• 09 Nov, 2025 *

One Sunday evening, hl asked some music fans whether they feel the need to collect certain records:

[…] for those who consider themselves to have a music ‘collection’, is it purely things that you like or do you include albums that you think are essential in some way, even if it’s not really your preference?

If you do, what are your top ten ‘essential’ albums?

hl tagged me into the conversation, and I replied:

100% just things that I like. There are very very popular artists, even in genres I like, which do nothing for me. I don’t enjoy them, so I don’t worry about them.

My ‘essential’ albums would almost certainly be the things that have had the biggest influence on me. Not necessarily the best or my favourite.

The logic here is that calling something essential means it gives definition. The Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards are an attempt to define the very best of cinema; Rough Trade has an ‘Essentials’ category which is a generic list of slightly left-of-centre massive sellers. Both will miss crucial examples - where’s ‘Jurassic Park’ or Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’? - because that sorting and sifting is subjective. They are not lists of most influential nor best selling, merely ‘important’.

hl asked what my top ten essential albums are. Not my favourite, not the best, the essential, the important, the formative.

After some reflection, here is that list.

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Dad’s influence

Various Artists - ‘The Best Rock Album In The World… Ever!’

My dad grew up in the late seventies. He has a box of seven-inch records full of The Sweet and Toyah Wilcox and other hits of that era. By the mid-nineties he’d not spun those singles very much, but the advent of those 1p album clubs - and this album in particular - meant all those rock hits were always playing when I was at a very formative age.

This long forgotten compilation is dad rock hit after hit - Queen, Kiss, Thin Lizzy, Alice Cooper, Dire Straits, Meat Loaf, etc. Three minute stomps, clear vocals, lyrics that tell a story, guitar solos. I don’t consider myself a fan of that genre, but those characteristics are the very definition of what I consider essential in good music.

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The Britpop Years

Supergrass - ‘I Should Coco’ Pulp - ‘Different Class’ Blur - ‘The Great Escape’

I was eleven when Different Class was released. I was in the second month of my first year of secondary school. I wasn’t sure how I fit in, feeling cleverer than many of those around me but somehow less, not as social. I was awkward and alienated and a little threatened.

And then on track one, Jarvis tells me it’s ok. I’m like him. ”The future’s owned by you and me”, and ”We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of, and that’s our minds’”

What an insufferable child I was.

But the joy in that album! The sense of being seen, of being reassured that there were grown-ups like me! That they’ll go out, and succeed, and have girlfriends!

And then I found The Great Escape and Damon Albarn told me that everyone was a little sad and a little uncertain and a little weird, and that it’s ok. And then I Should Coco said it’s ok to have fun and be silly and just enjoy music without being po-faced.

These three albums touched my soul, maybe even defined some core part of me. If I hadn’t found them just as I was becoming a teenager I doubt I’d have the same passion for music I do today.

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The importance of compilations

Various Artists - ‘21st Century Rock’ Various Artists - ‘Into The Blue’ Various Artists - ‘The Chillout Album’

Those Britpop songs told me it’s ok to be the other, to not worry about being popular or follow the crowd.

(Which is probably why Britpop died as quickly as it came.)

I listened to the radio and enjoyed what I heard, but I wanted to get the best bang for my buck. If I heard a fun song, maybe I could get the single but rarely if ever the album. The best approach was to get a compilation including that song - £12.99 or so for that track AND a whole load of other stuff.

It ended up being the ‘other stuff’ which really caught my attention. 21st Century Rock was my introduction to The Divine Comedy, my life-long favourite band after that point. Into The Blue was very light and ethereal and included Bernard Butler’s ’Stay’, something I considered my favourite song for years afterwards. The Chillout Album is full of trippy electropop like Moloko, Sneaker Pimps, Saint Etienne, and LTJ Bukem, a whole genre that I didn’t know existed and was amazed by.

This was what I wanted. The obscure, the fun, the unusual, the things that made me run across to my stereo and hit the repeat button. Discovery! Revelation!

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Post-millenial malaise

The Strokes - ‘Is This It’ Clem Snide - ‘Your Favorite Music’

I turned sixteen as we ticked over from 1999 into 2000. It felt weird: I was becoming an adult post-Britpop, post-millennium-bug, at the dawn of the internet, at the dawn of text messaging. We were increasingly connected to each other, but we were increasingly apathetic. The world hadn’t ended in 99 to 00 armageddon and culturally… everything went bland for a moment.

This was the era of David Grey, Coldplay, Travis. Sensible boys with guitars.

It was also the moment when The Strokes were meant to save us all because they were sensible American boys with guitars.

I had Is This It expecting the same sort of fun as lead single Last Nite. I got eleven tracks which sounded paper thin performed by people who sounded bored.

It was precisely what I didn’t want.

The Strokes were pushed at me by the radio, by the music press, by the same machine that had pushed Pulp and Blur and Supergrass my way, and I felt betrayed by them. I increasingly hunted online for music; Napster sort of worked with my limited access, so I just had to rely on people hearing things, making recommendations, and suggesting them to me to buy.

Someone did just that with Clem Snide. I went to the record shop and bought Your Favorite Music without hearing a note. This maudlin, country-ish, sardonic sound with these twisty little samples of children playing and laughing over the top struck the core of me. I struggled to decipher Eef Barzelay’s lyrics but there was a story there if you put the effort in.

Your Favorite Music continues to be a favourite. I can’t remember the last time I listened to anything by The Strokes. Definitely for the best.

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Settling down

Real Estate - ‘Days’

During university and beyond I kept looking for the weird, the fun, the music which touched something beyond the superficial. I amassed a proper collection and found all sorts of artists that I love with all my heart - The Divine Comedy, Stevie Wonder, The Go! Team, Clem Snide, Belle & Sebastian, Prince, Scott Walker, Field Music, The Magnetic Fields, and so on.

And I often find myself feeling nostalgic.

Someone in a record shop recommended Days to me shortly after its release. The band had the annoying 2011-era trope of having a stupid name and the artwork looked non-commital and disaffected and I wasn’t sure at all, but that record shop was excellent at pushing good things my way.

Jangly guitars! Three minute pop! Songs about growing up - first love and driving aimlessly and everything being “so easy”! Those Thin Lizzy rhyming guitar lines! It hit me straight away, and as I’ve replayed it pretty much every month ever since that initial listen it’s message has been reassuring.

We were all young and confused and maybe a little melancholy, and looking back on that time is a fine occupation.

I battle nowadays not to just listen to my old favourites. Days is a contradiction - an album of nostalgia, now an old album, but an album that still feels modern, still feels new, still encourages me to keep looking.

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