How did your family influence your musical taste ?

i owe a lot to my mum. Being driven to school with dudu pukwana, andy shepherd, susane vega and paul simon graceland, also tracy chapman. Jazz is my first and last love, everything else starts from there and i think it stems from hearing it at an early age.

While my mother owned the odd Beatles album, it was my older sister who first brought certain albums into the house that caught my imagination, notably lots of Pink Floyd, MOTHERSHIP CONNECTION and THE CLONES OF DOCTOR FUNKENSTEIN by Parliament, PARALLEL LINES by Blondie and the first B-52's album. At a period when my listening had been strictly limited to Kiss, she was a very strong force in influencing my musical enthusiasms. Oddly, later on in her life, she seemed to undergo a bit of an inexplicable taste-ectomy, and now listens purely to crap like Enya, Basia, Enigma and Sade.

We never even had the radio playing much whilst I was growing up - no singing, no dancing either. I did get a crystal set for xmas one year from them which seemed to excite an interest in 1910 fruit gum company for a while.

I have a lifelong aversion to Irish folk music, thanks to my mom and dad. It's all they ever played at holidays. They had some soundtracks and original cast records, but they never listened to them. And Bringing It All Back Home-how'd that get in there?

I have an older sister who would loan me her singer/songwriter LPs (Carole King, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, etc.) and I sorta liked them but quickly moved on to Alice Cooper. She didn't share my enthusiasm. And that was the end of the family influence on my musical taste.

My parents detested pop music, and worse, had no understanding of it. I was fed a diet of Mozart, Beethoven, Sibelius etc. until I acquired my first transistor radio and could start making my own listening choices. My sister is younger than me so I was always 'ahead' of her. Our dealings with relatives were limited so no influences there.

I suppose I still resent my parents' narrow-mindedness, though I have no problem with the music they forced on me...but a little pluralism wouldn't have gone amiss.

I think I might find Simon and Garfunkel very boring if it hadn't been for their everpresence at home when I was a child, summer evenings playing the vinyl of their Greatest Hits, and I still love them ... so, yes, an influence. My mum used to play Paul Simon's "Graceland" constantly in the late 80s and early 90s, though, and I think my hatred for *that* record, which I'd have no strong opinions about otherwise, comes from its overexposure at home. So an influence another way. Also my love of Abba started from the records my mum had.

I'm an only child, and my parents were both in their late 30s when I was born, so I heard very little current chartpop in my formative years, there was actually a time when, if I was listening to the radio between 5 and 7 pm on a Sunday, it would have been my mum listening to Charlie Chester's Sunday Soapbox. Then I realised that Bruno Brookes counting down the Top 40 was a much better option; hence this post, through a million diversions along the way.

I've always wanted to write something about my older brother's musical influence. He had the only stereo in the house, so his records were what I wound hear. First it was The Who. Then in 1985 he went away to school and wound up rooming with a DJ at his college radio station, so he returned home w/ Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy and the first Butthole Surfers EP. Hearing those shifted things around a bit.

Jazz was huge for him next, so it was on to Miles Davis & Bill Evans. Then he had an extreme Eno phase, so I heard all those 70s LPs, and in 1989 it was Galaxie 500 and Nick Drake. Many great records he turned me on to, and definitely a huge influence on my taste, w/ his tendency toward slow atmospheric stuff. He's married w/ 2 kids now and rarely buys new music, so for his last birthday I bought him the Clientele collection. It seemed to fit well w/ what he used to play for me. He loved it.

Btw -- thanks for your piece on that, Tom. From both of us.

Btwn the ages of 8 and 15, I hated everything my folks had to offer - however over the last 12 years, I've realised the brillinace of Glen Campbell, Bacharach, Dionne Warwick, Peter Paul & Mary, bob Dylan, Elvis - man I got an education from them in ways I don't think my parents even know...it just took a while - I'm glad i started listening though.

My parents were mods. (I'm sure you've all heard my parents' Ray Davies story by now.) So in my youth I heard vast quantities of records by the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Small Faces, etc. etc. which is probably why I am so partial to Blur, and put up with a great deal more Britpop than I should have. ;-) Then when I was a rebellious teenager, I got into punk and started dressing like a rocker just to rebel and annoy my father. My father, around the same time, started getting very heavily in folk- and I don't mean those well worn Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell records, I mean being dragged to every coffeehouse in Upstate NY (my father ended up becoming sound engineer for a couple of them) and every freaking folk festival on the East Coast. To this day, I still don't actually like folk music, but I do think that it left me with a lasting love of vocal harmony.

