When I was a nipper I wasn’t really into music. I couldn’t understand the idea of listening to something that didn’t tell a story. As long as I had my Famous Five story tapes, any long car journey was covered as far as I was concerned.

This may have had something to do with my mum’s love of Cliff Richards and my Dad’s obsession with Nana Mouskouri and the Carpenters. I have of course been making up for it ever since but on occasion I still remember the day I bought my first two albums- “Hey hey hey its the Monkees Greatest Hits!” and “Velveteen” by Transvision Vamp. An ageing hippy called Jeff Minter put me onto Transvision Vamp in a column he used to write in Sinclair User. The year was 1989 and I was 14.

That’s my guilty secret I’ve been attempting to atone for ever since (hey, I like Trout Mask Replica, I’m a proper music fan!) and I’m determined M’laddo (and in a bit the wee lass) aren’t going to grow up not listening to music. Since M’laddo moved into his own room we’ve always played him a cd to help send him off to sleep. He’s an active, loud, rambunctious lad and silence doesn’t sit well with him, so we thought it would be a good way to distract him from being cast out of the partental nest/room. Sure, he has the Night Garden album but we’ve tried to be a bit more diverse than that and thankfully have kept the Tweenies well out of it.

I now have a pretty eclectic taste in music, running the gauntlet of the New Folk Revival, to 70’s heavey/hairy rock, prog rock and some more modern stuff, and wifey would say her musical tastes are a lot more respectable than mine (she got to listen to the Rolling Stones growing up), so M’laddo gets a good selection of tunes to listen to. We try to go for slowler tempo stuff, so he’s only had a brief fliration with Deep Purple but to give you a flavour of his night time listening, these are the CD’s on current rotation:

The Definitive Simon and Garfunkel
The Very Best of Cat Stevens
The Cosmic Rough Riders
Pet Sounds- The Beach Boys
When it Falls- Zero 7
Wish You Were Here- Pink Floyd
The Rolling Stones

I also have a confession to make. M’laddo was nearly born to a nice soothing Morecheeba track. Unfortunately he decided to fight and was eventually born about 15 minutes later and the MP3 player had moved on to the next album which was Megadeth’s Countdown to Extinction. And yes, I’m still apologising for this one over two years later but I can’t help think it was rather apt…