Here's a ramble about what I consider to be the most important albums in my collection, for me personally. This doesn't mean favourites; some might be, sure, but what it really means is the albums that shaped me and my own musical journey. I'm going right back to when I was a kid, before I really started to buy music, and I'm gonna do my best to try and get this list correct chronologically.
So the first album/band I really remember enjoying a lot was Blur with their 1994 Parklife album. I liked this album from a really young age - I'm talkin' my first couple of years of primary school in the '90s when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. Of course, it was my mum's CD, and she likes a vast array of rock music, from Springsteen and The Jam to Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers. Anyhow, Parklife is a Britpop classic. I think I liked the occasional comedic touches, like Phil Daniels' narration on the title track. But I also liked the mix of music throughout, from the punky 'Bank Holiday', the new-wave ish feels of 'Girls & Boys' and the weird psychedelic vibes of 'Far Out'. Of course, this record doesn't really sound much like any of my favourite bands as I got older, but it's still a rock album at heart, and the first significant steppingstone for my musical journey.
The next album I remember listening to repeatedly has to be Queen's Greatest Hits. I went on a long 6-week holiday with the car and caravan around Europe in 2000 (if not 2000, then 01), and we had a Walkman with us. One of the cassettes was in fact, Queen's Greatest Hits, and I remember listening to it over and over again throughout the times we were in the car. To be honest, most of Queen's singles are perfect for any kid trying to get into the world of rock n' roll. The band absolutely nailed pop rock singles throughout their career; Freddie had such charisma and an incredible voice, you can sing along to any of their tracks and Brian May's guitar solos were always crafted so well. I still love Queen to this day, but I've gotta admit I tend to lean more towards the early, harder rocking albums. I guess I'm kinda burned out on a lot of their big hits, and as I got older I realised the genius of albums such as the debut, Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack etc., but there's no denying the importance of Queen for me and my musical obsession.
In the early noughties, my older brother was into the nu metal scene that was oh-so popular at the time. I've gotta admit, as a metalhead, nu metal is not up there as one of my favourite subgenres, but I've still gotta give it the credit it's due. And while bands such as Static X, Coal Chamber and Disturbed aren't my thing at all, there's still some albums here and there that I like, even today. Some my brother had, like System of a Down's Toxicity, Korn's Issues, Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and Slipknot's Iowa - and I enjoyed all of these as a kid back in the day. I think it was the riffs and the fact I'd never actually heard anything as heavy at the time that really stood out for me. It was different, and rebellious. I remember my brother also had all the Rage Against the Machine albums, the 2002 self-titled Nirvana compilation as well as Sum 41's All Killer, No Filler - so I guess there was something about guitar, riff-based music that really hit the nail on the head for me.
This next paragraph is a bit of a cheat, but the Tony Hawk games made an impact on both me and my brothers' musical tastes. We both played those games a lot back in the day (especially my brother), and the soundtracks to those early games were bloody brilliant. Best of any video game series if you ask me (Grand Theft Auto comes a close second). Those first 4 or 5 games had songs from some bands that are a staple of my musical taste, even today - AC/DC, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Suicidal Tendencies, S.O.D., Entombed etc., and also plenty of other bands I dig a lot, such as Fu Manchu, Bad Religion, Clutch, Queens of the Stone Age... the list goes on. I don't consider myself to be a hip-hop fan, but there's still some older stuff I like, and there was a lot of great rap in the Tony Hawk games. Interestingly, hip-hop would eventually become my brothers' genre of choice, whereas I leaned more towards the rock side of these soundtracks. The biggest factor to come out of this section however, is the fact Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 had AC/DC's 'T.N.T.' on it...
Because I liked 'T.N.T.' so much - the dirty riffage, the "OI!" chants, Bon Scott's bad boy vocals, I had to get whichever album that song was from. It was of course, taken from the 1976 international release of AC/DC's High Voltage - or if you're Australian, the 1975 album T.N.T.. I got High Voltage as a Christmas present in 2003 and never looked back. The music may not have been as heavy as a lot of what my brother was listening to, but it sure as hell was rawer and full of attitude, but tracks like 'Can I Sit Next to You Girl' and 'It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)' were also fun as hell, and catchy. I'd never heard anything quite as sleazy as 'The Jack' and 'Little Lover' either. Yep, this was it for me - I may have liked other bands at the time, but AC/DC were the first band I truly fell in love with.
