Favourite albums from your first year in university.

Burn, Red, Starless & Bible Black and Physical Graffiti. It’s what I was listening to at the time. Might be different now - would include some CSN&Y (as any combination and / or as solo artists) . 

Led Zepplin IV, Bob Seger ‘Live’ Bullet, and Lynyrd Skynyrd Pronounced; and I still listen to them today.  

After returning from evening classes in Chicago in the mid 70s the neighbors got a nightly chance to listen to the Hadjidakis album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD9op9sCyh8

That would be 1975 for me, so pretty much anything by The Dead, Stones, Hendrix, Zappa and Bowie. Was also a pretty good year for new albums: Wish You Were Here, Physical Graffiti, Born to Run, Blood on the Tracks, Katy Lied, Another Green World, Blues for Allah, among others.

Why would you presume most of us went to University? 

Started 84-5 too, have to be Prefab Sprout 'Steve McQueen' for me (actually released June 85 when I looked). The Smiths eponymous first album would be close.

Bruce

Showing my age here…

and:

[Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline]

Still play them both, often.

Aaaarchh! I studied music and my first music history teacher was crazy about Italian Opera. Every lesson I had to listen to a language I did not understand, weak late 19th century harmonies, wrong word / music accents (i.m.o) sung by ugly super tenors.

Luckily the theory teacher introduced me to Bruckner 4 and there it all started.

Bob the Builder posted:

Why would you presume most of us went to University? 

... and for you Bob, I first worked about 10 years and only then applied for a study in music. I'm originally a rebelious school drop out saved by some good contacts and ability to program software. I understand and still feel your comment.

My first year in college, ... I moved from Cleveland Ohio (a rock 'n' roll bastion) to Juneau Alaska, leaving my physical media behind. Quickly discovered NPR (National Public Radio). My music listening involuntarily went from rock to classical. I was fine with the change, thrilled in fact, and was drawn towards the romantic period. I got a gist about symphony construction, variation on a theme, and borrowing from the masters. 

Two big mainstream albums passed me by on their release at that time, but I discovered them not so long after in the early-90s; Paul Simon's Graceland and John Mellencamp's Scarecrow.

I didn’t go to uni but if I had it would have been Stranglers Rattus, Sex Pistols & Costello My AIM is True. 

1981/2 for me, I was listening to music from a few years before, so Led Zep especially II & IV, Hawkwind Quark Strangeness and Charm, Pink Floyd WYWH and DSOTM, Animals and Ummagumma, Fairport Convention Liege and Lief & Rosie, Deep Purple Made in Europe/Japan & Machine Head From the contemporary albums, Elvis Costello, Stranglers Rainbow.

I was starting my exploration of Beethoven and I had an Eroica which was played to death.

My Trio KD1033B had a lot  of use, and I still use all the albums now, apart from a Made in Japan that went walking some time in the '80s and was only recently replaced.

Bob the Builder posted:

Why would you presume most of us went to University? 

BtheB I agree just what goes through someones head when they say things like that. 

I've no idea how I managed to do it, but I hauled my first 'Hi-Fi' system (BSR MP60/Trio KA2000A & Audiotronic Criterion speakers) to my University Hall of Residence along with my luggage by train. The outstanding albums that I remember purcchasing in my 1st year were PF - 'Dark Side of the Moon', Quicksilver Messenger Service - 'Happy Trails', McKendree Spring ' 'Second Thoughts' and Dory Previn - 'Mythical Kings & Iguanas'. Sorry - that's also 4, not 3. I enjoy playing all of these albums to this day. 

The Hall of Residence is which I stayed during my first year had a common room with its own stereo system and a fund for purchasing LPs - the one album that springs to mind (and that I bought myself a few years later) was Wishbone Ash - 'Argus'.

Those were the days - Listening to music, playing football at every opportunity, drinking and occasionally going to lectures. I'm actually exaggerating just a little bit - I did end up with a degree.   

My 1st year at University was also to blame for my not being able to this day to listen to anything by Rod Stewart & the Faces or Maggie Bell & Stone the Crows. The only other person in my Hall of Residence with his own stereo system happened to be in the next room to me. He had every single Rod Stewart/Faces & Maggie Bell/Stone the Crows album that had been released at the time. I genuinely don't recall him ever playing anything other than these albums for the entire year, and he  played them loud.         

Freshman year for me at art school was bookended by Portishead. Dummy and Dj Shadow. Endtroducing.

Perhaps not the most optimistic albums, but were massively representive over what was going on stirring up the big art world endorsed by Charles Saatchi in the mid nineties.

Respite was provided by the wonderful and underrated U2 side project.  Passengers. Original Soundtracks 1.    Hope they get round to do an Original Soundtracks 2. one day.

