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A boozy bar-side discussion gets nostalgic: just who did turn you onto music, beyond the popsters filling the charts (and, of course, fuelling the comparatively weaker budgets for some of our favourites) and the regular channels spewing sound-alike boy/girlband slush? Rifle through memory banks pixellated by pints too many, over years too few (a necessary evil of this business, at least ‘til you’re forty and/or diagnosed with something preventative)… um… oh yeah.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and this week’s DiScussion celebrates those bands; the brave men and women who had a chance taken on them, and their thrusting forth into the wider world opened teenage ears (or pre-teen lugs, even, if you were lucky/cool enough) to sounds fascinatingly new, even if they weren’t, really. These bands, we’ll call them Gateway Acts – today you can look at a band like Enter Shikari, crazy-popular with The Kids, and acknowledge that they are a Gateway Act. Today them, tomorrow Refused… and then on to Botch, maybe. Basically, a world is opened by a source deemed creatively irrelevant by critics such as myself. They serve a purpose beyond any surface-evident intentions.

Me, I was getting into music just as something significant was stirring stateside; before I knew it I was copying a copy of a copy of a Soundgarden cassette, Badmotorfinger, and getting fed names by a friend whose older sister was, at the time, this amazingly cool girl who knew all about the sort of music I wanted to be owning. Red Hot Chili Peppers – brilliant, before I’d even got a copy of Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Mudhoney – I wanted to be in them well prior to pressing play on Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. These names were like mythological greats to me – names I wanted scrawled on my First Year pencil case, on my glasses case, on anything I displayed publicly at school, where the lines were drawn regarding Who Likes What Music, And What That Says About Them. I was, before I actively sought to be one, a ‘grunger’.

But, of course, one band above all set me on my way: Nirvana. Absolutely, positively, the most important band the development of my musical tastes and appreciation. I played my Nevermind tape to death, its final few minutes sounding awful as the deck chewed up the cheapo C90 I’d used to rip-off another copy of a copy. (Incidentally, I ‘properly’ owned Bleach _before _Nevermind, although the latter LP was already widely available at the time of said purchase. I’m not that cool.) When I got the album on CD, I was hooked: I accumulated as much Nirvana material as I could, up until I was about 20, and now have a shelf full of singles, promos and crap bootlegs; they, however massively popular they were in the world outside of my bedroom, meant everything to me. The first anniversary of Kurt’s passing was marked by my group of mates, one of whom still a ringer for the late singer, with a trip to Southampton to watch Dumb & Dumber. Tears of laughter, tears of sadness, muddled with only Jim Carey for comfort.

From Nirvana, I moved through some Britpop – Oasis, Blur, Pulp, early Radiohead – and onto a group of bands I’d read about but never ever would have listened to had it not been for the Nirvana Affect: The Melvins, The Jesus Lizard (yes, I have the split, on blue vinyl), Flipper, Earth… many more. Now, whenever I look over my Nirvana collection, I’m spurred to play something else. No disrespect to the band that quite clearly kick-started my love of music; more a celebration of the fact that their influence has pointed me to so many more brilliant bands, either directly or completely not.

So, that’s me. I’d also say Radiohead have been hugely significant in my musical growth, but they didn’t click with me ‘til the second release of ‘Creep’ (as featured on Now 26, where I first properly heard it). And besides, they’re still firing on all cylinders and are, quite possibly, still a Gateway Act for eleven and twelve year olds today. Maybe... Okay, probably not. Now, some other DiS staffers recall their own Gateway Acts:

Mike Diver, 27

Christ... now here’s some dirty laundry I don’t want to air in public – my inroad to music geek analdom would have to be the Manic Street Preachers, I suppose, after previous obsessions with Guns ‘N’ Roses, Nirvana and Radiohead amounted to nothing. The trick was they were very open about flagging up bands a lot better than they were, most notably The Clash, but also Buzzcocks, Wire, The Smiths, Joy Division and, when I’d started scraping the barrel of UK punk with makeweights like The Undertones, the artier/less-shouty strains of the American punk scene. I was actually into Television, The Stooges, Richard Hell et al just before The Strokes hit, which led to intermingling feelings of smugness and territorial despair on my part. And some dodgy leather jackets.

Alex Denney, 25

I can understand why At The Drive-In might seem a dubious choice for a Gateway Act, given that they weren’t Green Day, or Oasis, or the Libertines, never achieved any real commercial success and they’d all but imploded by the time I got round to hearing ‘Arc Arsenal’ for the first time. But it’s the distance that lay between myself and the quintet – I never once saw them live – that, I think, allowed my interest in them to explode into teenage obsession. Before that, all had been on hand and obvious, my record collection belonging to the classicist rock canon that continues to vaunt acts inbred by ‘60s Byrds jangle and the Beatles’ impish pursuit of popular culture. ATD-I didn't measure up to what my dad and my friends called ‘real music’, but to ears fortunately raised on the bruised destiny and skewed mind’s eye of Bowie the spine-tingling dive mid-way through ‘Arc Arsenal_’ sounded like the real-est thing I could be listening to at the turn of the century.

DiScuss: What bands turned _you onto the fact that there was so much more beyond Top Of The Pops, and at what age? Seems most of us found our musical feet in our early teens, or just before. What Gateway Acts are in circulation today? Green Day, maybe? What about a band like Gallows, who may inspire slam-dance-happy youths to explore punk’s past? Are there any breaking-through bands right now that you can see eventually having an influence comparable to a Radiohead, or a Nirvana?