When you load up Spotify, a great big chunk of the time you can’t think what to play, right? You default back to your old favourites, those albums and songs you played on repeat when you first discovered you could make them yours.
This isn’t about guilty pleasures; it’s about those songs you’ll still be listening to when you’re old and in your rocking chair. So, enter Teenage Kicks – a playlist series that sees bands running through the music they listened to in their formative years.
Next up, SOFY.
The Maccabees – Pelican
First mosh pit, Latitude Festival 2013. The irony of moshing to The Maccabees at Latitude is not lost on me.
Catfish and the Bottlemen – Cocoon
Remember vividly going to see them at the O2 Academy in Leicester when they toured their first album, hung around for ages after to get a really embarrassing picture of me and my friends with Van McCann, and my mum was fuming cuz she was on double yellows waiting to pick us all up.
Peace – Happy People
Album came out the same month I passed my driving test. Soundtracked a few near misses on the A1 in my old red Polo. Good times!
Gwen Stefani – The Sweet Escape
Clubbing underage in various now closed-down establishments across LE postcodes (shoutout X&Y bottle bar in Oakham) and we all used to be drunk and annoying and write ‘plsy the swfet escape!!!!!!!!’ in our notes and pass our phones to the DJ – pretty good success rate in the midlands but we tried it in London once when we came up for a night out for someone’s 18th, never did it again after that.
Jamie T – The Man’s Machine
Went to see his Brixton show, and it was the first time I’d ever been down to London for a gig, still the best show I’ve ever been to and the thing that made me decide to make music.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Heads Will Roll
I have visceral memories of listening to this song all summer after we did our GCSEs, probably smoking in someone’s kitchen while their parents were on holiday and thinking some producer from Warner Bros was gonna call us up any second and ask us to shoot Project X: 2. We had red cups and everything. Hahahaha.
David Bowie – Changes
Singing at the top of my lungs in my mum’s car on the way to school or to the shops. My mum loves David Bowie so he was always on.
Passion Pit – Sleepyhead
My cousin is my best mate, and most of my teenage years were spent with her driving around with the windows down, listening to this song or sat the park somewhere chatting shit and wishing time would go quicker so we could move out of our small town. If that version of me knew that in ten years time, I’d be wishing the exact opposite of that she’d probably tell me to fuck off.
Taken from the July 2025 issue of Dork. SOFY plays Dork’s Day Out this August.
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