This is the first of thirty-three posts, one per day, marking the last month or so to my 33-and-a-third birthday. The aim of this series is to list, and briefly discuss, 33 of the LPs that were most influential in my musical education. I'm excluding multiple-artist compilation albums, I'm excluding singles collections and greatest hits, and limiting myself to one work per performer. This isn't a list of the 33 best albums I've owned, but 33 of the most influential in my life. And though this is personal, and in a sense is autobiographical, please do not interpret this as a full or complete autobiography.

The story begins in March 1990, when I would attempt to tune in to Radio Scotland's national chart show, which went out between 8 and 9.30 of a Thursday night. With the lighter evenings, reception became increasingly difficult, but I still managed to hear some good tunes. One of them was Kiss this thing goodbye by local act Del Amitri. Frustrated by the single's lack of success nationally, and by local radio's reluctance to play the song, I felt compelled to purchase the record. However, by the time I got into town, the single had gone, and all that was left was the album.

And so it came to pass that the first album I purchased with my own money was Waking Hours, for the princely sum of £4.99. These were ten songs that I'd get to know inside-out - the hand-claps on Kiss this thing goodbye, the melancholic chord progression of Nothing ever happens, the cute lyrical joke on Empty. I think the novelty of having so many songs from one performer rather blinded me to their faults; Del Amitri wasn't a bad bunch of performers, but they were terribly earnest. It turned out that I'd been hooked by the one happy song on the record.

33 and a third

So, here's the situation. Exams are looming, and all you've got in your record collection is one record by a bunch of maudlin Scots, one by Jive Bunny that your parents bought on a misunderstanding, and a dozen or so singles that are beginning to show their age. And you've got a tenner eamarked for luxuries to get you through revision.

My preferred option was to tack back, and find a performer that had made a lot of singles I liked. If five singles had come off the work, and I'd liked them all, chances are that the rest of the album would be good. In the event, it boiled down to a choice between Madonna's Like a Prayer and Deacon Blue's When the World Knows Your Name. The latter was the one I went for, I think because it was 50p cheaper.

I'm convinced that I made the right call. Here was an album that flowed, one song into another, almost as if it were a couple of 20-minute titles with courtesy breaks. But, better than that, here was an album of optimism, of possibiities, of getting things done. There were some exhilarating upbeat tracks - Wages day, Queen of the new year, The world is lit by lightning - but some reflective and poignant ones, particularly Sad loved girl, which reminded me of someone I had my eye on at the time.

When I finally got the Madonna album, almost eight years later, my decision was vindicated. Like a Prayer is one outstanding song and a lot of decent ones. When the World... is one outstanding song, then another, then another.

There is only so much Deacon Blue that one person can take. By the time September came round, I was after something a bit different. Partly to ingratiate myself with one of their fans, but mostly to expand my horizons, I acquired the Cocteau Twins' newish album, Heaven or Las Vegas. This was a record unlike the previous works in my collection; even though Liz Fraser's vocals were audible, and it was clear she was singing actual words, this was a collection of sounds, not of songs as I had known them. Repeated listening paid great dividends, enabling me to know the tune and concentrate on the words, always the difficult bit to fathom. I don't think I've ever tired of listening to this album, there's always something new to discover. Stand out track? Difficult, because they do blend into one long piece, but the title track is probably the clincher.

Flushed with success from the Cocteau's album, I took a calculated leap into one of the local bands who had hit it big over the previous years. The Wonder Stuff - along with Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned's Atomic Dustbin - were the visible faces of a small Black Country scene circa 1990. The scene didn't catch the eye of the national press, who were still obsessed with the creatively-bankrupt Madchester phenomenon. Living on the fringe of the Black Country, this was the people we knew - in the case of Stuffies' drummer Martin Gilks' father, literally.

Hup had been out for just over a year when I bought it, and had already delivered one substantial single, Don't let me down gently, and the smaller but more infectious Golden green. Most of the album was upbeat work, with fiddles and banjos and call-and-response vocals suggesting that Kirsty MacColl might leap out at any moment - as she did on the next album. There were a couple of slower songs, including the rather good Piece of sky, but most of the album was performed at a breakneck pace. Stand-out track from this distance is Them big oak trees.

