Now that’s why compilations helped me find my musical feet

Abbey Road Studios may be most famous as the place where the Beatles revolutionised rock music, but yesterday afternoon a select group of professional pop pickers gathered there to turn out a landmark edition of another distinctively British brand: Now That’s What I Call Music, Volume 100.

Yes, Volume 100. But don’t panic. They’ve been knocking out three a year since Sir Richard Branson launched the low-cost series in 1983, so you’re not as old as that fact makes you feel.

But the news still gives many of us a whoosh of nostalgia. Some 120 million Now compilations have been sold in the UK; most of us own more than four.

I got my first Now album in 1984, when I was nine. My dad bought it for me after a cool girl at school asked if I received any good records for my birthday and I began gushing over a copy of Saint Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals that had been recommended by my octogenarian piano teacher. I can still hear her laughter.

It’s not that I didn’t know about pop music. We had loads of records in the house. But I had no sense of the charts, and a limited ability to locate songs in time. I was adrift.

The cheap plastic cassettes of Now That’s What I Call Music 3 tethered me to 1984 – and my peer group – overnight. While the brand’s big rival, Hits, hoovered up the top international artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson, the Now series felt as quirkily British as a Woolworths Pick’n’mix, locating me in place as well as time.

I gulped down bright, fizzy nuggets of Wham!, Bananarama, Madness, Queen and Duran Duran, along with classics by Bob Marley, Grandmaster Flash and Tina Turner. Although much of the material was cheesy, it was curated to ensure a good flow. The sequences burned grooves into our brains. I will always expect the euphoric piano of the Hothouse Flowers’ Don’t Go to be followed by the bass of Morrissey’s Everyday is like Sunday.

Like most customers, I stayed faithful to the brand long enough to get my bearings, then branched out on my own. The last time I heard a Now album was at a millennium party (Now 43, the bestselling of all of them, despite a dull commitment to boring boy/girl bands and their leavings).

So I was slightly surprised to discover the series was still going. I’d assumed the lost nine-year-olds of the 21st century would be finding their musical coordinates online. But Now 98, released last November, shifted a respectable 596,000 copies. Parents who found their musical feet with the brand are apparently falling back on it to give their own kids a leg onto the cultural ladder, ruling it safer than Youtube surfing.

When I posted about the 100th volume on Facebook, I was touched by my friends’ continuing affection for the series. A Bulgarian friend remembered her dad bringing the tapes back before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Another bought compilations from the years her children were born as musical time capsules.

Most movingly, a friend who works as a teacher of adolescents with mental health problems says her institution gave out MP3S of the latest Now album to new patients this year, as a coping strategy. As neurological studies show, when the human mind begins to lose its way, pop songs can plug into the medial prefrontal cortex to remind us not just where and when but who we are, and how we connect to those around us. Now, that’s what I call amazing.