I play it all the time and it never lets me down although I didn't think much of it the first time I heard it back when I was a lad in the 80s.

That's a good point, Gatz, though my copy of Rain Dogs (also one of my favouritas) is usually played at Casa Tintoverrano at least once a month. When I was transferring Poco's "Good Feeling To Know" to digital from vinyl, same thing happened (cue, I suspect, cries of Old Hippy from those who've never heard said album).

Having read elswhere on the board of Midlake's forthcoming London date, I popped Trials of Van Occupanther on. Which is possibly my all-time favourite of the moment. And then read Gatz's post..

I don't know why, but somehow my original CD of Rain Dogs went bad a few years ago. It just became all garbled from beginning to end.. I've not had this happen to any other disc and it appeared fine visually. It was most odd.

I shall have a Rain Dogs moment in a while.

My favourite albums, off the top of my head, are Rain Dogs, Exile on Main Street, London Calling and Doolittle.
Of these, only Doolittle captivated me on first listen - I rejected all the others as under-par work from the artists involved(!) But I keep coming back.
After a long hiatus, Rain Dogs really satisfied recently when I listened to it on a long, dark, rainy coach journey.

on musicians or songs that changed your lives I put "All Mod Cons" by The Jam on the Ipod today. Haven't heard it start to finish for ages and yep it's still great. Not a weak link, "Fly" was like finding a forgotten treasure and "Down In A Tube Station" is , well, "Down In A Tube Station".

I listened to it last night : rarely a week goes by without dipping into it, even rarer a month without listening to it all. As I listened to it last night, I was thinking of a Clifford Styll painting that I saw in the Tate Modern on Saturday (1953). Each time I see it, and spend a few minutes studying it, there seems to be something more in it, shimmering like a seascape.

I don't think I actually have a favourite album. I could easily list 10 albums but they wouldn't be ranked and would probably swell to 15 or 20 quite quickly.

i would say King of America. Funny thing is i had eager anticipation for the bonus disc version which is very very good but it is still the album in its original format that I consider to be the definitive version. Indoor Fireworks, Little palaces, Sleep of the just and I'll wear it proudly are perhaps four of the best songs he ever wrote on the same album.

It's true i haven't listened to it for a while , but it is without a doubt my favourite . It's been a constant in my life for nearly 25 years ,it is one of the most beautiful records ever made.
I went to see them play it in it's entirety at the Royal Albert Hall last year where they played a reather underwhelming greatest hits set followed by "Ocean Rain " with an orchestra. The "Ocean Rain " set was fantastic but it seemed to go by in about five minutes ! It's quite a short album anyway but i think because i know it so well , in my head , and i was trying to savour every moment that's why it whizzed past.

On CD at home as anything less just will not do.

I hadn't heard The Wall by Pink Floyd in probably a year. So I put it on and was only slightly disappointed in it.

I can see now that it is a bit fragmented musically as a lot of the songs are not much more than a verse long. So on a song by song basis there might be some mild substance to the idea that there's only four good songs on it. The difference is that if you pay attention to the story then almost everything deserves a place on the album (it could do with losing Vera and Bring The Boys Back Home).

Some of the songs might not stand up on their own two feet, but when supported by the other materiel it really works well. Roger Waters' opened his 2000 In The Flesh tour shows with the song In The Flesh. It really isn't a particularly great track and frankly doesn't cut it as the opening song. Without the 50 minutes of ranting and raving in front of it, and 25 minutes after, it doesn't have much impact. Line it up with the rest of the songs and it's great.

I dismiss anyone who says The Wall should be an EP or a single LP as people who are listening on a song by song basis. It's not an album of individual songs. It's a suit that needs to be heard in one sitting and in the correct order with particular attention paid to the words for it to work. Only a handful of tracks truly work out of context.

So I liked it a lot but I'm willing to concede that maybe I should go looking to pin my "favourite album of all time" medal on another album. Problem is, which? The Downward Spiral? Lateralus? Someone To Drive You Home? Or maybe I should just have a non-ordered top five?

Here's a question for you, which is the most played album (not Best Of) in your collection? And this answer will probably pre-date iTunes so don't bother looking there.

My answer would probably be The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails.* I base that on the fact that it still gets heard a lot and I've had it for a long time.

* A live DVD bootleg of the whole album performed at a recent show can be found at http://thisoneisonus.org/. I've not downloaded it so I have no idea of how good it is.

has been my favourite lp ever since I first heard it a couple of years after it was released. Brilliant songs, brilliant playing, brilliant sequencing of a variety of styles and it just jumps out of the speakers. I probably play it once a month and it's always been absolutley, emphatically, unequivocally, totally brilliant. (And did I mention that it's brilliant?)

by the Manics is the one I go back to more than anything else. It just keeps giving.

An ear bending borderline unlistenable roar on first listen that draws out many subtleties and shades on repeat listening. From the raucous fury of Faster to the more introspective leanings of This Is Yesterday.

It probably took me right up until purchasing the 10th anniversary edition to fully realise what a brilliant innovative musician James Dean Bradfield is. To put together instrumental tracks that complement and add to already existing unique and oblique lyrical themes is astonishing.

With some of my other favourites (The Clash, The Stone Roses, NMTB, Wish You Were Here, Village Green, Bringing It All Back Home, Apple Venus etc) familiarity definitely blunted the intial thrill - I can hear every one of those songs intimately in my head - I don't need to hear them through loudspeakers or earphones. The Holy Bible needs to be heard!

I got caught up in the recent Fabs-mania and shelled out for the mono box. I don't regret it, but I have to admit that I haven't really listened to it much at all. Circumstances mean that the bulk of my music listening is done via the PC at the moment. Some time, I'm sure I'll do something radical and actually play a CD from start to finish, uninterrupted, but for now the upstart Spotify consumes my attention to a frankly worrying extent ;-)

to all the people who've put Rain Dogs as your favourite album:

You are fragments of my schizophrenic psyche, and I claim my prozac.

Seriously, its such a good album. To anyone who still hasn't heard its bedraggled insistence, brimming full of witty pop ditties (of sorts) smeared with the grime of the gloaming, Rain Dogs is an essential purchse.

So thanks, Gatz, for allowing me to bask in the wonder of Rain Dogs once more.

After reading this thread I finally got around to buying Rain Dogs (£4.99 on iTunes).

Thanks guys - it's fabulous, as you said.

Thanks to the Tom Waits slant to this thread I had a look to see if I could grab Rain Dogs from Emusic (I had 40 downloads for Emusic USA that I had to use this afternoon) but found the "One From The Heart" soundtrack instead which I'm listening to now - and it's still magnificent.

Here are a couple of short TV adverts Tom Waits made to promote "Rain Dogs":

Not seen those before.