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What were the first 10 vinyl LPs that you purchased and when....

tiggers said:
Unlike Nigel I sadly never kept a log, but I will hazard a guess based on what I can remember owning early on (and still have luckily).

Blondie - Plastic Letters
Bowie - Ziggy and Aladdin Sane
The Clash - London Calling
Kate Bush - Kick Inside
Peter Gabriel - I
Genesis - Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
Stranglers - Rattus Norvegicus
Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene
Kraftwerk - Autobahn
Squeeze - Squeeze
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A lot there I had early on! Everything bar Squeeze. Still got the majority of them, though not necessarily the same copy.

Blondie I did via 12” single (Rip Her To Shreds, Denis, I’m Always Touched By Your Presence, Sunday Girl, Heart Of Glass, & Atomic). I back-catalogued the albums later in the ‘80s when they could still be found mint in £1 bins. Missing Autoamerican for some reason. One on my ‘I’ll keep the next really good copy I see’ list.

I really liked 12” singles. Television’s Prove It, Marquee Moon and Foxhole were early buys. Prove it being the first time I’d ever seen coloured vinyl (it’s green), though a whole shed-load of stuff happened shortly after e.g. Devo, Police, the luminous Neon Lights 12” etc.
 
Squeeze liked working with John Cale apparently but the early stuff was a bit of a pigs ear in my (retrospective) opinion.

www.bbc.co.uk

John Cale at 70: Cale and Squeeze

In 1977 John Cale, who celebrates his 70th birthday on Friday 9 March, produced the first EP by a London new wave/pop group called Squeeze. Packet Of Three was well received and they went on to record their first album the next year with Cale. John Cale with Squeeze. Photo: Jill Furmanovsky...
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
 
Tony L said:
A lot there I had early on! Everything bar Squeeze. Still got the majority of them, though not necessarily the same copy.

Blondie I did via 12” single (Rip Her To Shreds, Denis, I’m Always Touched By Your Presence, Sunday Girl, Heart Of Glass, & Atomic). I back-catalogued the albums later in the ‘80s when they could still be found mint in £1 bins. Missing Autoamerican for some reason. One on my ‘I’ll keep the next really good copy I see’ list.

I really liked 12” singles. Television’s Prove It, Marquee Moon and Foxhole were early buys. Prove it being the first time I’d ever seen coloured vinyl (it’s green), though a whole shed-load of stuff happened shortly after e.g. Devo, Police, the luminous Neon Lights 12” etc.
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Yeah, I'm a 12" single fan too as I think we've touched in before. I got into them right at the end of the 70s and bought up a lot of Blondie and other early New Wave on 12". Have Television's 12" output too. Also got a lot of the 70s disco where the 12" versions were really well extended... Donna Summer, Thelma Houston, EW&F, Gloria Gaynor, Jermaine Jackson, Trammps etc. My first coloured vinyl was a Donna Summer 12" I think. Loved it when 12" singles were extended versions of the originals, remixing became a thing in the late 80s/early 90s and the quality dropped for me although still some great versions to be found amongst the run of the mill stuff.

Have all of Blondie's albums on vinyl all bought back in the day, but think they went off the boil around the time of Autoamerican, still some good stuff on there, but the first four albums are all excellent and consistent. I was reading recently how conflicted the band were with Parallel Lines, they knew they had a solid album and a commercial one too, but felt they had lost their harder edge and were the worse for it live.
 
I've got a whole bunch of receipts on which I wrote the purchases, but they don't go as far back as first ones ...

1 was definitely Loud 'n' Proud by Nazareth - 1973 or 74
2 Brain Salad Surgery - ELP - same dates

3 thru 10 are vague, but I think would be drawn from the following, from 1973 or 74 to 75/76;

Argent - Greatest Hits
Deep Purple - Made in Japan, Machine Head, In Rock
ELP - Pictures, Welcome Back My Friends
Free - Heartbreaker, Fire & Water
Focus - Compilation
Hendrix - In the West
The Nice - Apr 67 - Spring 68
Uriah Heep Live '73
King Crimson - Starless and Bible Black
Rory Gallagher - Irish Tour '74.
Yes - Relayer

Most of the purchases were driven by hearing tracks on Radio Luxembourg or Alan Freeman's Saturday Rock Show.
 