At the start of 1991, Jesus Jones had been described in Select magazine as the band "so fresh that you can still smell the cellophane". They'd been on my radar a bit, once for the under-rated Right here right now, never a significant hit here. And because they had a bassist called Iain and anyone who can spell their name properly is OK in my book. And because their lead singer looked rather like one of my good friends. Oh, and their music was worth listening to.

But perhaps not purchasing a full album's worth. It was as if someone had taken a great guitar album, and a great dance album (...what, there's no such thing? OK, a series of great dance tracks...) and put them in a mixer and sent out the result. As individual tracks, all of them worked well - from the barking opener Trust me through the poppy International bright young thing and malicious Welcome back, Victoria to the finale Stripped / Blissed. When put back-to-back, though, the relative similarity of the works counted against them all, and the album's somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

A piece of serendipity led to the sixth Great Album in my list; Good Deeds and Dirty Rags by Goodbye Mr Mackenzie. The group, led by Martin Metcalfe, had been signed to Polydor records in the late 80s; in spite of a huge marketing campaign, they barely registered on the radar south of the border. I did remember their very minor hit single, The Rattler, which was a rattling good tune, and spotted the album in the bargain bin at Woolies for just £2.99. Cheap at the price.

The band says that they took their inspiration from the Pixies; I reckoned that the album channeled the huge expanse of the Mackenzie river basin, the isolation, the slightly nomadic lifestyle. The album's artwork, a careful study in sepia, helped to bring about a nostalgia tone; the music sounded modern, but looked as if it had fallen through a time-warp from the fifties. Though the last few tracks faded away into nothingness, highlights included the epic Good deeds, the stomping Dust, and the eponymous Goodbye Mr Mackenzie.

I forget exactly who alerted me to Runrig - whether it was the goody-two-shoes my parents knew, or the rock chick branching out into new and wholly unexpected directions, or just an appearance on the Scottish Top 40. Starting with the current release and (planning to) work backwards, I'd already bought the Capture the heart ep in 1990, and picked up a copy of The Big Wheel the following June, in its second week on release. At £6.49, it was the most expensive tape I'd yet purchased, and the first sale that would lead to a top-20 album placing.

Everything about Runrig was epic. Their rise to fame, from a local band playing village halls on Skye to having a number 4 UK album with no support from national radio. Their sound, that was epic - anthemic soundscapes such as Flower of the west and tenderness on a huge scale - Abhainn an t-sluaigh is a thoughtful lament about the isolation and dehumanisation of the large city. The group had ambition on an epic scale - slamming Scots Gaelic into the top of the album charts was a remarkable feat, and the album's title track An cuibhle mor set the standard for musical responses to the decline and fall of the Iron Curtain.

And Runrig had ambition on an epic scale. The 1991 lead singer Donnie Munro has twice been defeated in runs for parliaments, while Peter Wishart has twice been elected by the people of Perth. I never got round to exploring much of the back catalogue, and rather gave up on the group after their next album, but The Big Wheel always brings a smile to the ears.

It is not by accident that I've got almost a week into this project without mentioning my brief fling with gratuitously heavy metal. It lasted about six months, and came to an end simply because the genre didn't have enough good songs. Lots of guitar feedback and mumbling into one's poodle perm does not make a proper tune.

However, songsmiths can turn up in the most unlikely places, and Guns 'n' Roses was very much one of them. I bought their Use Your Illusion quadruple album in its first week of release, paying two pence under £15 for the honour. Very few other acts have even tried to release thirty new songs in one fell swoop, and I don't know of any that managed to pull it off in the way GnR did.

Split into two double-albums, I started with part 2, and the quadruple knockout punch of Civil war, Fourteen years, Yesterdays, and Knocking on heaven's door. After that, it was a mix of minor classics (Estranged, So fine, You could be mine) and completely rubbish filler (Get in the ring was puerile at the time.) A similar argument with the other album, which loaded the chaff at the front, and the good stuff on side 2 of the tape.

After about three months, I made a "good bits" tape, throwing away the nonsense and condensing the remainder of the project onto one C90. Nothing I wanted was left off, nothing I didn't want was included for space.

The singles from this album have been overplayed to contemptuousness, at the expense of quality work like Coma and Perfect crime. I got value for my money, and by setting the bar high, I was able to ignore many of the groups that tried to pull off similar tunes without the talent.

