My Musical Life - Part 1.

What's your musical journey?
Thinking back, mine's been a varied one - influenced by friends, family, Radio 1 and in the later years Radio 2.

My childhood music input consisted of a less than eclectic mix of Tommy Steele's Little White Bull, the sound track album to Rex Harrison's My Fair Lady and Russ Conway at my paternal grandparents' Bush gramophone - a spectacular varnished mahogany structure treated with the sort of veneration reserved for deities. I was the only other person other than Grandpa and my father allowed to go within 3 metres of it. An honour indeed.

My Grandpa Donegan on my mother's side had a taste more akin to mine, and lots of country seven inch singles - Harper Valley PTA was my favourite and there was some really obscure but compelling music on the spool to spool tapes I found, these were played on a radiogram the size of a narrow boat, which garnered none of the respect of the Bush; it was a dumping ground for cigarette packets, pouches of pipe tobacco and yellowing copies of the Daily Express. This was the music I preferred.

Then at home with my parents it was different again: a lot of classical music; some Nana Mouskouri; Aker Bilk and his British Jazz counterparts; The Seekers; Abba; and there shining like a jewel in the last but one rack - The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

And that was pretty much it, that was the musical diet of my first ten years, not exactly under nourished, but hardly an aural feast either.
The first album I bought and the first cassette I ever owned was Duran Duran's Rio, purchased in Woolworths in Crewe in 1982. A startling change of direction and I'm not sure my parents entirely approved. Then came a flurry of single buying and displaying some terrible taste and total lack of judgement my first single shopping trip resulted in the ownership of Neil - Hole In My Shoe, Nik Kershaw's The Riddle, and Paul Young's Everytime You Go Away - it was 1984.

There followed a few years with every Saturday morning spent taping songs from the radio - Animotion, Human League, Howard Jones, and pretty much anything that I liked the sound of. My tastes were changing, developing and growing.

One afternoon, at school, a friend played me the most ridiculously fantastic record I had ever heard, it went on for ages and was like a mini opera, it literally blew me away (a clichéd phrase but it's true). The track was Bohemian Rhapsody.

Bohemian Rhapsody wasn't off my cassette player for weeks, I'd play it, rewind, it play and repeat the process, ad nauseam. About a year after this epiphany I had every single Queen album on tape, and some specially editions too, I even bought A Night at The Opera on LP for my dad's birthday present. The staff at the long gone Omega Records in Northwich, were used to me meandering in each Saturday lunchtime and parting with £3.99 for each precious album.
(Yes, Omega Records - home to the label DeadDeadGood - does anyone remember Oceanic and their track Insanity? Click it and have a listen!)

Along the way I picked up some Blondie, and The Who too, but mostly I lived and breathed Queen from that moment, until I went to start my A Level studies. Then there was epiphany number two...