This Record Changed My Life III

Darren Hayes | Artist
Prince – Purple Rain 

The year was 1984 and the album that changed my life was Purple Rain by Prince and the Revolution. To put things into context, this is the year of FM stereo on the radio and a walkman that plays music in my head like music has never sounded before.

It’s a revolution in so many ways simply because of the portable format. At 12 years of age this is my first personal experience with music; listening to an album completely on my own and in a way that transports me to another place. Harmonies, keyboard lines and drum machines all spread out in my head like a neon universe. I think I learned everything there was to know about record production, reverb and melody during each playback. Each glorious eight minutes and forty-five seconds of Purple Rain left me with the same impulse: turn the cassette over and start again. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…”

Jane Gazzo | Channel [V] Presenter
The Smiths – Strangeways Here We Come 

I knew from the moment I heard Morrissey’s voice that it would change the way I would listen to music forever. I was given Strangeways on an old TDK cassette tape by my very cool friend Scottie. I played that tape to death in my walk- man in absolute awe of Morrissey’s lyrics dripping in prose and poetry and Johnny Marr’s delicate guitar melodies. I even remember the lump in my throat when I first heard the lyrics to Death of a Disco Dancer – it was unlike anything I’d heard in my life. How could someone sing a song so sad but with such conviction and make me feel so many emotions? Admittedly I had come to The Smiths party well after they’d broken up and released this but it had such a profound effect on me as a young teenager in so many ways. It introduced me to their incredible back catalogue which eventually led me to listen to community and independent radio to hear and find out about more music like theirs and eventually led me down a path from which I have never looked back. Well not until I heard the Stone Roses’ debut album a few years later…

Dallas Green | City and Colour
Jeff Buckley – Grace

I would say Jeff Buckley’s Grace because it’s the record that made me want to be a singer. When I first heard him sing Last Goodbye I must have been 14 years old. I had kind of been singing to myself then I guess, here and there, playing guitar and that, but that was the record where I was like, ‘Oh I need to make people feel that way, the way I’m feeling right here that’s what I need to do.’ There’ve been many records that have lead me down paths toward different areas but as far as where I’m at now, that’s the one that I was so completely moved by. People ask me if I’ve ever taken vocal lessons and I just say, ‘No I just listened to Jeff Buckley.’ If you can sing along to that then you’re doing okay.

Fergus Linehan | Vivid Live Festival Director and Head of Music, Sydney Opera House
The Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream

I was a late convert to music. In 1993 I was 22, man- aging a crazy theatre/music club in Dublin called the Tivoli for about 16 hours a day (for £240 a week) and about to have my first kid. My job meant I had to do everything from payroll to pouring drinks, then running up and operating sound and lights with a pretty wired Canadian guy called Brian. We kept sane by going out the back for smokes and listening to music. One night he brought in Siamese Dream by The Smashing Pumpkins. I admired lots of the grunge stuff around but most of it was just too smacked out for me. Siamese Dream seemed to capture the uncertainty and disappointment of the early nineties but there was nothing passive about it – the drum roll at the top of the album still feels like a call to arms. The Pumpkins became the soundtrack/crutch for the rollercoaster ride that was the following few years and plunged me into an ocean of music that I’m still splashing around in.

Ben Marshall | Sydney Opera House
Joy Division- Permanent

When I was young, it felt like records changed my life on monthly basis. Being a teenager in suburban Perth in the early ’90s made the discovery of bands like the Pixies, New Order and Jane’s Addiction thrillingly disorienting experiences. Getting older, the huge emotional impression a record can make remains but I feel as if its potential to change my life diminishes. Joy Division remain my rare example of an act that had a profound effect on my life at much later point andPermanent was the trigger. The essayist Christopher Hitchens spoke of the value in postponing reading Proust until middle age when one had accumulated enough of life’s disappointments, fears and delights to engage with such dense material. I feel similarly about Joy Division – throughout my teens and early twenties I thought Joy Division was an act I should like but I found the oeuvre too intimidating, too bleak and too impenetrable to get my head around.

In my later 20s a friend bought me Permanent best-of and said given my musical tastes I really ought to be giving this a go. I was at mutable point in my life having recently moved cities and radically changed careers. It’s a far braver man than me than will treat Joy Division as any sort of self-help guide (look where it got… well, you know) but looking back it seems no coincidence that I made a conscious decision to systematically tackle the whole of Joy Division’s output at this point, starting with Permanent, and to treat it like active study. It was like stepping into an Arctic submarine – icy blackness, exhilarating, isolating and galvanizing. I have always found that the hardest things in life to master always end up providing the greatest sources of satisfaction and pleasure and music that grows on you is no exception. While other art forms can profoundly affect me, I’ve found that music is the most instantly ‘transportative’ – literature, theatre and art can all be deeply moving but I’ve always found music sends me the furthest the fastest. Like scents and memories, it’s instantaneous and requires no analysis to get there. Unusually for an iconic band (and perhaps three songs aside) I was surprised to find the dense and impenetrable nature of much of Joy Division’s output meant that getting across felt like a personal discovery rather than music osmosed through the surrounding culture – a sensation I vividly remembered as a teenager in suburban Perth.