The music that moulded my character

I became a demented music freak from the time I got my first guitar at the age of 14. Growing up on a diet of mainly British rock in the '70s in Prai, a small railway town in the northern part of Malaysia, I was pretty much on my own, except for a few friends who seemed to like the same kind of music I was into.

We dug Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Manfred Mann's Earth Band and other pioneering rock bands. And as our tastes evolved, we started getting into Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Genesis, the Strawbs, Rick Wakeman and some pretty weird shit (the Sparks, Captain Beefheart...).

One of the first LPs I bought to play on my spanking-new JVC quadraphonic system was ELP's 'Brain Salad Surgery'. It a constant source of excitement for many years. Another LP that never failed to give excitations was the Strawbs's 'Hero and Heroine'. I also got quite a sustained kick out of Rory Gallagher's 'Sinner... and Saint', Rick Wakeman's 'The Six Wives of Henry VIII' and Led Zeppelin's third album (all bought with wages from a factory job during school vacation) .

OK, OK... I don't want to turn this into a nap-inducing longueur so I'll just end here by saying that the whole point of this blog is to turn you onto the albums that provided me respite from the misery of life in a small town.