As a follow up to my Download and 90sFest posts I got to thinking. Why do I enjoy festivals, concerts and clubbing? Apart from spending time and making memories with my family. Looking back I was fortunate enough to have been exposed to a wide range of music from a very early age and anything I could dance to was a bonus.  

As a child I was surrounded by the music of Beethoven, Dvorak and Chris Barber through my Dad’s love of classical and jazz music; he even rigged up a speaker in my nursery so I could hear his favourite music when he played it. He was also partial to a bit of Rock’n’Roll, he was an excellent dancer too and did try to teach me but, surprisingly, it wasn’t until I was 55 that I mastered the style after going to lessons with Amanda. Occasionally he would listen to some 1960s pop when my mother allowed it. Mother, being a bit of a snob, thought pop was beneath us; although she did rather like The Beatles and Cliff Richards and The Shadows so we were allowed to listen to them. I was also used to hearing a lot of the country and western music of the time due to their interest, along with a group of friends, in square dancing, which was very popular at the time. 

Most of my very early childhood was spent at my grandparents and they had an old organ in their front room which I vaguely remember myself plonking on the keys. It was a sad day when it was found to be riddled with woodworm and had to be destroyed. That early “interest” in playing an instrument led to my being carted off to Mr Moore the piano teacher for my first piano lessons as soon as my hands were big enough; I can still play Lucy Locket by heart! There followed years of spending my evenings practicing both willingly and unwillingly. Amanda has vivid memories of the off key fumbling and the subsequent thumps as I kicked shit out of the piano. By the time I left home you could see where the kick marks got lower and lower as I grew. Once I was in secondary school it wasn’t long before I was talked into taking violin lessons; another unpleasant memory for my sister. I’m not sure why but within a few months I switched from playing a ¾ sized violin to a full sized viola which was huge in my small hands.  This resulted in my joining the Nottingham Youth orchestra for a couple of years although I think it was more to do with a lack of viola players than my prowess though. My love of dancing, I presume, stems from taking ballet lessons from the age of two until I was forced to give it up due to weak ankles and it interfering with things our mother wanted to do at weekends.My dance lessons also exposed to a variety of music.I did briefly get back into dance at college and at one point it was a toss up as to which I would ultimately choose; music or dance; but in the end it was neither.

Through my musically formative years, unbeknownst to my mother, I was also being subverted by my peers. At six years old I was a pupil at the school where my mother was a teacher and it was here I heard ska and reggae for the first time. Every day the whole school would have to walk in a long crocodile through the streets of Nottingham to some off site dining halls for lunch. Since I was Mrs Brown’s daughter I was entrusted into the care of a lovely black girl a couple of years older than me; I wish I could remember her name; who would sing all those early reggae songs by Millie Small and Desmond Decker as we marched along. They always sounded so upbeat and easy to move to. It was a no brainer that I was going to continue to enjoy the style as I got older.

At junior school I began to discover other styles of popular music with the proliferation of teen magazines my friends bought which featured the pop stars of the day and although I was allowed to listen to the likes of Cliff and The Shadows, The Beatles; a band I thoroughly detest to this day; Freddie And The Dreamers because my dad liked them and The Beach Boys because, inexplicably, Mother liked them I remained very sheltered musically. And, to be fair, some of those 60s bands and artists were a little generic and unmemorable.

Then came my teenage years. Although my main musical focus was  still on the classical I was in a bigger pond with my class mates expanding my horizons and I was beginning to discover new sounds. By the time I was 15 my best friend Patty and I were veterans of Nottingham’s Palais De Dance where we could be found on many a Wednesday at the  ‘Grab A Grandad’ night taking advantage of a free Babycham from anyone stupid enough to buy us a drink before we ducked out and headed for Intercon; the newly opened basement nightclub beneath the recently built Victoria Centre. It was here I discovered disco, funk and glam rock. I started using my pocket money to buy the latest singles by the likes of T-Rex and David Bowie from Pearson’s at 2/6d each. One of the most memorable times of my teen years was  discovering my grandmother had bought me Alice Cooper’s “Elected” for the Christmas of 1972, much to the chagrin of my mother. Her control of my music tastes were beginning to slip away and she did not like it one bit and to be aided and abetted by her mother was definitely adding insult to injury. So it was quite a surprise when she agreed to my going to a pop concert a few months later. 

It was March of 1973, just after my 16^th birthday and I was  being allowed to go to a Roxy Music concert at Nottingham University along with my then ‘best friend’, Christine. It was here where my love of Techno and electronic music began. We had wangled our way to the front of the stage where the pungent aroma of Brut 45 wafted over us as Bryan Ferry strutted his stuff and warbled out ‘Virginia Plain’. But it wasn’t Ferry who caught my interest; my adolescent self most definitely had the hots for Andy McKay and I’m still a pushover for a saxophonist. Although, even now, five decades later, one whiff of Brut 45 is all it takes to hurl me back to that dark cavern of a gym hall and Virginia Plain. Musically, however, I was far more fascinated by Brian Eno, clad in what looked like peacock feathers, on the synthesiser. Little did I know then that the use of these early synthesisers were the beginning of the Techno revolution.

