my dad has an awesome sound system.

giant floor standing b&o speakers, and a really good amp.

before that it was large teak-boxed castle warwick ones, and before that something else that he’d salivated over in a hi-fi magazine for a few months before bringing home bound in bubblewrap and spending hours wiring, repositioning and ‘checking the levels’.
the thing is he’ll only play mark knophler or phil collins through them.
actually, that’s not true. he’s got an auspicious classical collection and sure, that all sounds brilliant through hundreds of pounds of hardware. but i grew up with very little pop music playing. we were a staunch radio four family and long car journeys were filled with news and documentaries from bush house, a bit of elgar, vivaldi or san saens, some story tapes and maybe some flanders & swann for singing along to.

very occasionally there’d be something my parent’s friends had taped from vinyl for us, or a throw back to before my ma and pa were married. simon and garfunkel, elton john, supertramp, 10cc, steeleye span or the inter galactic touring band (yeah… exactly. who?).

unsurprisingly i was a book nerd growing up - something the complete absence of knowledge of duran duran, wham or the human league only conspired to compound in me, so while my friends were talking about singles and taping the top forty i sunk deeper into the hobbit and pg wodehouse novels.
which is all context for my hand me downs.

i guess my parents weren’t that interested in seeking out new music, only listening to the stuff which they really enjoyed.
and while their pop stuff was mostly limited to music they’d heard and enjoyed at dinner parties, it was music they associated with sociability and good times. and that’s sort of what they’ve handed down to me. and because my childhood wasn’t saturated with music at every turn i’ve really clear memories of particular tracks in particular places. and theres a certain raft of music which mostly evokes lying down on the beige carpeted boot of our car (trunk rights were a treat me and my brother would fight over for long journey’s back from my grandparent house in norfolk - you could lie down with your head next to the speaker and watch the street-lamps loom over the motorway and away into the distance - or just have space to play with your lego if you were my brother). listening back to the inter galactic touring band album and reading about it (even seeing the artwork is ridiculously evocative) i can hear how terrible it is - yep, an all-star, proggy sci-fi concept album featuring members of status quo, meatloaf, clarence clemons (of the e street band) and soul legend, ben e king amongst others, how could it be anything other that knuckle bitingly terrible? yet i’ve been playing the jona lewie-esque starship jingle over and over with a big fat grin on my face and giggling like the seven year old i used to be.

and the one other track from the album which does the same thing is this.

i remember being baffled by my friends not knowing anything about this record; not knowing the lyrics or the tunes and i was still adamant that it was great stuff, so i guess it planted in me a definite sense that digging stuff which wasn’t just chart based and that really, no one else cared about was just fine. now obviously that void in my direct musical linage is something which has driven me to seek out my own family tree and fill crates, hard drives and my brain with song after song after song creating a new hereditary chain of music.

and what would i want to pass on to my children? well, that’s for part two of the post…