Soundtrack Your Life

The Times

Dave

Turn on, tune in
When I was a kid, we didn't have a record player. My mother was a public school teacher, so she would bring home the school turntable at weekends and we would listen to albums. The first record I bought, age 7, was a K-Tel compilation with Edgar Winter's hard rock instrumental 'Frankenstein' on it. It was the first time that I had heard music that turned me on.

Earn your stripes
I started playing guitar when I was ten, so my mother bought me the complete Beatles catalogue on sheet music. My favourite song was Rocky Raccoon - I'd play it over and over. It was actually the first song I performed live, to a theater full of high school students when I was 12.

Love on the rocks
When I was 16, I fell hopelessly in love with a girl called Windy. Just after we started dating she moved to Arizona with her family. It broke my heart. All I wanted to do was drop out of high school and drive to be with her. Led Zeppelin's 'All My Love' is the ultimate soppy ballad for that time.

God save the scene
I discovered punk through a cousin of mine, Tracey Bradford. My family would visit her family every summer, and one year we turned up and she had morphed into this rock chick with bondage pants and a shaved head. I was blown away. I immediately ran to the record store and bought the Dead Kennedys' song 'Nazi Punks Fuck Off' - a pure, simple blast of hardcore noise.

Xs all areas
'Debaser' by the Pixies lit some sort of fuse in me. I remember coming over to England a month after I joined Nirvana. We went to see the Pixies at Brixton Academy and they opened with Debaser. It was the fisrt time a song had made me so happy that I started crying.

Don't look back
'In My Life' by the Beatles is a big song for me because that is what we played at Kurt's memorial. I find it difficult to listen to now because it was so perfect for that day. At my wedding we had a Beatles tribute band who suggested this for the first dance. We didn't pick it. It breaks my heart to hear it even now.

Swede dreams
It's hard not to start dancing when you hear Abba's 'Dancing Queen'. I'm not even a closet Abba fan, I just love them, who doesn't? Bjorn Again opened for Nirvana at the Reading festival in 1992 and go the best response of the day - everyone went beserk.

Cooking vinyl
For an instant party, just add AC/DC. Back In Black is the perfect record because everybody loves it, even the ladies. My idea of a good time is friends, whiskey, a loud stereo and a big barbecue in my back yard. Just make sure the music is loud.

When the light's out
One of the most beautiful songs I've heard is Cat Power's 'The Colour And The Kids' from her album Moonpix. That song is so heart wrenchingly beautiful and romantic - it makes me want to kidnap her and run away and hide for ever.