24. Aero Dynamik, Kraftwerk (2003)

After I'd left, we went on with our lives, meeting only once or twice before my long trip to Brixton, a strange, solo journey down the Victoria Line. Kraftwerk were the guardians of our new identities as friends; a strange fate for one of the first groups that had bound us together. Their Tour De France Soundtracks – an album released the previous sweltering summer, and one I hadn't as loved quite as much as I'd wanted to – jetting through my ears for the week leading up to it, sounding like a new record, taking me through my city, giving every movement a silvery sheen.

That night, they were wonderful. And he had met someone new, someone lovely, someone much better suited, and his eyes seemed to shine in a whole different way. I was moving on too, and these songs from our past seemed to beat with fresh energy. Numbers dazzling me, Man Machine gleaming, but Aero Dynamik standing out, holding youthfulness within it, a special kind of brightness. It was the sound of a band doing new things, a soundtrack for people being transported to new places.

23. The Girl From Brownsville, Texas, Jim White (2004)

Play here.

Before I left, before Will Young, this is what happened.

We'd just moved to Archway. The summer of 2003 was the hottest in years, the weather hanging over the city like a heavy blanket. The previous summer had been sunny and perfect, every stall near our flat in Ridley Road lit up for the World Cup. Most of them had two flags – one for England, the new homeland, and one for the old country, whether that be Senegal, Cameroon, Nigeria, Croatia, Tunisia. And this being Dalston, there were thousands for Turkey. When they got to the semi-final, the noise was unbelievable, cacaphanous, euphoric – an orchestra of car horns, cheers and klaxons turning our part of town into an Anatolian concert hall.

By 2003, everything had changed. Heat was rotting the meat, flies were circling like vultures. One early morning, a consignment of huge snails fell off the back of a truck on the market, winding up the tarmac, slowly trying to escape. Around this time, we decided we should move on.

We were only in Archway together for six months. I loved that flat tenderly – three floors of tiny rooms, all stacked up like a Jenga tower. Highgate Woods within ten minutes, Highgate Village over the hill, the Parkland Walk round the corner, Archway Video next door, our local, The Worthington, doing curry half and half, Luigi Pizza up the road doing free limoncello, and a rent that was stupidly, brilliantly cheap. We would sit in the kitchen, beaming at our good luck, but still something wasn't right, something wasn't there, the last piece of the jigsaw wasn't slotting into place. It wasn't him – he was lovely – but it wasn't me either. I didn't know what it was.

But then, the new year arrived. Looking back, I'm still so sorry about what happened, and the way that I had become. And if you're reading this, I'm still sorry too. Thank you for still being my friend, and for being one of the greatest people I have ever met.

Before I left, we'd bought the Rough Trade Country compilation. We played it on the same dusty CD player that we'd had in Dalston, the same player which would blast out The Streets. But by now, it was winter, that winter where that gorgeous Will Young song was playing over the radio every day, every hour, reminding me, painfully, just what I should do.

He would put this compilation on in the kitchen, and I would wait for the song by Jim White, an early demo of a track that would be released the following year. He would play it as he made spaghetti bolognese, as he boiled the kettle, as he smiled as beautifully as he always had. When the CD finished, and he would head upstairs, I would go back and play this track again, looking for it to speak to me, as people always do in times of deep sadness. It said, "My history of dreams is a scandal/Of back-assward schemes and romantic disasters", "Lord, you dealt me more cards than I could handle", "I know only one cure for a permanent tear in your eye". Listening to it now, it seems like a song lost in time, a song from another world entirely. It is a song from a time when I took leave of my senses, when I took leave of everything, when leaving was the only thing I knew.

22. Leave Right Now, Will Young (2003)

Because I had to. And because I did.

21. Far Away, Martha Wainwright (2005)

Two words, that's all it took. A female voice, alone, at the start of a record, all sweetness and smoke, its softness frayed to rough edges.

Three seconds, that's all it was. I still find it astonishing that voices can do this, out of nowhere, out of nothing.

