My music influences.

Episode one. Where it started?

Thinking back to my early life, I was caught up in a strange and unique set of circumstances that became the fundamental starting point for my eclectic taste in music. When I was about seven, even at that tender age, I felt at odds with the music beamed into the lounge by Top of the Pops. My embryonic interest in music was completely down to having a brother almost eleven years older than I was.

As a family we had just lost our father to an unexpected heart attack and were busy coming to terms with that. My brother was never really a total rebel and was conscientious enough to achieve good A level results. But during this period, he was seeking out the music of his generation that exploded at the end of the 1960’s into the 1970’s. Not owning a record player of his own, he would ‘borrow’ albums from his friends and bring them home to listen to on our parents Sanyo music system. As well as a turntable, this cutting-edge technology boasted an Akai reel to reel tape recorder. My industrious brother would brush aside the boxes of James Last, Matt Monro and musicals such as The Sound of Music and The King and I, which our late father had meticulously recorded. He would record over them with his booty of purloined albums, putting all this new music on to these huge magnetic tape reels.

As his life moved him ever further away from the family home, I, as this young impressionable kid brother, was left with all these tapes to investigate.

So, while my peer group generation were discovering the early 70’s Glam rock rampage of Sweet, Slade, T Rex and the like, I was on an altogether different path. My journey through these taped albums came with no instructions though. There were no album covers to read the track listings from. Just my brother’s biro, scribbling out the neat script of my father and replacing it with the briefest of titles. Emerson Lake and Palmer ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, for instance, didn’t fit in the allotted space on the box cover, so all I had to work with was ‘ELP! Live’.

I was introduced to The Beatles with one tape having the White Album on one side and Sgt Pepper’s on the other. If you are not familiar with reel to reel tape decks; they take some loading. You have to feed the tape through a myriad of rollers and runners, ensuring it passes on the correct side of the playing heads, then spool it on to the empty reel, hand wind it for a few turns before turning the huge play switch to the right, watching as the mechanical wheels and gizmos push the tape against the heads and the reels start to turn. If everything has gone to plan you get music, if not; you end up with a nest for your hamster!

One box simply said “Doors”. What? Patio Doors? Barn Doors? No. As it transpired this was the first album by the American band ‘The Doors’ and an early introduction to the wonderfully disturbing voice of Jim Morrison and the keyboard wizardry of Ray Manzarek. My peer group were busy lapping up Mud, The Rubettes and Suzy Quattro, while I was just discovering the album Fireball by Deep Purple.

On another tape I found myself enjoying some more heavy rock. Subsequently I learned that this thumping music was Led Zeppelin or more particularly, Led Zep II, the one with the theme music for Top of the Pops (Whole lotta Love…). I think I was the only person in the playground that knew that! Another tape had Free ‘Live’ pencilled on the box, with Groundhogs ‘Split’ on the B side. The Free album I had, was recorded live at The Locarno in Sunderland and the Fairfield Halls in Croydon. It was just so stripped back and basic, but I was transfixed by the rawness of it. It was apparently rush released by Island Records in June 1971 as a tribute to the band, who had broken up in April of that year. Amazing to think that here I was, a seven-year-old, discovering a band, who had already ceased to be! I have a theory about Free, which I will return to later, in Episode Two.

There was then a brief period when my brother returned from wherever. I later found out that he had taken a gap year after his A levels, before going to University in London. A segment of that gap year is when he returned to our home and suddenly there was a record player other than our mum’s and a fresh set of albums for me to discover. There were so many to listen to. Some stand out moments I recall were the first listening to Tommy by The Who or Foxtrot and Nursery Cryme by Genesis. Jimi Hendrix, only dead for a couple of years at that time and the record companies were busy putting out posthumous albums, trying to cash in. I didn’t know any of that, I was just in awe of the huge sound coming from the perforated speakers, as Voodoo Child (Slight Return) wah wah peddled into life (when mum was out!).

I distinctly remember when Dark Side Of The Moon was brought home. All the posters and stickers, the incredible gatefold cover and finally the sound. Like nothing else I had ever heard. It wasn’t the first Pink Floyd album I listened to though! One night, about a year before, when my brother was baby-sitting for me, he decided he could accomplish the task and also visit the pub, so he put a disc on his turntable, plugged in the headphones and placed them over my tiny head.

“I’ll be back in an hour…. or so”, he waved as he exited my room, leaving the pulsating opening track of Meddle deafening me! That track, “One of these days………. (I’m going to cut you into little pieces)” is still my yardstick for how good a stereo is. If you can twist all the knobs on your Hi-Fi to eleven and still get no vibration or distortion when this track is thundering away, it’s probably quite a good system!

There was some stuff in his collection that I never quite got. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band and Soft Machine never hit the spot for me. He was staying up late to watch ‘Whispering Bob Harris’ on The Old Grey Whistle Test, punctuated by my mum hammering on the ceiling telling him to “turn that racket down!” That must have been where he heard about Beefheart and probably The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and their show ending rendition of ‘Delilah’. With regard to Captain Beefheart, I guess at my tender age, I wasn’t ready for avant garde jazz/blues/rock music just yet?

I did feel like I had skin in the game now and asked Santa to bring me music for the first time. It was that Beatles double album, the red one of the early 70’s, a compilation of their greatest hits between 1962 and 1966. Good place to start I figured. My mates got something from Gary Glitter… (innuendo intended!).

