On being asked if I’d like to write a short article about my favourite album of all time I immediately knew that it was Marquee Moon by Television. Then the problems started… Marquee Moon already tops the ‘top 100’ albums lists in various middle of the road music media across the world every year… we all know it’s amazing and no amount of gushing on my part will make that any more true. So then I realised that the whole ‘favourite album’ conundrum could run in several directions (don’t let it ever be said that I like to over-complicate things!). There’s the album you’d like people to think is your favourite; the album that is secretly your favourite; and the album that was important to you personally for some reason…

So I got to thinking about albums that I could genuinely say had changed my life… and I kept coming back to Pillows & Prayers, a label sampler LP released by Cherry Red Records in 1982 to advertise their forthcoming releases (people who bought the original LP in Britain may recall not paying more than 99p!). Okay so I don’t listen to this album all the time nowadays. Its principal importance was in performing its intended function - introducing me to new bands and making me buy their records! I have P&P to thank for introducing me to - amongst other icons of new wave - The Monochrome Set, Five or Six, Eyeless in Gaza … but its more than that. It was this album that really spawned my burgeoning interest (and soon to be all consuming passion) for obscure post-punk and new wave music. It also resulted in my being something of a devotee of the sampler LP in and of itself, seeking them out far and wide…

And it’s also a reminder of different times. When I really started getting into music it was just before the whole internet thing snowballed. There was no last.fm, you couldn’t just download everything and anything on mp3, even Ebay was in its infancy. If you wanted to know about obscure music you had to literally get down on your hands and knees in record shops and fairs to find it, haggle with record shop people and trade your records in order to buy new ones (or pay the rent!). It was unimaginably different to now and the sampler LP was a great navigational aid in seeking out the good stuff. Unbelievably this was all only a few years ago… and whilst I don’t miss getting deep-vein thrombosis crawling around dusty boxes of records, I still owe thanks to P&P for opening up a world of music that has profoundly influenced my subsequent life.

Pillows & Prayers’ most important legacy however was introducing me to the band Felt – who’ve occupied a very important place in my heart ever since. It’s alleged that Lawrence Hayward of Felt named his band after hearing Tom Verlaine’s staccato utterance of the word ‘felt’ in the Television song ‘Venus’ – my favourite ever track from my (other) favourite album Marquee Moon - so maybe there’s a kind of circularity to the whole thing…