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The first was Aqualung - Jethro Tull. 1971.
Most if not all the other 9 are mentioned above by various people but I can't remember the order.
 
Not bought with my own money, but requested for Christmas - and on cassette tape, rather than vinyl:

1. Mike Oldfield - Ommadawn
2. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Organisation

Then the first two albums I bought with my own money:

3. Steely Dan - Countdown to Ecstasy
4. Talking Heads - Fear of Music

After that, it gets hazy, but this was an early purchase:

5. Todd Rundgren's Utopia - Adventures in Utopia

All of the above reflect the influence of my older brother on my taste in music. After that, I was more swayed by the music press (in particular, Dave McCullough, writing in Sounds). Generally, more obscure stuff, so the next five looks something like this:

6. 23 Skidoo - Seven Songs
7. Crispy Ambulance - The Plateau Phase
8. The Go-Betweens - Before Hollywood
9. Blue Orchids - The Greatest Hit
10. Clock DVA - Thirst

Those are the ones that stand out in my memory, from the pre-university years, anyway.

I had a "metal" phase in my mid-teens but I borrowed those albums from friends, rather than buying them myself.

And then, I discovered Chas & Dave. ;)
 
wacko said:
In awe of a couple of posters here. Seem to have fully formed mature tastes right from the get-go. Unless they started buying in their 20s :)
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Yes, I’m curious about age. For me it was very young, 10 to 12 when I started and I was a T. Rex obsessive. Aside from some 7” singles around that time I exited off into prog pretty fast, but that was largely due to access to a friend’s older sister’s record collection. That’s where all the Floyd, Genesis, Yes etc came from. That certainly tipped me off on a certain trajectory until punk/new-wave came along when I was 14-15.
 
droodzilla said:
Not bought with my own money, but requested for Christmas - and on cassette tape, rather than vinyl:

1. Mike Oldfield - Ommadawn
2. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Organisation

Then the first two albums I bought with my own money:

3. Steely Dan - Countdown to Ecstasy
4. Talking Heads - Fear of Music

After that, it gets hazy, but this was an early purchase:

5. Todd Rundgren's Utopia - Adventures in Utopia

All of the above reflect the influence of my older brother on my taste in music. After that, I was more swayed by the music press (in particular, Dave McCullough, writing in Sounds). Generally, more obscure stuff, so the next five looks something like this:

6. 23 Skidoo - Seven Songs
7. Crispy Ambulance - The Plateau Phase
8. The Go-Betweens - Before Hollywood
9. Blue Orchids - The Greatest Hit
10. Clock DVA - Thirst

Those are the ones that stand out in my memory, from the pre-university years, anyway.

I had a "metal" phase in my mid-teens but I borrowed those albums from friends, rather than buying them myself.

And then, I discovered Chas & Dave. ;)
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Similar start to me. I can remember going into the record shop a few times before I was 13 with Dad buying records with my pocket money:

1. Jean-Michel Jarre - Oxygene
2. Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of the Worlds - this got played to death for years
3. Dire Straits (First album) - Bought because I loved "Sultans of Swing" (hmm not bad as a ten-year old) but it took me years to like the rest of the album.
4. Madness - One Step Beyond.

Then a bit of a gap until I was 14 I think these are the next six.

4. Mike Oldfield - Crises
5. Tangerine Dream - Rubycon
6. Tangerine Dream - Ricochet
7. Yes - 90125
8. Yes - Fragile
9. Tangerine Dream - Phaedra
10. Tangerine Dream - Encore
 
I can't remember a single one! Mind you, it was over 60 years ago!🤓 I would have been about 14 when I bought my first LP, pretty sure it was The Rolling Stones first album.
 
I can't remember the exact order, apart from the very one, but the first 10 I bought with my own money were...

