Music That I Grew Up With

Music Room
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We are all musical and HiFi enthusiasts. And I suspect that for some of us we will always be tweaking to get that extra sound quality.

What I thought I would do with this thread is to share the music that I heard during various parts of my life together with some of the equipment used and who was responsible for bringing it into my life.

I will start in the latter half of the 60’s. I grew up in NE Scotland in a fishing town. As my father was a fisherman it was left mainly to my mum to keep the house going. We had a valve radio that did SW, MW, LW and had a plethora of cities from around the world that all seemed very exciting.

My mother would play the radio and I recall Petula Clark Sailor and Downtown. I also remember a fair bit of Jim Reeves (He Will Have To Go) and I also recall Burl Ives being played - especially on a Sunday morning as the 4 or 5 records that my parents had would get played over and over. This was on a very basic record player.

After school my mum would pick up my sister and I and we would go and meet with her friends in one of the towns cafes. Always in the back room would be a Wurlitzer playing stuff by the Beatles, Beach Boys, Monkeys and occasionally Rolling Stones ( my mother was not a fan).

Anyway thought I would share this with the forum and I look forward to hearing the music and hardware that had an impact on you.

If enough interest I can jump forward to the early 70’s, High School dramas in a few weeks.

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Good thread. We always had music at home but Mum who loves classical music and ballet enrolled me for piano lessons at 6, and Dad loved trad jazz. As I grew up in the 60/70s I became increasingly aware of the great rock bands in particular Free and Creedence Clearwater Revival but add loads more to that list. Gave up the piano lessons at Grade 6 but the electric guitar was the attraction by then, idiot move! However, the result is that I can indulge in Scarlatti, Beethoven, Miles Davies to Alt-J.

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Curiously my parents never listened to or expressed any preferences about music when I was young. I guess they went to dances etc when they met but music/theatre/cinema was never a big part of their lives. They were born in 1928/30. My older brother similarly has no interest in discovering music.

We had a radio and eventually a ‘music center’ with turntable, radio and cassette built in. I was really only exposed to music via a ‘cool cousin’ who liked Jethro Tull, Rush and Yes etc. Then along came Abba (first record) and Radio 1 etc. Home taping didn’t kill music, instead I remember swapping lots of cassettes with friends in my early teens.

Bruce

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Strong memories of Old Tige by Jim Reeves and many others. Derived from part of a Sunday being dedicated to things like Family Favourites.

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Dad played in a silver band ( cornet) so that was always being played ( not so well !) he was a keen hi fi hobbyist and built a pair of kef constructer transmission line speakers with a leak amp ( stereo 30 I think) with garrad 301 . Mum used to play Cat Steven’s and the Beatles a lot.

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My parents, mainly my mum, listened to classical or sometimea opera arias through BBC Third programme (forerunner to R3, for those unaware) on the valve wireless (radio). I liked the classical but not the opera. My mum had a wind-up gramophone and small collection of classical 78s, plus some Irish music, which she played occasionally. I didn’t like the Irish stuff, singing male voice dominant, and I don’t remember any catchyCeltic reels etc, but the classical was good.
At the start of ‘beatlemania’ when everyone at school was singing “she loves you yeah yeah yeah” making me cringe in pain, I was just old enough to be allowed to play the gramophone myself, and the first piece of music I fell in love with and played over and over again was Beethoven’s Egmont overture. Then one day at about the age of maybe 9 or 10, I was allowed to stay up late to hear his Pastoral Symphony on the radio - If I hadn’t been hooked already, that would have done it!

I couldn’t stand pop music, or at least the mainstream stuff which was all I heard on radios - coinciding with the advent of affordable pocket-sized transistor radios, through which music started to spring up everywhere.

In mid 1960s I started to like a few things I heard on the radio (includintg the odd Beatles record, though at first I refused to admit it!). This was the genesis of heavier rock and prog, but the key was finding the right radio programme. Then when I was about 13 or so, my older brother got a ‘Dansette’ type record player, and I got to listen to some of the music he was starting to collect, most notably Pink Floyd’s Saucerful of Secrets and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 (but only when he was out, without his knowledge or permission - there was trouble when discovered, usually because I forgot to return the bass and treble boost controls back to where he liked them, as I always felt it sounded best with both on maximum!) The Beatles’ Get Back single was the first record I ever bought, followed by Shades of Deep Purple the first LP (if memory serves correctly), both with only my brother’s record player to sneak playing on.

