A musical interlude

I got an email the other day from a friend on facebook. Now, most of you will know I’m not good with facebook and avoid it like a politician avoids the truth. But I clicked over there to take a look and discovered I’d been tagged in a little game that asks you to name fifteen albums that will always stick with you. Well, I do like my music so I’m kind of interested in the game but I have a little trouble with the idea of naming fifteen albums. Don’t get me wrong, I can name plenty of albums that I like and enjoy but there are only a small handful that will stay with me.

I grew up in the sixties and seventies. My mum and dad had a huge record collection from their own past and even my nan, who lived with us, had a few of her favourites. I was the youngest of five so as I grew up I listened, not only to my parents music, but also the music my older siblings enjoyed. These were days of radio more than TV and I can remember listening to Family Favourites, Childrens Favourites and Sing Something Simple. (It wasn’t all music though, we had the Clitheroe Kid and Just a Minute and the Goons too.) But I’ll stick to the music side of things for now. My sister, Penny, was a big fan of Cliff Richard and still travels around to see him even now. Brother Tony was a huge Beatles fan, but then, we all liked them. Derry and John had their own tastes too and as I grew into my teens, I too found my own bands to rave over. There were a lot of teen magazines doing the rounds back then – Fabulous is the only one I can recall at present but I know there were a lot more because they all had posters of bands in them and we cut them all out religiously and pinned them to the walls. We four boys shared a room and the walls were pretty much completely covered. Penny slept in the downstairs bedroom with a life size picture of Cliff pinned to the ceiling directly above her.

Come the seventies and I was earning a wage. This meant I could spend all my hard earned cash in the record shop. I’d get paid, spend it all and then go borrow off my mum for the rest of the week.

I bought myself an afghan coat, tie dyed my jeans, put on my headband and listened to T. Rex, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and David Bowie. When money would allow I went to a few concerts but not as many as I’d have liked. That came later when I’d married and had become a little more responsible with the cash. Evenings were spent listnening to late night radio and finding new music to enjoy. I would listen to a show that played new releases and if I heard anything I liked I’d go to the record shop and order it next day. To this day, when I hear a song I like, I stop what I’m doing and take note of the title and the singer so that I can buy it later.

So that was pretty much the basis of my musical upbringing. Once I’d married Reet and we got our own place I bought a quality hi-fi system (which was still in use up until last year. The speakers are still excellent and have found a new home with brother John. The cd player and the tape deck have all but burned themselves out but the amp and record deck are tucked away in the attic, just in case I decide to dust off my old singles one day). Once we were settled financially and I found I could buy records when I wanted I set out to buy all those songs I enjoyed as I was growing up. I’d always had this vision that I could go to my record collection and pick out anything I’d heard, past or present. So along with the seventies stuff I was paying top dollar for I was also looking in the cheapo shops for old stuff.

When cd burning became possible on my computer and with download sites such as Napster I was in my element. I was amazed at how much old stuff was out there and even some of the songs I considered to be obscure were readily available thanks to a sharing public. Despite being on dial up in those days my mp3 collection grew and grew. I would come home from work, set up the pc to download a selection of songs and then go for my nap. By the time I came back the downloads were either completed or cancelled half way through because the sender had gone offline. Even so, I reckon I downloaded ten songs a day sometimes.

As well as the mp3s, I have more than three hundred singles, two hundred albums and nearly three hundred cds. I also have an I-pod now and have loaded a huge lump of that collection onto it. I’m still totally amazed that I could probably fit my complete record collection onto a gizmo that fits into my shirt pocket! My I-pod has thirty GB of space and I’ve filled nearly twenty four of those with music from my collection so my vision is almost fulfilled. What I’d like to be able to do now is to turn the I-pod into a jukebox kind of affair so that each and every song on board can be selected from a list. I know you can scroll through them all on the I-pod itself but this is fiddly and takes time when there are so many thousands of songs on there. But if I could transfer the list to a screen on the wall and simply tap in the song number like we did with the old pub jukeboxes, well that would be perfect. (I’ve recently discovered that this technology is available but it’s a little expensive at the moment.)

With all this background you have to understand that my musical preferences can date back to the war years, thanks to my mum and dad, and on through the years to around 1983 when I pretty much lost interest in the music of the day. During the eighties and nineties I started looking for new stuff that wasn’t pop. I found some unusual people, like Klaus Nomi, They Might Be Giants, and The Violent Femmes to name but three. If I like an artist I tend to buy several of their albums and will play them for a time until the fad wears off. Then, years later, I’ll hear a track from one of those albums and I’ll remember how much I liked them and start playing them all over again.

For me, music is all about mood. One day I might have Meatloaf screaming passionately through the speakers and the next might be a mellow day with Sade or Roberta Flack. On an inebriated evening alone I might turn to Tom Waits for some down and dirty blues.

On Christmas day we don’t put the TV on in our house, we play music. I have a selection of carols, including Jethro Tull playing God rest ye merry gentlemen and Ted Nugent playing Deck the halls, so it isn’t all Neil Reid and the Nancy Boys School Choir. I even have a copy of Tom Waits singing Silent Night if you can imagine that! I try to keep the music family orientated at Christmas though as Reet and Pat don’t necessarily like my own particular choice. (I have The Happy Wanderer in Czekoslovakian and three different versions of Big Rock Candy Mountain, as well as a selection of yodelling songs!) Not that they stay awake for much of it, and I find that once they’re asleep I can get away with some cajun music or some good ol’ tear jerkin’ country. But, by and large, give me a singer with gravel in his voice and a dagger through the heart and I’ll be happy. Failing that, some good old rock and roll will always go down nicely.

During the course of writing this little piece I’ve tried several times to create a list – fifteen songs, fifteen albums, fifteen artists… I even considered fifteen artists that I always return to sooner or later, but it’s impossible. As hard as it is to find fifteen albums that will stay with me forever, so it’s just as difficult to name fifteen artists from so many. So, no lists then, but hopefully I’ve managed to give you a little glimpse into my musical heritage. I don’t know about you but it’s left me with a yen to dig out those old 78s. (Oh come on, don’t pretend you’ve never heard of them!)

Cheerie – bye. x