T.Rex - Electric Warrior
Rod Stewart - An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down
Bowie - Hunky Dory
Bowie - Ziggy
Rod Stewart - Every Picture...
Bowie - Man Who Sold the World
Roxy Music - Roxy Music
Alice Cooper - School's Out
Moody Blues - In Search of the Lost Chord
The Who - Tommy

I was around 12/13/14 years old at this point. The first record I ever bought with my own money was a 7 inch single of The Move, Flowers in the Rain, on my 11th birthday, coincidentally the first record ever played on Radio 1. I still have all these records too.
 
Seeker_UK said:
Blame that and Oxygene (plus Son of My Father) for becoming a synth nerd.
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For me it was Hawkwind (Doremi & Space Ritual), TD’s Rubycon and Autobahn that got me interested, and later Tubeway Army and OMD really knocked it home enough to save up and buy a synth (a Korg MS10). Especially OMD as they lived very nearby so kind of reinforced anyone could have a go, one certainly didn’t need to be Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman to own a synth! A couple of friends had EDP Wasps which were the entry of the synth market at the time and really cool.
 
kjb said:
My memory isn't anywhere good enough to be precise but...

My first records were mainly the samplers available around 1969-1971 when I was still at primary school. I could get these with pocket money as they were around £1. Wikipedia says You Can All Join in and Nice Enough to Eat were both 14 shillings and 6 pence (£0.72) and Harvest 29s/11d (approximately £1.50)

You Can All Join In ( Island)
Nice Enough to Eat (Island)
Happy to be a Part of the Industry of Human Happiness ( Immediate)
Picnic: A breath of Fresh Air ( Harvest)
Back Tracks 5 - a side each of The Who and Hendrix (Track)

An Aunt bought me Abbey Road the Christmas it came out - Xmas 1969.
I got my dad to buy me Led Zeppelin 2 after some student teachers who were working in our primary school played it to us.

I bought Split by the Groundhogs after seeing them play Cherry Red on TOTP ( that was on 15th April '71, just before my 11th birthday)
I also bought Electric Warrior. I did swap Split and Thank Christ for the Bomb for Can's Tago Mago a few years later ( with the top opening cover). I still have the Island, Immediate and Harvest samplers though.

Abbey Road, Spilt and LZ 2 are all long gone - swapped for various things along the way - LZ 2 for the first Black Sabbath record. I still have the copy of Electric Warrior.

That was the first 9 if memory serves.
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Having a sort through my records yesterday and was reminded my 10th record was School's Out by Alice Cooper. I still have the desk sleeve cover with paper knickers inside!

Maybe this is one I should have swapped!
 
Not sure on the first 10, but I recall the first one I got was Elvis - On Stage in 1970. Another in the first 10 will likely have been Abba - Greatest Hits around 74.
 
It is fascinating reading this thread in relation to the many Rick Beato (a good YouTube creator/musicologist) moral panics about modern pop music. It is clear from the above that most of us either started in, or took little time to reach leftfield/counterculture music. Few stayed long at all in the chart-pop market. As stated I was a T. Rex fan, so as a youngster had a fair few singles, a copy of The Slider, plus a few other pop 7” singles (several Slade, Gary Glitter’s Rock n Roll Part 1 (oops!), and much to my credit Street Life by Roxy Music).

As such I did start in the world of ‘pop’, but after T. Rex (which I still like a lot, though have far better copies now) I headed off into far more obscure music.

I’m not making my point very well as it really needs to be on one of the Beato-related threads, but I do think his rants at Spotify top #10s etc are really must an old man reacting to children’s music of the kind our generation would have hated too. Anyone even slightly older will do exactly what we did any start deep-diving all manner of more rewarding genres well off the beaten path. Those of us who were buying stuff like TD, Hawkwind, Yes, Floyd, Groundhogs or whatever in the ‘70s were never in the chart-pop mainstream. Chart pop was just as shit then as it is now!
 
Tony L said:
Chart pop was just as shit then as it is now!
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Ah yes, but in the late 70s and 80s, when many of us were finding our musical feet, you had 'pop' acts in the chart and slightly less poppy fare.



Which would open the door for a wider exploration of what's out there in the record bins.

Same can be said for a lot of dance music in late 80s / early 90s (not my area of expertise).
 
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