By that point I had already learned about hifi, and was in the middle of saving (pocket money, paper round earnings and money in lieu of birthday/Christmas presents) towards building my own, to be free to play whenever I wanted plus enjoy better sound…

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Music on the BBC Light Programme….. Children’s Favourites, Family Favourites, 2-way Family Favourites, etc. Everything from Classical to Delaney’s Donkey winning the half mile race :joy:.

Radio had valves that had to warm up :scream:. All seems such a long time ago now.

ATB, J

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Bach organ works played by Daniel Chorzempa or Helmut Walcha. Eine kleine Nachtmusik and other Mozart pre-classical evergreens. Various light religious classical semi popular stuff (which I hated).

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A great thread! I recall in the early/mid 60s my parents having a radiogram unit (teak cabinet with a record player and radio inside) and also a Grundig reel to reel tape recorder. Music was of the Jim Reeves and Petula Clarke type - all very boring to me. Then in late 69 I purchased my first album - Led Zep II - and recall playing it on the radiogram (with my mother in the background telling me to “turn that noise down!”). That was the start of my music and hifi journey. A very distant memory now.

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Lovely idea for a thread at a time of year that suits reminiscing. I need to think back carefully before posting to avoid the need for multiple edits.

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It all started with tube radio’s for me. I still get excited when I see a nice one. The next thing was a bright orange plastic turntable with integrated speakers. Used to play my parents records. Sounded awful, but still good fun. The first single I ever bought was called Dance Yourself Dizzy from Liquid Gold. Later my musical taste changed to bands like ELO, Supertramp, Dire Straist and especially the Alan Parsons Project.

With the money from my first job (age 14), I immediately bought HiFi gear. I had so many brands in the beginning: Sony, AKAI, Technichs, Philips etc. I still remember my AKAI tape deck that I used to record live music played by a friend. Graphic equalizers were also ‘the thing’ in those days and I owned multiple. I even built my own racks with custom lighting in it.

Now that I started digging in my memory, I can think of so many things :slight_smile: The musical taste is also changing constantly. Starting with Disco and Soul, via (Symphonic) Rock to Alternative and now Jazz, Folk and Soul.

Nice memories! Thanks for triggering this :slight_smile:

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It was only BBC Radio 3 or 4 in our house. Mum had the radio on all day in the kitchen and even in the car on holidays. I picked up on pop music listening to Radio 1 in my bedroom. I attribute my interest in Hi-fi to my grandfather who spent much money in the music department of Browns of Chester, changing his system maybe once per year. (my dad inherited his B&O 5500 system from him in the 70’s). I used to frequent Beatties music department in Wolverhampton and hanker for the large Japanese tuners they had. My first gear was a Pioneer stacking system from Laskys.

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What a great thread, Radio was the main one for me, we had a massive Grundig radio that played whatever the main BBC station was at that time (mid 60’s) my parents were into James Last & Bert Kaempfert, and had a large selection of their records, my father also played and owned a huge (to me) Wurlitzer organ, so Klaus Wunderlich was another on constant rotation.

My 4 Aunties were completely different and seemed to own 100’s of singles, by the Beatles, Stones, The Who, Manfred Man, Dusty and Cilla etc, whoever was No. 1 they had the single, which seemed brilliant to me.

Along come the 70’s and Radio 2 was the thing, Pete Murray, Jimmy Young, David Hamleton etc who brought the likes of 10cc, ELO, Sweet, Wings, Mud, Elton John, David Essex and of course Led Zeppelin, plus countless others, too many to mention.

The 70’s also introduced me to someone who had a massive influence on me introducing 100’s of bands, the late great John Peel.

Oh for a Tardis…

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You just reminded me. The radio would get switched on Saturday evening to listen to Jimmy Shand Scottish Dance Band music. My father would take out an accordion and play along. I do have some of the Dance band music that gets played occasionally - usually when Mrs B is out.

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I think that the drive to hear new music, dip back into older music in our collections and being open minded about what we are listening to, is at the heart of our hobby. Though I think music being a constant part of our daily lives means it is more a life choice rather than a hobby.