After the roots rock blast of Guns 'n' Roses, my next significant album - one I both purchased for myself and received as a yuletide present - was something that the Roses actually recommended. "Go off and buy something from the New Age section" was the instruction on the front of Use Your Illusion, and that could explain why the very new-agey Shepherd Moons was a surprise best-selling album in late 1991.

The album is polite piano-and-vocal music, with the tune generally far more important than the lyrics. Highlights included the rolling Ebudae, Evacuee's remarkable evocation of brass bands playing carols, and the thumping piano stormer that is the album version of Book of days. On the surface, Enya's album is not particularly demanding music, but it has far more depth and substance than much popular music.

1992 began with A-levels, revision, essays. Forty-five minutes working, fifteen minutes relaxing, rinse, repeat. Into this routine, the single fits far more neatly than the album. One of the very few albums I bought that year was through a private trade, swapping some rocktastic nonsense for Prefab Sprout's Jordan: The Comeback.

I've never been able to listen to this album without respecting the original vinyl double-album format - sides of 5, 4, 5, 5 tracks each tell a complete story, and running the tales together detracts from the narrative. Paddy McAloon and Thomas Dolby worked on the twin tracks of celebrity (Carnival 2000, Moon dog) and religion (Wedding march, Scarlet knights), all combining on the title track and the optimistic finale Doo-wop in Haarlem. Some have compared this album to a stage production, others are just awed by McAloon's versatility.

In true Desert Island Discs fashion, if I were restricted to one album, this would be it. Almost all human life is contained in this hour.

Straight into 1993, and the new year sales unearthed a sneaky little gem. Prince of the Deep Water was the album by The Blessing. It began with the classic slipped disk Highway 5, and continued in similar vein for the best part of an hour. It's soft rock music, a clear influence from the blues, but most of the work has gone into the lyrics, and the arrangements, particularly the gospel choir on Hurricane Room.

This album - which cost just 99p - was one I listened to a surprisingly large amount over the next six months. Laidback without being horizontal, it turned out to be the right tune for study and problem-solving. Until researching this feature, I hadn't even thought about the work for the best part of ten years, and that is my loss.

It was impossible to avoid Suede in the early part of 1993. And I didn't particularly want to - their music was a welcome counterblast to the tedium of the still-fashionable grunge. However, when the group's debut album came out in the Easter break, I resisted the temptation to buy at once, and decided that I'd wait until June, after my exams were completed. In the event, I couldn't quite wait and got the album when there were a couple still to take.

The album had been hyped to high heaven, and didn't quite live up to expectations. With that much hype, nothing could. Still, the combination of Bernard Butler's catchy hooks and Brett Anderson's covertly sexual lyrics had a certain cachet, enough to ensure that I'd keep the album in rotation for some years. This aim wasn't helped by the very poor quality of the tape I'd got, audibly wearing out after just a dozen or so plays. You'll know the singles Animal nitrate and Metal mickey, but perhaps not the track Sleeping pills.

There was a period - a very brief period - when I was convinced that ambient dub music could provide everything an ear needed. It can't, but it's still enjoyable in the right circumstances. One such time was the start of my second year at university, fresh with optimism from having survived a tough opening year, and looking to do something good. Turned out that one ambient dub album could help a lot.

Morning Dove White, by Glasgow collective One Dove, was Andy Weatherall's new project. He had mixed blues and dance beats to make Primal Scream remarkably successful in the early part of the decade, and was now turning his attention to the dance beats in isolation. These beats were stripped down to the bare minimum, and Dot Allison added ethereal vocals that came from somewhere close to Liz Cocteau-twin. The result was an hour-long album that didn't bring the group the success they deserved, but helped to open the floodgates for funk-with-light-vocals.

The Bristol Sound would be a great hype just over a year later; by then, my tape was already showing signs of wear. After I'd been searching for some years, the album was re-released by Sony Classical in 2001 - a move that showed just how far the definition of "classical" had stretched in the intervening years. For my money, the highlight is the opening track Fallen, but the whole album is a great one.

Two Songs a Week

It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when Classic FM asked more of its listeners than simple relaxation. Back when it launched, the commercial classical music station was able to break some artistically-challenging music. Philip Glass's Low Symphony, Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, Michael Nyman's Piano Concerto. The last of these, a half-hour suite of music based on a theatre production he'd been involved with, was played hard without ever being played to death. On CD, it was paired with MGV, a piece Nyman had written for the opening of the TGV-Nord line, between Lille and Calais.

