I grew up in the leafy suburbs of
Liverpool,
England, in the 1950s and 1960s. So, as a child I listened to pop music on the radio - the first record I remember loving was
Rosemary Clooney's "
This Ole House". Music wasn't a particularly central part of my life - shamefully, I never learned an instrument - though I gradually acquired a small collection of
Lonnie Donegan 78s and, later,
instrumental 45s by
The Shadows and others. In the early 1960s I took a casual interest in local bands who made good, like
The Beatles and
The Undertakers (my dad was apparently their bank manager for a time), but I certainly never bothered going to see them even though they played locally - I was probably still a bit too young anyway. I was more interested in the pop music coming out of the US - including high quality music that I've loved ever since, from the likes of
Dion and (a little later)
The Shangri-Las.
By the time I had become a university student, I was acquiring - largely from
Selectadisc in
Nottingham - a reasonably wide library of psychedelic and "progressive" music - including the peerless Forever Changes by
Love - and had become a particular fan of
The Velvet Underground and its offshoots. (Somewhere, I still have an
unpeeled banana...) For a while, my favourite album was
Nico's The Marble Index. I also (this was the early to mid 1970s) started going to more concerts - the most memorable of many being Captain Beefheart in (I think) 1972. Unforgettable, and still probably my best ever gig... Another memorable moment was when a friend had me listen to
Marvin Gaye's What's Going On - one of the few records where I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard it. Before then, I had played little attention to soul music, or R&B - I liked some of it, but it hadn't particularly engaged me. But, that moment was the start of a long and gradual initiation into the joys (and pain) of black American music.
I was still expanding and broadening my musical interests, and one singer/songwriter I discovered in the mid-1970s struck a special chord -
Tom Rapp of
Pearls Before Swine, all of whose (pretty obscure, but wonderful) albums I managed to acquire on import. Years later, in the early 1990s and having no idea if Rapp was alive or dead, I made my first venture online, and discovered to my amazement that he had his own website. Within half an hour, I had emailed him, and, astonishingly, within literally a few minutes, had a personal email back from the man himself. I was impressed...
By 1976 I was working in a proper grown-up job, and listening to both new and old music. I loved
punk from the moment it began - I was the first person in
Exeter,
Devon, to buy a record by the
Sex Pistols.
Me: "Have you got this new record, "
Anarchy in the UK", it came out yesterday?" Bloke in The Left Bank, Paris Street: "No, never heard of it.. oh wait, it might be in this new box that just came in... yes, here it is...."
So, that was the start of many trips to record shops to buy the latest punk singles - and the development of a special regard for
Jonathan Richman, the
Ramones and
Talking Heads in particular. (Saw
The Clash a few times live - they were pretty rubbish really.) Around this time, as well, my esteem for various Canadians started rising -
Neil Young,
Leonard Cohen, and, above all,
Joni Mitchell - particularly The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira, still very high among my favourite and best loved albums. And I was going to pubs and clubs to listen to R&B bar bands, and discovering the music of
Howlin' Wolf,
Sonny Boy Williamson II,
John Lee Hooker and the rest.
Since that time, I've gradually developed more of a love for, interest in, the development of what I can call black American music from the 1920s or so, up to the late 1970s. Partly to blame was a fascinating book, What Was The First Rock'n'Roll Record, by Dawson and Propes, which led to me "discovering"
Cab Calloway,
Louis Jordan,
Sonny Boy Williamson and many others. My awareness and knowledge of soul music - both
northern soul and
southern soul - keeps on developing. I was once lucky enough, on a tourist trip to
Memphis, to (almost literally) bump into, and shake the hand of, the legendary
Rufus Thomas.
And always, at the same time, I've kept on discovering new music - or, music new to me. Twenty years ago, I probably had no records by
Nina Simone - now, she takes up a fair chunk of my iPod. And, around the same time as I "discovered" her, a friend introduced me to the wonderful and (to an Anglophone audience) completely unknown French music of
Arthur H and
Lo'Jo. Belatedly, I found
Curtis Mayfield and
Mary Margaret O'Hara. And I got to see both Neil Young and Leonard Cohen in concert.
New music often disappoints - it's just not as good as the old stuff. Some exceptions... The wonderful, marvellous,
Cat Power, with whom I am in love with a rare passion.
The Beauty Shop - excellent, obscure, but now sadly defunct. The brilliant
Sufjan Stevens. The
White Stripes and
Arctic Monkeys are really pretty good as well, as is the charming
Alela Diane. And, of modern obscurities,
Gotye, a Belgian-Australian singing drummer (what else..). [Not obscure now though. Shame the album with the hit on it isn't half as good as the album before that......]
Taking up most space on my iPod (as at April 2015)