My love affair with Music
Thinking back, the first record I remember getting was The Good The Bad And The Ugly by Ennio Morricone, which I received for my birthday in 1983.
For Christmas that same year I got two more LP’s, ‘Sudden Impact & The Best Of Dirty Harry’ by Lalo Schifrin, and The Blues Brothers soundtrack.
My earliest emotional connections with music came through films, and one of the most influential films at the time was The Blues Brothers, which I first saw a couple of years earlier.
The following year Breakdance came out on video and I heard ‘Tour De France’ by Kraftwerk. Highly disappointed it was not featured on the soundtrack album, but I managed to get a copy on 12”. Plus the Breakdance film led me to Wild Style, which came out a few years earlier.
Wild Style introduced me to Grandmaster Caz and The Cold Crush Bros. Another door was opened.
The following year LL Cool J released RADIO, and the cover alone put that album on my Christmas list together with The King of Rock by Run-D.M.C.
A few years later we got Eric B & Rakim, Ultramagnetic MC's, Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, Big Daddy Kane, Stetsasonic, Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, Slick Rick, Public Enemy, NWA and BDP to name a few.
All of which either Introduced me to, or sent me to dig deeper into artists like James Brown with Bobby Byrd & Lyn Collins, The Winstons, Lonnie Liston Smith, Bob James, Roy Ayers, Grover Washington Jr, Donald Byrd, Bootsy, Funkadelic, Sly & the Family Stone, The Meters, The Mohawks and many many many more.
I fell in love with R&B, Soul and Funk thanks to the Blues Brothers, then Hip-Hop sent me looking for the records that supplied the hooks & breaks to my favourite tracks.
After a 40 year love affair with music, buying records, reading liner notes, finding new favourite sounds and following them across decades, genres, labels, musicians and bands. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.
I’m still finding records that I can’t live without. and I'm still learning something new about music every day. I hope this will continue for another 40 years, but for now a little bit of my music jibber jabber is shared in the Journeys below. Have a dig and feel free to share if you have something worth sharing…