Martha Wainwright's Far Away, like so many of the songs from these fifty, was a song I first heard at my desk at The Word magazine. At that point, we would've been in the room on the second floor with the industrial portholes – it felt like our own little tugboat, set sail on the sea of Pentonville Road. Later, like imperial conquerors, we would ascend to the top floor, and I would tuck myself into the back, left-hand corner of the ship, my wall covered with posters and flyers, surrounded by mountains of books and CDs, cooling cups of coffee and Keith Drummond's sweet wrappers.

But Martha came to me before that, when we hadn't yet risen, when I was sitting next to Dave, by the sofa on which Mark would curl up like a cat, pretending to have an afternoon nap.

I'd play this song over and over – when I was trying to write, trying to edit reviews, when I was proof-reading chromalins, my hands and my arms, somehow, covered with ink. I don't know why this song calmed me down, especially given that its lyrics are so agonised, so intense. The part where Martha sings, "I have no children/I have no husband/I have no reason to be alive, oh give me one", in particular, still sticks out from the song like the cry of a wounded cub. But somehow it manages not to sound needy, only desperately sad. It still cuts me completely, right through to the bone.

Three years later, now no longer tucked into my corner, I met her. We had spoken on the phone for a few hours, so I could write a short biography for her record company – a job I couldn't quite believe I'd been asked to do. Then she played a gig to promote the new website I was editing, which I couldn't quite believe either. I remember standing on stage in a bright green dress I had bought from a vintage shop, announcing her set from her microphone, my palms clammy with nervousness, and her coming on, planting a kiss on my cheek.

And then she played Far Away. The whole world seeming to stop in the gaps between her notes, until her voice made it spin again.

20. Once Around The Block, Badly Drawn Boy (2000)

New Years Eve, Manchester, 2000. A year after the day when nothing went right. Now, a cold car snaking from Swansea to the North on treacherous, snowy roads. The cold burn of a winter after a summer in which anything, anything, seemed to be possible.

I had fallen for him – WHACK – between the students' union bar and the Star and Garter, the two of us kissing at Smile as if it we'd invented it, a weekend in a daze, my whole life all mapped out. His name in my head constantly like a neon sign, blazing as brightly as his bleached, blonde crop, the halo of it protecting me for the next week. And then, five days later, him arriving in London. Smoking cigarettes by the sculpture at Euston while I waited for train, his sweet face arriving, the woozy wander home, wrapped up in each other, giggling ourselves daft. Sharing falafel at Holborn that we could barely afford, sharing whisky at a Turnham Green bus stop to keep ourselves cosy, listening to Badly Drawn Boy when we got home to my basement room, my housemates not seeing us for days, not wanting to escape, not wanting to leave, until he had to go home, until he made the call.

It had only been a fortnight. He came back after his exams, like a homecoming soldier, for two more attempts, for two misty weekends. The first – his face at another train station, his kiss on my forehead, his bony, skinny body back in his messy bed. The second – the Glastonbury Festival, the £2 Tiny Tea Tent truffles, everything unravelling, Black Box Recorder singing for us about a girl in the wreckage. Him going home, me moving to Muswell Hill, a tiny, fairylit bedroom with barely enough space for a folded-up futon, endless tears on the shoulder of my best friend, Alex, our legs dangling out of the window to our overgrown garden, cigarette ashes on the windowsill, red wine dulling the pain.

And now, six months later, I was returning. Welsh Dan driving a car of us up to Richard's new house, far away from Longsight, far away from our short time together. He teased me, he mocked me, he put tinned spaghetti on my cheek like a madman, he grinned when I cleaned it, when my eyes welled up. And then we went to the concert. In the Castlefield Arena it was minus three degrees, and no cornershop Scotch could keep my bones warm. He disappeared into the crowd just before Badly Drawn Boy came on, and when Once Around The Block began, Welsh Dan held my arm, and my cheeks iced with tears.

When midnight finally came, just like the year before, there were no fireworks for me. But as the minutes ticked by, something had to change. I grabbed a policeman on my way out for no particular reason, and gave him a big snog to general merriment. It made me smile for the first time it ages. It also made me realise that if I wanted to go on, then I couldn't go back.

I fell asleep in my clothes, and woke up with a purpose. Later that day, my train pulled into Euston, I left his ghost on the platform, and I knew I had made the right decision.