This brief period of my brother being home revealed that he would go and see bands live too. There were so many concerts and festivals that he attended. I remember one time when he came home with a Frisbee he had caught, while watching a band at The Reading festival. Or the occasion he went to see Pink Floyd at The Bournemouth Winter Gardens. This was probably while they were touring The Dark Side of the Moon, before they recorded it the following year. It felt like we had come full circle when we both saw them together at Earls Court years later in 1994.

Back to my early memories and influences. His brief stay ended all too quickly and I was once more at home without an elder brother or his stereo, so it was back to the Akai tape deck and the recordings he’d left behind. Top of the Pops were now in surreal mode, with acts like Wizzard, Alvin Stardust, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Leo Sayer or Lieutenant Pigeon and their classic ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ (off the charts with that one!). Nothing within my sphere of interest ever seemed to appear!

By the time I got to secondary school, the Glam rock had segued into early Punk and music by several of the latest bands was of interest to me. The Stranglers’ track ‘Something Better Change’ was a Common Room favourite, along with tunes by The Buzzcocks and The Clash. Back at home some of my brother’s possessions had been left behind, surplus to requirement or just forgotten. Amongst them was a cardboard box of some new-fangled cassette tapes. I liberated several and as I didn’t have anything to play them on, when I returned to school, I managed to persuade one of the bigger boys to let me play some of the tapes. It must have been the third time of doing this that a fifth former popped his head round the door of the dormitory, interrupting our listening and demanding to know whose music this was. Fearing some damning criticism, or worse, my loyal and closest mates all pointed their fingers in my direction.

“Fleetwood Mac; cool stuff, what a great album!”, praise indeed! So, I now knew it was Fleetwood Mac at least! But that was about it. Once again it had no title, playlist or any markings on it. Eventually I was able to verify that my brother had recorded their new album, Rumours and that appeared to sit well with this fifth form chap. Kudos indeed.

Prior to the 5^th former’s correct identification of the album, all I knew was that it was the music they were using on the BBC for the opening credits of the Formula 1 Grand Prix coverage. It is now inexorably and forever linked with the pointy racing cars. There were some really interesting theme tunes knocking around at that time. One other I recall was the theme music for a very serious Sunday political show on London Weekend Television called Weekend World. For its entire history, they used the last 55 seconds of a 1971 track called Nantucket Sleighride by US heavy rock band, Mountain. I tried to find out who was responsible for the decision to use such a heavy piece of rock music for a political ‘talking heads’ programme, but I have nothing. The romantic in me would like to believe that it was some unpaid intern, left alone to root about in the music archives, while the decision makers went off for GnT’s! But I digress.

While the music I listened to was a mixed bag of older stuff and the occasional chart-topping novelty, once settled into boarding school, it transpired that I had a reasonable singing voice of my own. For a time, my musical journey took an altogether more classical turn. I mainly sang religious pieces; Handel’s Messiah, St. Paul (oratorio) by Felix Mendelssohn, Camina Burana by Carl Orff and The St. John Passion by Bach. These were the stand out pieces I remember, but there were a host of other solos, certainly in 1977, to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. I hammered out ‘Hear My Prayer’, with the delicate solo ‘O for the wings of a dove’ contained within it, again by Mendelssohn, as the centre piece of the celebration. It brought classical music into my life and today, when the moment takes me, I have been known to enjoy something stirring by Beethoven or Bach or perhaps Tchaikovsky and Strauss. There would be crossovers too. My music Master declared one day that he had been listening to a wonderful piano suite by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky called ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’. ‘Hang on! I knew this piece, well at least the prog rock adaptation, by Emerson, Lake and Palmer’. I somehow recorded it from the reel to reel deck at home on to a cassette and brought him a copy. He listened and perhaps an eyebrow moved a bit? That was a real squaring the circle moment.

It was hard to compete sometimes with the music that my peers were listening to. Some of it passed me by; some I just couldn’t avoid. Status Quo?! Never has so much music been played to so many, with so few notes. Some one-hit-wonders that appeared I remember fondly, Pop Muzik by M and then the truly bizarre, the eponymously titled ‘Jilted John’ enunciating that ‘Gordon is a Moron’…. Unforgettable. One other memory still brings a smile to this day. The then unknown Kate Bush released this ethereal single, ‘Wuthering Heights’, which seemed to captivate the Top of the Pops crowd. I just found it strange. My brother, usually a fairly open book of receptiveness and interest in new sounds, detested it! and the ‘wafty’ arm flailing dancing about, in the video. Any mention of her name, even today, and I watch him shudder with unease. Ironic that she was discovered by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.

Bowie crept into my consciousness with the release of ‘Scary Monsters’ in 1979 and the single ‘Fashion’, which was never off the radio that year. I regret not listening to Bowie earlier in his career. I think he got lumped in by me, with all the Glam rock stuff and that was a mistake. As I matured I came to see him for the true genius he was and I have since bought and enjoyed his extensive back catalogue.

By the time my own O Levels (GCSE’s to you youngsters) came along, music had slipped into the synthesizer pop / New Romantics era. All Human League, Soft Cell, The Cure and Joy Division, heading unerringly towards Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. This was the moment when I had my next fabulous opportunity to once again pillage my brothers extensive record collection……

In the next episode, I relate how two momentous weeks in Germany brought my music taste right back into the same sphere as my peers and my feelings regarding the rock quartet, Free.

Stay tuned Pop Pickers!

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