For me this happened three times in my life.
Age 13: The first one - A school friend found out I had two (mono) cassette recorders at home, and asked me to make a copy of a tape to (I think) impress a girl. The tape was Tarkus, by Emerson Lake & Palmer. Prior to this my record buying was limited to comedy stuff like Monty Python and the Goons. Hearing Tarkus blew my young mind and even now makes me feel like a young teenager when I hear it. Also opened me up to the world of prog rock and ensured I was addicted to Alan Freeman's Saturday afternoon Radio 1 show for years, until it was sadly replaced by the heavy rock dirge of Tommy Vance. I still like some of the more tuneful prog stuff to this day, just last week on a drive to Manchester I listened to Keith Emerson's piano concerto followed by Five Bridges by The Nice.
https://youtu.be/WKNOlDtZluU
Age 17: The most life-defining one - (two singles rather than an album) - I was by now an avid reader of both Melody Maker and the NME each week, so naturally gravitated towards John Peel's show, 22.00-00.00 every week night. By now I had two hi-fi cassette decks so could make compilation tapes from the tracks I liked. Peel was by now playing a mixture of hippy stuff, folk stuff, reggae and this new "Punk" thing, which really just seemed like a daft fad to me. Until the night he played London Lady/Grip by The Stranglers for the first time, followed by Oh Bondage, Up Yours/I Am A Cliche by X-Ray Spex. I was spellbound by both of these and they became my first "New Wave" purchases the following day. From that I was totally ensconced in the scene and my mind opened to the bands/artists who provided the soundtrack to my life; Joy Division, New Order, The Fall, Buzzcocks, Magazine, Wire, The Undertones, Talking Heads, Ramones, Gang of Four, etc., etc. My choice of friends and acquaintances from then on, which shaped my adult life from that point, would have been totally different without that 'Eureka' moment provided by the Stranglers and Poly Styrene. Plastic's real when you're real sick.
https://youtu.be/zrzENjzd7Mghttps://youtu.be/aTfgWegud7o
Age 56: The most expensive one - I spent 30 years solidly resisting the idea of "dance music" as a thing of merit. For me, music was for listening to. I dismissed everything to do with Hip-Hop and everything which came after including House and Techno. I was very closed-minded. Having spent most of my adult life listening to the music I fell in love with during my late teens/early 20's, with just a few more modern exceptions allowed to creep in, by now we had the internet and I had discovered this app called Soundcloud which seemed interesting. For some reason one of the tracks it was suggesting me to listen to was something called "Fanfare (Marc Romboy moving Atoms Mix)" by Emerson Digweed and Muir. The artists name, being redolent of Emerson Lake and Palmer from my youth, made me click on it and give it a listen. What followed was another epiphany which, to cut a long story short, has sent me into my 60's on a great journey of discovery of the wonders of all sorts of electronic dance music and also re-kindled my love of ambient/electronica from my prog rock days. It also resulted in my reviving my love of recording (after last dabbling with a Teac 4-track in the early 80's) and led to where we are now - a Mac Pro with a massive library of plug-ins, various hardware synths and a growing Eurorack fetish which I see as the thing which will keep me occupied well into my retirement.
https://soundcloud.com/marcromboy/emers ... ving-atoms
