What Ya Listenin' To?

I guess one of the most important questions we ask as adolescents, when meeting a potential friend and/or boyfriend/girlfriend; or, perhaps in seeking out what tribe we might belong to, is: "What music d'ya like?". It certainly was the case in my youth, and has probably always been [and maybe always will be] the case, as the discovery of music has been central to the process of growing up and finding one's way through the hormonal maelstrom of one's teenage years and on into adulthood. Let's face it, we all - or most of us, at any rate - need a soundtrack to our lives. Which brings me to open-mindedness with regard to music(s). It's something that has been in the background of my own personal musical journey from a pretty early age: nine or ten years of age, I'd guess, when I discovered my love of [particularly] guitar music.

I loved pretty much every form of it from a very early stage in my youth, to be honest, but at the point that I moved schools into the secondary system aged eleven, I was already a fan of classical, flamenco, folk, jazz, blues and rock guitar. Already, the seeds of my eclectic taste in music were sown. I grew up listening to all of the above and classical music generally, along with the more mainstream pop, schmaltz, big-band and country-based music of mainstream radio and TV. In short, I grew up liking just about everything that music could present me with. I was not entirely uncritical in my choices, and I was aware that not all things in all genres of music were equally good, but, on the whole, I was pleased to to try anything on offer, and to pretty much the same degree I still am, sixty years on.

What I've always found annoying and fascinating in equal measure is why not everyone else shares this broad church approach to musical appreciation. The most famous person to share almost as catholic a taste in music as my own was of course the late British DJ, John Peel. But on a more personal level, I've known perhaps two others who have approached having almost no limits [I could always find something to the contrary!] to their music listening canons: my late friends, Johnny Kyte and Alan Moores; both of whom introduced me to an even broader spectrum of music than I already espoused, at two very different periods in my life: the influence of the first opening the doors to the second, some fifteen years later, who then opened my ears to yet more as yet unheard stuff. In the process of our friendships I gave them both, in return, music that they had as yet unheard: what goes around, comes around...