Tucked up with my school muckers in the passenger lounge on the overnight crossing to Le Havre to stay with a family in the shadow of a power station. My mother had bought me NOW 12 on cassette to listen to in my Walkman and there, tucked away in between Hothouse Flowers' 'Don't Go' and Danny Wilson's 'Mary's Prayer' was Morrissey's 'Everyday Is Like Sunday'. This was an absolute revelation to my 12 year old ears, and soundtracked the entire French exchange. I apologise again to my host family for forcing them to play it over and over again in their Renault 4 as we toured the coastal towns of Normandy where we - aha - trudged slowly over wet sand.

I was wondering about this the other day after I heard Chri Rea who had such an epthany that he claims he became a singer over night after hearing one blues song on the radio. In fact on the recent "Pop Britannia many" of the stars on it seemed to have had the same experience, is it just musicians?

The most vivd occasion I can think of was when "smells like teen spirit" first came out and we drving along in a mini bus (off to plant some trees) and by the end of it we were all "head banging" along , my memory tells me it was one of the occasions when the DJ played it again immediately but I'm not sure.

Chuck Berry's The Promised Land is a record that I knew I'd heard frequently as a child; I just couldn't put my finger on exactly when. Then a few years ago, I remember watching one of those Old Grey Whistle Test compilations, and up came The Band's version from 1973, accompanied by some black and white cartoon footage of a cat riding a wagon or something. Something clicked: I was absolutely sure that I had seen this before. Not only that, but the more I think about it, I think this would have been the first time I heard the song - even before the far more familiar Chuck Berry original. My Dad used to watch The Old Grey Whistle Test, and although I would have been nearly two at the time, I'm convinced of this as my first musical memory.

I think.

In 1985, on a Geography trip to Stoke-On-Trent, I heard It's All Over Now, Baby Blue on the radio and decided for the first time that I thought Bob Dylan could really sing. To this day, I'm very grateful that whichever DJ it was elected not to play something from his most recent album at the time. Not sure Tight Connection To My Heart would have had the same effect.

lying half alseep in the back of my parents' car on the way to Wales, listening to the tip-top sounds of Radio 1. 'Walking On The Moon' by The Police came on. It sounded so extraordinary to my young ears. I sat bolt upright and drank in every note.

More details. The caravan was cream and lemon yellow, and parked down the hill on the campsite, to the right. The tranny had a pinky-orange leatherette finish and was placed on the middle of the three foldaway steps. I was sitting at a white foldaway table with a sky-blue-check Formica top, eating foldaway sausages and beans (probably Heinz, but possibly HP - in Anglesey you took what you could get).

Fast forward ten years to my first "Born To Run": I was sitting on the fag-burned grey-blue carpet of a mate's room in a hall of residence, wearing those suede lace-up ankle boot things I can't remember the name of. Even on first hearing through a foldaway Chad Valley stereo, after four bars of That Riff it was clearer than it's ever been since that I was listening to a lad who'd probably be around for a while.

I first heard The Pixies ''Velouria'' why staring down into the trenches at Ypres during a History trip in Year 8.

6am Jullandar Shere by Cornershop. I was in a traffic jam in Mortlake (just over the level crossing past the station) in my black Golf GTi on my way to work in around 1995. Janice Long was doing the breakfast show on XFM when it was on a trial licence. It totally blew me away.

I also vividly recall playing snooker on his Mum's dining room table at my friend Graeme's house in 1979 when he put The Undertones debut album on. That moment changed my life as I went from prog rocker to new waver that very day.

I was in the car on the way to work listening to the Word CD. On came 'On the Radio' and i was immediately hooked. The moment in my mind is rounding the corner by the Mill Hotel in Sudbury. It was there that I was in love. I played it at least once more before work started and then emailed Mrs Elliott to let her know about the greatness of Ms Spektor. I haven't really stopped listening to it since then

I was just too young for Punk in 77, and only liked 'nice' music. The patchy, Punk clips and coverage I'd seen were all shouty, spiky and as scary as singing Daleks.

