When I were in my teens I started getting into music. I used to listen to my brother's
Levellers,
Mega City 4, and other bands' tapes. My sister got me into the Smiths by never stopping playing their albums over and over in the car.
The earliest band I remember liking on my own was
The Lightning Seeds. I had Jollification and some of the singles off it. I don't know if I could listen to it now. I must dig it out.
When I was about 13 I started getting those
Britpop compiliations like
The Best Album In the World Ever.... Pt. 1 and
Shine 1,2,3,4 etc. on tape. Around the same time I was into
Blur and
Oasis. Much of Blur's stuff has stood the test of time, much of Oasis' hasn't.
Northern Uproar's
album is here somewhere too
.
Padraig (currently of Yeh Deadlies fame) used to make me mixtapes with lots of great music on them. I loved getting them and listening to them to death in work or at home. He really helped broaden my tastes. He introduced me to, amongst a whole wealth of other bands
Bjork,
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds,
Massive Attack,
John McCormack,
Whipping Boy and
Pavement. He still makes me cds sometimes .
All through out this time I used to buy chart singles alot too. I'd buy them in the now defunct Tape 2 Tape in Swords or in Woolworths up north in Enniskillen where they were way cheaper. I have pretty much every song from every Levi's ad during the 1990s on CD single here somewhere.
Babylon Zoo,
Smoke City, et al please stand up.
Some other bands around this time that I still love include
Radiohead (but of course) and
The Eels.
In my later teens I started liking Irish balladry, initially from hearing a
Luke Kelly compilation. I'm still very much into this end of things and have numerous cds, mp3s and lots of versions of different traditional ballads from the English speaking world.
As I've got older my tastes have become, for want of a less worn term, eclectic. There's not really a genre of music that I don't have at least some limited interest in. People I met in college introduced me to lots of music. Colm aka
DJ PCP was and always still is playing me different calypso, electro, grime and miscellaneous world music and curios. He was the first guy I knew with an LCD Soundsystem record.
While in college I got really into '60s Jamaican ska which I still absofuckinlutely love. Perhaps the single biggest influence on the music I play has been
Casiotone For the Painfully Alone. I found some of his songs on epitonic or the Tomlabs website years back and they blew me away with their immediacy, humour and the simplicity of the recordings. Writing this has made me think of the 100s of other bands that I've enjoyed so I'll just call this part 1.
Thus endeth Part 1