloody Valentine and Ride down my throat and me refusing to accept that as remotely palatable). My first CD that I can remember buying when I got the little tape adapter for my discman in my truck when I was seventeen was Evol (an SY album that I hadn't heard prior to then that now ranks as my favorite). I figure the 90s were my formative years for the most part, graduated high school, started college, joined the military, and every significant musical memory I have from that time is tied to SY.

00s-Black Dice: Black Dice changed the way I thought about music. What it could be, how it could be made, they changed everything for me. It's fairly logical to have moved from SY to them, a progression of noise of sorts, and the same things that I love about SY are the same things that I love about Black Dice. In spite of the fact they have fallen off in recent years, there was such an urgency to those early records. That feel that that album had to be made right then and that it wouldn't be the same if it had come out two years earlier or two years later. They were a band that said something with self oscillating pedals and blown out distortion, and it was the perfect soundtrack to my tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during that time. It was violent and disorienting and made little to no damn sense--but there are always those moments where everything comes together for a minute with their songs and there is a certain clarity, and those moments of calm are the best times in the desert. Regardless of what they do for the rest of their careers I will probably always buy every release from these guys--though largely I expect to be disappointed anymore--just because of how fucking perfect they were for awhile.

10s-Barn Owl or Jasper TX probably: Still way early in the decade but I think as I have gotten older and moved away from the military, become a husband and father, I appreciate a calmer, quieter experimentalism than the harsh noise of the first decade. Don't get me wrong, I still get a jones for Hair Police sometimes, but by the time I get done with a 12 hour shift, and get the daughter to bed, and stuff done around the house, and my wife falls asleep on the couch, putting on my headphones and listening to either of these bands is just a perfect way to end the day for me.