A common pursuit for the X generation is to play the desert island game -- if you could only bring a few records with you to this island, which ones would they be and why. The editors of this book asked a number of famous Irish and UK musicians, writers, filmmakers, artists, and people in the record industry itself to play the game, to tell them which record albums of the 60s and 70s influenced them the most as they were growing up. And so we hear from Marianne Faithfull, Donovan, Ron Wood, from Roddy Doyle and Paul Muldoon, from Jim Sheridan, as they tell us about those albums which lived in their bloodstreams, and the pasts unraveled -- early loves, travel, friendship, experimentation, sex, drugs or, in the words of Led Zeppelin and The Who, the good times, bad times of my generation.

Noted individuals from a generation formed by classic rock select their ten favorite albums, and reflect on the individual choices made, repossessing a vanished past with "notes towards an autobiography through sound" -- and mapping a culture for the X generation, microserfs, cybernerds, and beyond.

My Generation carries a distinct Irish dimension, with each contributor linked to Ireland through birth, blood, or residence. Several hundred albums by Dylan, Presley, the Stones, the Beatles, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and many other singers and groups of this period are listed by over seventy contributors -- familiar and unfamiliar -- who tell us what it was that made these particular records so special to them, how theycan continue to exert a powerful influence on them decades later.

At the end of the century, as a millennial search for identity informs opinion-makers and style-consultants, the sixties and the seventies will be celebrated as a golden era when times indeed a-changed, and music provided its heartbeat.