When you load up Spotify, a great big chunk of the time you can’t think what to play, right? You default back to your old favourites, those albums and songs you played on repeat when you first discovered you could make them yours.
This isn’t about guilty pleasures; it’s about those songs you’ll still be listening to when you’re old and in your rocking chair. So, enter Teenage Kicks – a playlist series that sees bands running through the music they listened to in their formative years.
Next up, Soeur.
Tina: Musically one of my favourite albums of all time. Although I quickly realised I couldn’t really relate lyrically, I still loved listening that album to death.
Tina: As a young girl, not only did this song and literally every other DC song musically resonate with me, but the message of independence, girl power, friendship and loyalty struck a chord and most probably shaped me in some way. Even today I can’t help but break into dance when I hear a DC song. I’m not ashamed either.
Tina: I remember my brother playing this song LOUD and becoming completely obsessed with garage for about ten years through my teens. It didn’t matter what the song was about back then. Later on, I’ve discovered how important lyrics are but back then all I wanted was music to dance to.
James: Every teenage house party had this blasting out the parents’ hi-fi.
James: Probably another house party singalong to be fair! I think early Biffy still has a foundation in the music we’re writing now.
James: Probably where it all started to change for me, listening to the weirder side of rock and realising there’s a whole other world beyond Kerrang! and NME.
Anya: I wasn’t exactly a normal kid, I struggled a lot and felt like I didn’t belong. Listening to this song helped me realise that I wasn’t alone in that.
Anya: I remember being about 12/13yrs old, I’d woken early at my big sister’s student house and was raiding her laptop for some new music to put on my iPod. The name “Rage Against The Machine” seemed promising, so I hit play and fell immediately in love, I’d never heard anything like it.
Anya: I didn’t discover PJ Harvey until I was about 16 or 17 when a boyfriend of mine insisted I listen to the album ‘Rid of Me’; it honestly changed my life. I love how you can almost see the movement of her face as you listen to her singing, the fearlessness with which she experiments with her voice and the unapologetic intensity of her emotional expression. It taught me a lot.
Taken from the October issue of Upset. Soeur’s EP ‘No Show’ is out 23rd September.
