So what is this all about then?

Basically, for those who don’t know me or my story - my Dad passed away on Thursday 25th May 2017 following an 18 month battle with a malignant Brain tumour. We didn’t always have that close of a relationship, but I always looked up to my Dad and in many ways wanted to be like him and most of all wanted him to approve of me, of my life and of the choices that I made. One of the big things that we did bond around and have in common was a shared love of music though. When I was a lot younger, my Dad had a vast collections of vinyl records, which he then donated to a neighbour when a short-term trip to some far-flung foreign land turned into something a little more long term (I suspect I’ll touch on a lot of this throughout the future blogs, so I won’t go into all the detail now). However, by that time the world had started to move on to CDs anyway and he set about rebuilding a lot of that old collection again in this new-fangled format (that I’m sure would never die out and be replaced with anything else…). 

As part of his legacy, I have managed to get hold of his old CD collection and my intention is, as a tribute to my Dad, to go through each and every CD, listen to them, pass comment on them, share memories that the music sets off and just generally get a load of things that are in my head out there into the public domain to share with whatever audience I get. At last estimate there were around 400 CDs in his collection (nobody has counted yet, but I suspect I will at some stage) crossing a broad range of genres, eras and overall levels of quality (I’m sure there are some hidden gems in the collection) so I’m hoping that it’ll be interesting to people to see what sorts of things crop up and will maybe be tempted to check them out themselves too. With the advent of the Internet and music streaming specifically, I’m sure most things will be easy enough to track down these days. 

It’s interesting to me that I’ve chosen to set about this task in this way, when i think that as a child I often struggled to write anything of significance down (a combination of really poor hand-writing and an overall lack of imagination when it came to thinking about what to write). I remember being about 10 or 11 and being asked to write a story to fill a side of A4 paper, and when it came down to the last few lines I took      to      really      spacing      out       my       words      to      get      to     the       end! But all that’s changed in more recent years, I’ve had brief stints as a reviewer of unsigned bands (mostly ones found through MySpace for those of you who remember that) for a very short-lived free magazine called Salvo and was for a time a ‘blogger’ for one of my old teams in an old job of mine too. So overall I’ve become a lot more accustomed to making use of the power of the written (or typed…) word than I ever imagined I would be when I was a child. I used to often be accused of talking too much when i was younger too, and that seems to have died off a bit so maybe the written word is just my “inside voice” escaping in a different way. As anyone who has worked with me over the last 15 years can attest to, I’ve got a bit of a penchant for a long wordy e-mail when the mood strikes me so I’m sure that at times people wish I’d talk more and write less.

So why music? Other than the aforementioned link back to my Dad and his CD collection I think I’ve just always found that sensory reaction you have to different stimuli fascinating. Whether it be a certain smell that takes you back to a specific time and place, seeing something in a new way or hearing a great piece of music and getting tingles I’m still often taken aback at how powerful all of our senses are. Towards the end my Dad definitely started to lose his power of sight and his hearing, but one of the last things I did to really help him out was to dig out an old CD player and some headphones and put together a collection of his (or my…) favourite CDs to keep him entertained as much as possible while he was in hospital. A small gesture in a lot of ways, but something I’m very pleased that I got the chance to do for him. Also, I was entrusted with picking the music that played at his funeral and spent a good couple of hours trawling through Youtube coming up with different suggestions (both serious and joke ones) with a mix of happy and upset tears being shed. 

And I guess that in itself is the combination of factors that have lead me to this point really. The CDs are all there and waiting, and I’ve made a few initial hand-picked selections to start off with, but as we get further into this and I (hopefully) get a bit of a clearer idea of how this is all going to go I’ll start dipping in totally at random and seeing what comes out. Variety is the spice of life and all that - and I’d like to think that my Dad didn’t buy any CDs that are that dreadful. Having said that he was a bit of a notorious wind-up merchant at times, so if he did have an inkling that I was ever going to undertake this task, I’d fully expect him to have found the worst CD in the world and snuck in into the collection somewhere. 

So I’m hoping that this has enticed you to follow in my journey through music and memories that you enjoy reading my thoughts as much as I’m going to enjoy putting them out there for you all.