Name an album from your youth that you didn't discover until you were in your thirties and beyond

Let's define your youth as 19 years old and younger. In my case I'm thinking of any Sweet album past Give Us A Wink but there are hundreds more perhaps thousands.

 

Born ‘68 didn’t get Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat til I was 33 though I bought We Got the Beat as a 45 the year it came out.

Blondie - Parallel Lines, just bought it at 52!

 

Born 1955, didn’t hear Forever Changes until 1988 (aside from You Set the Scene which got a lot of airplay back in the day).
I didn’t discover the 13th Floor Elevators until 1985.

 

At 49 years old....

Yello - "Stella"

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI0qLsDIa0oudAg9syHJywSqr0FKtwEwj

 

wire

 

Probably a lot of albums.

I think I had the best of Sweet as a pup.... green and black cover.... I ended up getting all the reissues with the extra tracks in my thirties.... and Cut Above The Rest.

Warren Zevon
The Kinks eighties stuff
Iron Maiden's post Somewhere in time albums

Lots of stuff.
It has been fun filling in the blanks

 

Björk

I was a teen when her classic ‘90s albums came out, but I didn’t start buying and collecting them until my 30s.

 

Those Sweet albums are sorely neglected. There's great stuff on all of them.

 

Because like a lot of people, I stopped listening to "new" music after my youth (the cutoff being in the mid 1970s), I completely missed NRBQ. I later discovered them (and some other gems) thanks to Bob Dylan's Them Time Radio Hour programs.

NRBQ is one of the most talented and versatile groups I've ever heard, with an incredible number of great albums both done in the studio and live. They continue to astound and entertain me on a daily basis.

 

More than any other band Wire is the band that I didn't pick up on AT ALL until far later than I might have. I literally never heard their music until the mid-late 1980s and realized all at once that I had completely missed the music from what would quickly become perhaps my most admired and respected band of their time. I count the following records by Wire as brilliant and beautiful. Every one of them would be in my top 100 records:



Pink Flag (1977)
Chairs Missing (1978)
154 (1979)
The Ideal Copy (1987)
A Bell Is a Cup (1988)
IBTABA (1989)

 

born in 1968 - I remember really liking the song "Just the Two of Us" when it came out in 1981. But I didn't check out Grover Washington Jr. albums until much later. This one, from 1975, is particularly good:

 

Electric Ladyland
London Calling
Ziggy Stardust

 

Severed Heads, pretty much all the albums from 1982 to 1994. I'll name Bad Mood Guy and Come Visit The Big Bigot.

I just didn't know anything about their stuff until I was brought to a show in 2017, and since then have become a big fan.

 

Tago Mago & Ege Bamyasi from Can. I was aware of the band, but never bothered to dig in. Same with Ian Hunter's solo debut and All American Alien Boy (post Mott the Hoople).

 

That would be a pretty long list... I discover new old stuff all the time.

Recently any given Bee Gees album. Seen them all as kid and youth but it was a time when my peer group just wouldn't check out this band. The backlash had already set in.

 

It's A Beautiful Day s/t. I'm certainly familiar with 'White Bird" going back to the 70s, but never heard the complete album until I bought a used copy this year. Wow! Great music. Followed up getting Marrying Maiden and the Carnegie Hall live album.

 

Whilst not becoming quite as enamoured with them as yourself, I only started listening to Wire in the last ten years and I enjoyed quite a lot of their stuff

I'm 51 so there probably wasn't much chance of me hearing them seeing as their highest charting single was 51 in the UK in 1979, back then the only way my 8/9 year old self heard music was the radio and Top Of The Pops

When I heard "Three Girl Rhumba" I immediately thought of the song "Connection" by Elastica, then when reading about the band I found out it wasn't just me, Elastica made an out of court settlement over the similarity

 

Oh, I can name two fantastic examples that took me 50 years to finally get (and they're recent for me).

So, back in ye olde days. I remember seeing the cover to Curved Air's early albums in peoples collections. I even heard some of the music back then. But it was this folky nonsense with a female vocalist warbling as though she needed to clear her throat. I was into Sabbath at the time, so it stood no chance.

Fast forward to modern day, and I got intrigued because a) Cherry Red reissued Curved Air's first albums, and I like the work they do; b) Seeing the covers triggered the nostalgia gene (the guy who had all their albums at the time was a pot-head hippy type, and if you were around his place he'd quickly go through his collection saying "buy this!" because he wanted the money for more pot. His albums covers reeked of reefer. )

So, anyway - once Cherry Red completed their reissue campaign they put out four titles in a clamshell box for very little money, and one evening I just grabbed it. Wow, I'm so glad I did. I'm now a complete convert. Their debut album is something else. In fact, I'm so enamored I also bought the individual releases, since those mostly had an extra disc with extras.

Another recent OMG moment was another band from back then, and another female vocalist at the helm - Pentangle. Enjoying Curved Air, Amazon recommended Pentangle, so I bought their debut. Wow, now that's out of this world! I really should have known how good these were because Danny Thompson was a member, and I have several albums that include him as he sometimes plays with Richard Thompson. Still, I now own 6 Pentangle albums with one on the way. Their sound shifted a bit, with more or less depending on the time they were recorded, jazz elements, but again, the debut is a wonderful blend and the other albums are really nice.

In these modern times, with the net etc., stray, random, thoughts or comments get written and you tend to be held to it forever. God forbid you can change your mind on something! Yet I've changed my mind of lots of music. Some I hated and now like, and some I liked but now find dull. It's all about being a human being and following the ebb and flow of your journey through music. We shouldn't be so precious and dogmatic about things, especially the arts and music. Today's junk is tomorrows gold. When it comes to these two bands, I've done a 180 and don't feel I need to apologize for it. At the time I heard them, way back, I wasn't ready to embrace their sound, it's as simple as that. Today I am.

Never, ever, be afraid to embrace things you've disliked in the past. It's a very natural result of maturing and finding different interests and gateways to new things. Even on this forum, we should readily accept that a post made a year ago, 60 months or 6 months ago, was a snapshot in time, not something carved into stone.

Yes. Some of you need to accept Bowie's Tonight (another album I've done a 180 on).

 

All 3 Nick Drake albums. Granted, I don't think anyone knew of Nick Drake until a couple decades after he died.

 

This one predates me, more like from my older brother's youth but I discovered this a couple of years ago and found it to be a great power trio album and much different from their other releases.

 

I would think that the most dramatic for me is Iron Maiden. I ignored them back in the day only to discover them about 10 years ago which would have been when I was mid 50's.

There are many dozens of albums from the early 70's that I've discovered since the internet exploded along with the reissue of albums that were obscure even at the time of release

 

Always liked that cover, however, the band/album doesn't do a lot for me. I do have a CD reissue.

 

I was born at the end of the 60s so I'm not going to include any of the 70s classics, I would have been too young to realistically have heard an album like, for example, Marquee Moon.

In terms of the 80s when I was a teen and into music, I did like The Smiths but never owned or heard all of Meat is Murder and The Queen is Dead until relatively recently. Same with classic mid 80s Fall albums like This Nations Saving Grace.

 

Luiz Bonfá - The Bonfa Magic (1991)

 

All the 80s acts !

I was a teenager in the 80s.
But I only listened to "old" 60s and 70s music.

It's only in the years 20k when I was 40+ that I started to open up on Prince, The Police, Dire Straits, Level 42, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, ...