This Record Changed My Life

John Watson, Eleven Music
Bruce Springsteen – Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Growing up in Townsville in the early 1980s wasn’t a lot of fun: no Internet, no cable TV, no FM radio and only two TV channels. It’s a very different place these days but back then it sure wasn’t easy to discover music. However, I read about Bruce Springsteen in the rock mag’s from ‘down south’. Fortunately, I worked in the local second hand record store so when we got an old cassette of Darkness On The Edge Of Town in stock one day I was keen to check it out. All those great songs about feeling trapped and needing to escape struck a profound chord. Songs like Badlands and The Promised Land. Songs about young guys stuck out in the dark but craving some bright lights. Unforgettable songs like Racing In The Street – arguably Bruce’s finest hour. 30 years later this album still inspires me. When the Cold Chisel tour was in Townsville last year I was describing some of this to Jimmy Barnes. He grinned and said “Maybe you should call that albumDarkness On The Edge Of Townsville”. Exactly.

Glenn A Baker, Music Historian
Paul Butterfield Blues Band- Paul Butterfield Blues Band

We are all captives of our adolescence and musically, mine began not so much with the Beatles as with a burst of confrontation, allegory, opaque poetry and stream-of-consciousness that washed away yeah, yeah, yeah and moon-June-spoon. The radio would never sound the same after I’d been exposed to Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone (the Who’s My Generation as well). But it wasn’t by the radio that I was next spun around, in that pivotal year of 1965. It was by an album on Elektra that peaked at just #123 on Billboard and did absolutely nothing in Australia. The self-titled Paul Butterfield Blues Band was an antidote to Herman’s Hermits that one could clutch passionately to one’s breast and repel all disbelievers. This fiery racially-integrated Chicago quintet – Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Elvis Bishop, Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay – turned a whole generation of young lads onto electric blues (though a nod needs also be given to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds). From Born In Chicago through toLook Over Yonder’s Wall, it was a heady brew that took us young innocents into Southside bars and clubs and truly converted us to an eternal sound. It had The Doors’ producer at the helm and growled with such command and confidence that music would never sound the same again. And you know what? Their second album, East West, was just as amazing.

Nicole Hart, Revolutions Per Minute
Nirvana – Nevermind

Nirvana’s Nevermind had a profound effect on me … it was unlike anything else I’d ever heard. I was aware of Mudhoney, Sonic Youth and bands of that ilk, but Nirvana emerged seemingly from nowhere with this album that swept you up in its drama, angst and power, the light and shade – it was so exciting and you could feel that edginess/tortured artist vibe coming from Kurt as he delivered each song. I was at BMG Records in Adelaide at the time and we worked the album, as BMG had the Geffen label at that time; it was an incredible experience watching it grow week on week into this monster success. I remember everything about it just blowing me away – Smells Like Teen Spirit, Come As You Are, In Bloom, Polly – the passion and power of Lithium. The mystery surrounding Kurt Cobain, his songwriting, his relationship with Courtney Love, even the artwork with the baby underwater chasing a note on a fish hook – all served to heighten the experience of Nevermind. Butch Vig’s production is just incredible –more than 20 years on it stands up as strongly as ever.

Rebecca Young, Artist Voice
Yeasayer – All Hour Cymbals

A friend gave me this album a few months after I moved to Sydney from Brisbane. After travelling overseas for a year and then starting university, I had slowly become less interested in actively discovering new music the way I had during high school. I was completely out of touch with current music, and when I started playing All Hour Cymbalsit felt so foreign and new – which I guess was the way I was feeling, having just moved to a new city. It took me a long time to fall in love with the songs, but the track 2080 had me hooked from the beginning. This track made me curious to give the rest of the album a chance, so I had it playing in my car for weeks. I slowly got to know the songs which all seemed so different and unique, incorporating many styles of music. Not long after, they came to Australia and played at Oxford Art Factory, which is still one of the best live shows I have ever seen. There is a lot of music like this around now, but at the time it was so great to hear something unusual and interesting. The album kick started my love for music again and made me curious to start looking for new bands and seeing more live music. This eventually led to my interest in being part of the music industry itself. 

Karen Tinman, Director, Consumer Marketing EMI Music Australia
Died Pretty – Doughboy Hollow

Their fourth album, released in my first year of an Arts degree while I was working part time in a record store, unleashed my passion for Australian alternative music. Sure, I had been a dedicated Aussie music fan for years, but my tastes were more INXS and The Models; I grew up on Countdown and listened to commercial radio. I discovered Died Pretty live – at The Annandale I think – and bought Doughboy Hollow straight away. Obsessed with songs like D.C and Sweetheart, I fell in love with indie pop and started adding The Falling Joys, The Clouds, The Welcome Mat, anything Half A cow released, Underground Lovers, You Am I to my collection. By this point, I was on a mission to forge a career in the music business. Twenty years later,Doughboy Hollow is still one of my favourite albums and one that I credit for evolving my music taste, as well as shaping my future.