19. Let's Push Things Forward, The Streets (2002)

A kitchen in Dalston that we'd painted yellow, a dodgy CD player gathering dust, and the skinny half of the pair of us flailing around between the spaghetti bolognese he'd take four hours to cook, and a sink full of dishes – my skinny boy with sideburns and a Seventies shirt, a ladle in one hand, a tea-towel in the other. When anybody mentions The Streets, l hear the opening horns of this song, and the years peel away. I'm taken back to Barry, the 26-year-old boyfriend of 24-year-old me, and the flat that we shared on the dark side of town.

We thought Ridley Road was wonderful. We lived in Regal House, a white and blue building that would've looked spick and span if was on a sunny riviera, had been rubbed free of griminess, and had a view of bobbing fishing boats rather than the North London Line. But it was ours, it was cheap to rent, and we loved it. We loved the noise of the stalls on our street and the cheap food we would buy from them; the calypso that would soar from the food vans and record shops; the buildings we'd see rising up from the gloom of the city, including the Gherkin transforming from a root to a rocket; and even the rumble of the nuclear train every night at 10.30, drowning out the telly with its rattle and hum. We also loved the way the empty marketplace looked at night-time, a forbidding, shadowy avenue strung with tiny, glowing lights. For some reason, It made me think of Spaghetti Westerns, and I would often stride through it, in the dark, on my own, pretending I was Clint Eastwood (Good God, I was braver then). Although I'd have a Mr Bagels' veggie special between my teeth at that time, probably, instead of a toothpick or a sexy cigar.

Original Pirate Material was an album that we couldn't stop playing over that perfect year. It whirred as we painted our new home in all sorts of silly colours, and it entertained the mice that we hadn't known about just as much as us. It was also a great place for parties, and the best that we held there was on that New Years' Eve. The fancy dress theme, as these parties always had then, was the album sleeve. I went as the girl on Saint Etienne's Foxbase Alpha – my sign immaculate in red and black fit tip, before my rosé bloody ruined it – while Barry, a fan of The Wedding Present, went as George Best. There were two Live Through Thisses, two Parallel Lines (one male Blondie, one female), a couple as the White Stripes, an Aladdin Sane who fell asleep and smudged her zig-zag, a Meat Is Murder who kept looking at someone she shouldn't have, a Wish You Were Here who filled the flat with orange tissue paper, an inventive Sticky Fingers – with a literal large carrot down his trousers – and a blonde female friend transformed into Craig David with a goatee, headphones and beanie.

The costumes I remember most fondly, however, were the Original Pirate Materials. Guy in a t-shirt covered with yellow neon stickers – a lit-up block of flats disguised as a real human boy – and Lucy walking around in a big cardboard box, windows drawn on her sides, a pirate hat on her head, a peacock on her shoulder. I remember Guy drawing a scary rabbit in one window, and Lucy tapping her fag on him, before everything got a little hazy. Apart from us all flailing around to Let's Push Things Forward, half-drunk, half-asleep, without a care in the world.

18. Destroy Everything You Touch, Ladytron (2005)

I couldn't believe what was happening when I first heard this song. It was if someone had grabbed a test tube and concocted a pop song precisely for me – a girl in her late twenties obsessed with the sounds of space, who loved icy singers, shiny synthesisers and incredible introductions. This was all in that song, and I swear – sorry, Mother – that it will always be one of my favourite singles. If you haven't heard it before, I implore you to play it now by clicking that arrow up there – feel it kick in, rise you up, take you somewhere sublime.

For months, I'd put it on my iPod and I left home every morning, my heart rising in its chest as the momentum as its beginning kept building – rising and rising and rising and rising. Its first note would blast out like a bomb every time, lifting my right foot right up, placing it back on the ground with fresh force and fresh meaning. This song made me feel indestructible. This song made me feel like the queen of the world.

It should also have been number one forever, but it wasn't to be. Some record company wrangles for the band meant this song became a lost classic, a piece of perfection frozen in time, a jewel lost in the galaxy. It would have to wait four long years to have its reprieve, too. Playing over the opening credits of The September Issue, the artful documentary about American Vogue, it carried Anna Wintour's cool struts and hard glances as the film swung into life, framing her conquering New York for the millionth time. The next day, I listened to it again as I strode through the wet streets of Hackney, and I knew exactly, precisely, how fantastic that felt.