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Music has always been a big part of my life. Early memories include Beatles 45rpm vinyls, Dad’s Mantovani LPs, records of Irish and Scottish songs and Music Hall ‘favourites’, and Mum’s Max Bygraves records.

And if all that sounds like a jumble of old-fashioned gobbledegook – yeah, well, music was different in those days….

It was vinyls of course – 45’s and LP (Long Playing Records) which were played at 33rpm (revolutions per minute). Ironically they are now making a comeback and my wonderful grandchildren are experiencing the delights of placing the record carefully on the turntable, lifting the needle and placing it on the outer edge in the groove. Before vinyls were the 78 records of my parents’ era – we still have a few that belonged to Chris’s mum – but during my lifetime records were replaced by cassettes, 8-tracks (never quite worked out what they were) and then CDs (compact discs) which we were told would render vinyl completely obsolete (yeah, right..) which then gave way to downloading and streaming music via various platforms. I have a Spotify app and do use it but refuse to pay for a streamed music app that simply removes your music as soon as you stop paying them every month for the privilege of listening to something you’ve effectively bought. At least with records and CDs you keep what you’ve paid for and can play it again 20 years later if you want – providing you can still buy the turntable/CD player to play it on….

Rant over.

Our first family record player was a Fidelity player a bit like the one below, only being my Dad’s it was a nondescript shade of two-tone beige rather than red and white. The great thing about this record player was you could stack up to 12 singles (45rpm) on the central spindle and each one would drop down as the previous song finished playing; the needle would automatically move out of the way of the dropping record and then move in to take up the next piece of music. Magic!

The less magical thing was it was mono – all the sound came from the one speaker at the front. Not that we ever questioned that. It was quite good enough to play Mantovani and The Beatles. I remember Mum buying some Beatles records for me to listen to (her taste was more Max Bygraves, Perry Como – or Comb-Over – and Matt Monro) and I think the first I actually chose was ‘I’m A Believer’ by The Monkees – I idolised Davy Jones. Even back then, music was as much about the singer as the song. I’ve already documented my early interest in Mark Wynter – and yes, we had all his records too.

By the early 1970’s Dad had moved on and bought a…wait for it….music centre! It was all the rage then – a turntable, two speakers and if you were really posh a cassette player too! (My cassette recorder deserves a blog post of its own!!). And yes – it was stereo! Not that I knew what that meant at first – not until I heard ‘The Prophet’s Song’ on ‘A Night At The Opera’….then I knew its value!

But I’m getting ahead of myself in terms of musical taste. Before I discovered Queen I delighted in the musical (and visual) talents of The Osmonds – especially Donny – as well as David Cassidy and David Essex. Yes – I was a teenager! Yes, I listened to ‘Puppy Love’ and ‘Long Haired Lover From Liverpool’; I loved ‘Rock On’ and ‘Crazy Horses’ (look them up!) and yes, my absolute best ever Christmas was 1973, ruled by Slade and Wizzard. I was a child of the early 1970s – David Bowie, Sweet, Suzie Quatro, early Rod Stewart and Elton John and T Rex. What can I say??

I know Dad had his music centre by 1974 as this saw the release of Queen’s ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ which I played over and over again on the old record player which by this time was in my bedroom to make way for the newfangled contraption in the front room. After the perhaps twentieth continuous play of the LP I clearly remember my Dad yelling up the stairs to turn that rubbish off! He also predicted they would last about 6 months…..I took great delight in pointing out this error of judgement in the late 1980s.  From then on Queen were – and still are – my favourite ever band. They were rivalled only by my discovery of Bob Dylan – of which more in another post.

A mention must be made here of Auntie Winnie. As documented elsewhere, she came over on Saturday afternoons and took me and my brother and sister out for the afternoon – mainly to get us out of our parents’ hair. She also had a keen eye for what a teenage niece may want for her birthday or Christmas gift, and she would pre-order each Queen album as it came out to make sure I got it. I still remember the thrill of being dropped in Diss town centre – my sister and brother were then taken to the Station to watch the trains – and picking up the latest Queen album ordered for me by Auntie Winnie. A bag of sweets (and possibly a book) from Diss Publishing Company and I was ready to go home and huddle in my bedroom for enjoy the delights of Freddie Mercury’s voice and Brian May’s guitar…

By the time I got to college my musical tastes had developed to include a lot of prog rock – early Genesis and Rick Wakeman for instance. But it was when I met Chris in 1984 that I was introduced to a huge amount of new music – new to me that is. We would have record nights wnen we sat up till the early hours drinking wine or lager, and he would play DJ, choosing song after song, some I knew, most I didn’t – all great. Through him I discovered a lot of American music such as Steve Wariner and most important, Fleetwood Mac – How had I never really listened to their music before??

However much I enjoyed music, my knowledge couldn’t hold a candle to Chris’s, espcially when it came to the 1960’s. Again, pirate radio stations played a huge part in this and deserve their own blog post, but he knew music from the 1960s that very few people had ever heard of. At one point early in our marriage we got into the habit of listening to morning radio and about 7am they used to run a quiz called ‘Hook Line and Sinker’ – the idea was they played a ‘hook’ – the opening riff – of a song and you had to ring up and say what the song was. If you were right, there were two more questions, one based on a line from another song by the same band, and a question loosely related to the song or band – correct answers to all three won you a prize. We never rang up, but without opening his eyes, practically every morning Chris not only identified the song, but predicted what the next two questions would be and he was rarely wrong!

Whether through age or being taken up with the responsibilities of home, family and jobs, we sort of lost track of current music as we moved through the 1990s and still don’t really follow new music. We still prefer the 60s, 70s and 80s stuff we’ve listened to for years – and Chris is still introducing me to songs I’ve never heard of, even now. He now hosts a weekly radio show on Sunshine Radio and uses it as a way of playing little-known artists and songs, such as Duncan Browne….

…who I first heard of several years ago when we were staying in Canterbury for a few days. We were sitting in the sunny hotel garden one evening with a glass of wine and got chatting about music Chris remembered…so I started looking up songs on Spotify, which he’d never got to grips with, and he was amazed at what it could do. I think the first song we found was ‘The Huge World of Emily Small’, and later he asked if I could find ‘Alfred Bell’ by Duncan Browne….and I loved it! A few days later, a CD dropped through the letterbox – he’d ordered the ‘Give Me Take You’ album for me.

I also love that although each having their own particular taste, my own children will listen to the same music as us (I certainly never wanted to listen to my parents’ music!). One Christmas I was gifted a 3-CD set of Queen’s Greatest Hits. By Boxing Day it had mysteriously disappeared…into Ross’s bedroom…. Ross also introduced me to some great music, and in turn I introduced him to King Crimson.

Musis is the background to life – even now a piece of music can transport me to another time and place, and taking up roles in musical theatre have extended my tastes and interests even more. Apparently some people never listen to music – I wonder how they live…..