Aged 13 I heard this.
My path was set!
Why do you like the music you like?
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
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Then I discovered new wave. Blondie, Squeeze and the Boomtown Rats followed.
Yebbut, why do you like the music you like (as per your OP title)?
I love melodic heavy metal.
Another example here:
I watched all of The Beatles movies summer of 76 on BBC1
I spent that summer binge reading Enid Blyton books.
I was living in England as an 8 year old when Lennon was shot, and media was saturated with Beatles songs, movies and clips. I was vaguely aware of them the day before, I was a huge fan the day after and listened to them almost exclusively for the next five years.
The photograph of The Beatles on the back cover of “A Collection of Beatles’ Oldies… But Goldies!”
Pop music is ALL about looks, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise, and I thought “Why does everyone now look like shite?”
It was the early dire. Never looked forward from that day onwards.
Having accessible singles at home – I enjoyed playing them. Sugar Sugar, Telstar, Killer Queen, The Wombling Song, Downtown and many more. My mother liked Stevie Wonder, Simon & Garfunkel and Neil Diamond so I played those LPs too. Less accessible were the sacred LPs owned by my prog-lovin’ older brothers but I did manage to “borrow” them when they were out. I wanted to be all grown up and get into Yes and Floyd but it didn’t thrill me as much as a really good 3 minute pop song. I didn’t appreciate LPs until I could afford to buy my own ones.
One Christmas at the age of 13 I asked for and got Replicas and The Pleasure Principle – so I think those LPs sent me on my way.
It’s like asking “why do you do the job you do” or “why do you fall in love” – something just chimes at a moment. Being a slightly angry kid, “loud” appealed, and at the age of 8 or 9 there was plenty of loud about.
And the there’s friendship and influence – you choose friends based on common interest, and music being part of culture forges that bond and comes to define you, along with other cultural tropes you absorb.
What’s he banging on about? If it sounds good, appeals to your psyche, and the look fits (yes, fashion is a factor) then you’re in.
Oh, and there is also oneupmanship – finding something you think is yours, suits your personality, and the sharing
Back in the day the music paper you bought was also a key influence.
I was a die hard Sounds reader and thought NME people were pretentious twats.
Melody Maker was for musos only.
Sounds for me too – inkie follow-on from Smash Hits.
Follow on? I was reading Sounds before Smash Hits had been invented…
…and I would have agreed with Wheaty about NME readers!
My history: Smash Hits > Sounds > Kerrang > NME > Q
Sounds was for headbangers. NME catered more for my taste at that time
You’re probably right re Sounds @dai
I think as my tastes changed (Heatstrokes was a favourite for me too) so did my favourite inkie
Sounds was only for headbangers in the eighties. In the seventies it was my inkie of choice, because it covered a lot of progressive music.
NME wins again 😉
Wasn’t Sounds the one pushing all those nasty Oi! bands..?
Yup, and it gave a home to Garry Bushell. Was also thre first to push the Mod Revival (although GB in his usual obtuse manner called it the Mod Renewal
I’d stopped reading it by then – I didn’t like all that nasty Oi! music. If you were a prog fan, it was like suddenly being made stateless – overnight none of the published media wanted you.
Chris Welch and Chris Charlesworth liked prog, over at Melody Maker.
True: but when punk, etc hit it was a bit like the tap had been turned off, for a good few years anyway. It was one of the reasons that I ended up with Word: they could write about progressive stuff without a sneering, ironic tone (mostly)…
Incidentally, I can’t remember why I preferred Sounds to MM in the seventies…
Ah, I loved Melody Maker.
The Oxfam Bookshop in Bloomsbury, London, had a table top strewn with them last weekend. From the early to mid-80s which was precisely my era. If I’d had the time I’d have stood and got my Proustian Rush on.
My parents had a 78rpm radiogram in the 50s and I just loved playing records…absolutely anything…and they allowed me to listen to the radio all the time. Oddly, I am currently curating music for a ‘gold’ radio staion, and it has reminded me of first records I heard, and also carbon dates that time to around 1959. The Beatles and merseybeat in 1963 were my real epiphany, and everything since relates back to that – tunes, guitars, harmony….just great songs.
This is where someone usually reminds us to put videos in replies/comments, and not in the main post, isn’t it..?
Three older brothers gave a childhood home in which I grew up listening to prog and folk, while my mother had Radio 3 on whenever she was in the kitchen. My father liked jazz. I don’t like jazz. Hello Sigmund!
I worked in Brittany as a teenager, which slowburnt into late flowering passion for European folk dance. In middle age, I found festivals to be my natural habitat.
