I am not yet 30 so all of my musical epiphanies have necessarilly come in the past three decades - well in fact the last two decades. First witnessing Green Day on MTV in 1994, The Wildhearts at Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1995, Rage Against the Machine at Reading in 1996, Born Slippy in a club in Liverpool that same year, etc. These musical life changers seem to slow down as I get older and I suspect they will soon peter out altogether.

On TOTP in 1989 performing Fools Gold and Hallelujah respectively. I think you'll find a lot of people were affected by that; The Smiths doing This Charming Man on the same programme got a few people hot under the collar.

Additionally, I can remember many of the big players of punk and the new romantic scene talking about Bowie performing Starman on Top Of The Pops being their big moment.

Radiohead at Glastonbury in 1997 and at South Park in 2001
Oasis on Top of the Pops doing Shakermaker in 1994 (with Jamie Bowman in the audience!)
These Animal Men at Exeter Cavern Club
First pill watching the Prodigy and Chemical Brothers in Brixton Academy Christmas 1995

The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash; the first hip-hop/sampling record I'd ever heard - a genuine "What the fuck was THAT?" moment

hearing the red house painters on a 4ad promo cassette in a car on the A3 somewhere between Putney and Kingston.
hearing Westwood play Krs One's My Philosophy on ITV's rarely missed Night Network
Bam Bam's Where's Your Child and Soul II Soul's Back To Life on a proper sound system at a mate's party in Guildford.
Epic45 on headphones on a beach in Portugal last year.
Burial's second album on my iPod on the train every day for a month last year.
Too many others to mention...

It’s an age rather than era thing.

I'm 30, so my first true 'what the f*ck was that!' moment was Nirvana. I would assume it had the same impact on me as punk.

When you're younger the best thing about music is that you don't have the context. Nirvana hit me because so hard because I was unaware of most punk/rock records. Pavement hit me because I was unaware of The Fall*. To my teenage ears britpop felt fresh because I wasn't fully aware of the full lineage which preceded it.

Similarly, although I like The Arctic Monkeys, I’m not blown away by them because I know where they’re coming from. However, if I was 15, they’d be my favourite band ever.

*I only mention Pavement because today's work soundtrack is their collected back catalogue.

The last one was Explosions In The Sky....about 4 years ago...

Hearing First Breath After Coma on a **Cough** Uncut Cd.

It opened up my ears to a whole heap of other stuff.
I'm sure they are more, and more recently, but I can't think of one at the moment...oh yes, Johann Johannsson's Fordlandia two weeks ago...I have reappraised how I feel about modern classical music on the strength iof the opening track to that album..it's led me to Arvo Part, and now I am seeking other stuff.

Hearing Dylan for the first time when I was about 14 and thinking hang on, that's not like T'Pau.

I guess a lot of the musical landscape changing events have been; although I hope not totally, but the youth still get to hear the stuff from the past for the first time, and maybe they interpret it differently...

of life-changing moments. As it should be.

My most memorable involve births, deaths and marriages but as we seem to be talking musical moments here's a few...

Seeing live music at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, often in the company of a large bunch of teenage mates. ELP, Family, Genesis, Floyd, Zep, Yes, etc. I can still see in my mind what the group looked like on stage and whereabouts I sat in the hall. I was on my own when I saw David Bowie in a pre-Ziggy gig which made me always dream of working in a live music setting.

Working on The Anarchy In The UK gig at Leeds Poly. My job as Social Sec was to look after the 4 bands wholed up in one large dressing room. It was the start of many more similar moments and punk was FUN, apart from the gobbing. I still get a thrill seeing live music performed well, especially by unknown bands.

Watching solo artistes on a stage who are so brilliant you imagine they are singing straight at you. Tori Amos and Kate Rusby immediately come to mind but there are many more gifted musicians still doing the rounds.

Latest moment = seeing the first ever gig by The Lancashire Hotpots in St Helens last year and the next memorable moment (I hope) will be getting their new CD Pot Sounds in a couple of weeks. That and seeing Todd Rundgren for the first time live next week.

Onwards and upwards!

I still get excited about certain things that are new to me (and what's familiar too, as it goes, when an old tune suddenly and occasionally hits me again as if anew and fresh - as in 'god that's so good' even though have heard it so many times before)but maybe not with quite the same intensity and impact such things had in my salad days, as it were. But personal feelings aside (if that is possible) I would suspect 'milestones' in pop in general have diminished - that seems inevitable, as only so much can be invented out of what are limited means. But I don't doubt youngsters get the same thrills as I did from what's new to them.

For me seeing film of Neil Young on OGWT playing Hurricane wearing his plaid shirt and leaning into the wind grimacing as if involved in some epic struggle, with his hair blowing around him created a big impression. Another one was Magazine doing 'Shot By Both Sides' on TOTP. Howard Devoto was like some frightening but charismatic alien. That was powerful. Of course these things seem that bit more ordinary, if still great, when seen now.

It's a Sunday night in 1975, I'm 11 years old, in my bedroom taping the new entries off the new top 20 countdown on Radio 2 (as it was then), and hearing Kraftwerk ("Autobahn") for the first time.

I didn't know what a Craft Work could be or what an Autobarn was, but I knew with absolute bloody certainty that I was listening to The Future...

or more to the point, as you get older it gets more rare to be thrilled by music because of the hundreds of albums you've listended to umpteen times by then. However, the flip side means that when something does thrill you at the age of 40 or whatever, it must be bloody good!

Also, there may be a "live music vs recorded music" thing going on here: live events are more likely to provoke genuine "hairs on the back of your neck" experiences, but as we age we are less likely to go out to see live bands (broad generalisation, but probably correct on average).

Case in point: I'm 43, and earlier this month went to see Killing Joke do their "just playing the old stuff" gig. When they started Pssyche it really rather affected me (something in my eye, etc etc) ...

...in a small club in Middlesbrough in 1989.

Suddenly *getting* that "Sweet Thing/Candidate" wasn't just the boring bit between "Diamond Dogs" and "Rebel Rebel", it was, in fact, awesome.

Hearing "Thomas the Rhymer", "King Henry" et al, by Steeleye Span in my mid twenties, and realising that it was one of those songs that my parents used to play when I was about 5.

and I heard "Birdhouse in your Soul" by They Might Be Giants over the radio on the school bus. My life was never the same again.