Relistening to music from your childhood years.

So there it is, I feel a bit blue, then I pick some music from my childhood years. I'm convinced my whole musical taste is based on my love for Northern Soul. I like super saccharine popmusic. Especially pop that has biting lyrics. I love the friction between the sadness of the singer and the hooks that seem to fight with or try to solace the singer. But my love for No Wave 'n' Punk stems from my rebellion against Northern Soul.

I'm interested in how your listening habits from your childhood formed your taste now.

I grew up in the 70s (and 80s) but during that decade I rarely if ever heard contemporary music. I had a few singles from the Grease soundtrack cause I begged for'em but apart from that my dad was indier than thou: he never listening to that crappy 70s disco music (his words not mine).

Okay, I can't write to save my phat arse. Still interested in how your listening habits (or your parental..) shaped your music taste now.

dad - ornette, stockhausen, beefheart, varese, jazz/classical/soundtrack music in general, would buy any "rock" or "pop" record who had Accredited Jazzers on it thus lots of drake, martyn, ayers and all that.

mum - italian therefore lots of bel canto/opera plus sinatra, dino, como, lanza etc. etc. etc. plus beatles band and light pop in general.

result - total bipolar but oddly unifying love of music in five/six-yr-old self.

(i guess that's why escalator over the hill made such a monumental impact on me at such an impressionable age because basically it brought both of these strands together and suddenly the world all made sense)

Parents: Beatles, Nana Moskouri, Esther Ofarim and Abraham, umm The String-a-longs...

My own musical tastes started with the Beatles, and wheatever was on TV (Monkees, TopOfThePops, etc), and whatever I managed to get cheap at jumble sales.

Started off with "Blue Suede Shoes/Hound dog" Elvis RCA single (apparently, his first ever reissue from 1959, found in 1970 or so), although I did have "Been such a long way home" Garnett Mimms, which was gifted to me at a school fair.

Ended up with a ton of old singles (Batchelors, Stones, Cliff, whatever people were getting rid of), and a bunch of albums.

Also, new singles when I had the money and the inclination. (pop, mostly, early seventies)

Then Punk 'happened', and things got better.

In the 80s my dad tried to make my mum listen to music. She was a violin player (who stopped playing it the moment she met my dad). So he went out and bought her tons of 80s stuff, like Eurythmics,... He also gave me a Grace Jones single which scared the shit out of me.

I think my love of Punk and No Wave which I only discovered in my 20s is some sort of rebellion against girl groups and Northern Soul.

Mother: Cliff Richard

Father: Meat Loaf

and that's it.

My mother has never been interested in music. The only pop record she has ever displayed any enthusiasm for: "Eye Level" by the Simon Park Orchestra.

My father liked musical soundtracks: South Pacific, My Fair Lady, The King And I, The Student Prince, Flower Drum Song and especially Salad Days. He graduated to Andy Williams, The Beatles "before they went funny", The Seekers, Bobbie Gentry, Simon & Garfunkel, The Carpenters, Dr Hook, Andy Fairweather-Low and Carly Simon.

Meanwhile, my granny liked the New Seekers, late 60s/early 70s Eurovision and the pop end of glam, especially Marc Bolan and G*** G******.

My family's default position was basically anti-pop, vehemently anti-rock, and passionately anti-hippy in particular. I was brought up to believe that Mick Jagger was the most evil man in the country.

This made pop music the forbidden fruit, and hence much more desirable.

My starting point was bubblegum/Britgum/Eurovision/J.King-stle novelty songs, and I quickly developed a parallel taste for Trojan-style reggae. That taste for sugar-rush sweetness has never left me, and it partially explains why I fell so hard for bouncy, rushy hardbag in the mid-90s.

Mid-1960s to early 1970s MOR (Bacharach/David, Herb Alpert, Andy Williams, Carpenters) still makes me feel warm and protected. But it's the Beatles who are hard-wired into me the deepest - they channel childhood memories to an almost synaesthetic degree.

Due to the anti-hippy Jagger-fear etc, I grew up feeling scared of rock: Hendrix, Led Zep and Janis Joplin in particular made me feel disquieted and unsettled. These were bad people with a sinister agenda. I've never totally shaken off this feeling.

