This is from entirely the wrong year, but you catch the drift… Still love that Sheryl Crow album though, defo in my personal top 10.
In retrospect, it seems like a bit of a con, but at the time I thought it was an incredible opportunity to fill out my CD collection with some classic albums for what I think might have been £1 a disc. Maybe even £1.49 for 5. I can’t seem to find any concrete evidence of the deal now…
New subscribers to the Britannia Music Club would receive a welcome gift in the form of 5 CDs at a much reduced price. Then you’d be sent music every month that you either kept and paid for, or sent back for a refund. Needless to say, I could barely organise my own hair, let alone sending back CDs in the mail, so until our membership was cancelled, dear Mater and Pater shelled out over the odds for still unlistened to CDs of various forgotten musical also-rans.
But let me tell you - I feel like the albums I received in that first delivery have shaped my entire life since.
Suggestions for my choices came from a rather odd place in retrospect. Tam, the janitor of my primary school, would be forever suggesting great music we should check out, and this was invariably classics from the 60’s and 70’s. So my first delivery consisted of mostly greatest hits collections from Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Bob Dylan, and The Kinks. I also received Dark Side of the Moon, still Pink Floyd’s finest album to my ears, although I didn’t ‘get it’ til much later in life*
What an education - these are still the stalwarts of my listening habits to this day, and were instrumental in my understanding of what constituted good and bad music. New music would forever be compared to these absolute legends of songwriting and performance.
No wonder songs from these artists have populated my live sets as well. I’ll grant you they are far from obscure artists, but for a young teenager I felt they’d opened me up to a world of genius creativity that still resonates with me many years later.
I’d love to know your formative albums or artists - the music you think shaped you and continues to comfort and keep you enthralled.
Gill
*I still believe that all you need to understand humanity and our place in the Universe is Dark Side of the Moon and a good recording of Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite. And maybe some stimulation of an alternative kind, thought not essential.