My sister had a great influence on my musical taste. She was really into Billy Joel and Elton John... Given that our sibling rivalry meant that I couldn't possibly like anything she did, it was just as well, I guess, that she didn't like anything good!

I feel for you...man.

My LOVE for Graceland comes from my overexposure to it at home.

My story is pretty similar to Geoff's above. One thing that was cool, though, was that my grandparents owned a tavern in a popular vacation destination. The tavern had a jukebox, and the selections in the jukebox catered to every possible demographic at that time (1970s). I mean it had Don Ho, ZZ Top, and tons of four-years-out-of-date sixties stuff. My brother and I got to keep all of the old 45s from the jukebox, so that definitely influenced me, as I still prefer singles to albums. But 45s were the most fun format ever.

Robin, I had the same experience with Simon and Garfunkel. I know they're trite hippies but they're associated with too many happy times in my childhood for me to not like them now.

Lawrence. Welk. Do those two words mean anything to you?

ace question!

my family influenced my musical taste in many ways .... my parents were trad (irish traditional) musicians who regularly brought home droves of musicians for all-night seisiuns - i still love trad, especially in a live setting. of my four brothers, two were Proper Rock fans (thin lizzy, rory gallagher) who would slag me off for listening to the top 20 on my transistor and lecture me on Real Music. they were at least partly responsible for my teenage years of big country and rush fandom. oldest brother had least pin-downable tastes - hated trad, hated proper rock, loved jazz and punk and was a huge fan of early U2. sadly he was also the brother least likely to share his music with you.

but it's turned out that my brother tony has had the most lasting influence on my way of thinking about music. like mark pitchfork's brother, he had the only proper stereo in the house. he went on record-buying trips to dublin and came back with loads of these weird and wonderful Factory sleeves (with records in them too, duh), kraftwerk, john foxx, cocteaus, early cure and simple minds, DAF, cabaret voltaire, heaven 17/bef/human league, yello, shriekback ... and much more. it was music that no-one else i knew had even heard of, and anyone who did hear it classed it as That Weird Futuristic Shite. of course, it was only years later that i realised how great a lot of this stuff was, by which time tony (again, like mark's brother) had got married, had kids and therefore had more urgent outlets for his time and his hard-earned cash. but i'll always be grateful to him for introducing me to a world of music outside Earnest Guitar Rock and, even more importantly, for not badgering me into liking it.

happily i was able to reciprocate his influence to some extent in 1997 (or was it 1998?) by bringing him to tribal gathering to see both kraftwerk and orbital. he was taken with the come-full- circleness of seeing both bands.

i have two sisters who like music too, but they haven't influenced me in any real way (apart from an extreme aversion to nanci griffith).

I have my brother to thank for everything I listen to, if he hadn't nailed my feet to the floor about 8 years ago whilst playing Pink Floyd then I might listen to modern music, rap, R&B...I can't think of anything worse!

But who says you can't like all that together?

I just noticed that The Pinefox and I share a nostalgic fondness for Graceland stemming from overexposure to it in the formative years! (Well, I was still being formed, anyway...)

my dad: terminally tone-deaf and rhythmically impaired but for some reason some of my earliest memories of real music are his soul and funk records (stevie wonder, earth wind and fire) and classic pop (beatles, abba). my dad used to buy a 12" every friday after work and that was one of my favourite times.

my mum: ex-symphony violinist. hardcore classical fan and very knowledgeable about it. i don't really enjoy classical music as an adult as much as i did when i was five or six.

for some reason during the mid-eighties my parents both got really into philip glass. i thought that was the SHIT! pretty soon my brother and i got walkmans as a present and we begged my dad to make us philip glass mixtapes. i remember being pretty self-conscious when i went off to school and discovered that my friends weren't so into philip glass. they thought i was a little screwed up.

Not too much. My parents' lifetime music collection: a Readers Digest classical set (I played it once - to my knowledge it was otherwise untouched), a Bachelors comp, 'I've Got A Brand New Combine Harvester' by the Wurzels and 'The Birdie Song'. I am not making that up or editing it in any way. I owe the development of my musical taste to friends rather than family.

I learned to appreciate Motown and Country because of my mom, Jimmy Buffett because of an aunt and Techno and AC/DC because of two cousins.