For my 21st birthday, my parents bought me a kick-botty stereo centre, and a couple of CDs of my choice. The Piano Concerto / MGV was one of them, and became the first disk that I played that night. The Concerto takes the half-dozen motifs from the original score, and blends them into one fulfilling piece. MGV is, I think, by far the superior piece, as it accurately reflects the pulsing and motion of a train travelling from Lille to Calais. And not the other way round. I had hoped to listen to this piece while taking precisely that journey last year, but an MP3 player that had decided to become a piece of plastic ruled out that idea. One for next time.

In my final year at university, I spent a lot of time and energy with Sarah N, a law student who was a mysterious tragic drama heroine. One of her favourite albums was Hounds of Love, the 1985 release from Kate Bush, herself a mysterious tragic drama heroine. The album was knocked down to £4 in the sales that new year.

The album, as is common knowledge, splits into two halves. The first half, containing the singles such as Running up that hill and Cloudbusting (or "Cee! Nee-naw. We're coming in, chummy!" to Identi-hit afficionadi). The second half of the work is a concept piece about a boy who is floating on the ocean, apparently without hope of rescue. One of the things we've lost in the CD format is the ability for an album to change gear between side 1 and side 2.

A good friend inspired this purchase, and she always had taste. The title track reminds of nights spent barking at the moon, as one does.

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If she's best known for one thing, it's the theme music to seminal eighties show The Krypton Factor. Composed for the 1986 series, the aggressive synth stabs would become synonymous with television's toughest quiz, and would remain with the show for its remaining ten years. But there was more to Anne Dudley than the soundtrack to Gordon Burns, an element conveniently ignored from last year's biographical programmes on Radio 2.

No, there was her work on Jeeves and Wooster, the lyrical prowess of Close (to the edit), and her ambient classical works. One of those was 1995's album Ancient and modern, turning traditional sacred music into something with a modern edge. Familiar motifs, sometimes familiar tunes, but in unfamiliar arrangements. This is perhaps best illustrated on The holly and the ivy - a tune that we all know, in an arrangement that is most unusual.

Though spiritual in background, this album also functions as a secular work. Bridging the classical and ambient-dub sectors, this should have been something that Classic FM ran with; that the station never liked Dudley shows just how small-minded it is.

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I could go one of two ways with the Britpop explosion of 1994-7. I could make it the centrepiece of this project, seeing as how it forms the bulk of my record collection. Or I could pick out just a few highlights, on the not unreasonable grounds that it was fun while it lasted, but few individual records were particularly influential on me. It's the latter path I've taken; maybe I'll come back to the halcyon years more as my 45th birthday nears.

Dubstar was a three-piece band from Newcastle, who trod ground that was broadly similar to One Dove (qv). While the Glaswegians had mostly used vocals as an additional instrument, the Geordies composed proper songs, with verses and choruses and meanings. Their best-known work, Stars, is perhaps amongst the worst songs, but it's a great number to listen to. There are jangling guitars, particularly on the Billy Bragg cover Saint Swithin's day, and a story told in three minutes on Popdorian. Disgraceful, as an album, was dive-away listening during a rocky time, when my career plan dissolved away faster than ice-cream in the summer sun.

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When my career plans went up in smoke in 1996, there was a huge mixture of emotions. Some of the anger and resentment was channelled into fervent support for the Angry Young Woman of that year, Alanis Morissette. Jagged Little Pill had come out in the autumn of 1995, and achieved suitably moderate success. The release of the fourth single, Ironic, coincided with a major marketing push to finally knock Oasis from the top of the album charts. It was in that week's push that I purchased the album, at the knock-down price of £9.99.

The thirteen tracks of Morissette's third album were full of vitriol, but with a subtle undertone of "it is possible to do better than this". From the rage of Right through you to the possibilities of Perfect, there was a clear hint that something in my life could improve, as it did.

This, incidentally, is the album that counts as one-and-a-third in the titular "33 and a third", for I have it in three different recordings. The 1995 original studio album, a 2005 acoustic remake, and each of the songs in a live and/or acoustic form when it came out as a B-side to the six singles lifted from the album.