The next pick is another AC/DC record, and that's because 1980's Back in Black was the first album I actually bought with my own pocket money. So I picked it up a few weeks or so after getting High Voltage, and I knew I had to go with BiB due to it's popularity and the fact it had songs such as the title track, 'Hells Bells', 'Shoot to Thrill' and 'You Shook Me All Night Long'. Yeah, it had Brian Johnson on it and not Bon Scott, but both were brilliant in their own way. And Back in Black is a perfectly-produced, masterful rock n' roll record in every sense of the word. I listened to it about a billion times in 2004. Weirdly, I don't remember picking up many more albums in 2004. It was 2005 when I really started to buy music regularly.
The 3-CD Headbanger's Bible 2005 rock compilation from Warner Music is, for me, more significant than you'd think. I wrote an article about this thing last year, analysing it in detail. There's about a billion artists on this compilation that I'm a fan of now, but the one's that really stood out for me at the time were Rainbow, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Van Halen and Thin Lizzy. I'd buy albums from most of these bands within a year or less.
The first band I properly checked out after buying that compilation was Van Halen. I just read my review of The Best of Both Worlds compilation again and I stated "I remember my mum buying it for me as a birthday gift in '05 when I was thirteen years old and my music collection probably only consisted of AC/DC's High Voltage and Back in Black, Led Zeppelin IV, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast and Deep Purple's In Rock.". Now that I think hard about it, there's some mistakes here. I did indeed own all those records around 2005/early 2006, but aside from AC/DC, I actually think I owned this 2-disc Van Halen compilation before any of those other CDs. Also, even though my mum did buy this record for me, I don't think it was a birthday present. I think I spotted it when food shopping in Tesco or something, and she kindly bought it for me then. Anyhow, I was blown away by Eddie Van Halen's playing on songs such as 'Eruption', 'Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love' and 'Panama' etc., and even though I leaned more towards the David Lee Roth era overall, I've always had a soft spot for the Sammy Hagar material, even at such a young age. I'll admit that looking back on this compilation today, there's a lot of holes to pick. Too much Hagar, not enough Roth - but the music is still classic stuff regardless. Needless to say I remember picking up albums such as the self-titled debut and 1984 not long after playing Best of Both Worlds to death.
Next up was a seriously big deal for me - Black Sabbath with Paranoid. I absolutely adored this record and played it soo much as a teenager that it's no longer a go-to Sabbath record for me as an adult. The title track is the obvious hit that everyone knows, but it was 'War Pigs', 'Iron Man' and 'Electric Funeral' that were some of the coolest tracks I'd ever heard in my life. Tony Iommi's riffs were so heavy, yet so catchy and memorable all the same - they just screamed 'doom'!! Strangely enough, as an adult, my favourite song here is probably the trippy and mellow 'Planet Caravan'. Aside from the instrumental 'Rat Salad', it was probably my least favourite track back in the day. Like I said, I'm a little tired of Paranoid now I'm in my '30s (aside from 'Planet Caravan' and possibly 'Hand of Doom'), but the influence it's had on my life is astronomical. I bought the debut and Master of Reality not long after, the latter being one of top albums of all time, to this day.
My next pick is an album I sorta, kinda stole off my brother! It's Metallica's Ride the Lightning. Along with all the nu metal he was into, he also liked Metallica at the time, but I didn't hear them until after I'd gotten heavily into Sabbath. I decided I wanted more classic metal, and this outstanding slab of '80s American metal scratched the itch for me. The songs were so big, so heavy, and so thrashy too. From the blistering 'Fight Fire With Fire', the hauntingly heavy 'For Whom the Bell Tolls', the monstrous 'Creeping Death' and the majestic 'Call of Ktulu', every song here clicked with me. I even loved the much-overlooked 'Escape'. Again, I got kinda burned out on Ride the Lightning as the years went by due to playing it far too often, but I went through many years of not listening to it - and after re-reviewing the album back in 2022, I can honestly say it's still as good as it ever was.
