What's the first album / single you ever bought - have we had this?

[Jurek]

Well?
Album - Frank Zappa, Apostrophe.
Single  - Ian Dury, What a waste.

[Paul]

Album: Grease.

Single: either something by the Bee Gees (Tragedy?), or Billy Joel’s My Life.

[Basil]

Single:  I bought two on my first purchase.
Elvis. Return to Sender
Cliff Richard.   Bachelor Boy.

Album.  Maybe twelve months  later.   Muddy Waters.  Can't remember the title.  See how I changed in my later teenage years?   

[rafletcher]

Album - Aladdin Sane by David Bowie. I never bought any singles.

[Mr Larrington]

Single: Can't remember
Album: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage (at the same time)

[nicknack]

Single: Apache - Shadows
Album: Wheels of Fire - Cream

[Wobbly John]

Album (the photo doesn't do justice to the coolness of the gloss black on sain black graphics):

I can't remember buying singles, but was brought up on my older sisters' collections of Beatles, Stones, etc, 60's singles & albums. 

[PaulF]

Single was probably Bohmian Rhapsody, album either Relayer by Yes or Tomorrow Belongs to Me by Sensational Alex Harvey Band

[T42]

Flying Dutchman overture/Tannhäuser ditto - Hans Knappertsbusch

It was in mono but so was my record player. I used to shove it under the bed and lie down to listen with the music coming up on either side.

[Cudzoziemiec]

First record I ever bought was Upstairs at Eric's by Yazoo. Can't remember the first single. I still think it had a great cover:


and it was a great album!

[Redlight]

With my own money...

single - I hear you knocking' by Dave Edmunds
album - Sladest by Slade

[Deano]

Single - Rat Rapping by Roland Rat

Can't remember the album.

[hatler]

With my own money : -

Single  Juicy Lucy  Who do you Love
Album  Deep Purple in Rock

[Pingu]

First album:



Can't remember the first single 

[Ian H]

H Minor went to grammar school and was subjected to Classical Music lessons.  Home music was trad jazz and crooners.  Classical Music sounded like Noise.  So H Minor (12) went to a record shop and asked for Beethoven's 5th symphony.  It was Out Of Stock.  So he asked for Beethoven's 6th. 
The Man asked: "Do you really want this?"
H Minor insisted, took the record home and played it.  It sounded like Noise.  He played it many times and eventually it started to sound like music.

I've never ever purchased a single.  My musical tastes have broadened, though not necessarily deepened.

[LEE]

Stratosfear - Tangerine Dream

Somebody to Love - Queen

I've never really stopped listening to Stratosfear over the years.  "Ambient" has made it seem very contemporary.

[ian]

I can't remember the first album – suspect it was Now That's What I Call Music n or somesuch. I was a serial pause-recorder in my youth with a huge collection of C90s.

I do remember the first single though, purchased from Woolies with funds from my hated paper round (the local advertiser, I had to deliver about 10,000 copies via a supermarket trolley every week, took hours and it always rained other than a brief interlude when the dogs would come out to bite me). And because it was and still is awesome.

[Kim]

Album: REM - Automatic For The People

I was late to discover popular music, and didn't actually *buy* anything until after I had a CD drive - my cassette collection was (the occasional present aside) all pirate copies or record-paused from the radio.  I must have bought this a couple of years after its release.

Single: Either Reef - Consideration  or  Placebo - Nancy Boy.

I'm really not sure which, and the release dates are close enough that they aren't any help.  I've only ever bought a handful of singles, and - cuteness of 1997 Brian Molko aside - mostly for the B-sides.

[De Sisti]

'Saturday Night', by EW&F.

[LEE]

Because an album, when you needed to work a paper-round to buy one, was such a significant purchase,  I think it's true to say that nobody will ever listen to popular music that intently (or stare at the packaging quite as as intently) as we did back then.  Teenage friends would congregate in each other's houses, just to have a group listen and group stare.

We listened to albums in the track order as intended by the artist and we listened to them incessantly.  I dare say many of us knew where the record was produced, who produced it, who the engineers were, and so on, because they kindly included such reading material on the album sleeve.  There were precious few distractions back when I bought Stratosfear (Possibly "Some Mother do 'ave 'em" would tear me away).

I now know what a Fender Stratocaster is, but I didn't when I read those words on the back of Stratosfear...it sounded like it could be something from outer space.

We tended to listen to every track, without skipping the "fillers", because it was a PITA to getup and move the stylus.  I do miss that whole immersive, and formative, experience.

[ian]

Ah, the rare Saturday's I escaped my Saturday job at the Coop and got the bus down Nottingham (always down) to spend the entire afternoon flipping through the stock in Selectadisc.

[Kim]

I lived through the demise of track order, and I only slightly miss it.

