Thousands of records…

Records...we had thousands of records...they're still around...thousands of them. Most of them were crap.

My dad has a dangerous combination of qualities...

• an obsessive hoarder
• an inability to distinguish good from bad
• a very big attic

So...we had thousands of records - a living statement that quantity was better than quality - actually often the albums themselves would encapsulate this statement in their titles - whether it was "50 Guitars Visit Hawaii" or "101 Strings Put You To Sleep". Ok in amongst all this quantity lurked some quality. I heard a lot of Beatles, Nancy Sinatra and The Beach Boys while growing up. But I also heard a lot of the dreadful John Bird pretending to be Idi Amin (which my dad did, and probably still would, find hilarious) and an awful thing called "The Hut Sut Song" that he would play to anyone who visited.

My mum would listen to most of what my dad inflicted on her but with a bit of country thrown in. This was the seventies, country was tassled jackets and cowboy hats, country was Tammy and Dolly and Don Williams.

My brother discovered "disco" as a music and as a place to go...

I reached 14 (1978) and I needed to break free from this muddle of good, bad and ugly music - and I did...