How I came to be.

Every lad my age has a special place in his heart for his mother. I think my mother helped me love music an awful lot and here are some of the reasons why.


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My eldest brother is ten years older than me and went to a private secondary school about 45 minutes' drive from my home town. So up until I was five years old I would sit in the car with my mother taking my brother there and back, twice a day, for three hours, five times a week.

She had two albums which she would play incessantly. First, the Talking Heads compilation Sand in the Vaseline and second, the bargain bin soul compilation Blues Brother Soul Sister.

The way soul sounds is a strange mix of the alien and the completely familiar, especially to a child. I think I was aware that these people were american and from a different time, and so they sounded like broadcasts from the abyss, but they also sounded like the only way music could be.

I forget who wrote this, but some journalist once was watching The Who smash their guitars on telly and turned to his older teenage brother and asked, 'why doesn't everyone play like that?' and his brother knowingly goes, 'yeah, why doesn't everyone play like that.' And when I listened to stuff like Aretha I didn't really understand, 'why doesn't everyone only listen to this?'

I found all of the stuff, from Sittin on the Dock of The Bay to Chain of Fools (which sounded especially alien), to be true beauty. I committed my first naturalistic fallacy and assumed that these records were music. Nothing else belonged to this higher plain. They revelled in the ecstasy of heartbreak and misery, and as the records became normality for me after their umpteenth playing, they never really lost any power. Or they did, but I found them simply amazing rather than shocking. I had a window of music in my day which enhanced the world, every day.

A lot of the Talking Heads stuff struck me as amazing but I only grasped the power of their lyrics and central message later on in my teenage years. The main thing I took from listening to them so early was an intense memory of their songs. The Remain in Light era Talking Heads especially, with its lackadaisical melodic loops, became like nursery rhymes to me; songs you don't really understand but which you remember for ever.





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One of the first things I ever asked my mother about music was, 'Is Little Richard fat?'

I assumed the name was ironic. Because Little Richard sounds like the fattest man in the world. He was my first ever favourite artist and later the first album I ever bought was one of his, a cheap Hallmark-type compilation from a stall in a hospital foyer at the age of 8, for 7 quid which is a lot for a lad with £2 pocket money a week. It is an amazing voice that opened new doors in a much better way than Elvis ever could, who was so impersonated he sounded to my 50-years-late ears like an impersonator. But Little Richard was an island on his own, unlike anything I'd ever heard. It is commonly said that the saxophone is the closest instrument, in range, tone and timbre, to the human voice. And Little Richard sounded like a saxophone. That raspy, up-and-down, bass heavy swing. The ubiquitous saxophone solos on his songs were, I thought, there to humiliate the saxophonist, as Little Richard entered the song after them and out-saxophoned the saxophone.


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The way my mother would sing would also help me personify these things and perhaps help me understand the adult emotions inside them, although I'm less sure about that last claim- I really think the emotional power of these songs is fairly obvious prima facie even to a four year old child. To this day I can't hear the opening horns of Rescue Me and not immediately recall, in one of the most powerful Proustian moments I have, sitting in the passenger seat of her black Peugeot 505 with her comically lowering her voice to sing the horns as she looked out the middle distance of the road. She would sing a lot, but with Rescue Me she for some reason only sang the horns and it was incredibly memorable.


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Some songs I would take away from the car and bring into my own private world. I had a little 'den' in the hill above our house which was not a constructed den but the inside of a Rhododendron bush, often a good place for a child to have. I would take the Blues Brother/ Soul Sister tape out of the car and play it on my tape walkman (now in the possession of a Mr Gavin Leech), which was the one thing I insisted I wanted on the duty free on a cross-channel ferry, as I paced ferociously back and forth inside this bush. Dancing wasn't really something that occurred to me at the time, although I did formulate dance routines in my room to Little Richard records and the Talking Heads song 'Road to Nowhere' around the age of nine, but to begin with I didn't dance, I paced. It seemed to me to be the music of destiny, and pacing seemed like the thing that should be done to it; pretending to be a man of greatness for the duration of the song. The two songs that made me feel most like this were the original Booker T version of 'Green Onions' and the unparalleled 'Respect Yourself', which together with the New Testament is the greatest thing an 8-year-old bullying victim could ever do with his time.

I never really wanted to stop my furious pacing as it was going on and so, in order to prolong my musical self-aggrandisement, would listen to the songs over and over. I remember the song that came after Green Onions on the tape was 'Shout' by Lulu, and so whenever I heard the opening a capella 'we-e-e-e-e-ell, you know you make me wanna' at the start of 'shout' I would frantically press rewind to get to the start of green onions again. And I still don't really like the song 'Shout'. I have no doubt the two things are connected.




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My mother also instilled in me an ability to listen to the same song over and over again for hours, which came in prominently with Something Good 08 and What's It Gonna Be, both of which I listened exclusively to for weeks at a time. I feel that this is all due to one journey from Durham to Helsby after dropping the very same brother at University, when for three hours we listened to 'Stay' over and over again.

Just a little bit longer...



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Probably the last thing my mother got me into was Mongo Santamaria, who she came to adore as she seriously took up dancing in her early 50s. The Mongo Santamaria album 'Watermelon Man' is probably the last record my mother revealed to me that I thought was entirely perfect, and still do to this day.



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The last moment of deepest musical connection I had with my mother was when I watched Stop Making Sense for the first time when I was 13- I was aware of it for years before I watched it. I watched it on my own in the living room with the door closed and went mental, dancing virtually continuously. Stop Making Sense struck me as the way dancing should be; free, ridiculous and totally removed from reality or sex appeal. So I just went crazy to it.

I came out of the room, sweaty and wild-eyed and the first thing I saw was my mother at the dining room table, just back from a shopping trip. We made eye contact and it was clear that she knew exactly how I felt. I now only get this eye contact from my mother when she wants to make it clear she knows I smoke.



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In my teenage years I got very into rock and metal as I entered a new and alien group of friends at 14, but gradually began to try to mould and bend this taste back to my old childish soul-obsessed roots, with bands like Aerosmith and The New York Dolls, but I was clutching at straws. I eventually gave up on rock music completely and accepted pop and dance as the way and the light thanks to my friend Rosie, and here I am today.