Where were you when you first heard...?

[Amor de Cosmos]

A favourite or classic song.

Born to Run: UBC bowling alley, played on CFUN. The DJ described it as "Martha and the Vandellas meet Phil Spector." (?) My GF, soon to be wife, looked at thespeaker in the ceiling and dropped her ball, missing on my toe by a gnat's whisker. "Who is THAT!" we said in unison.

Please, Please, Me. Barnwell S.M., Friday lunchtime dance. Babs Wheeler brought in a brand new copy. Generally we pooh-pooh'd British acts, but we'd given Love Me Do a reluctant nod, and Babs had impeccable taste (plus we three boys fancied her like crazy), so she would always get the benefit of the doubt. None of us had heard anything remotely like it before.

[Hot Pepsi]

By coincidence, I have a strange memory associated with “Born to Run.”

For some reason, I think the first time I heard “Born to Run” was on the radio on 96.7 WQWK, while in a car on Bradley Avenue in State College, a residential street a little over
a mile from here.

I don’t remember it, but somehow that song brings to mind an image of that street. It’s somehow buried in my subconscious. If that’s not why I have that association, I don’t know why I do. I knew a few kids who lived on that street, and my scoutmaster lived on it, which is why I may have been there, but it doesn’t have any other significance to me or that song.

I recall “Just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims/ And strap your hands across my engines” and understanding that it was sexual, but feeling naive that I didn’t know exactly what I meant. I’m still not sure. I don’t know what “velvet rims” are. Is that a thing Jersey guys put on their Firebirds in the 70s?

I only remember that it was on that radio station because that was the only place I would have heard it as a kid.

[ursus arctos]

They are now, dunno about the 70s

https://tiresize.com/wheels/Veloche/VELVET-Chrome/

I first heard it in my bedroom, but then my dad worked for his label

[Simon G]

One of my favourite songs is "When the Sun Goes Down" by Arctic Monkeys. I wasn't really aware of them at the time, aside from "Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" which had just been number 1. Then when I was driving to watch Cheltenham play Rushden and Diamonds at Nene Park it came on Radio 1. I was transfixed and had to pull over afterwards to call my then girlfriend to tell her that I'd just heard the new one from Arctic Monkeys and it was awesome.

Maybe not a classic or anything, but that memory has always remained.

[elguapo4]

Two songs come to mind.

I first heard Blue Monday by New Order on the night of my brother's 21st birthday party. After the pub closed , a group of us headed on to the nightclub, where the DJ announced this new song that had just been released that day, I remember everyone going "Wow, that's amazing ". I think I bought it the next day.

The other one was Don't look back in anger by Oasis. Again I remember being in a club, and a friend saying " this is Oasis' new single " when it came on. Again I was blown away, but the main reason I remember it, is that another friend met his wife that night, and I always associate the two.

[Tony C]

Little Feat's 'Rock n' Roll Doctor' - Black Sedan Records on Oxford Road, Machester autumn 1974. This was the record store where the cool kids from the university campus hung out, and I only went under duress from a friend. Didn't like he place that much, never keen on the smell of joss sticks, but that's where I heard this and it all changed. Previously my tastes had been very clearly defined: Stax/Atlantic/Motown soul, Bowie and Led Zeppelin. But this was something else. Rock? Soul? Funk? Blues? Country? All of the above. It was indefinably wonderful. I scratched together every penny I had over the next couple of days, went back to Black Sedan and bought 'Feats Don't Fail Me Now'. Black Sedan deserved my custom. Curiously thinking about Colin Bell earlier. I've seen and liked a lot of footballers in my time but Colin was the one who really matters - the one who made the difference. The one for life. In music it will always be Lowell George. And that moment in Black Sedan mattered.

[Jah Womble]

I first heard Blue Monday by New Order on the night of my brother's 21st birthday party. After the pub closed , a group of us headed on to the nightclub, where the DJ announced this new song that had just been released that day, I remember everyone going "Wow, that's amazing ". I think I bought it the next day.

I first heard Blue Monday via John Peel's programme - after which, he rather denounced it as 'a bit boring'. (Peel was prone to do that with the listeners' darlings during 1983 - I also recall his dismissal of The Cure's Lovecats as 'absolute rubbish' on first hearing, while he didn't rate Siouxsie & The Banshees' take on Dear Prudence much, either.)

Pretty sure Love Will Tear Us Apart was initially heard on ITV's Fun Factory (a sort of knock-off Tiswas for the summer months) in which they also played the promo. (Presenter Billy Boyle described Joy Division as his 'favourite female singer', if memory serves. I imagine he'd have been unaware that Ian C had just died.)

Anyways - more in keeping with the thread, the first time I heard A Day in the Life was during a school English class - our teacher, clearly a fan, deciding that we'd study Beatles lyrics for a couple of weeks or so. A lot of us had never heard the song before and it was probably fair to say that this was the only time I can recall my nightmarishly-rowdy class staying silent for six minutes.

[Mr Delicieux]

Good thread idea, this.