For the next couple of years I continued to study Serious Music both at school and subsequently college; I was destined to become a music teacher; a choice thrust upon me by my mother; until I decided I wasn’t. Which coincided with meeting Paul, who introduced me to a whole new musical landscape. The first album he played for me, bless his little cotton socks, was Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield because he thought it was the nearest thing he had to classical music in his record collection. I hated it, always had despite it being one of my dad’s favourites (or was that because my mother said it was?). Then he played  ‘Fandango’ by an as yet unknown band in the UK, ZZTop, which he’d recently bought in America on his last tour of duty. My 19 year old mind was blown away. At that time he was also quite into progressive rock where many bands such as Tangerine Dream made use of synthesisers to create not just music but, like Brian Eno, to produce wonderful soundscapes through which my mind could wander unhindered. Even better when wearing headphones. Within a few weeks I was listening to albums by Rick Wakeman, Robin Trower and Stomu Yamash’ta.

I left my studies behind me, got married and brought up my daughters all to the soundtrack of the late 70s and 80s with the rise of Techno bands such as Kraftwerk, and Gary Numan; punk rock and Two-Tone, which rekindled my liking for ska and reggae with Desmond Decker, the Specials and The Selecter. Paul even bought me my own small synthesiser for my birthday one year which I enjoyed playing about with but the pressures of family life, raising children and running the local playgroup left me very little free time to myself and it was soon gathering dust in the corner of the sitting room.

There was a short period, in the gap between the older three girls and the younger two, that I was going out with Paul’s sister Mandi on a Saturday night to the local dives which often ended their nights with a bit of Northern Soul or the really cheesy sounds of seventies disco. Occasionally, when visiting my sister in London she would take me to the odd classical concert if they weren’t too expensive.

But it wasn’t until late 1991 that I got back into the swing of going out to nightclubs. With Paul and the girls living in Spain I had moved into the nurses accommodation at my training hospital to complete my RGN training so was sharing a lot of my free time with people in their early 20s. Although the ten year age gap felt enormous I did make a couple of very good friends with whom I shared a flat and on any given Wednesday we would hurry off shift, change out of our uniforms and head to the hospital social club; they were allowed back then; for cheap drinks before heading into Boston and the Corn Exchange where we would dance the night away to the latest sounds. By the time I had qualified and returned home permanently the girls were growing up and developing their own musical tastes. Which is how, in the October of 1994, I came to be at Alexandra Palace with Suzy and Kate watching Britpop bands Blur and Pulp. Suzy subsequently got into Guns and Roses and Oasis whilst Kate preferred the techno clubland genre made famous by the Club 18-30 party culture of Ibiza and Ayia Napa.

Moving forward to the early Noughties and Netti was now old enough to start clubbing. I well remember having to go into an actual back street “private” shop where I had to create an account before I could buy her first leather bra! It wasn’t long before we were regularly heading off into Barnsley where each pub and bar had it’s own vibe catering for all tastes in music. We used to love Quasimodos/Esmeraldas; pop downstairs, power ballads and soft rock on the middle floor and dance music on the top floor. We generally bypassed the ground floor and headed straight to the middle then the top before clattering down the fire escape rear exit and on to the nightclub where they played the really cheesy stuff until around 1am when it switched to clubland. 

As the girls grew up and had families of their own the clubbing and partying became less frequent, reserved for special occasions such as birthdays, hen parties and weddings. I did however manage to get my fix fairly regularly through the “payday” ward nights out where, on the last Thursday of the month, I would join my colleagues for a pub crawl round Sheffield and ending the night at the famous Leadmill with it’s throbbing dance music, sticky floors and invariably flooded toilets.

When Bozzie met Jim in 2006 it was a musical match made in heaven. Through her teenage years she had been, still is, a bit of a goth with a yen for heavy metal; like her dad; and Jim, who  had the same tastes had introduced her to the Download Festival. On one of their visits they were telling us which bands they were going to see that year and  at some point mused that I had never experienced a music festival and wouldn’t have minded seeing Motorhead  and AC/DC as well as a host of other bands. Before I knew it my camping ticket was purchased and I had one of the best experiences ever. It wasn’t just the music, it was the atmosphere, the euphoria, the buzz. The beast was awakened and since that fateful weekend in June of 2010 I have managed to go to Download umpteen times in the intervening years, seen some fabulous bands and introduced several grandchildren to the experience. 

Which brings me nicely to the present and a few good memories over the last few years: Slipknot (concert), Guns ’n’ Roses, Linkin Park and Ice Nine Kills (Download) and Ian Van Dahl, Five and the Vengaboys (90sFest). So now we are all up to date and as my Spotify lists will testify I still like many genres of music from Albinoni to Rob Zombie and I am definitely not too old to enjoy any of them and I will most certainly continue to rock up at the latest festival, concert or event be it Classical, rock or rave. 

OK folks, in a complete about face, I am now off to spend the next few days watching the full 15 hours of Wagner’s Ring Cycle for the umpteenth time.