Record-pausing from the radio aside, albums were generally second-generation copies of whichever friend had bought the original tape/CD/vinyl of that one, on C90 or later MiniDisc.  CD and MD made track-skipping trivial, but unless you were at home with your collection to hand (and listening was as much an on-the-move thing as not), that was generally just a way to run out of music faster, and so used sparingly to avoid bum tracks that hadn't been edited out (generally only when you owned the original and could take your time crafting your own format-shifting copy).

Walkmans were normal and ordinary, and listening was personal by default - social listening was something we grew into as we gained independence and audio equipment with loudspeakers.  CD and later MD were welcome innovations.  Album artwork was certainly a thing, but not a massively important one - perhaps on a level with hidden tracks.  I saw the rise and fall of Napster (though our main mp3 sharing protocol was always NetBEUI) and welcomed the mainstream proliferation of recordable CD.  The soundtrack to my university years was played through WinAmp^[1].  I had become an Old Fart by the time flash memory was cheap enough to store music on, and internet bandwidth so abundant that you could share music at a quality that made buying CDs unnecessary.

These days it's too easy to fiddle.  You're most likely to listen to an album because you've been too distracted to tweak the playlist.  I find there are some albums I listen to as whole albums, but the majority just get borged into an amorphous database of tracks by a given artist.  It very much depends on the album.

But I still buy music on CD, even if I store and play it as FLAC, because I'm a 1990s kind of luddite.  I have an appreciation of vinyl, reel-to-reel tape and even valve amps, but have no nostalgic illusions when it comes to getting the job done, and compact cassette can rot in hell (and take DAT with it).  My main audiophile concerns are whether headphones fit my head and the slowly declining frequency response of my cochleae.

I've been living with a deaf person for so long that music-as-wallpaper now seems as alien as television-as-wallpaper did when I stopped living with my parents.  I don't do radio, or streaming.  But I do appreciate that I can bung a fragment of misremembered lyrics into google and be watching the music video a few seconds later.


_{[1] It really whips the llama's ass.  Even if half the time it was actually XMMS.}

[ian]

After the last house moving lug of the CDs and vinyl, I only buy digital music now (I'm still luddite enough to buy it, rather than stream). Which does make me a bit sad because I genuinely did enjoy the vinyl experience (oh, I know that sounds wrong, but let's leave that aspect in the bedroom/sex dungeon [delete as inappropriate]). As a design nerd, I loved the artwork and typography and there was something just satisfying about putting an LP on the platter, spinning it up and dropping the needle in the grove. Even flipping the record was the intermission of the audio world and you were allowed to have a favourite side. As said, you made a commitment when putting an album on, it was too much palaver to play a single track. I like to think that this aspect reduced the amount of filler on albums, but that might indeed be nostalgia. Compilations, of course, were diligently made on C90 as were copies for the Walkman. Home taping killed music, of course. Completely dead.

That said, I couldn't take my vinyl to university as my parents did have a car, which meant I could take what I could carry on the train, so it was mostly C90 copies and compilations. They saw me through university, and by the time I started my PhD, CDs were the thing, the future thing. You could spread jam on them. I don't know why. Possibly they're marginally more edible than Pop Tarts.

To be honest, they were always a bit crap. The artwork and typography was squirrelled down a size that made it mostly pointless and once you'd got over deck-comes-out-deck-goes-in it wasn't very exciting. Of course, there were more LEDs to make up for it but I generally don't trust things that glow in the dark unless they're analogue. I used to have a top-loading VCR that displayed secret messages quite possibly from the Devil herself. Disquieting when you're trying to watch Cops. CDs were dull and practical like sensible shoes and you knew there was always a clear and present danger of Brothers in Arms. Copies could spontaneously generate in any early-to-mid 90s CD player left unattended. They eventually solved the problem.

Until you get enough of CDs that carting them between houses is an effort and then you find the best place to keep them is the garage because you've turned everything to mp3 and aac anyway. I can't remember the last time I played an actual CD. I still often feel duty bound to listen to the entire album though.

[pumpkin]

Slayed (by Slade) and Who's Next (The Who). the latter being still one my favourite albums and is one of the few where I start at the beginning and let it play all the way through. Sticky Fingers (The Rolling Stones) is another. From the opening of Brown Sugar to the final chords of Moonlight Mile it's just right.

[Cudzoziemiec]

The thing I miss about the great demise of the vinyl LP is the end of sleeve art. They tried to transfer the genre to CDs but the available space just didn't cut it and of course on spotify or whatever today's Shiny Young People use it's just not there at all. But I don't really miss having got rid of my teenage/twenties vinyl and record player cos a) It would have been a complete pain to lug it round when I was living the jet set international high life,* b) While some of it is still worth listening to (probably including Yazoo) and doubtless the odd forgotten gem would turn up, most of it was crap.

*High life being a musical style (or styles) sadly lacking from anything I've ever owned