if The Beatles are not your favourite band...

[naughty boy]

...who is?

just one nomination, please

[Darkness_Fish]

Nah, it's just The Beatles for me. They were fab. Proper song craft.

[driftin]

The Rutles

[George P. Smackers]

I guess I think that the idea of "favorite band" is a bit more personal than the answer "The Beatles" could express. They're too "great" to be that, it's like saying the Mona Lisa or Starry Night is your favorite painting. I'm a Beatles skeptic anyway, but even if I weren't, I'd feel funny thinking of them as "my favorite."

[naughty boy]

Nah, it's just The Beatles for me. They were fab. Proper song craft.

So....Bauhaus, then?

[Darkness_Fish]

Current 93 would be the obvious pick, though Coil run 'em close.

[clive gash]

The Dan with The Clash close behind.

[Dayodead]

The Beatles are important in that they were one of the first bands I listened to from my older brother's record collection, when I was a kid...That fact would not make them my favorite, though....A building block, if you will...(If we were ranking, they wouldn't be in the Top ten)....My favorite band is Yo la Tengo..

[Diamond Dog]

Paul Weller.

[Rayge]

It's changed a lot over the years, but currently, and for last 20 years, Yo La Tengo is a good shout.

[toomanyhatz]

The Velvets or Television, probably. (Hmm...will I take TV's Capitol album over "Real Love?" Tough call.)

[naughty boy]

It's changed a lot over the years, but currently, and for last 20 years, Yo La Tengo is a good shout.

[clive gash]

Whoever John Reynolds reckons is the best.

[bobzilla77]

The Who.

It's one of the only things that has remained consistent about me since the 70s. There's been times I wasn't interested in what they were currently doing, and times when I was way more interested in some new thing I was just finding out about. Today, if they announced they were playing live, I would probably try to go but not fuss too much if it was too expensive or too much trouble to get in. But in terms of having a "favorite band", they've been it since I was 11.

[Phenomenal Cat]

It's changed a lot over the years, but currently, and for last 20 years, Yo La Tengo is a good shout.

I saw them once years ago and it was simple game of Spot the Influence. I walked out.

[Rayge]

It's changed a lot over the years, but currently, and for last 20 years, Yo La Tengo is a good shout.

They're a good band with a lot of variety and a huge debt to the Velvets, and they're still releasing good material 30 years after they started.
And that is a factor. No matter how much I loved bands such as the Velvets, Love, Jefferson Airplane, the Pistols, the Byrds, the Yardbirds, the Magic Band, Roxy Music, the Who – and I loved them all, at least for a while – there's been nothing worth listening to that's new for 40 years or more from any of them, and several of them shat on their earlier work with later careers as soloists, or reformations, and so on. Often, my likes are distilled down to just a few tracks that I don't venture beyond. Even later favourites such as Joy Division/New Order, Mercury Rev and Sonic Youth have broken up or faded out.
And it also needs saying that most of my favourite tracks are by soloists, vocal groups or here today gone tomorrow bands.

[algroth]

It changes, but for the last couple of years it's been Magma for me. Can't get enough of them.

[Dayodead]

It's changed a lot over the years, but currently, and for last 20 years, Yo La Tengo is a good shout.

I saw them once years ago and it was simple game of Spot the Influence. I walked out.

If you actually saw them, then maybe you should have stuck around to see they are far more than their supposed (and overstated) debt to influences like VU...

[clive gash]

They look like shite though, not nearly as cool as Walt and Don.

[clive gash]

When Teachers Rocked!