My dad is superSUPERindie in attitude. Nothing comes even close to Northern Soul. Nothing. If it's not NS, it's basically shite music. SO the whole elitist attitude never scared me, it always paled in comparson to my dad's.

My gran used to listen to Motown. I think my grandfather (on mum's side) was into jazz and classical music. Used to play in an orchestra but never really noticed him listening to music.

My parents, both born in the early '30s, had little more than a passing interest in music. They owned a bunch of albums, from some decent jazz stuff (Louis Armstrong, Erroll Garner, Duke, et al.) to the more easily digestible side of pop (Neil Diamond, Gordon Lightfoot) to loads of crooners (Johnny Mathis, Sinatra) to sing-along-with-Mitch type of things to the godawful Max Bygraves, etc., but they played the stuff only intermittently (except some Bygraves hit collection, which my dad listened to constantly for a year; it might be among the only music I truly can't tolerate more than a few seconds of). They were much more radio people -- and luckily, the radio they listened to was a transistor in the kitchen, which gave ME fairly unlimited access to the family hi fi (one of those big wooden jobs flanked by two speakers; it substituted as a serving table when guests were over).

Most of the music that impacted me early came from my older brother's stash. In chronological order (I mean in terms of discovering the stuff, not release dates), the first few years of my listening were defined by the following:
- some Tommy Roe hits collection on a yellow label + Paul Revere & the Raiders Greatest Hits (first two albums I remember consciously listening to and thinking about)
- Stones, Through the Past Darkly (my favourite artifact in the world, probably) and Beggars Banquet (and later on, Hot Rocks and Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers)
- Doors 13 (a comp) and Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine
- a handful of Beatles LPs, the key ones being Sgt. Pepper and the White Album
- Heavy Cream and The History of Eric Clapton (!)
- then, sometime in '72, a new day dawning.... Ziggy Stardust, second, third, and first Roxy LPs (in that order of purchase), first Ferry and Eno albums, Slayed!, Mott, first Dolls, Alice's Killer/Love it to Death/School's Out (the version with the women's panties, which Paul hung on his bedroom ceiling lamp)
- all this, followed in due order by loads of prog: Genesis, Yes, all the usual suspects

Concurrent to this was everything happening on radio, which I also paid obsessive attention to (there was also a more hidden "older sister" influence that I didn't recognize or appreciate until much later). I remember being scared shitless late at night listening to "Nights in White Satin" and "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" on the radio (I didn't know anything about the songs or who sang them). Also remember arguing with my sister about various K-Tel-type songs and week-end Top 40 countdowns, "Billy Don't Be a Hero," Paper Lace, Clint Holmes, etc. A bunch of 45s (most of them the domain of my two sisters) that got played frequently included Bee Gees "Run to Me," King Harvest "Dancing in the Moonlight," and Looking Glass's "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)."

First piece of vinyl I ever owned: "You're so Vain."

I refused to listen to any kind of pop/rock music until around age 10 (before that, it was only stuff meant for children), and when I did, it was because I discovered there were some nice and lively and catchy singalong tunes in rock songs too. So I guess that very early thing did already make me very interested in melodies, and perhaps how I love all things twee. Also note that I had already been playing the piano with classical training before that, and the slight classical training may have made me want to judge pop from classical criteria sort of.

When I did get into pop music, it was right in the middle of the synth/new romantic thing, that has really shaped my musical taste. I love synths, but I prefer them to be combined with actual tunes with verse and chorus. And also all pop music back then had male lead vocals, so I never got used to female vocals, which is probably the reason why most of my favourite music has male vocals only.

My dad had only jazz records, that never realy caught my interest much, but I did enjoy my mum's Beatles albums. And I still do. Except my own CDs are in stereo and sound much better ;)

I am a completist for all canonized oldies solely for this reason.
Oddly, listening to them can either remove the blues, or cause them...

Playlists divided as follows:

50s (Rock n Roll) hits
60s Hits (all radio hits)
60s TV themes
70s hits (general)
70s Classic Rock hits
70s Soul/Funk hits
70s Disco hits
70s sappy ballads (light up my life)
70s TV themes

Everything sorted by year. 50s is complete. 60s is pretty much complete. Still working through the 70s (at least the Disco hits list is complete). I listen to some everyday.

I was not much of a fan of 80s/90s hits for the most part (too into Hip-Hop to give a shit), but I've started collecting and sorting them too.