Simon Le Bon: That's What I Call....

My favourite Stones album. ‘Gimme Shelter’ — what an opener; ‘Midnight Rambler’, which might be the band’s best song ever, and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. But there really isn’t a bum track on it. My first copy was from the secondhand bin at the record shop at the top of Rayner’s Lane. It cost me exactly £1. I took it home, opened the windows, put the record on at full volume, lay on my back in the middle of the front room, and let the neighbours know exactly what I thought.

For me it was the best post-punk/new wave LP. There is a dark, industrial purgatory in the background, mainly created by Bernard Sumner’s innovative use of the synthesiser. Then we get to Ian Curtis, whose voice sounds like Jim Morrison from beyond the grave. It demands your attention and drags you into a sort of joyful, paranoid insecurity. This album is utterly compulsive and entertaining

This album was my entry point into an enduring love affair between me and the music of this musical giant. Softer and more futuristic than The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane is a dreamer, dreaming of how things might be. The introduction of jazz/classical pianist Mike Garson was a stroke of genius on Bowie’s part. This album will always be in the top of my pile.

I started recording a weekly, music-based radio show in 2020 and I soon realised that I wanted to play up-tempo music, the faster, the better. I didn’t discover Bad Nerves’s eponymous debut album until 2021. As soon as I did, it shot to the top of my playlist. This is some of the best 21st-century punk-rock music out there. It’s full of drive, beat, musicality and fresh youthful energy.

This album had such an enormous effect on me. Its dark and unsettling minimalism gets under your skin like nothing else. The synths are massive and sometimes Beth Gibbons’s fragile, wavering, vocal is made so tiny, it seems like it’s coming to you from the end of a very long tunnel. It’s an absolute masterpiece of production on all levels. In ‘Wandering Star’ she sings: “Wandering star, for whom it is reserved, the blackness, the darkness, forever.” Don’t we all feel that way sometimes?