Pretentious Twat

So, we blunder innocently into the self-analytical quagmire that is Robyn's soundtrack challenge.
Musical tastes decade by decade.
Are you all sitting comfortably? This could take a while; I've lived through an awful lot of decades …

Having been concieved and born to the sound of rock and roll (1958), my earliest musical experience must have been of dad's big box of 78s; early Elvis (I remember loving "That's All Right, Mama"), Little Richard, et al; blagged off US airmen while he was tooling around the Med on nuclear bombers in the fifties.

As for actual clear, childhood memories: I remember sitting on the floor of our dank little terraced house (the one with the outside privy, full of spiders and darkness, that haunted my early years), gazing up at the small patch of grey sky, just visible above the rain-washed houses over the road; lost in the sounds of Wout Steenhuis - a Dutch slide guitar player - and mum's LP of Hawaiian singers. The dream of escape; of sunshine; of something better.

We had a battered old upright piano in the front room. Mum and dad would belt out boogie woogie on it. Or mum would sneak up behind Tchaikovsky, then leap on him and the two of them would go head to head like a couple of sumo wrestlers. She was pretty good. She got the odd smackdown. Her mum used to sing and play piano for the silent movies and taught her well. Mum also played at the Sunday School in the old mission hall at the top of the road while we bothered God.
She tried to teach me piano when I was three, but then Uncle Bernie went and fucked up my life big time by giving me a little guitar …

First single bought with pocket money: "Message to Martha"; a Burt Bacharach song covered by Adam Faith. I also remember loving "Three Little Fishes" …
Then came The Beatles …
I was a fanatic. I had the little Beatles suit, all the records and nonsense that they released.
Then one day, I sat in front of the old Dansette, worked out the riff to "I Feel Fine", bought a pick-up for the guitar and an old valve amp and embarked on a life of reprobate behaviour.
The soundtrack to my sixties was The Beatles and Radio Caroline. They were a pirate station, operating off a trawler in international waters just down the coast from us, playing only album tracks. Until they sunk in the seventies, they were my food and drink. We even had our own pirate station for a while, with their help and advice. Radio Maidstone. Operating from above a friend's dad's chip shop in Lowestoft, playing mostly our own stuff. Heady days …

Then along came hormones and girls and kinda put a stop to all that.

In the early seventies, I was in prog heaven. Our band covered Yes and Genesis and Mahavishnu stuff (I played lead guitar; I was a precocious little bastard); while mum and dad filled the house with west coast rock and things were, well … groovy.
I also sung tenor in the school and the church choirs for a while (a cheap way to pick up girls); I can still remember most of Verdi's Requiem. But then came the almost physical shock of hearing Stravinski's Rite of Spring, and choir went straight out the window.

Back at school I was chummy with the deputy headmistress; we had a shared greed for avant-garde music and Japanese opera. Which was great, because while everyone else had to wear uniform, she let me wear my ratty old afghan coat and grow my hair long. She also let my band play gigs at the school, which was pretty unheard of back then.

Then along came punk.
I turned eighteen in '76 and it was a blast. Pistols, Clash, Patti Smith. I didn't really care that everybody suddenly hated virtuouso guitar playing; I managed my mate's punk band and headed off to college, where I discovered Bob Marley, dropped out, and then endless years of gigs and sessions followed in something of a blur …

There seems to be a big hole in my memory. I'll have to check through my vinyl when I get home and find out what happened in the eighties. Sitting here, I really don't have a clue. I do remember some really horrible things/bands/people/events, but that's probably best left in the box marked "Used Decades" and tucked out of sight.

The next thing I can remember is Pixies and Nirvanva and discovering Steve Albini and then Bongwater.

Robyn's right. The older I get, the more stuff I like. I still love anything extreme, but I'll listen to everything from country to opera to metal to rap … whatever … as long as it's the real thing: music from musicians who care about what they do.
The only thing I won't listen to is "product" … oh, and power ballads … and light operetta … but anything else goes …

I just read that back. Ye gods, I sound like a pretentious twat! Oh, well. Thanks, Robyn, for a self-revealing - and somewhat prolonged - afternoon coffee break.