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Editor's Note: This blog was contributed by overseas writer Rhiannon Easterbrook.

Picture this: a group of men emerge from the mist; they are weary from hard, physical work and are on their way back home to the monastery they inhabit on a small island. Or: four men race from opposite corners of a field to stop an out of control hot air balloon. Then there’s this: a standoff outside a Wild West saloon as the two alpha males finally face each other down.  

They’re all opening scenes, sure, and good ones at that, but they don’t all work in the same way. The middle scene, as you may recognise, is the attention-grabbing first chapter of Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. But what of the other two? Well, they’re both songs, or, more accurately, the images that the songs put into my head. What’s important, though, is that they’re opening tracks. One is ‘Men Together Today’, from the glorious British Sea Power’s inappropriately named The Decline of British Sea Power, and the other, ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us’ on Sparks’ classic Kimono My House.

Everyone remembers their reactions when they first listened to an album that really means something to them: how they started off impressed by some songs and gradually grew to love others as that sudden spark of recognition - or even a feeling of disappointment - gave way to fondness, familiarity and admiration. It’s true that our first exposure to an album is often via a single or a favourite song a friend shares with us, but never underestimate the importance of that first listen of an album, beginning to end, and in particular to that opening track.

To borrow an image from one of my favourite writers, listening to a well-crafted LP is like drawing a circle with a pair of compasses: the first song is like the static point about which the other half turns. No matter where the album goes after those first sounds, it’s always in reference to the impression that was first created.

I can say the same for my favourite novels and films. Take A Matter of Life and Death, for example. David Niven spends the first scene deciding to bail, parachute-less, out of a badly damaged WW2 plane, facing certain death. He spends the rest of the film escaping that death and making Heaven for himself on Earth. Or how about The Usual Suspects, with evidence of violence all around, those orange lights reflected across the water and the mysterious, obscured figure of Keyser Soze, the identity of which is the subject of the rest of the movie?

With very few exceptions, records don’t normally have a storyline, but they can have emotional arcs, arcs of mood or conceptual progressions, even if they are not “concept albums”. Call it a vibe if you want. Remember Is This It, and how its bored, laconic tone evoked the setting and drew up the players for the next ten songs. It also provided a refrain rather humorous for one of the most hyped albums of the last decade.

There are plenty of other artists who can pull off similar tricks. 'Devo Corporate Anthem’ is a robot’s fanfare for the band that thrills us with Duty Now for the Future. Much more subtle, but just as effective, ‘Along Again Or’, creeps in with an acoustic guitar and welcomes us to Forever Changes’s world of loneliness and confusion, which is the colour of Spanish Terracotta and just as easily broken. Led Zep’s ‘Immigrant Song’ is about as clear a statement of intent as it is possible to get while, more recently, France’s apocalyptic electro outfit Justice signal their grand ambitions by naming their first song ‘Genesis’, which, apparently, is mentioned at the beginning of a fairly famous book, although it provides something of a ‘Revelation’, if you ask me. Fnar fnar.

If any band knows how important those opening shots can be, though, it’s Pulp. Somehow combining the politics of Class Struggle with the pizazz of a Hollywood musical, ‘Mis-shapes’ not only set up one of the best albums of the 90s but, with its assertion “We're making a move, we're making it now, we're coming out of the side-lines”, formed a commentary on the band’s own career, all without coming over as self-referential bollocks. ‘The Fear’, meanwhile, simply stated that this was “the sound of loneliness turned up to ten” and boy, were they right. If Jarvis hadn’t been a successful pop star, he could always have worked for Ronseal.

Rhiannon Easterbrook is a hyper-analytical culture-lover, who enjoys listening to music about as much as she enjoys expressing her opinions on it, both loudly in the pub and through the medium of writing.  She is still hoping that she will be Emma Peel from 60s show The Avengers when she grows up.  She is 22.