Released: 1998 Label: Hut Records When I bought: 1998 In 1998, The Verve could do no wrong. Urban Hymns had dominated the zeitgeist, Richard Ashcroft was the very definition of cool, and seemingly everyone wanted to parody the 'Bittersweet Symphony' video. Nailed on for that year's Mercury Music Prize, surely? Indeed not. Instead, another group of northern young men with guitars walked away with the gong, and a cheque for £25,000. Gomez hailed from Southport, played their first gig in Leeds, and signed to Hut Records (a subsidiary of Virgin Records) in 1997. Their debut album, 'Bring It On' came out in March 1998, but it's fair to say it didn't set the world on fire. The Mercury Music Prize win - which came a year to the day of signing their record deal - gave the album a burst of publicity and sales. I bought the record off the back of that win, but was so deep in my Britpop phase I didn't really connect with it. So that was that. I didn't listen to...
Pretty much every day I listen to a record from my collection randomly picked by my daughter before she goes to school. This is to justify still having hundreds of CDs (and a few cassettes and vinyl)