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Singles represented tremendous value in the mid-1990s - four songs for £2.49, if you bought them in the first week of release, with funky sleeves and free gifts. Such tremendous value came to an end, for it was killing the record companies' big earners, the albums. So, by the start of 1997, it was back to the albums shelves. First off that year was Tragic Kingdom, the third release by Arizona band No Doubt.

The phrase, "You know them for their ballad Don't speak" springs to mind, even though I'd got in two weeks before the single release, when the album was still a Huge Priority, and retailing for under a tenner. In full fairness, the album really is jolly good. It weighs in at just about one hour, fourteen tracks bursting with goodness and vitality and energy. Don't speak, at least as recorded, was a red herring - the band was all about the rock chick in the halter top and baggy trousers, not the demure lass in a dress.

No, the album opened with a triple punch of Spiderwebs, Excuse me mister, and Just a girl, then continued in much the same vein for the rest of the hour. Other highlights include two musically-interesting tracks, The climb and Tragic kingdom, and the heartfelt End it on this. Even the filler was good stuff, and I spent a happy hour - probably the happiest of the flight - bopping along to this album while spending one Saturday afternoon that April looking out on the snowfields of Labrador and Quebec.

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1997 was quite a crazy time, with revolutions in politics, and in fashion, and Britain even managing to win the Eurovision song contest, as crazy as that might sound. One of the more simple, if perhaps not sane and sensible things, was Kenickie, the glittery four-piece band from Sunderland. I'd first heard of them during the previous year, when they were doing interesting things on the radio. When I came back to so-called, Brem and shim were extolling the virtues of the band. I had the opportunity to get their album in its first week on release, and seized it with both hands.

It's a light piece of work, nothing particularly demanding in the thirteen tracks. But the optimism, the joie de vivre, struck a considerable chord with the events in my life. These are songs of possibility, of beginning, of things starting to roll. There was a deliberate irony when I dug out the record late on the morning of 6 September that year. Stand-out tracks include PVC and Nightlife, and that tells a lot about the work.

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Another late-era Britpop album I bought early in its lifespan was The Golden Mile, by My Life Story. You can almost fill in the blanks: Jake Shillingford, pop genius, less class-obsessed than Blur, far more real than Oasis, more well-rounded than most competitors.

The lead single, 12 reasons why, remains an absolute classic, and anyone who can include a song called Strumpet is doing well. This was another album I dubbed to tape, and it came into its own when I had to spend a day wandering around the clifftops of Bournemouth waiting for a friend's wedding to kick off. The album also included a well-thought out interactive section, encapsulating the slightly sleazy but generally respectable end-of-the-pier show.

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On through 1998, which was a bit of a crap year in all senses of the word; indeed, I pretty much gave up listening to music for some months in the middle of the year. Eventually, almost inevitably, the tunes returned into my life.

The Barenaked Ladies had been a mainstay on The Old Radio Five, before it turned into first a rolling news-and-sport station, then into a rolling sport-and-news channel, and now into a sport-and-hell programme. Their late-nineties release, Stunt, generated their only significant UK hit, lead track One week. It's good, but It's all been done and Call and answer are superior tracks.

In retrospect, the album is clearly frontloaded with all the good stuff in the opening half, and degenerating into some rather forgettable filler towards the end. But as something to cheer up a thoroughly ropy time, Stunt was worth its weight in gold.

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In the autumn of 1993, it was impossible to avoid the promotional activity surrounding Bat Out of Hell II. The follow-up to Meat Loaf's masterpiece had been a decade-and-a-half in the making, and tunes from the album were never far from the radio at the time. While I liked the lead single, the rest of the album was less appealing.

Fast forward to the end of 1999, when it's become clear that Bat II has become as much a cultural touchstone as its predecessor. Debate still rages over what the titular That was - debate that I never could understand, for the lyrics of the radio edit of the video remake of the single cut of the album version still make it abundently clear. But it would be wrong to judge the whole album by one, generally misunderstood, lyric. It owes a lot to Jim Steinmann's songs, as perfect as any Gershwin composition, just executed somewhat differently. And it owes a lot to Mr. Loaf's execution, just the right degree of bombast, just the right degree of humility.

Just as Bat I is an album in the style of the late 1970s, so Bat II is an album in the style of the early 1990s. Coming to it six years later ensured that the fashion had drained away, and the quality shone through.

