How did you first hear your favorite band/performer and what was your first reaction ?

Seven minutes later I have a new favorite band, piece of music and more, and that's that. I think I didn't try and convert my friends so much as let them know there was something cool out there.

After months of watching me come in and buy JAMC, Velvets and early Sonic Youth records, Dave said "I have something you might be interested in..." and pulls out this amazing looking record, featuring these two beautifully spaced-out looking cats, holding vintage guitars, grooving to this psychedelic swhirly purple background.

From the first time I put it on, and the tremolo/feedback thrash of "Take Me To The Other Side" all the way through to the lullaby drone of "Call The Doctor" it was, as advertised, somewhere in my heart, things would never be the same again.

None of my friends liked it, but what did they know? They were all goths! It wasn't until I went back to NYC, that I ran into a new crowd who said "Oh, you like Spacemen 3? Ah, do you know about this band Loop? Have you heard Telescopes? And we've got this weird record by this weird band with a funny name like "My Bloody Valentine" or something...

Anyway, on the radio, his new find: The Fall, something off Live at the Witch Trials, my guess "No Xmas for John Quays", which JP liked a lot, but it could have been "Rebellious Jukebox", or actuall anything. In the cool but imaginary version of te story, I have to pull off the road, but in truth I'm fairly sure it's ES's car, and she's driving, and doesn't respond the way I do.

Respond to what?: the clammy tinkle of Yvonne Paulette's keyboards (whatever happened to Yvonne Paulette?); and just the general clatter and oddness — and of course MES sneering like a thousand-year-old wiseass child. Peel is wild abt them, so are a coupla NME bods I sub- worship, so I'm ready to listen, but nothing has prepared me for this sense of *being called*, of a sound made just for me.

I maybe say something to ES; she's maybe non-committal, perhaps even even hostile (unlikely: our "relationship" was built on NEVER TELLING THE OTHER ANYTHING). Probably I keep my response to myself. I certainly don't tell any of my nearby male friends: most of them I consider idiots anyway. I know they won't get it: actually I don't want them to get it — to share it would be to devalue it.

I don't think the Fall changed the way I heard music (I find "Fall- type" bands X-tremely boring: but Smith changed the way I saw the world. Or — actually — I think confirmed my then-instinct: that when it was allowed to emerge (as punk maybe allowed it to emerge), True Prole Poetry [with all the obvious grown-up caveats abt such a notion: I was a peculiar, quite sheltered kid then], was stranger, cleverer, more cantankerous, more embattled, more demanding-terrifying- exhilarating than anything I would discover — in any sense, from drugs to movies to Great Canonic blah-blah-blah — at, for example, college (which I had either *just* started, or was just about to start.

His sense of being trapped in a milieu that just didn't get it, and just didn't get HIM — some horrible Prestwich estate choking his gifts and freedoms and insight — and his will to escape through reading and writing and music: hey, this just BLARED out at me. My milieu was "nicer" — Shrewsbury's a pretty town, in its way — and less apparently hopeless: but it was like, *He Knew*

Others sometimes said: What's Smith on about? And OK, some things he's sung have taken me years to come at from the right angle, but (basically) he understood Fright, and how to use it.

"I've had shears, pointed, straight at my chest-ah!"

I haven't, obviously, but the specifics are just the specifics.

Err, yeah, that's psychotic. I'm not crazy or a stalker, I swear. Because my stalking object is dead. But seriously I just thought the Manics sounded great on the radio and since those were the days of my first job, my first crazy disposable income, I was raiding every shop within walking distance, one of which was an indie/import record store.

I first saw the Smiths on Top Of The Pops in the early/mid-80s. I think it was TOTP. I know it was The Smiths. Probably some greater fan than I could tell me what song I saw - I remember it being dirgey and odd and my feeling very, very turned off by it, and wanting some pop to come on instead. I'd have been 11 or so - it just seemed like music for really old people. It aroused no interest at all.

I thought it was the Go-Betweens or something.

(I mean. w/o recourse to "minus infinity and one" etc etc, which would obviously be silly.)

but they didn't become my favorite band -- supplanting sly and the family stone -- until i bought pet sounds upon a number of recommendations. i remembered their hits and they just struck me as innocuous pop and i couldn't imagine how, in the space of one album, they could be considered so revolutionary and as an influence to all of these artists. and after several listens i still couldn't imagine it; but with a number of my favorite artists, persistence paid off and one day it just struck all the right chords, and that's when i began buying all i could get my hands on and downloading smile mp3s, the first mp3s i ever downloaded. all of this continues to present day, having bought that new collection of odds n' sods put out just last week or so.

did i try and convert my friends? ha ha ha ha ha. in mike's case, it worked at least. ;)

Anyway, be nice or I'll write a virus that downloads my mum's Mark Knopfler album (in Mp3 format, naturally) on to your computer and makes it play on CONSTANT FUCKING REPEAT. Then you'll be sorry. ;)

I do have to worry about someone who calls Richey Edwards "sub-Sylvia Plath" and then goes off to cry in his beer at Morrissey, for fuck's sake. *ring ring* Hello, pot? This is the kettle. You are black.

As for this virus, you are talking bollocks now and I think you are a silly, silly man. I shall challenge you to a duel if this keeps up.

Anyway, I have two stories:

Story 1: The year before my oldest brother went off to college he bought this album by a guy who was gaining momentum in the Minneapolis music scene. All I really remember is staring at the record player while the disco/house thump rolled on under some extremely funky guitar and the singer sang in a souldful falsetto about people demonizing him for his race (which even at age 6 I understood) and his sexuality (which went completely over my head). Pretty soon I was terrorizing my mother not only with the lyrics to that song, but also "Sexuality", "Do Me, Baby", and "Annie Christian", a song which remained one of my favorites for years afterwards.

Story 2: I remember being at a friend's party in 9th grade. MTV was on the TV in the living room and a bunch of us were hanging out talking. Suddenly, this video came on that featured five guys in varying degrees of makeup and incredibly frizzed hair standing on top of a cliff. I was transfixed by the opening music, which had some lovely jangly guitar over a driving bass line and some sweeping, majestic synths careening all over the top of it. When the singer yelped, "Showmeshowme/Show me how you do that trick/The one that makes me SCREAM, she said..." I was completely sold. What I wasn't prepared for, however, was the unreasoning worship that I would experience when my best friend got the album for Christmas and played "The Kiss" for me...

"Cats are allowed to roam around freely, killing wildlife, spreading diseases, fouling gardens with their excrement, damaging property and breeding even more of their kind"

Cats are ROCK STARS.

i) i saw the video for sonic youth's "teenage riot" in sixth grade. i thought it was cute and fun and catchy and typical of the other kind of "alternative music," the kind that wasn't made by mopey englishmen with funny hair. then i went back to my aerosmith albums and didn't hear anything more about them for four years or so.

ii) a friend had been plugging joy division throughout my last year of high school. i'd also read a lot of awestruck criticism. i was sort of expecting them to be sort of gritty and folky and velvets-ish. but somehow sort of gothy at the same time. finally i asked my friend to play me some. i was first struck by how stylishly '60s it was, in a weird way. when the bass slid up to that 6th in the opening to "24 hours" and wrenched my innards along i knew i had a new favourite band.

aside from hearing stuff on the radio... and aside from having only 1 favorite band

I heard Jim O'Rourke from a Zero 7 compilation (ghost ship in a storm)

I got a lot of people into MIA. At one bar they played that Paper Planes song every week nonstop for like 4 months because of me.
The song got old.

actually I don't really have any interesting stories I can remember...
I think most of my favorite bands/singers we're discovered via the internet
bumping this thread nonetheless

Early Genesis I first heard after buying Selling England By The Pound. My first reaction was that it wasn't that good. I played it for some guys I was working with in my art class and they didn't like it either (more so than me).

ME: "I think that 'Battle of Epping Forest' is supposed to be the best track on here... I'll skip to this song". (oops)

Four years later I picked it up again. Now it's one of my top 3 albums (I think)

Roxy Music: The Early Years was a random purchase from a cool music shop in Boulder. I rocked that album out with my walkmen the entire time I was in Boulder. Best random purchase ever.

The first time I heard my favorite band, Sonic Youth, was seeing the "100%" video on MTV. I totally hated it and thought they were awful for a year or two after that. Still don't particularly like the song.

(xp Now that I think about it I got Talk Talk greatest hits that day too... another band that I had really never heard much of before.)

MTV's 120 minutes was my intro to much of the stuff I discovered and would call a favorite years later. I used to tape and watch it weekly during the 1988-1989 school year (high school sophomore) and remember seeing for the first time:
Sonic Youth ("Teen Age Riot")
Galaxie 500 ("When Will You Come Home" with the creepy intercut band / animal testing / stag films footage)
The Fall ("Big New Prinz" with the Michael Clark dance stuff)

I was down at KCOU (MU Student radio) and noticed that ONEIDA and BROTHER JT were playing a local show, so I decided to check out the Oneida album in format and play the first song from it ("Whitey Fortress" from Enemy Hogs).
I thought it was pretty damn good, but it didn't blow me away. Then, I heard them doing an on-air interview the day of the show and they were HILARIOUS on the air and name-dropping lots of my all time faves when talking about influences.

And then the show that night completely ripped my head off.
xpost I love watching old videos of 120 Minutes

Distinctly uncool, but true.

Went away to college, had fast internet access for the first time. Researched music on allmusic (the only music website I knew at the time), downloaded the songs with the checkmarks by pretty much every band with good reviews (including bands in genres I didn't like, in the name of being open-minded). On Napster, I think, that's how long ago this was.

Found myself liking, then becoming obsessed with, the songs by a dance music group, which was unsettling since I'd grown up with grunge rock and classic rock, and I thought of myself as so goddamn serious, and dance music was for silly people. It was the beginning of a love affair with dance music in all its forms that has only gotten deeper, more satisfying, and more obsessive over the years.

but which group?

C&C Music Factory

Basement Jaxx

First encountered the band called MX-80 Sound through their entry in the old Rolling Stone blue book, but never read anything substantial about them until Chuck Eddy repped for 'em in an '87 article called "Metal Was Punk Before Punk Was Metal". I considered Xhuxk's opinions to be particularly trustworthy at the time, and when I learned that the band's singer was the witty Rich Stim (a SPIN magazine regular), I knew I'd have to hear the mysterious band someday. It took me two years to find a copy of their debut, $1.00 to rescue it from budget bin oblivion, and 2 1/2 songs to become hooked forever.

The band in question was headlining a show where two of my friends' bands were playing. I hadn't heard of them before. It was a really loud and boomy room, and I didn't have earplugs and my feet hurt, so I left about 2 songs in. It wasn't until several years later when they came up in conversation as something that I would like that I began listening to them.

This dude sent me all the albums:
Forgotten 90's alternative rock masterpieces WANTED

...and this was my reaction:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_WhUgyYfUOj4/SEZHOh01sKI/AAAAAAAAA0c/23huq1DzN4w/s400/Family+016.JPG