In no particular order;

Will do - TV on the radio (switch remix)
Start the bus, Bristol 2012.
on a date with an assistant film director, we were talking away when this song came on, and I'm ashamed to admit I interrupted her mid-sentence in order to open shazam and find out what that song was. No regrets, a large motivator in her becoming a director was to get back at people who'd doubted her, found it all a bit machiavellian tbh.

Jealous guy - Donnie Hathaway
in work, 2009/10
My colleague had stuck radio 2 on, and pint-sized jazzman Jamie Cullum was talking about the musicians who'd influenced him. I think Jo Whiley was interviewing him, anyway, this song came on, and I was blown away by Hathaway's voice. So much power.

Scheherazade - Rimsky-Korsakov
playing fallout 4, November 2015.
I'd tried to get into classical music, goodness knows I'd tried, yet could never find anything to really grab me, but then I heard this, and everything changed.

[Felicity, I guess so]

God Save the Queen was in an old-fashioned booth in a department store in Roermond, Netherlands. The assistant was bemused that we asked for it and we walked out like we'd had a couple of lines of speed. Amazing.There was a bus across the border every Saturday from our camp in Germany. Later I did more serious record shopping in D?sseldorf but I went back the Saturday after to buy it and bought the Bollocks L.P. in Roermond, too with a bizarre promotional sticker: "Geef voor New Wave" and a drawing of a charity tin.

I know that was when I 1st heard it but it makes me wonder why I hadn't heard it on Peel- he did a weekly highlights show on BFBS maybe the British Forces Broadcasting Service dissuaded him from including it...certainly we got resistance from squaddie youth club DJs if we brought it along to play

[matt j]

Sweet Child of Mine, perhaps obviously, MTV over summer vacation. It couldn't be avoided, and the guitar solo is one that just has lingered forever. Associated to my cousin Kenny and his two kids that my brother I spent a lot of time with that summer. It played on the radio constantly, and it was one all of us recognized and turned up when it came on. Kenny took all of us camping one weekend where he went hang-gliding, so lots of different oddball experiences there. Learned what air 'thermals' were and how to spot them based on what the buzzards were doing. Eternally made paranoid about checking your shoes for scorpions. My brother drove for the first time down the mountain to go retrieve him after a 'flight'. Kenny died of an overdose years later, so this weekend looms large is my memories of him.

Smells Like Teen Spirit playing on MTV Europe during a school trip to The Hague (model UN). Obviously it's been tinted and overlaid by later impressions, but it 'felt' like something just changed overnight. Just not like anything else at the time (it felt), and stuck out like a sore thumb. It was on constant rotation, playing at least every hour or more. Everybody in the hotel room just kind of went silent when it would come on. I don't even remember anybody talking about it, just kind of dumbstruck. I vaguely remember a Vanessa Paradis song being on rotation at the same time, some of us would watch that one without the sound.

Dead Man's Party playing appropriately at a 'food hall' during a Halloween weekend at an amusement park (doing their 'spooky' thing). I couldn't believe I'd never heard it before, and then oddly, it came up almost immediately on some OTF thread. Also remembered for me and the Missus severely underdressing for the night and nearly freezing on the way back to our car as a cold front passed through. Under-rated song.

Killing in the Name (and the rest of the tracks from the first album) schoolmate had the CD early and we all listened to it in a sleeper car on the way to Russia (Model UN again). The whole trip got colored by RATM and one friend who was really into them. (Used to wear a hat with "I <heart> COPS'.) When I got back home after the trip, I tracked it down in the record shop, and the album was already a sleeper hit and on display at the front of the store. (Local shop, I don't think it ever went on sale at the air force base exchange.)

[Giggler]

Over the Hillside by The Blue Nile: the factory floor of my summer job in between the second and third years of university, on the second of five 12-hour night shifts that week.

Mark Radcliffe had left Radio 1 and joined Radio 2. He began his first show in his more sedate settings by saying "If you don't like this, you don't like music" and he followed up by playing this, the first song from Hats.

I was totally enraptured by what I heard that Monday night and vowed that when my work for the week finished on Friday morning, I'd buy the album. As it was, that Friday morning was the worst of my life for many reasons and I got a bus to Bury, had breakfast, and bought the album, with tears in my eyes throughout. I must have looked like the lad in the 'Feel like pure shit just want her back x' meme.

Retrospectively, I had no idea how lucky I was to find the album in Music Zone in Bury, not a chain known for their stock of sensitive music. I played it constantly that summer, even though the picture that the lyrics painted, although beautiful, occasionally didn't seem to make sense ("Eh? Why would you stack magazines and cigarettes in the rain?"). When I went back to university, the events that caused that Friday morning to be so bad kept nagging in my mind and it became the soundtrack to a bleak autumn of doomed relationships and self-destructive behaviour, of sitting on the last train back to Preston with my temple against the cold glass as wind threw rain against the outside of it, feeling down about having done it again.