1970. Deep Purple In Rock had just come out and I recorded it to a reel-to-reel that I took with me to London, whereupon I proceeded to annoy all in earshot with it. Saw them live at the Albert Hall shortly after too. 

SJB,

funny you mention Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.  One of my lasting memories of my first term at Uni is evenings spent at The Castle in North Street, eating tomato flavour crisps washed down with pints of 80 shilling and listening to the incessant drone of LC&tC's Lost Weekend coming from the Jukebox.

As for a favourite album that appeared that year, if you could dodge Dire Straits Brother in Arms, then it probably boiled down to these two, both rather different, but the first copies of which were just about played to death by yours truly;

The Sisters of Mercy - First And Last And Always

Mick Jagger - She's The Boss

   Cream - Fresh Cream.                                                                                      The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced.

   I dragged my some what rudimentary hi-fi from home to begin my 3 year adventure at Glasgow School of Art, and these two were on

   constant play throughout that first year.

   Now, having posted these, I'm feeling depressingly old ........... but hey ho, the music was great. 

I went to university as a fan of classical music, with a small, very small, interest in 'popular' music, which was 99.99% garbage (Hendrix, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly were the few exceptions in my collection). Once there my ears were opened to bands that I had not heard of; I was a fan of neither Radio 1 nor 2. My favourites from my 3 years of (mostly) misery were and are

Roy Harper - Flat Baroque and Berserk

Focus - Moving Waves

and

King Crimson - At the court of the Crimson King

The first tune that was playing when I went into the nearby youth club was Jethro Tull's Thick As a Brick.  It still takes me back when I haven't heard it for a while.

It would have to be Caravanserai by Santana, nobody was doing this subtle jazz rock fusion. At the time Neil Schon was barely 19 and Carlos 21 years old, quite incredible what they delivered musically for guys so young.

At the age I "should" have been at Uni, This Years Model by Elvis Costello.

Hmack posted:

My 1st year at University was also to blame for my not being able to this day to listen to anything by Rod Stewart & the Faces or Maggie Bell & Stone the Crows. The only other person in my Hall of Residence with his own stereo system happened to be in the next room to me. He had every single Rod Stewart/Faces & Maggie Bell/Stone the Crows album that had been released at the time. I genuinely don't recall him ever playing anything other than these albums for the entire year, and he  played them loud.         

You and me both. My next-door neighbour in my first year did less and less work and more and more clubbing as the year went by. How did that bother me, you ask? Well, it wouldn't have done were he not also in the habit of playing Hotel California at full tilt at 2am when he returned from his extra-curricular excursions. By the summer term, with the rest of trying to do some work to avoid getting thrown out, we were getting same Eagles track, full pelt, in the small hours four or five times every week about half a metre from my ears. I/we probably should have imposed some retributive justice, possibly involving gaining access to his room and pouring several pints of Old Peculier into his system but we never did. I had to settle for the smug knowledge that he got what he deserved in the long run - a one-way ticket back to the West Yorkshire hellhole he'd briefly extracted himself from.

Mark

I have a couple of albums that spring to mind. Played so much at the time that somehow I find it hard listening to them now (middle age melancholy?). A couple were bought mainly after seeing bands live for the first time as Brighton was a prime concert circuit town, and tickets were easy to get hold of.

Prefab Sprout - Steve McQueen. Transvision Vamp - Pop Art and Talking Heads - Little Creatures. All repeat played endlessly. And I don't think I was ever the same after seeing Wendy James live.

I was starting grad school when SJB first went to uni in 1984, and those picks of his were big for me back then too. Four years earlier, when I started as an undergrad in 1980, I guess old favorites taking big steps defined a lot of what I listened to: Clapton “Just One Night”, Metheney “As Falls Wichita...”, Talking Heads “Remain in Light”, and Peter Gabriel “the third one with the melting face” got a lot of rotation (Rega Planar 3 w/Ortofon MC, Crown pre, Harmon Kardon Citation12, local Pulse speakers with space age Kevlar drivers!). Hard to pick a small number of albums from that era, good thread...

But the soundtrack of my transition to really wanting (and sort of starting) to become a physicist was Roxy Music “Avalon” which came out in third year and was on constant play for a zillion long homework nights learning quantum mechanics from the classic Cohen-Tannouji textbook set that weighed about five kilos, heavy with the weight of knowledge lol.

Most of these still get a “spin” chez nous...

Regards alan

No Uni because the thought of it didn't occur to me unfortunately but lots of fun that year spending the winter in Tenerife and the Summer in Benidorm and Ibiza listening to music like this,

Fast Eddie - Acid Thunder

A Guy Called Gerald - Vodoo Ray 

2 in a Room - Somebody In The House Say Yeah

Sha-Lor - I'm in Love

Blaze - If You Should Need a Friend

Phase II - Reachin

Royal House - Can You Feel It

Jungle Brothers - I'll House you

T-Coy - Carino