The Afterword

moseleymoles on Music and your parents

There you go.

My brother put a large plastic crate on the front room floor, containing about a hundred CDs. The process of clearing out my parents’ house ground endlessly on, as we worked through almost sixty years of books, papers, clothes, china…my dad in particular grew up in a small terraced house during the war and the rationing after. Part of the great post-war leap in social mobility, he and mum bought a large Elizabethan house in the middle of the Peak District and that was where they stayed for the next sixty years. They never threw anything away, and had enough tinned tomatoes stored up to last me out as well as them.

By the time I could talk to dad about music his taste was strictly classical and jazz. He would chunter at the kitchen table as I did my homework to cassettes of The Police or The Jam. Truth be told one of my earliest memories at the end of the sixties, in our previous house, involves his music taste. I can remember crawling under his enormous Grundtvig stereo system mounted coffin style in a large wooden cabinet, and » Continue Reading.