From all of that, I like quirky, I like adventurous, I like well-considered arrangements and the use of whatever instruments come to hand. Why do I like what I like? Because it’s brilliant, that’s why.
It was George Harrison who said something like The Beatles saved the world from boredom. That’s it really. A world of mystery and glamour, strange appearances, and daftness. An interruption in a grey, rather stuffy, dull universe for the sake of good times. Something your parents didn’t like. The Stones on the cover of the 5 by 5 EP. These people looked so cool and were so charismatic. I’d like to do what they’re doing, be them.
Getting a ticket for e Solihull Record Library when I was 16. The NME in the 80s. John Peel and Annie Nightingale.
Then.moving away from Solihull and finding there were other people who liked similar music to me.
Solihull did have a majorly good record library, and then aa better still CD library, as my onetime container ship full of C90s would later demonstrate. It was thanks to them I found a love for foreign folk musics, aka “world”, hoovering up releases by Marta Sebasteyen, Ukrainians and Baaba Mail. Also led me to become a late adopter of techno: electronica/dance of the Underworld/Leftfield,/Orbital/Chemical Brothers variety, with one short step to where my separate pleasures coalesced: Afro-Celt Sound System, Kan, Mouth Music and all that.
I’d missed out on the CDs as I’d left the midlands by about 88. It was interesting reading Pete Paphides memories of Easy Listening too as that was a place I used to hang out at in my teens too (I lived just up the road in Olton)
Lived in Shirley, then Cheswick Green, then Monkspath, 1982 – 2004. Worked in Hall Green.
I like Afro Celt Sound System, and love Mouth Music. I’ve never heard of Kan. A quick Google suggests a recently-deceased Japanese musician. Is that barking up the wrong tree?
Short lived electro-folk outfit led by Brian Finnegan (Flook)
On the dance spectrum from folk to electronic, if por them on the folky side of ACSS. Too much tin whistle for my poor ears to cope with. I’m more Fluke, than Flook, I would say. Martin Bennett and early Edward II synergize the roots/electronica genres better, I found.
I just listened to this – gave me toothache.
Out of interest, re penny whistle, or rather, low whistles, what do you think of this lot? I classify as Miami Vice meets Ballyclare.
I’ll let fitter answer that one.
Why, Sal, why?
In a nutshell, that does my head in on many levels.
At boarding school, aged 13-15, musical appreciation was a competitive sport, everybody amassing a desk drawer full of cassettes and a little player. With the usual fare being Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath, these monochrome colours seemed a little lacking, altho that era Floyd, AHM thru’ Meddle, with everybody and their dog having Relics, remains fond retro dive territory. For reasons not quite certain, possibly triggered by the inkies, I liked the idea of exploring the outskirts of electric rock, finding myself, simultaneously, buying History of the Byrds and History of Fairport Convention. Each, of course, with a veritable search engine of sideways links to explore, via their Pete Frame covers. Hooked, and some, traversing Fairport thru’ Steeleye (only the first 3, of course, before they became “popular”) on to all things Albion. The novelty of Morris On and the Compleat Dancing Master ensured more avenues still, and the love lingers to this day. Meanwhile, the Byrds begat The Flying Burrito Bros, leading me to Country Gazette, Emmylou, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (and, ultimately, the Grateful Dead, but that is a minor side estuary). Anything with pedal steel and/or a banjo, and I was and am in, the same for fiddles and accordions. If push comes to shove, I guess my greatest current predilection is Scottish trad derived music, courtesy my Gaelic speaking mother, but the links into anglo-folk and Appalachian country are often all part the same.
Yet, as I scribble, I am listening to Tarkus!
A fine album is Tarkus
Must try it again some time. Last listen I had trouble discerning where one part ended and the next started, it just sort of became one mass without much change
(Which is probably the intent).
Side 2 was better, but still hard work as I recall
Helps if you like a bitta prog…🙂
Noted – I’d class myself as Prog Savvy, and of the ELP offerings highly rate Brain Salad Surgery. But Tarkus Side 1 … I must try harder
Tarkus, side 1, is, for me, peak Emerson. But I always preferred Hammond to Moog. I jumped ship for BSS, the glue coming less sticky on Trilogy.
My favourite Emmo burst is Blues Variation from Pictures. Phenomenal playing.
The Hammond on Tarkus is extraordinary, I’m a bit obsessed with it at the moment. I tend to prefer more soulful stuff on the instrument, but there’s something about this. It’s even got me wanting to learn it somehow.