Until at my best friends house, with the clanking of his parents having tea in the next room, he played me the sweary selections from his older brother's copy of the Pistols NMTB at some volume, on his dad's smoked glass stereo and curly lead headphones. Every bit of effing and jeffing was relayed by me, back to my friend as it happened in an overly loud voice due to the deafening level of headphones "he just said f..." -
"Shhhh...keep it down, mum and dad are next door".

It was like being blasted with gramophone gamma rays. When the headphones came off I was as fizzing and fired up as The Hulk, ‘nice' had been atomized - all I wanted to do was rage in raggy togs to pumped up punk.

The Johnny Walker show, I think before he left Radio 1 to go to the states for a while. Lunchtime, probably early 70s. Even then he was one of the only listenable DJs, along with Alan Not Arf Freeman at drivetime, as it wasn't known at the time. I digress. On comes the Johnnie Allan version of Promised Land, released on an LP called, if I am correct, Saturday Night Specials. It was the single. My first overt exposure to the accordion in rock. I had bought that single by 4pm. I then left it on a train on the way to a party, a year or so later. Weep not, I have it once more, albeit only thru' the joys of download, but still one of those small hairs on the back of the neck listens. (Even when Los Lobos lift the solo verbatim on their track on the Nebraska tribute, shame on their otherwise good reputation)

Some of these I may have mentioned before.

June 1972. At home watching kid's tv - Lift Off With Ayesha. This stick-thin man with spiky hair (grey on my telly - only later found out it was orange) dressed in a glittery jump suit comes on and starts singing about 'hazy cosmic jive' with his arm draped around his blond guitarist. Jaw hits floor.

Summer 1976. Skeleton Records, Birkenhead. Browsing the second hand racks when this unholy row comes out of the speakers...Antichrist...Anarchist... Year Zero arrives.

Sheffield City Hall, September 1982. Elvis Costello and the Attractions. A haunting new tune, deep and moving. My mate whispered "It's about the shipyards in Poland". It wasn't. It was actually about the Falklands. It took a while for the Costello version to hit the shops, Robert Wyatt got there first - but it was that early airing of the tune sung by Elvis that first moved me deeply.

.....some time in 1973, lying in bed with tinny transistor radio and the little white earpiece which regularly cut out, listening through the static for something, anything actually recognisable as music, then suddenly the opening Chuck Berry riff, a piano trill, and Bolan pouting "Well you're dirty and sweet, clad in black don't look back ..." Whoops. The world just changed.

our first family house 1969,walking in the downstairs sitting room, about 4 and a half years old, the Radiogram on the left and my mum putting on a bunch of singles. The fist or second one to drop was Mr Tambourine Man by the Byrds. I remember the first chimes, my little sister and the cut on her face sitting on a couch, my mum humming along and me just standing there loving the tune.

I go there every time I hear it and I've never got tired of it in my 42 years.

I vividly recall a shared experience with "The Joshua Tree" which seemed to generate a fair old bit of pre-release hype at the time. Bought the album on the Saturday following release (on vinyl of course), then went up to a friends (Mum and Dad's) house where we listened to it in its entirety 4 times in a row, accompanied by pizza and (for some bizarre reason) Tennents Super Lager.

The album was great. I puked on the way home, think it may have been down to a badly-defrosted pizza, as opposed to the 6 cans of Super Lager...

Anyway, whenever I listen to it I'm right back there in 1987 in my mate's front room.

Keith

I was 12 years old. As we drove up the M6 - heading back to home, the end of summer, the return to school and everything else miserable and routine - I heard 'Gangsters' by The Specials for the first time, on the Radio One Top 40. I'd never heard anything like it in my life, it was completely thrilling and I knew there and then that I'd found a new thing to love that wasn't for kids, it was part of the terrifying world of teenagers. I loved it; within weeks I was working out ways to narrow my school tie, tighten my school Farahs and get away with white socks and Walt Jabsco button badges on the lapel of my blazer. In some respects this is the reason I'm sitting in the WORD office now.