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Whole lotta love was my intro to heavy rock: A friend of my older brother took a copy of LZii to the Scout hut to play between rehearsals for a play we were putting on - played on my then new first hifi system that we were using to play incidental music and a couple of songs for the play. (I don’t think anyone else had any form of “stereo” which could be used as a sound system in a small hall and I readily volunteered for the chance to show off my pride and joy!) I was so glad I did as LZii etc would have been so much less interesting on a bassless Dansette record player or similar.

That was only three or four weeks after the album’s release. I bought it for myself within a week.

Within a year I had bought Deep Purple in Rock (and saw them, my first live experience) and Black Sabbath came along, plus Black Widow, Edgar Broughton, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, ELP, Curved Air, and added Floyd’s Atom heart mother, also some classical including Schubert’s Trout quintet, pand some Beethoven.

However, I don’t know if these count as music I grew up with, as by this stage I considered myself to be grown up!

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I do agree with that. This year, I realized again that music is what it is all about. There were some changes in my system (software and hardware) that were not all improvements. I started fiddling and than realized that I was not really listening to music anymore. Listening to sound quality i.s.o. musical emotion. I just want to enjoy the music and the emotions it triggers. Sound quality is a bonus, but not what it is all about.

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My parents were not really interested in music. At some point they bought a “Stereogram”. They had some excruciating Mantovani LP’s that they played when we had visitors. and amongst my Dad’s records I fell in love with the music of Glen Miller. I even have a triple LP still, that I had for Christmas when I about 10 years old. “In the Mood” was my favourite. A school friend and I listened to our parents Jazz records.

At Secondary school I became interested in girls and Prog. To pull the girls, you had to like Prog at my school. My first LP was Deep Purple in Rock, followed by the Yes Album. I had a tape recorder somebody gave me, and I recorded a lot of Radio One “In Concert” transmissions. I had a Saturday job in a shop and saved up and bought a Garrad SP25 with a Wharfdale amp and speakers. I also accumulated a few more LP’s.

At 17 I went up to London to work for the MOD, and the stereo went with me to a series of grotty flat shares. I accumulated more records, and via a friend actually saw some “In Concert” shows at the BBC Paris Theatre. I quickly realised the Civil Service was not for me, and did a part time Engineering HNC.

In a grotty Chiswick flat, that I shared with a Girlfriend, I was listening to Phil Collins playing his favourite music on Capital Radio. He is a man of good taste, and he played “San Lorenzo”, by the Pat Metheny Group. I was just stunned by this track, and bought a copy of the album the next day. I quickly drifted into or rather back into, the world of Jazz and left Rock and Prog behind me.

I was now in my mid twenties and had passed my exam with the IStructE, and could afford a Technics deck together with Quad Pre and Power. I also had some Celestion Ditton speakers. Soon after came an early Phillips CD player. I had met my future wife, who was crazy about Genesis and the New Wave. We bought our first house in Milton Keynes, and after a coule of years a flat in Ealing. I learnt to like Joe Jackson, she discovered Metheny.

My wife was homesick, so we moved to her hometown in Northern Italy. This is my Bohemian period, whilst I learnt the language. I did all sorts of odd jobs, but the big one was working for our local theater as a photographer. I got to photograph, and sometimes meet a whole load of my Jazz heroes, including Metheny. I went back into engineering, but carried on with the photography for a good while.

My record or rather CD collection has grown to a thousand or more albums over the years, mostly Jazz. My tastes are moving towards the more experimental end of this genre. I eventually set up my own Engineering studio and it has gone well, and so I could afford to upgrade. I got fed up with the separates which at this point were a huge Italian power amp and a Hegel pre amp, together with my now ancient Celestion Dittons, and bought a Naim XS3 and PMC speakers. I finaly bought a streamer too. I have gone down the headphone rabbit hole and have more cans than is sane, that I use with a SPL Phonitor SE.

So the music that has stayed with me is Glen Miller, 70’s Jazz Rock, a little of the best Prog/Rock like Family, Yes and Joni Mitchel and some old New Wave. But it is mostly Jazz that I listen too. I feel there is a lot of Black music that I have missed, and maybe I will explore this area.

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Those of us who were teenagers in the Late Sixties, Early Seventies can all tell a tale like this.

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After early exposure to the likes of The Everly Brothers, Little Richard and Chuck Berry via my big sister’s record collection, it was only a matter of time that I’d follow her escape from the dysfunctional parenting after hearing my father complaining that he thought a spell on the army would do The Rolling Stones a power of good and describing a Ginger Baker solo as “sounds like he just threw his drums down the stairs”.

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