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It was during a week-long party to mark the end of the 1990s that I first heard Gretchen Peters on record. Oh, I'd heard her songs before - Faith Hill had had a massive hit with The secret of life in the past, and Independence day picked up a spin or two on the Light Programme.

While her 1997 album The Secret of Life has many highlights - not least On a bus to St. Cloud and Over Africa, I think I prefer Gretchen's eponymous 2000 work. All human life is hear - Eddie's first wife is as predictable as it sounds, Picasso and me is a hauntingly simple tale about an old woman and her cat.

Over the years, I've seen Ms. Peters play live on no fewer than four occasions, more than I've seen any single other musical performer. Every show contains Secret, every show has Independence, every show has The aviator's song and This used to be my town from her 2004 album Halcyon. But, for some reason, Gretchen never plays In a perfect world. Perhaps it's in full knowledge that there would be a soppy puddle on the floor by the time she'd finished.

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2001 was, by popular consent, a thoroughly barking year. Perhaps the only abiding album from that year was the Avalanches' work, Since I Left You. It's an album entirely created from cut-up bits of other people's music, a technique that was as disorientating as the time. I got the album at some point in the summer, and played it off and on as the world spiralled into madness. Then, when things changed in the new year, I put the album away, not to be dug out until its fifth anniversary. The singles - the title track and Frontier psychiatrist are familiar friends, and I may yet become familiar again with the others that I'd forgotten.

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It's fair to say that the Sugababes were my soundtrack for 2002. The group has just about fallen apart in the first year of the millennium, but re-grouped and picked themselves up. The big comeback single was the mash-up of Freak like me and Are 'friends' electric?, complete with a video that is almost perfect girl power. The rest of the album was also strong, confident, self-assured songs.

Individually, they were entertaining and listenable; taken together, they formed a backbone when one was needed. Stronger was good, and Shape deserved its spin as a single, but my (second) favourite track on the album is More than a million miles, towards the end.

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Perhaps the best signifier of impending middle age is when you catch yourself saying, Hey, this Hall and Oates track is really rather good. In its original incarnation, the light soul of Daryl and John was the butt of more jokes and opprobrium by the fashionistas.

Fast forward to 2003, and the duo make their first record since the 1980s. It is still soul, but they threw off the trappings of modernity (no Method of modern love electronica here) to produce a timeless album that flows into the ears like aural chocolate. Like most modern albums, the best tracks are at the front - the title track Do it for love, the New Radicals cover Someday we'll know, the rather wonderful Forever for you. But the filler tracks, from about number 6 onwards, are still rather good. Intuition was a lost single, and Love in a dangerous time is amongst the greatest songs yet recorded.

I reviewed this album shortly after getting it, in a short-lived "review each album" kick. Since then, the album's been played enough to seep into my bones, yet rarely enough to present a surprise when I hear it.

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2002's series of Star Academy started incredibly badly. We're talking probably the worst entertainment performances that the BBC had yet aired. Though I didn't bother watching much after the first week, the consensus opinion was that it got a bit better. Couldn't really have got worse, unless they invited Jemini to perform...

The following year, a second series took place. The format was hacked around to buggery, there was a pointless and ongoing feud between Richard Park and Patrick Kielty from which neither emerged with any shread of credibility intact. Buried deep amongst this mess was a huge amount of talent. The cheery songwriter Alistair Griffin, the suspiciously bonkers Peter Brame, the talented Paris Campbell-Edwards. Winning the popular vote throughout the series was Alex Parks, who put an intensity and vivacity into all her performances. Here was a talent we could believe in, who we supported as loudly as reasonably possible, and briefly got to meet in the final week of competition.

Introduction was rush-released in November 2003, and was the only album that I've ever bought on the day of release. Almost by definition, it was a greatest hits album, containing five cover versions from the television broadcasts, and half-a-dozen songs that had been begun on screen. Highlights include the unbroadcast cover of Mad world, the self-explanatory Not your average kind of girl, and the REM cover Everybody hurts.

Where did it go wrong for Sparky? Not releasing a follow-up album until autumn 2005 allowed her to drop out of the limelight, and raised expectations so high that they were almost certain to be disappointed. It's not that Honesty was a bad album, just that it didn't live up to anyone's expectations. Alex left her record company by mutual consent last year, and is believed to be travelling the world in search of inspiration, love, and a good bass riff. Introduction remains a classy souvenir of a wonderful ten-week chase.

