Hawkwind - Silver Machine
Still my favourite band of all time, and this is the song that goes on whenever there's something inside me I can't express - an emotion I can't name or describe, but I know if I don't get it out, it will burn me like acid. I dance around with no trace of self-consciousness, I sing at the top of my voice, and it opens the pathways for the worst of whatever's inside me to get away. It has never failed to make me feel better afterwards.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYv2n-hRsa0

They've done hundreds of other songs, but this, for me, is the ultimate one. Loud, fast, weird, trippy, and I can't hear the opening chords without the hair prickling on the back of my neck. The song itself isn't linked to any significant moment in my life the way some of the stories here have described, but there was one incident that sticks in my mind.

They were playing at the Liquid Rooms in Edinburgh a few years ago, so I trotted along to see them, and ended up at the very front. They launched into this one, and I saw this huge smile on Dave Brock's face. Now he must have played this song literally thousands of times in the several decades since they wrote it, and he still had this absolutely beatific smile on his face as he wired into it. It came across as a combination of "This is so much fun!" and "I still can't quite believe this is my job!".

Now this may just be that over the years he has consumed his entire body-weight in drugs, several times over, but I don't think so. The smile didn't just light up his face, it lit up his entire body. I can't hear the song now without thinking of that smile, and the echo of it lingers within me well after the song has ended.

Better than Prozac any day of the week.
(Leo Sasquatch hates being the grown-up, Sat 30 Jan 2010, 14:27, Reply)