I can't leave Deep Purple In Rock off this list. Deep Purple would eventually go on to become my favourite band of all time (sitting just ahead of Sabbath and Priest) and In Rock was the first Purple record I purchased. I was familiar with songs like 'Smoke On the Water', 'Black Night' and 'Highway Star', but there wasn't a single track from In Rock I'd heard prior to purchase. Needless to say, I was blown away by the high octane 'Speed King' and the crazy musicianship of songs like 'Bloodsucker' and 'Flight of the Rat'. Blackmore and Lord's guitar/organ virtuosity was (and still is) everything I needed, while Gillan's banshee vocals on the utterly masterful 'Child in Time' still give me goosebumps to this day. Not necessarily the most important record in my development as a music fan, but probably my favourite on this list.
Led Zeppelin IV, I think, is the next chronological choice. I remember getting this album on my 14th birthday - again, it was my mum's recommendation as she had some Zeppelin on vinyl back in the day. I remember playing 'Black Dog' over and over before actually obtaining the album (thanks a lot LimeWire, anyone else remember it?) and thinking it had some of the coolest guitar playing in history. Anyhow, Led Zep IV is one of rock's all-time greats. Some will argue III is better, others Houses of the Holy or Physical Graffiti - but IV was my gateway to Zeppelin, and with 'Stairway to Heaven', 'Rock and Roll', 'When the Levee Breaks' and the aforementioned 'Black Dog', who can blame me for falling into a Page/Plant/Jones/Bonham addiction rather quickly?! Even the mysterious album artwork had me hooked from the get-go.
I have to give some credit to Def Leppard as well. Even though 1987's Hysteria is not necessarily my favourite Lep album these days, it was the first one I ever heard and I used to listen to the cheesy anthem 'Pour Some Sugar On Me' on repeat back in those days! Hysteria is an incredibly slick and poppy hard rock record; the hooks are to die for and the album spawned 7 hit singles!! I'll admit that the band's discography post-Hysteria is patchy for my tastes - there's plenty of instances where they were too poppy for their own good, but the first 4 albums are absolute classics, and this was the one that I ended up with first.
Iron Maiden's 1982 breakthrough, The Number of the Beast, deserves to be on this list too I think. So here it is. It's not my favourite Maiden album, and I'm sure even at the time it was quickly surpassed by Piece of Mind for me, but I still love the title track, 'Children of the Damned', 'The Prisoner' and the underrated speedy opener 'Invaders'. I'll be honest and admit that if I never heard 'Run to the Hills' or 'Hallowed Be Thy Name' ever again, I probably wouldn't be all that bothered since they're still played to death to this day, but the fact is Number of the Beast was still one of the first heavy metal albums I ever bought, and it's impact on me and my musical obsession is in there mentally. The album cover and imagery, Bruce Dickinson's vocals, the riffs and solos... like Sabbath and Metallica, Maiden encouraged me to go out and buy a whole lot more metal...
Speaking of metal, I basically worshiped Dave Mustaine in my later-school years. The first Megadeth release I picked up was the Greatest Hits: Back to the Start compilation from 2005. It's missing loads of classics and in all honesty isn't actually that good at summarising Megadeth's career up until it's release, but I remember I had the first 5 Megadeth records in my collection not long after owning this greatest hits package. Like I said, it's definitely missing a lot of tracks, but either way I loved and each and every one of the songs that are featured here (aside from 'Prince of Darkness' from Risk of course!). It's bands like Megadeth that got me heavily into thrash - the first form of extreme metal I was heavily into.
So, thrash metal. Annihilator's 1989 debut, Alice in Hell, was an important record for me. I remember reading a heavy metal special issue of Classic Rock magazine around the time I was 14. It broke down each of the main subgenres, with a few examples of bands and a summary for each one. Annihilator was one of those bands, and I remember downloading the song 'Alison Hell' (again, cheers LimeWire) and immediately replaying it over and over again. I loved the super-tight precision of the riffs, the short and sweet classical guitar passages, the cheesy lyrics and the almost B-movie horror-like atmosphere. Needless to say, I knew I had to have the actual album Alice in Hell. I didn't have my own debit card and wasn't buying stuff online yet as a school kid, so me and my friend ordered 2 copies for ourselves, and just like the song 'Alison Hell', the rest of the tracks on the album blew me away and I played it continuously for months on end. It's one of those albums that dragged me further down the road of heavy metal. I'm very proud of my Annihilator collection that I've obtained over the years. So many cool albums and releases throughout the years, some kind of obscure, others not so much. But great, underrated discography regardless. Thanks Jeff Waters.
