Current mood:	giddy
Current music:	Perspects - 13 (In Two Parts)

Top Ten Albums That Had An Effect On My Life, or Look At How Indie Jojo Is
I was tagged by suicideally so here goes, in no particular order:

1. The Smiths - Hatful of Hollow (if that counts as an album, I know it's a compilation, shush; if not then I'll have Meat Is Murder instead)
There is simply not a bad song on here. Ranging from the gorgeous spiderweb melancholy of the semiacoustic tracks like Back To The Old House, to the heady film-credits grey-skyed rush of William, It Was Really Nothing, to the booming industro-emotional thunderstorm of How Soon Is Now? and back again. It's just everything pop music should be - exciting, dramatic, reflective, seductive and magical. This got me through pretty much every up and every down of my teenage years, and it still excites and comforts me in equal measure.

2. Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
Yes, I know. It remains one of the most intensely angry and desperate things I've ever heard, and I think parts of it are really quite beautiful in a white-hot fury sort of way. I used to listen to this on the bus to school all the time and then wondered why I was like a ball of self-disgusted nerves all the time. It did help me feel less alone and tragic though.

3. Blur - Parklife
A gloriously kaleidoscopic pop album in the vein of XTC's angrily literate vignettes about England. Blur were my first ever "favourite band" and I spent so long listening to this the notes and words have all kind of been imprinted on my brain. I'm sure this got annoying in its omnipresence when it came out but I was in the States then, you see. Probably part of the reason I was so into it was due to the fact that I came back to the UK after all that British Identity = Cool stuff was over.

4. Siouxsie & the Banshees - Juju
Another wonderfully intense set of songs which fizzes with energy, mysterious glamour and intent. A band at the height of their powers. A true dark jewel of a thing. Are you getting enough clichés here? This got me into female-fronted bands - for some reason I was always highly skeptical of female singers before I heard this and fell in love with it. It also opened my eyes to the more gothward leanings of post-punk, but no "proper goth" stuff I've heard really lives up to it at all.

5. New Order - Power Corruption & Lies
Opens with the breathless teenage cinema of Age Of Consent and stays that good. I love that you can hear the sound of something new and slightly unfinished emerging from something familiar and tinted with gloomy nostalgia. And it has great tunes. Not to mention the most beautiful record sleeve Of All Time. The first record I bought on vinyl and the soundtrack to many a late-night wandering/contemplating/going quietly spare.

6. A Bugged Out Mix by Erol Alkan
The reason I wanted to start DJing.

7. Radiohead - OK Computer
This blew me away completely when I first heard it. I think a good measure of a really extraordinary piece of art is when you may well be able to understand it and find it appealing but you can't for the life of you imagine actually creating it, having the idea for it. This is a concept album which works beautifully and powerfully to describe late twentieth-century postpostpost-industrialisation overwhelm (it's a word now), fear and alienation. I think. I went mental at one of my schools when I was about fourteen and spent about a year writing a big thesis about this compared with Orwell's 1984 up in my room before I was asked to leave the establishment for being too miserable/insane.

8. Brian Eno & David Byrne - My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
The realisation that music need not follow verse-chorus-verse, nor have distinguishable lyrics, and can in fact veer into the realms of - gasp! - ambience without for a second being boring or losing the essential romance of the pop idea. Or something.

9. XTC - Black Sea
I do love my observational clever-clever pop music. XTC have always been one of my favourite bands because they don't labour the point too much, have a sense of absurd humour but aren't "zany", and like, really care about what they write about. And Andy Partridge is one of the most unusual and skilled songwriters I have ever encountered. My dad had lots of XTC records and this was the first album I really got into, which introduced me to the fact that pop music could be about things and have tunes at the same time. Also brilliantly sympathetic to my suburban youth and whatnot.

10. Peaches - The Teaches Of
The album which soundtracked me starting going out to clubs. I think my first club moment, when I remember thinking "this is the best fun in the world", was when I was dancing to Lovertits on my own, off my face on Tesco own brand vodka, in a badly thrown-together outfit in the mirrored basement of Stay Beautiful in 2004. I love how Peaches is never afraid to be scary or ugly in her exploration of sexuality. This is really filthy and danceable, but also refreshingly confrontational and stark in sound. It's kind of like how I wanted Suicide to sound but they never quite consistently lived up to it. Ooh, controversial.

And on that bombshell..

I tag ultraruby, p_dan_tic, moleintheground, charleston, mark13, toptens, angelv, thedavidx, s0b and curiousbadger.

So much I had to leave off this, arg! I was tempted to put the Heart & Soul Joy Division box set in but I thought that might be pushing the idea of "album" a bit far.

Oh and also we got our marks for the unit I handed in recently today and I have got 84% - one point off a First. As it's supposedly an upward direction we are expected to move in before the final assessment, I am very pleased. I am sipping booze, predictably, to celebrate.

Oh and here's my exciting Xtreem 1981 Haircut for those of you who didn't see it/don't have Facebook: