Martin Carr

"I remember this from the time, but also my son, Sonny, who's five, is obsessed with this record. I first played it to him when he was three and he'd get his little guitar off the shelf and just go mental with it. When one of your kids likes it that means you have to listen to it about 15 times a day but I didn't mind. It's like, "Yeah let's stick it on, play it louder." It's just absolutely perfect and so heavy. And lyrically I get it now but I didn't at the time. You don't really get lyrics when you're a kid. You just think it's about horses. I always thought Jeff Beck's 'Hi Ho Silver Lining' was "silver lightning" - I thought it was about a horse. That whole thing to me is just a love song for a horse. Fuck knows what it's actually about. Drugs? Yeah, probably. One of my favourite memories of school is the school cloakroom full of tartan - that was for Bay City Rollers, but it just really reminds me of this era. My sister was a couple of years younger than me but she had Osmonds socks and an Osmonds lampshade. She had a couple of their albums. But 'Crazy Horses' is such a fantastic record. The first record that I ever liked was 'Billy Don't Be a Hero' by Paper Lace. I nearly chose that, but then I listened to it again and it's not very good."

"Around 1983 or '84, pop music stopped doing it for me. It was getting a bit clean. There was still a lot of good stuff, but I think it was The Smiths... I wasn't obsessed with them the way Sice was and a few other people I knew, but listening to them made you want to find something else. Then, when The Jesus And Mary Chain came out that was it. My brother brought their second single home and I wasn't sure at first. It was such a racket. It still is. But it was 'You Trip Me Up' that really did it for me - I was sold. This beautiful marriage of... it's not nice feedback, controlled feedback like you'd get off The Who. It's awful. But the core of what's going on - the song - is so lovely. And they looked fantastic, like The Beatles in Hamburg. They looked like a gang. It just seemed like they were blowing everything away and starting again. I went to listen to the Velvets after I'd heard this, and the Velvets did it... it was either noise or it was a great melody. They never really did the two together, whereas the Mary Chain managed to marry the two. The video is just fantastic. They're walking around somewhere in the Mediterranean, sitting on the beach in full leather gear with their massive guitars. After hearing the Mary Chain, that was all I wanted to listen to - bands who did that. They were a big band. They were in Smash Hits, which is hard to believe."

"I was into so much stuff around this time. It was 1981 and I was 12, turning 13 at the end of the year. I loved Duran Duran and Associates, 2 Tone stuff, ABC, The Jam... it didn't really matter then. You didn't have to be part of any tribe. We had them, but we never called them mods or rockers or whatever. We had the Sweats - they were the heavy guys who used to sit in a circle and smoke dope on the school field. They liked Motörhead and they all stank of patchouli oil. But they were all very friendly. Then there the Smoothies - they were more like mods really. Very tidy and neat, with these wedge haircuts. But I could never really do that. I could be one thing one day, and something else the next. I liked 'Ace Of Spades' at the same time as liking 'Planet Earth'. It was all the same thing. I remember being in class and we were all talking about 'Love Action', and singing the middle bit - "I believe, I believe what the old man says...", which I thought was profoundly wise at the time. It's still pretty good. I like the line, "I believe in truth/ Though I lie a lot." The noises in the intro really intrigued me. And for a while I did put the air guitar down and get my mum's ironing board out and play the synths on that. The music's quite cold - it's quite a cold groove for a love song. And it is a love song. His voice is kind of warm, but he's got such authority - you believe everything he's singing. At the end of that year, when Dare came out, everybody had it. It was great."

"Then we became rockabillys and got really into the Stray Cats, This was about 1982. It was my brother and his mates who started brushing their hair up, and me and Sice joined in. It felt like years at the time, but it was probably for 12 to 18 months we became rockabillys. We had our hair piled up, baggy trousers and crepe shoes. I still love the Stray Cats. They had this cartoon image - their hair was much bigger. I had such a crush on Brian Setzer, he's a great singer. But the guitar playing is phenomenal. The B-side is called 'Drink That Bottle Down' - I think it's live in Newcastle - and you've got the double bass player Lee Rocker shouting these blues. It really is a racket, but the guitar playing is unbelievable. The variety and dexterity and fluidity - the ferocity of his guitar playing is wonderful. I was into them for a couple of albums, but by the third album we kind of gave up. My brother got deeper into it - he started getting into psychobilly and all that, The Sharks, Tall Boys, The Meteors, The Milkshakes - all that Klub Foot stuff. And there was a psychedelic wave - The Purple Things and The Vibes - and it all got really strange. I was out of it by then. I think 'Relax' came out and I was back in the modern world."

"This is a bit of a sidestep, but in 1987 I went to the States on a Camp America. Me and my mate applied and we got in and he went to work in this really posh Jewish camp in Massachusetts somewhere, with all these lovely kids. I was working with these underprivileged kids from The Bronx, in Carmel in upstate New York. These kids were rough. I was 18 and they were like 12 and some of them were bigger than me. I shared a cabin with a guy called Daryl who was from New York. He just played the Run–D.M.C. album all day. Bigger And Deffer was out then too, the LL Cool J album. I just loved it. That was when I got into hip-hop. I wasn't sold on the music. I always thought it was a bit lumpy, before Public Enemy came out. It was missing a groove really. But 'It's Tricky' is really uptempo. It's really aggressive, which I liked. It's got that 'My Sharona' riff and that's not going to send you wrong is it? It sounded great in the house. It sounded so alien. My mum and dad didn't want to know and when you're that age you want to be freaking out the straights."

"This isn't part of any phase in my life. I just heard it on Peel, and it had this "gathering of the tribes" time signature - not sure if that's true or not, but it's such a strange record. The delivery... the first line, "Saw her face in the window, it looks quite strange..." That's brilliant. And it's like an odd, surreal miniature. I don't know what it is that makes me like it so much. The chorus goes, "I just can't believe that looking over you, I find you appealing, but it seems that I do." That sums up the way I feel about the record. It's not a pretty record, but I love it."

"I think the period from 1979 to 1982 was the best period for British pop music. And out of all that stuff it's 'Oliver's Army' that I've chosen. It gets more incredible the older I get and the more I understand about it. Visually, when it first came out, Elvis Costello was like a Halloween version of Buddy Holly. It's all distorted - his clothes were too big for him and his glasses were too big for him. He didn't look like a very nice guy - quite frightening - but singing this amazing song. Some songs will move your feet, emotions, and some will move your head - and this has got all of this, all together. I knew all the words. I'd write the words down in my exercise book at school, but I didn't understand any of it. But they're such good words you don't really have to. I love that first line: "Don't start me talking/ I could talk all night". It just brings up that image of youthful idealism - we can sit up all night talking. Before you get into drink, drugs and all that, you just sit up talking because you can. I love that. It could Paris in the late 60s, or London at the end of the century, or Greenwich Village. Musically, I just read about the piano part... Elvis didn't like the song at all and they were going to scrap it, so the piano player suggested, "Why don't we play something like ABBA?" I think it's 'Dancing Queen'. And then they put that on and that was it. But no one wanted to say yes at first as it wasn't a very cool thing to do."