Tarkus was huge for me. The SOUND of the instruments playing the opening 5/4 riff, Emerson’s organ sound and the lines he played – what is that shit? A combination of blues and Bartok, I just loved it. Still do. I’m the only person I know who does, apart from a few bods in this parish. Go on, you know you want to hear it again…
It’s brilliant, the whole thing. I can also understand why people don’t like it.
Brings me back to my NME/prog-hate issue: many people will hate ELP on principle – I’m not sure they even need to have heard any…
Well I can sure live without hearing a single note – but you already know that. I have nothing against prog,* it’s just not for me.
*I say that, but I would be willing to put up several layers of egg boxes and fleece around the soundproofed room I would enclose you in if you ever made me endure it.
*Arf.
I bought this when it came out because a mate had the first album, which I really liked, and I was always a fan of the Nice. I never really liked it much even back then, and I did actually dig it it out relatively recently to see if it had aged well…it hadn’t.
There is quite a lot of proggy stuff from that era that I QUITE liked, or convinced myself I liked, and sounds awful to me now. Played some Barclay James Harvest recently and that was really grim.
I still have a soft spot for BJH’s Mockingbird, despite the distinct lack of lustre with the guitar solo.
My ears unfriended ELP for good, many years ago.
Take a ticket and join the queue to shoot me.
Why would anyone shoot you, far less join a queue? There are more who dislike progressive on here than like it: and even within that group, there are plenty who can’t stand ELP. You’re in the majority, my friend…
My objection was to the late 70s/early 80s NME-style attitude that it must be crap automatically, even without hearing it – the old slogan about PF “I don’t have to hear it, just looking at the cover makes me throw up”. – you know what I’m talking about.
The crap cover, don’t need to listen to it was true though for Love Beach
Yep – I’ll give you that one…🙂
It was that NME “we know what’s worthy and what isn’t” attitude that eventually stopped me from buying the mag.
This ⬆️ – with knobs on…
Music lesson in S1 at Barrhead High School. Studying Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Last lesson of the topic cue ELP’s version & a lifetime’s fandom.
Complete inability to talk to girls = lifelong love of heavy rock.
Inability to belong to a 70s tribe = a wide variety of music, ranging from 60s soul to folk to alt country.
Occasional obsessions with TV programmes = disappearing down various rabbit holes eg Babylon Berlin & Weimar music
Plus Spotify allowing access to everything
Also collecting the History of Rock magazine led to a myriad of bands
A teacher at BHS, Colin Brockett led to a lifetime of a love of Van Morrison though not his recent output
I doubt even Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society would be able to instil a love of Van’s recent output.
That did make me chuckle. Very true!
My listening really broadened through work and Q Magazine as well as the occasional lucky find on the radio. In its pomp, Q reviews were reliable enough to take a punt on and the other techs I worked with all brought their own diverse music. I never got on with John Peel’s show but as a teenager I listened to Nicky Horne on Capital, when it was an individual station rather than a brand.
I often feel as though I’m catching up, having missed various “scenes” when they were fresh and new. Sometimes due to life, work, kids etc, sometimes because I’m suspicious of what’s fashionable, which I’ve never been.
John Peel – I did listen, but not regularly. The DJ that gave me an introduction to “stuff I might like” was Mike Read. Yes, he’s come to be seen as a bit of a know, and the Frankie reaction is his legacy, but he played some good stuff, and did actually appreciate and own the music
Mike Read was my accidental introduction to TMTCH. When they split in ‘91, he got a mention on the farewell tour t shirt.
I wrote about it on Toppermost, inspired to do so by Dave Amitri who seems to be absent lately. Anyway, read it or scroll past. I enjoyed writing it and I’m full of admiration for anyone who can write on demand. I had to accept that finished was better than perfect.
https://www.toppermost.co.uk/the-men-they-couldnt-hang/
My parent’s mixed record collection of classical music, jazz, easy listening, show tunes plus TV themes/ movie soundtracks have all cast a long shadow on my tastes. Other than that, watching TOTP and listening to the Top 40 in the bath on a Sunday.
It was Quo really. Call the rhythm what you like, 12 bar, a shuffle, boogie, whatever you want (ayethangyew). It’s elastic pull over the I, IV, V chords was mesmeric.
I began to seek it out elsewhere and found it in the likes of Dr Feelgood and the more laidback reefer-tinged JJ Cale records.
I got into the usual rocket fuelled soloists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and the more considered but equally mental in live performance Rory Gallagher. All great, all good then as I got older it was a tune and lyrics that mattered more. Songs. Enter Knopfler, Richard Thompson and all sorts of lyricists who can play a bit.
It’s gotta swing, man