It is 1988, I am 17 years old and and in a relationship with first serious Love Of My Life. For reasons I can't quite put my finger on, I am also a Hue and Cry fan - and just as worryingly My Love has a slight penchant for INXS.

I have just made an excursion to Bristol with My Love and bought a Creation cassette called 'Doing It For The Kids' from HMV for the very good reason it only cost 99p.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doing-Kids-Various-Artists/dp/B0000083BH

We sit in My Love's bedroom as quite nice indie jangle follows quite nice indie jangle... until Momus appears with A Complete History Of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24)- and the camp intelligence and humour knocks me sideways. I play it again immediately. They are unlike any lyrics I have ever come across before, as it were, and it is certainly a tad more interesting than 'Looking For Linda'.

A few weeks later the album 'Tender Pervert' is released and I sit with My Love in their bedroom and listen to the first track 'The Angels Are Voyeurs':

"He sees the way we tamper with the things we most depend on
The danger stands his hair on end and gives him a hard-on
He calls his angels down to watch that slut the world get hers
God is a tender pervert
And the angels, and the angels are voyeurs"

My Love starts moaning that the music I now listen to is 'just too weird' ever since that day we bought that cassette, sexual favours are suspended and then we split.

However, the way I look at the world is changed forever thanks to that nice Momus chap - even if my penis temporarily has just me for company.

Summer 1969. On a university arranged vac project in Gateshead, living in the top floor lodgings of Mr and Mrs Snook, waiting to go out drinking. Turn on newly-purchased FM trannie, find I'm listening to some version of Jazz Club on BBC (first time ever) but don't turn off as on comes this fabulous music. Listen all through and then go and get hammered on Exhibition bitter. Still see that room and taste the beer whenever I hear it.

Mirror in the Bathroom by The Beat.... a rainy morning break at school, clustered round a tranny radio in the bike shed (not behind it!)... same location, around the same time, Geno by Dexys. Not a great fan of either at the time, but funny how they can stick in your mind.

Happy House by The Banshees... halfway up a hill, my first hillwalking trip with my Dad... thanks to the limited playlist on wunnerful-radio-wun they played it on the way down too.

Magical Mystery Tour - Aged, I'm guessing around 3 (making it 1971), watching it on TV with my folks around Christmas. It wasn't born when they originally showed it in 1967, must have been a repeat...

I always associate Blondie's "Heart Of Glass" with Swap Shop and a Saturday morning when I was quite young. I remember crawling on the floor, writing letters on scraps of paper and asking my sister if I had written a proper sentance yet. Still struggling with the latter.

I think it was probably summer 1973 but possibly 1974. It's a hot and sunny Wednesday afternoon, I'm on a school coach on our way to an athletics match. I'm a 1,500 metres runner. My stomach is already churning with anxiety, even though it will probably be another couple of hours before I have to run. The bus driver has the radio on when on comes Stevie Wonder with Too High. For a few minutes my fears evaporate and I'm spellbound. The chorus sticks with me all afternoon. When I'm pounding round the track it runs round my head. I won that afternoon. I credit Stevie with getting me to the tape.
I've never been a big Pink Floyd fan. In the summer of 1980 I was camping with some mates in the south of France. We've been on a camp site outside San Tropez for a few days but woken up to the sound of rain battering against canvas. Its a miserable morning as we pack up the damp tents to move on. Once we're packed and in the car, someone sticks Meddle in the cassette player and as we descend down a hill side with a grey Mediterranean in front of us the track San Tropez comes on. Of course.

Late August, 1975. Edinburgh, Bruce's Records on Rose Street, a sunny Saturday afternoon. I had bored my world senselesss with wild evangelising about Bruce Springsteen, based largely on my enthusiasm for The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and reports from live shows in the more obscure rock reads of the day. Back then there was often a lack of synchrony on release dates and this small but perfectly formed record store had a wonderful stiff-sleeved Columbia import of the long-awaited, long delayed Born To Run. I took it to the counter and asked to hear it. I was nervous. I was ushered to the airplane seat that was de rigueur at the time and put on the huge half-coconut cans. By chance or design, I'm not sure, but it was side 2 and from the roaring drum intro of Ernest ‘Boom' Carter on the title track through to the last keening organ note of Jungleland, I was spellbound, delirious, self righteous. I giggled and laughed and nearly cried I was so happy to hear something that delivered on all the promise. The denizens of Bruce's must have thought I was certifiable but they didn't call for the men in the white coats and I went back out into the sunlight totally excited clutching the album under my arm.