It was around this time I also really got into Faith No More. I had a compilation (The Platinum Collection), and although I enjoyed a lot of the tracks on it, not all them really clicked with me, so I ended up purchasing Angel Dust not long after. I guess I was still trying to 'figure them out'. Well, I figured Angel Dust out alright. I'll admit that it took me until my mid '20s to really appreciate each and every FNM record (although I'm still not completely won over by Sol Invictus, the 2015 comeback), but this and shortly afterwards, The Real Thing, really won me over. The songs are so diverse, ranging from funk-driven metal pieces ('Land of Sunshine'), catchy alternative rockers ('Midlife Crisis', 'A Small Victory'), oddly pretty instrumentals ('Midnight Cowboy'), all the way up to bizarrely brutal compositions ('Jizzlobber'). Every song is a classic, and the album opened me up to more experimentation within heavy music.
Considering Judas Priest are in my top 3 favourite bands ever, it's odd that I didn't truly appreciate them until my last year of school (year 11). I already had British Steel - I picked that record up around the same time I was buying Sabbath, Maiden, Saxon and Motorhead records. As much as I liked British Steel, it wasn't an album that made me want to buy more Priest albums. There wasn't really anything on it that blew me out of the water, and I assumed all Priest albums sounded this way. How wrong I was. I ended up getting 1990's Painkiller a couple of years later, and this was the album that made me a Judas Priest fan. I already had albums from Anthrax, Slayer, Venom, Testament etc. at this point, so it wasn't necessarily one of the heaviest albums I'd ever heard. No, what it was, was the most metal album I'd ever heard! I heard Painkiller and automatically Priest were the kings of pure, unadulterated heavy metal for me. This is the album that I think of when the words 'heavy' and 'metal' are put together. Not only are the songs amazing, full of some of Halford's greatest vocal performances of all time, blazing Tipton and Downing guitars as well some of the hardest drums from Scott Travis you'll ever hear, but it's also one of the best sounding metal albums of all time. The production is just perfect. So yeah, Painkiller is fully deserving of it's place on this list.
At one point I was really into death metal, especially during my college years going into my early '20s. Like most metalheads in their early stages however, I took issue with growling vocals. I liked thrash metal, sure, but I couldn't get on with death or black metal and the like due to those extreme vocals. I remember downloading Cannibal Corpse 'Hammer Smashed Face' some time in either year 10 or 11 at school, and not diggin' it at first, but eventually beginning to enjoy it with more listens. HMV (or was it Zavvi?) had a ton of CC albums in stock one time and I bought what was at the time their newest release, Kill, in my last year of school, probably because it's one of the only records in their discography to not feature gory artwork. Not that the artwork didn't intrigue me, I guess I almost felt embarrassed to buy something like Butchered at Birth at the time! Anyhow, Kill was a bit of a shock to the senses; I still consider it to be one of CC's heaviest albums, and maybe it's just my personal attachment to it, but I think it's also their best. The production is amazing, and it was the heaviest, most brutal thing I'd ever heard as a 15 year old. But the music was also so technical and precise that I couldn't not love it. Cannibal Corpse are like the AC/DC of death metal - not necessarily the best band in their genre, but you know what you're getting and they're always great both in the studio and on stage.
At first, I wasn't going to include this next pick. But the more I think about, the more I think it really did make an impact. It's Meshuggah and their 2008 obZen album. I bought this when it was first released, not knowing anything about Meshuggah other than the fact this new record was getting rave reviews in the magazines I was reading at the time. It was a little jarring on first listen; the time signatures were all over the place and the riffs like nothing I'd ever heard, but some of these songs are still incredible to this day ('Bleed' anyone?). And I really do think this is one of those records that opened me up to yet more forms of songwriting within heavy music and had a real lasting effect on me personally.
My last choice is the 1992 album Urban Discipline by Biohazard. I bought this album when I'd just left college aged 18 and began to work a full-time job. I'd always somewhat liked punk and hardcore music, but never really started buying albums in those genres until I picked up Urban Discipline. I almost picked Suicidal Tendencies' self-titled debut, but I think I had UD first! Biohazard perfectly bridged metal and hardcore punk with their fast, hard-hitting riffs and street-smart vocals and lyrics. Throughout my late teens and '20s I bought many hardcore albums from bands such as Bad Brains, Sick of it All, Cro-Mags etc., but this was the album that was my introduction to the scene. And what a classic it is.
If you couldn't be arsed to read all of that... here's a quick list of my picks:
