My first band was...
ABBA. No more, no less. I might have dabbled in a little Hilary Duff, tuned in to a song or two of Kelly Clarkson and perhaps toed the line of the teen-angst queen that was Avril Lavigne, but the band who first convinced me of their supreme musical genius was the two Swedish couples who performed those sophisticated and oh-so-catchy pop arrangements of Benny and Bjorn. I recall "SOS" being quite a favourite, but it was really always "I Do I Do I Do" - that key change got me every time.
I think the phase lasted about a year. It was the dawning of the age of the iPod, only we hadn't quite got there yet. My first MP3 player held a whopping 128...megabytes: perfect for the 20 or so songs that make up the ABBA GOLD collection. Nevertheless, those 20 songs kept me grooving for the entire year and I can honestly say I did not get tired of them. They just got replaced eventually...
Because along came...
U2. I know there are a lot of 'real' rock-lovers who unceremoniously dish the crap on Bono and his fellow Dublin rockers. And yes, I can understand how Bono can be annoying, and perhaps the band's musical finesse doesn't measure up to others...BUT. I love them to pieces. My first encounter with U2 was a compilation of their 80s hits, more specifically, track 1: "Pride". As soon as that riff took hold, mind = blown. Pop music seemed wimpy by comparison and from then on ages 13 to 14 were consumed by ranty Irish political anthems. Over the next three years I slowly worked my way through every U2 album I could lay my hands on and my first pay packet, earned playing background music for a function, payed for a copy of the band's book, U2 By U2, which I similarly devoured with the enthusiasm of a loyal fan. To this day their 80s albums are among my favourites in my music collection, but I also fell in love with more recent additions All That You Can't Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (the latter remaining my very favourite rock album to this day). When I was lucky enough to see them live, I fairly burst with excitement to see my childhood idols in the flesh and they remain the band with whom I am most sentimentally attached. So don't. breathe. an. insult.
But these don't quite compare to my love of...
The Beatles. Anyone who knows me even slightly realises pretty early on that I am a Beatles fan in the most enthusiastic and devoted sense of the word. I won't go so far as to say fanatical, or worshipping, because I find that kind of fandom disturbing to say the least, but my love for the Lennon-McCartney songwriting machine, George Harrison's guitar genius and Ringo's charisma and drumming skills knows only fairly lenient bounds. When I was younger, I was familiar with the catch-call "YEAH YEAH YEAH!" and upon stumbling across occasional pictures of the Fab Four in magazines and such, found it rather amusing that I couldn't tell them apart (rather unthinkable now...). But it wasn't until the age of 15 that I decided I should listen to some of their iconic tunes and realised the magnitude of their impact on music. If U2 had inspired me, The Beatles sealed the deal: I decided then and there that I HAD to be a musician.
Predictably, I fell for "She Loves You" first, closely followed by "Hey Jude", "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "I Feel Fine"...quite subconsciously I explored their music in a largely chronological order and by the time I reached Sgt. Pepper my mind had been blown many times over. Their music is inexhaustibly amazing, ridiculously varied and always sophisticated, clever and beautiful - love, love, love.
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