David Bowie versus Pink Floyd: What are our favourite albums?

Independently minded - by Sheffield artist Pete McKee. (image reproduced by permission of the artist).

To mark Record Store Day tomorrow, we asked some of Yorkshire's independent record shops to choose their favourite album of all time and why it means so much to them.

Adam Gillison, Jumbo Records, Leeds

More Specials - The Specials

Favourite albums of all time are always a difficult thing to isolate, as inevitably they are always subject to context: fashion, culture, politics of the time - or just the mood that you are in. More Specials is, of course, subject to context too, but it partially evades this because it was an album out-of-context even when it was released in 1980.

At the height of the popularity of the ska craze, the Specials effectively created an album of psychedelic muzak, liberally dotted with reggae, soul and rock’n’roll along the way. It was an impossibly weird album at the time, and still feels quite alien today.

Of course, this means little without the songs, but the Specials were absolutely at the top of their game - tracks like Do Nothing, Stereotype, Man At C&A and Hey Little Rich Girl capture the viciousness of the era like nothing else.

And then there’s the band - a huge band of giant musical personalities that could have worked against each other (who knows? maybe they did), but formed one of the great music gangs.

The era-defining Ghost Town was the curtain call for this lineup, but More Specials was the record which paved the way.

Video - Record Store Day 2016: What and where to spend your hard-earned cash on ...

Paul Lowman, The Inkwell, York

Endtroducing - DJ Shadow

The cover of Endtroducing is a photo of two guys digging for vinyl in a record shop. It’s fitting. Endtroducing is a record about records, a collage of painstakingly arranged beats, melodies and snippets of spoken word sampled from hundreds of vinyl records.