Despite all this, it remains a favourite album, as do the other three in the band's small but perfectly formed canon. Every time I go to Glasgow, I get the underground round to Hillhead and have a walk up and down Byres Road. In my pocket are the sleeves from all four albums on CD, which I bought from the branch of Fopp there on my first visit to Glasgow, and a Sharpie. Just in the hope that I might see Paul Buchanan in the newsagents, or in the Curler's Rest where I have a single with one ice cube, before getting the train back to the centre. I've not seen him yet.

[Aitch]

Elvis Costello: Local TV news programme in the northwest had a Friday evening music slot introduced by Tony Wilson. Elvis came on one evening and sang Alison so achingly, scathingly beautiful that he shredded the inside of the cathode ray tube. Next day, mum and dad had to fork out for a new set and I had to buy My Aim is True. Unfortunately the recorded version of Alison is a bit saccharine but memories of that scratchy Friday night still turn my stomach.

Kind of Blue: HMV store on London's Oxford Street. It was being played in the shop and I had never heard anything like it. I stood transfixed for so long an assistant came over and asked if I was OK.

[S. aureus]

The first time I heard anything by the Pixies was at the Corn Exchange (April 23, 1989, Googling informs me).

Private Idaho at school when I was 15 as someone had a copy of Party Mix! and a record player.

[Giggler]

Elvis Costello: Local TV news programme in the northwest had a Friday evening music slot introduced by Tony Wilson. Elvis came on one evening and sang Alison so achingly, scathingly beautiful that he shredded the inside of the cathode ray tube. Next day, mum and dad had to fork out for a new set and I had to buy My Aim is True. Unfortunately the recorded version of Alison is a bit saccharine but memories of that scratchy Friday night still turn my stomach.

Kind of Blue: HMV store on London's Oxford Street. It was being played in the shop and I had never heard anything like it. I stood transfixed for so long an assistant came over and asked if I was OK.

That reminds me of my first experience of From Sleep by Max Richter. We'd done Millwall away on the Saturday and stayed in London overnight in a hostel in Kings Cross. We walked to Covent Garden the next morning, hungover to buggery, and this was playing in Fopp. A combination of the hangover and the music almost had me in tears.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

We'd done Millwall away

Oi oi!

[danielmak]

I'll go with 3 different artists.

First, not something I heard but my parents weren't really into music. My mom listened to pop country stuff like Crystal Gayle and my dad was mostly news radio in the car. At home, they had their noses buried in books. At one point I was going through the 10 records they owned and came across Born to Run. I asked my dad about it and he said, "I read about him somewhere and figured I should listen to it." I'm sure the "somewhere" was the week he was on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

Second, I had the first Clash album (bought it when I was 9 or 10) but remember seeing a video for London Calling on a late night video show and was just blown away by that song and the video. Still that song is probably one of my favorites. I was spending the night at a friend's house, we put on the video show, he crashed out, I stayed up and told him he fucked up. Missed brilliance.

Third, I posted this before, but I started with Kiss and Cheap Trick as a really small kid and then discovered punk early on. So, what is now deemed classic rock stuff was never on my radar. I had no clue about big rock bands from the past. A friend gave me a Motown mixtape when we were listening to a lot of mod and second wave ska stuff. His brother made the mix for him. I put the tape in the cassette player in my car and the tape flipped at the end of the first side. The second side was Jimi Hendrix. The first song was "All Along the Watch Tower." Holy shit. I was blown away. I had never heard him and I was 16. Again, it was all "alternative" music for me up to that point. On a sad note, my friend's brother died from COVID last year. F****** pandemic.

I can't say that Hendrix is a regular listen for me now but that experience certainly fits how surprising music can be and how wonderful those surprises are for music fans.

[Sits]

Not really a classic, but I always remember the first time and place I heard In The Night, from the album Actually by pet Shop Boys. It was 1987, and we went straight from a “music centre” to one of those black “mini stack” systems with a CD player. Technics. Neither of us had ever heard a CD, and Actually was one of three CDs we bought on the day, to have something to play on it.

Got it plugged in, put the album on and sat down. It’s a decent bit of production on a good first track, and that combined with an improvement in hardware from the music centre to something more modern combined to make it sound like a seismic change. Still think of that moment when I hear that song.

[Artificial Hipster]

I'll always remember being wowed on first hearing Primal Scream's Loaded on the radio on a weekday morning in the, er, bedroom of the barmaid from the Cemetery Hotel. I'd fancied her for ages and our relationship began during a lock-in the night of Rochdale's FA Cup 4th Round victory over Northampton. She dumped me a few days after our narrow defeat at Selhurst Park in the 5th. I associate the song with her to this day.

[Felicity, I guess so]

I remember 1st hearing Rock Lobster on Juke Box Jury on TV and Geldof gave it 0 and ranted about it being 'just a list of fish! They have another one of just planets!'

That's when I fell in love with the B52s and confirmed that Geldof was a humourless, self-important arsehole

[Jah Womble]

On the same show, Geldof slagged off Patti Boulaye and her latest single, plus its parent movie (The Music Machine) - only for her to emerge stage-left, leaving him ashen-faced. (Or more-so than usual.)