It's 1995, and I'm in Nashville for the first time. It's very late at night, much brown spirit has been consumed, I've seen Waylon Jennings walking through the mist and been ejected from a strip club for not taking it quite seriously enough.

Now I'm being driven quite slowly along a Tennessee highway by a woman who is even drunker than I am, trying to find the apartment of a mutual friend. Then this gorgeous female voice comes on the radio, I sober up instantly & time seems to stand still. I can still see the empty road curving round in front of me today, glowing under the street lights and hear this person singing about how she's forgotten all about an old lover but that the song she's listening to brings it all back.

It's a spine-tinglingly brilliant record & I immediately fall in love with both the singer & the whole idea of contemporary country music. Sadly I have no idea who the singer is, what the song is called and of course the DJ doesn't tell me at the end of the record. I'm forced to fall back on my companion - then a leading record company employee - who looks at me like I'm mad & goes "Ssss Triiisssssshaaa"

Ah.

Perhaps that's Trisha Yearwood then, whose unlistened to CD I have in my bag, and which, I now vaguely remember, is called "The Song Remembers When". And who, as it happens, I am due to interview first thing in the morning...

On a similar tack, I can clearly remember reading the review in the hugely influential (in my bedroom anyway) Let It Rock magazine which caused me to rush out and buy "Born To Run" without having the faintest idea what Bruce Springsteen sounded like. That turned out to be a good move too.

I was on a fifty-four-and-a-half hour train journey, travelling from the southern tip of India to the mountainous north in the early 90s. After nearly three wonderful months in the subcontinent, I suddenly had a moment when I'd had enough - enough of the heat, the noise, the dust and dirt, the poverty, the chaos, the toilets.
I asked to borrow a friend's Walkman, and climbed up to my top bunk at the end of the carriage. I pressed play to listen to whatever tape was inside it, and on came the tin pot percussion and shifting chords of the opening to "Unfinished Sympathy" by Massive Attack.
I was instantly and utterly transported to somewhere else - I don't know where, but it sounded extraordinary, and it cured me.

I am revising for University exams. What passes for "essays" from the previous year, along with copious, graffiti strewn "lecture notes", are scattered across the carpet, and I am sprawled in the middle of the floor, half heartedly reading the stuff.

Next to me on the carpet is my Dad's pretty decent portable radio, tuned in, as far as I can remember, to Alan Freeman's Sunday rock show. Fluff is playing his usual eclectic mix of ELO, ELP, and so on, with an occasional more angular interjection from AC/DC or someone similar. It's pretty good background music, an antidote to the soporific effects of reading about organic chemistry.

I'm barely aware of the start of each song, paying limited attention to what Fluff's banging on about between songs, so I miss the pre-announced names of most tracks or the artists involved. Until, that is, a curious guitar sound attracts my attention, and the first line of the lyrics unfold, sung by a familar voice;

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality.

6 minutes later I have been transfixed by the song, amazed at its twists and turns, at the number of tempo and stylistic changes packed into a baroque ballad about someone who has just killed a man. My jaw has dropped as I realise that this really is Mr Mercury and Friends, more familiar to me then as a kind of erzatz Led Zeppelin, but suddenly transformed by 6 daring, outrageous minutes of fun into something much more interesting.

I cannot remember exactly what was the subject of the papers in my hands or what song followed next, but every time I sit in that room now, I can see that radio, see the clutter scattered on the floor around me, feel the carpet under my elbows and hear Freddy's voice ringing out clear and bold.

on a Bus Australia, er, bus, crossing the Nullabor Plain from Adelaide to Perth. Total trip; approx. 36 hours, with a break every few hours to allow the smokers to clog the clearest air I've ever had the fortune to walk in. No lights, just stars and desert and a straight road most Southern American states would die for.

It's me, my girlfriend, some other backpackers, the odd Aborigine and my Sony Walkman. Trip of a lifetime in itself, only halfway through I pulled out the cassette I'd purchased the day before and plugged it in.

Mostly, I'd been taken by the cover; a long, thin cowboy-like dude nonchalantly leaning on a wall next to his steel guitar. Attitude personified.

To this day, the album is one of my favourites, but when I reached track six the record, and the trip, took on whole new dimensions. I will never forget stepping off the bus at a 2AM ciggie-break and re-winding to Chris Whitley's Poison Girl from Living With The Law, walking 20 or 30 yards from the small group of people and looking up at the, seemingly millions, of stars of the Southern Hemisphere.

I love that his music instantly transports me back to that time and that the memory remains to this day so incredibly vivid. A great talent taken far too early.

Back in the mid 1990's as a teenager, I had managed to graduate from the Euro fizz of implausibly cheesy dance music to Oasis and Blur. I had however, not heard anything by Manic Street Preachers, although I had read about the disappearance of Richey.

Lo! and behold, I was in my bedroom on a friday evening, I think in April, 1996. TFI Friday was must-see TV for me, and Chris Evans introduced the Manics. Not knowing what to expect, I watched intently, and was gobsmacked by the brilliance of A Design For Life. I was lounging on my red futon, and it would have been sometime between 6pm and 6.30 as my mum hadn't called me down for dinner yet.

Not quite life-changing, but it certainly kept me moving on the path from a boy listening to 2Unlimited(eek!) to a man listening to the whole gamut of rock from Berry and Presley onwards!

But late '90s, a warm day in Spring/Summer and I was living in a Glasgow tenement flat. Everyone had windows open and across the back court was playing a quite unusual song over and over again. It started to grow on me and I eventually found out it was 4 Non Blondes 'What's up'. Always takes me back to that day and location !

It wasn't the first time I heard it, but I vividly remember discussions about the lyrics to Squeeze's 'Up the Junction' whilst standing in the school dinner queue in 1979 - we just couldn't get over the fact that everything rhymed.

My Dad (like many of his generation I think) talks about the strangeness of hearing Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel for the first time. He was doing National Service and someone brought it in and enthused about it. My Dad says you just can't imagine the impact it had - it sounded like nothing they'd ever heard before. Didn't stop him going off to do his folk dancing demonstrations though !

Sitting around watching telly after school with my older sister who'd been a big Marc Bolan fan, this came on

Tragic though it may sound it still pretty much (though not wholly) defines my musical and sartorial tastes. Once a Mod . . . Goths are like that too. You can always tell one, even years afterwards. The traces linger and you're drawn to certain things by instinct. Weird having live bands on kids tea-time TV show.

On the Evening Session. A small student bedroom, my recently-former boyfriend sitting, tense, on the edge of the bed, his hands stretched out onto the covers, his eyes wide and waiting. We both loved them so much we wanted to hear it in the same place at the same time. We spent the next eight minutes with our mouths open. And, yes, we're still friends.

Sunday Dinner, World Wide Family Favourites on the radio, the smell of roast beef and roll out those lazy hazy crazy days of summer, those days of soda and pretzels and beer.
What was a pretzel? We didn't have them in Lincolnshire.

September (?) 1986, the VCR was set to tape "Rock Around The Clock" off BBC2 because Dire Straits' Alchemy concert video was on, and they were "my" band at the time - it was actually the only music I owned. Not wanting to be a victim of unscheduled snooker overruns or some such nonsense a good half hour or so was added to the taping...

Fast forward to watching the next day - of course, the Dire Straits thing was excellent, but back to the studio with Andy Kershaw (and Mark Ellen?) and a live Billy Bragg in the studio thrashing out "Help Save The Youth of America" on a funny looking green guitar - certainly not the silky tones of a Stratocaster, but it sounded urgent and "important".

It took a few days to sink in…but looking back it changed everything - from there to studying the "Talking To The Taxman About Poetry" album credits and checking out Johnny Marr and The Smiths, Kirsty MacColl, the Peel sessions and not that long after a magazine called Q started up..

Still have a soft spot for Dire Straits… but what on earth would have happened without those extra 30 minutes?

Final Thought :

My wife - who I met through a shared love of music practically forced me to meet Billy after the opening night of The Broadway in Barking a couple of years ago - couldn't think of a thing to say on the spot apart from "thanks"…but this is *why* I was saying thanks Bill.

TOTP's, a Thursday evening...DJ introduces Alice Cooper, no idea what to expect, suddenly this long haired motley crew are on the screen, the singer daubed in black mascara, that riff, dun-der-dun-der-dun-der-der....lyrics about no more school....as a 12 year old could it get any better?
Oh yes it could..... my Dad spluttering expletives at the "thing" that was on the telly......I was hoooked.....what was there not to like...the image, the song, the fact that it upset the folks.....heaven!
And 36 years later, I still hooked on to Alice and every time Schools Out comes on the random play the memory of that evening floods back and I'm 12 again

Context is everything. It's a rainy Saturday September morning in 1981. I'm 11 years old and playing my first away school football match. The nervous First Years (of which I'm one) are sitting on the bus with the older, bigger, louder boys. Collectively, we're trying to avoid their attention, but laughing at, whilst not really understanding their jokes.
One of them has a tape recorder on which he's got a tape of the Top 20, one tune immediately spears me and it's one he plays repeatedly from his collection. It's got synthesisers, a steady beat, but the tune sounds..sad. Then the vocals start, quite high, almost a little bit girly and the lyrics just..grabbed me - "It's my direction, it's my proposal, it's so hard it's leading me astray". Yes! He's here with me right now! The song continues, a hymn to teenage confusion? Longing? When he reaches, at the end.. "You'll understand, it's not important now" there's an entire ocean of very precocious teenage terror that I'm feeling and this song is articulating. Is this what being an adult's about?
"Souvenir" by O.M.D. It can still stop me dead.

1972 listening to John Peel under the literal as well as proverbial bed covers. He played the full 18 minutes of Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air. I'd never heard anything like it - broke the piggy bank to buy it next day for 10 shillings and sixpence...and I've been hearing echoes of it ever since in The Who, Pink FLoyd, Mike Oldfield, 90s dance music and much else....

I distinctly remember the first time I heard Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane singing "Miracles" ....I was in first grade and living with an abusive step mother who was away for the day for the first time since my father and I had moved in with her. It must have been summer because I was alone in the living room next to the stereo and the sun was coming in through our front window. Since there was little opportunity to "relax" in the house( as I was confined to my room when she was home) hearing that song and it's inspiring lyrics at the exact time of my very first moment of true freedom in the house, was something I'll never forget..i remember the warmth of the sun on my face, the way the room seemed so much brighter with no one around..and the swirling of the saxophone at the end of the song...I know seriously cheezy..but it allowed me to use music as a coping mechanism...a way to really escape...

Bob Marley live - totally unlike anything else I had listened to before. I was only twelve but I can still remember being so impressed by him as a performer. He just had an instant something that I hadnt really seen before.
"One good thing about music - when it hits you feel no pain." Still one of the best opening lines to a song and still listen to that track to this day and get transported back to arguing with my parents to allow me to stay up late and watch THE TEST. I always won.

This monkey's gone to heaven.

Dingy indie nightclub, sticky floor, half a cider with a malibu in it (I kid you not,custom made alcopop, thank god I grew up!), this song blew my mind. I'd never heard anything like it. Still love it.I was wearing the jacket my dad got married in at the time. Funny, the things you remember.

Shame I didn't get to see them 'til recently at T in the Park. Biggest disappointment of my life. No energy or spark, felt like they were just doing it for the cash. Awful.