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By concentrating exclusively on albums recorded by a single performer, I've not been able to mention the Eurovision Song Contest. The annual celebration of European unity began in 1956, but didn't really get going until the 1994 contest, when the new countries of Eastern Europe first appeared on the stage. Ireland won that year with the famous Riverdance, and it wasn't until 2001 that the contest would dive behind the Iron Curtain.

The previous year, Latvia had become the 37th country to tread the hallowed stage. Brainstorm had never felt as obvious winners as the Olsen Brothers, but third place for the brightly optimistic My star was a fair result. I didn't get the album Among the Suns until late in 2003, which was a bit of an error on my part. Though there are filler tracks, most of the songs work as stand-alone pieces, particularly Under my wing and the slightly silly Welcome to my country. It's not the most intense of albums, not the most taxing listen, it's a happy and entertaining work.

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It must have been early 2003 when I was walking home, getting very bored of a discussion on Radio 4 about something. Intending to tune up, I accidentally tuned down, and landed on Radio 3's Stage and Screen programme. They were discussing the forthcoming revival of Leonard Bernstein's Wonderful Town, and played a few songs. A year or so later, I chanced upon the original soundtrack album, starring Betty Comden, and took it without a second thought.

It's the tale of two young ladies who move to New Amsterdam in search of job, love, and a life. The song that hooked me was Conga, a bouncy number that tries to extol the various delights of the city's nightlife, only to be ignored in favour of the eponymous dance. There are other highlights, including the seventeen key changes of Christopher Street, and the jock-u-larity of Pass the football.

The album also contains extracts from an early version of On the Town, including the title track. That scratched an intellectual itch I'd had for many years, as it provided the theme to Radio 4's series Postcard from Gotham.

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Though I've seen Gretchen Peters in concert on a number of occasions, the only person I've seen on two consecutive nights was Melissa Ferrick. She'd been active on the recording circuit for the best part of a decade, and had gained a significant cult following in the years.

Nebraska and Beijing were most certainly not about the Cantonese city and Canadian province. Though Bad bad girl is an eight-minute behemoth of a song, imposing and impenetrable, it's more than made up by the two outstanding tracks Westbound and Anything, anywhere. Unlike most contemporary albums, these gems are tucked away as the album's final tracks, not completed in the first quarter-hour.

It's not so much that Ferrick's 2004 album, The Other Side, was important in my life, as everything it represented. Here was the life and love of Jaeda, one of my best friends in the entire world, condensed into five inches of silver metal. These things help to bridge the gaps...

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Sometimes, the search is more entertaining than the prize. That was almost the case for Scala On The Rocks, an album by a choir. I first heard the group on Xfm's chart show in early 2004, performing With or without you, and managing to hit a note in the final chorus that is amongst the sweetest sounds I've ever heard.

Straight off to my favourite online music shop for a copy, then. "We don't stock it yet, it'll be released in the autumn." Come back in the autumn, then. "Oh yes, sir, £11.49 to you if you don't mind." Two months later, they came back with a rather sheepish "Er, sorry, we can't provide this to you, because the moon is in the wrong house, or something."

I put the album on the back burner for a little while, looking for it in every single record shop I visited. Eventually, paydirt. One copy in my grubby little paws, not letting go until I've paid for it.

The album was worth it. A decent version of Bittersweet symphony, a crisp version of I touch myself, and of Perfect day. Highlight, though, is the sheer wonderfulness of With or without you.

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Natasha St-Pier had been one of those performers who had been on the fringes of my consciousness for many years, without quite percolating past my peripheral vision. The New Brunswick native had represented France at Eurovision 2001, but that was the year of Dr Death and the Tooth Fairy, and St-Pier's quality was lost in a woeful night's entertainment. She'd sprung back in 2003, with a collection of songs that became L'instant d'apres, but I'd still not made the connection.

It took an appearance on TV5's Acoustic programme to join the dots between her past, present, and future. And it took a trip to Belgium to obtain a copy of her work - discounted to €9.95. The obvious highlight of L'instant... is the soaring, optimistic chords of Mourir demain, but the whole album works on a level that is almost impossible for English-language works. The songs make sense individually, but combine to form a soundscape that is greater than the individual parts.

And that, I suggest, is what a good album will do. These 33 have turned the trick for me.

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