Jai Al-Attas,  One Meaning Communicated Differently
Weezer – Blue Album

I actually found this record about a year after it was released. We never had pay television at home so MTV and RED (or whatever it was called back them) weren’t a way for me to discover new “edgy” music. Anyway the way I found this record was through the Buddy Holly video being pre-installed on the Windows 95 CD, we got a computer for Xmas that year which was our first with a CD Rom and were very, very excited. I actually thought that Weezer were from the 1950s because the video is integrated with Happy Days footage; I soon found that they were actually a new band that had just released their first record. I’ll always remember this because it was the first time my love for music and technology came together. Weezer are still one of my favourite bands today.

Todd Wagstaff, Parker & Mr. French
The Triffids – Treeless Plain

Growing up in the suburban sprawl of southwestern Sydney, I would aimlessly draw logos ranging from AC/DC to Spandau Ballet on my pencil case. I wore lemon ‘Tropical’ shorts and a pink ‘Penguin’ t-shirt to my first major concert (INXS doing The Swing at the Hordern). At the time we were young enough that a schoolmate’s father had to chaperon us, and naïve enough not to be overly offended when he asked me if I was “going to a tennis match or a rock concert?” It was around this time I sensed there’s something more to be had from music. I saw my parents crying when my older sister come home with a shaved head; I glimpsed into a world that let music challenge and change. My sister took me to a show with the Tribe, The Triffids and the Eurogliders at the Sydney Cove Tavern. It was in a room full of skinny people with opinions as tight as their jeans and as sharp as their boots. I was enthralled by the people and the music and I backed that up by buying the Triffids debut album.

After a single spin I was in love. I listened to the album endlessly. It was brave and beautiful. My Baby Thinks She’s A Train just made sense to me at the time. The album made me want for something better and smarter from the soundtrack to this kid’s life. Treeless Plainhad me hooked and I followed the bands pursuits in Europe through the pages of my then new bible NME with absolute fascination. The artistry of the album was the perfect foundation to The Triffids brilliant and authentic career. The album and the band were the blueprint I would aspire to in my future professional life. It was a gamechanger for me – I got rid of the pencil case at that point and I grew up much cooler than my sister, but I still see nothing wrong with a man wearing lemon or pink.

Scott Thurling, Founder Popboomerang
The Sugargliders – Ahprahran

It is 1994, I’m in my early 20s and still living in Melbourne’s sleepy “Yarra Valley.” After years on a radio diet of FOX and MMM, RRR is finally discovered! The show is Witch In the Colours, the announcer Jason Reynolds. Over the airwaves comes an evocative, delicate, jangled guitar line and whispered, gentle, intellectual vocals. The barrage of “bogan” rock is silenced forever. The back announcement reveals all. The band is The Sugargliders and the song Ahprahan. Oh no! They have recently broken up! Phew! They have just formed a new band, The Steinbecks. No more hiding in these hills, the city is calling out my name! The search begins and everything starts falling into place (Beat, Inpress, Missing Link, Au Go Go, Gaslight, The Punters Club, The Evelyn, Sarah Records, Summershine Records and so much more). Wow, Jason Reynolds runs Summershine! Maybe I should start a label also…

Scot Crawford, GM, Shock
Kiss – Hotter Than Hell

They were the band that as a kid really drove through to me that mindset of ‘stand up for what you believe in’. As cheesy as that sounds, this album always takes me back to that time and in some ways gave me a place to hide, a space in my mind so to speak. Also the power of Ace Frehley’s solo on Got to Choose, for me, totally sums up the power of music saying what words often can’t. This album was very much the soundtrack of my youth.

Dan Zilber, FBi Music Director
Noise Addict – Meet The Real You

Sydney’s lo-fi indie-punk-pop band Noise Addict and their 1996 album Meet The Real You was a hugely important album for me as a moody teenager. The earliest incarnation of Ben Lee’s music, it showed me that my favourite acts could come from Australia, have imperfect vocals, loose playing and (to this day) some of my favourite lyrics put down on tape. It was one of the albums that made me dedicate my career to music and is the first time I remember wanting (needing?) to expose other people to music I loved. I still put this one on to feel like a kid again, when anyone reminds me that I’m not.

Claire Collins, Bossy Music
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

You know that line in Almost Famous where Penny Lane says ‘they don’t know what it’s like to love music so much that it hurts’? That sums up my feelings towards Wilco’s now-classic 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I first heard it during my final year at university and I have vivid memories of listening to it obsessively on my Discman while stressing over what I was going to do with my life. My fascination with the now-infamous saga behind the release of the record piqued my interest in a career in the music business but it was Tweedy & Co’s peerless sunset performance of the album at the 2004 Big Day Out that set me on my path. The intersection of the personal and the political in the Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics and the almost heartbreaking beauty of the music on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot really resonated with me at that pivotal point in my life.