Songs that influenced me, part 3

The final part of a three part post on the songs that most influenced my taste in music.

A recap - a facebook thread on the 10 albums that most influenced your taste in music made me realise that, for us kids of the 60s, it was singles not albums that mainly influenced our taste in music - we couldn't afford "LPs" even if we had a record player.

So to complete my list, following on from Please Please Me, You Really Got Me, Purple Haze, Reach Out I'll Be There and See Emily Play, I have:

I'm So Glad - Cream 1969
OK so this is the first album track in my list as I switched to vinyl and joined my peer group in getting blown away by Goodbye Cream. But specifically this was the track that got me into long discursive tracks of extemporised music, in particular prog rock in all its pomp. Which I've never grown out of.

Hors D'Oeuvres - Roy Harper 1971
I wondered about this choice for a while. Did Roy influence my taste in music? Most people realising my favourite musician is basically a man with an acoustic guitar assume I like folk, or acoustic singer songwriters, but for the most part I don't. After all he has been described as "epic, progressive acoustic - a category of one". However, I have nearly twice as many Harper albums as any other artist in my music collection. Roy influenced me to listen to Roy more than any other artist over the whole 50 years since I first saw him play. When I'm not sure what to listen to, I listen to Roy. So I guess that counts as an influence. When I first saw Harper I'd not heard any of his music: I don't know about underground but he was (and for the most part remained) unplayed on radio apart from John Peel and once in a blue moon now on Radio 6. This was the first song he played that night - when he eventually stopped chatting with the odd strum thrown in. I was immediately hooked. The song is about how quick we are to judge and criticise people and is typical Harper: quite long with two verses, the first allegorically setting the scene, the second focussing on the specific target. Dave Gilmour once said that Harper would go for subjects that other musicians decided not to touch (so, for example, explicitly criticising Islam). This one was aimed at his critics in the music papers:
The critic rubs his tired arse
And scrapes his poor brains and strains and farts
And wields a pen that stops and starts
And thinks in terms of booze and tarts
And sits there playing with his parts...
And he says this singer's just a farce
He's got no healing formulas
He's got no cure-all for our scars
He's got no bra-strap for our bras
And our sagging tits no longer hold a full house of hearts
And you know what? I don't think this little song's gonna make the charts
Well you can lead a horse to water
But you're never gonna make him drink
And you can lead a man to slaughter
But you're never gonna make him think
Needless to say this indeed wasn't the hit single EMI were hoping Harper would record. But he has probably made me think more than all the other musicians I've ever heard put together. Yes, an influence then.

Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 2, 1901
The girl who was to become Mrs H introduced me to this in the early 70s. I'd never listened to classical before. She's always liked piano music and we listened to this quite a lot when we first got married. A couple of decades later I started listening to much more classical music but this has remained a favourite. I like them both but there's more Tchaikovsky in my collection than Oasis.

Peaches - The Stranglers 1977
I'd read about punk rock and I didn't think I wanted to hear it. Then I heard this on the radio and it piqued my interest. Though the Stranglers weren't really punk and, while more than ok, aren't my favourite new wave band, this opened my ears to what was happening and pretty soon I'd moved from listening to Mike Oldfield to The Clash. For me the new wave era from 1977 to the early 80s is the second great flowering of British pop music nearly equalling the mid 60s.

Breaking The Girl - Red Hot Chili Peppers 1991
My red son is responsible for my last choice. I'd listened with him to the Chilis Californication album quite a lot in the car without really warming to it, but I loved the next album, the more commercial By The Way. A bit later he ripped a CD for me with a selection of stuff including three tracks from the Blood Sugar Sex Magik album which predated the two I knew. Bingo, now I got it. The Chilis are my favourite post 1990 artists and frequently feature in my car. I asked the red son about Breaking The Girl, saying it sounded a bit Beatles-ish. He laughed and said he'd read that John Frusciante had listened to Beatles songs all day before writing it. Which explains why I liked it and neatly closes the loop on my 10 influential songs with where I started, on Please Please Me.