A selection byLaurent Garnier
A general selection
Twenty-one records picked and talked through one at a time: Gainsbourg to Bach, La Piscine to the Haçienda, and a seventeen-year-old son's drill playlist. The reasons are his.
- Picks
- 21
- Years
- 1721–2020
- Curator
- Laurent Garnier
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
Ask for a coin of this list →A disc that opens it on a phone — not printed yet
Take 7 of 21 to YouTube → (opens in a new tab)
Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here. 14 of these records have no verified YouTube link yet, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
The picks — selected, not ranked
Serge Gainsbourg / Histoire de Melody Nelson
1971 · Philips
One of the two records I buy compulsively. Every time a flea market has a clean copy I take it, and there must be five of them at home by now, purely in case the first one ever wears through.
Donna Summer / I Feel Love
1977 · Casablanca
The other record I buy on sight. I have played it so many times that I want pristine copies waiting behind the one that is in the bag.
Also on Disco, Roots, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Alain Bashung / Samuel Hall
1998 · Barclay
Bashung mattered enormously to me, and Fantaisie Militaire is where he went somewhere darker and more electronic than anyone expected of him. It is the record that told me to break my own routines and take the risk.
Laurent Garnier / The Cloud Making Machine
2005 · F Communications
What Bashung's turn gave me. I did not want to make another techno album — I wanted to write for choreographers and for cinema. I listened to this one thousands of times while making it, and it opened those doors.
New Order / Blue Monday
1983 · Factory
The classic of classics. I first danced to it at sixteen at La Piscine, a new wave club in Paris; two years later I was in England playing the Haçienda and hanging around with the band. A whole chapter sits in it.
Also on Madchester, The Waxonia Desk — Both Rooms, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
The Sugarhill Gang / Rapper's Delight
1979 · Sugar Hill
The first hip-hop record I ever heard, at thirteen or fourteen. It opened a door onto a music that has not once left my life since.
Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force / Planet Rock
1982 · Tommy Boy
Where electro begins, for me. Those enormous synthesizers carrying a rhythmic energy that lands like a rock record — I had heard nothing put together that way before.
Also on Electro, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Dizzee Rascal / I Luv U
2002 · XL
I am a serious fan of English music, and this is grime at the moment it arrived — something new that owed nothing at all to what the rest of us were doing.
Also on Grime, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Gazo & Freeze Corleone / Drill FR 4
2020
My son, who is seventeen, played me this. I make a point of staying open: listening to what the younger generation is on is how you learn the codes of French drill rather than guess at them from outside.
DJ Rolando / Underground Resistance / Jaguar
1999 · Underground Resistance
A monument. Chicago house felt like a natural continuation of disco; Detroit techno broke the rules altogether and sounded like the future. And this one everybody played — house DJs and techno DJs alike.
Also on Detroit Techno, The Waxonia Desk — Detroit, Heard in Europe, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Serge Gainsbourg / En Melody
1971 · Philips
I like throwing a curveball into a set, and this is what stays in the crate for it: two minutes of psychedelic guitar that takes a floor out of its comfort zone and starts telling it a different story.
Front 242 / Controversy Between
1983
EBM, and exactly the kind of rock-adjacent electronic record I like to drop into a set. It sits at a techno tempo without any help, and it is part of the foundation of this music rather than a novelty beside it.
The Stooges / I Wanna Be Your Dog
1969 · Elektra
I cut my own edits and loops of rock records like this one so they can live in a club without falling apart. It is there to put raw punk energy into the room, so that nobody in it ever gets comfortable.
Bérurier Noir / Porcherie
1985 · Bondage
I played this the night before an election to say one thing to the floor: do not vote for shit. A dancefloor can be a political place, and a DJ can hand a crowd its own feeling back to it, amplified.
Fela Kuti & Africa 70 / Zombie
1976 · Coconut
This one is Radio Nova. I had come out of a very Anglo-Saxon club world in England, and the people there kept putting African and Brazilian records in front of me until my ears were open to all of it.
Also on Afrobeat, 1976, Dancing to Bad News, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Laurent Garnier / The Man With The Red Face
2000 · F Communications
My way into jazz. I cut it with my saxophonist during a stretch when I was deliberately pushing at the edges of what I already knew how to make.
Miles Davis / So What
1959 · Columbia
While recording The Man With The Red Face I could not tell the jazz musicians what I wanted, because I did not have the words. A friend handed me Kind of Blue and said: study this, learn the vocabulary.
Also on Jazz
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion / Skunk
1996 · Matador
The best door into the blues I know — electric, furious, nothing polite about it. Hearing it sent me down an internet hole for months, pulling down every blues record I could find.
Laurent Garnier / Dealing With the Man
2009 · PIAS
A blues of my own. Played live with the band, at Pleyel or anywhere else, it brings something human and sweaty into the concert that I would not want to do without.
Nina Simone / Love Me or Leave Me
1959 · Bethlehem
Her story is the thing. A Black woman in a segregated country, refused the concert-pianist career she had trained for, who took that training and put it straight into jazz and blues instead.
Johann Sebastian Bach / Brandenburg Concerto No. 5
1721
The bridge to Nina Simone, and why it is here at the end. Listen to Bach and you hear the exact classical piano she is playing inside her jazz records — which is the whole argument: it is all one music.
About the curator
French DJ and producer, resident at the Haçienda in Manchester before returning to France, where he became the central figure in the country's electronic music scene and co-founded the F Communications label.