Yes, you guessed it, I am still a huge ABBA fan, but there is a lot more to the choice of music I love listening to than that …
Vinyl
As a child, I grew up in a house where we all loved music. My mum and dad owned an HMV Radiogram that played vinyl records at speeds of 45, 33, 16 and 78RPM. I was very drawn to this piece of furniture with its front speakers and built-in turntable. I was even more fascinated with the 45 singles our family accrued over the 1960s. We had some magical parties where I took charge of playing the records we bought, it was probably the aspect of growing up that I remember most fondly. Music is like a photograph album to me where songs bring back memories of people, places, events and happy or sad occasions. From as far back as I can remember, there was music on in our house: Top Of The Pops on a Thursday night; Family Favourites on a Sunday lunchtime; Pick Of The Pops on a Sunday evening; and everything in between. We had quite a large record collection bought with pocket-money or money our grandparents gave us for Christmas and birthdays. All five of us loved music, my mum and dad, and my two younger siblings. But I think I took the lead role, I loved nothing more than to go to the record shop on a Saturday with one of my cousins and buy something from the chart. In those days, there was always something I liked, indeed far too many songs to choose from that the pocket-money ran out very swiftly!
I used to have the tiniest amount of sight in my right eye as a child. It was never enough to see where I was going, read print or recognise people. But what I loved was standing at the living-room window when the sun shone through holding a record in my hand. I used to look at all the different coloured labels such as RCA, Pye and Decca, but I could only see them if I held the record up to the light from the sun streaming in. My parents bought packs of small white labels that I could stick on the A side so that I could feel it with my finger and know that I was putting it on the turntable the correct side up. I also put Braille on record covers so that I could identify them by artist or name. This improved my family DJ skills no end! But the little sight I had diminished so that I could see nothing by the time I reached my teens. By that time, I was so used to doing without it that it never phased me at all.
John Denver
By the time I heard of American folk singer, John Denver, I was 12 years of age. He reached number one in the chart in 1974 with the beautiful Annie’s Song, and it was my first real music crush on an artist. While my school friends were screaming and drawling over Donny Osmond or one of the Bay City Rollers, I was immersing myself in the songs of John Denver. There was something about his voice and lyrics that captured my heart. One by one, I began to collect his albums over the next few years. At the same time, however, my parents were in the middle of an acrimonious separation. Being incredibly close to both of them, my heart was broken that I had to choose which one of them I wanted to live with. Now aged 13, everything about family life changed for me, but my one constant companion, whenever I wanted to shut out all the bickering, was John Denver. There were times when I would lie on my bed huddled close to my tape-recorder listening to John Denver’s music. It didn’t take away the pain of my parents splitting up, but it gave me some peace and a well deserved distraction from what was going on around me. I still have his entire studio album collection on CD, and eventually had the privilege of going to his concerts on six occasions. When I listen to John Denver now, I no longer feel sad or long for what I couldn’t have which was to wake up with my mum and dad at home together. My parents went onto re-marry their respective partners, and are sadly no longer here to share music and happier times with.
ABBA
At the same time that John Denver was enjoying his most prolific popularity in the States, Swedish pop sensation ABBA were racking up number one after number one hits on the UK and European charts. One or two friends at school were getting into ABBA in a big way during 1976, and I found myself loving their songs too. So the strange mix of listening to ABBA or John Denver as my favourite artists grew as I swept through my teens. To my joy, both my parents liked ABBA and John Denver too, especially my mum. She would borrow my ABBA albums that I saved all my money to purchase, and then her mum joined the ABBA fan club my family had fast become.
In 1979, by good fortune, my mum worked with someone who was selling his two tickets to see the final ABBA concert at London’s Wembley Arena on 10th November. My mum didn’t have a lot of money, but she managed to scrape the money together to buy the two tickets so that she could take me to the concert. It was a night I will never forget, my mum and I had a fantastic time. She was my eyes, and described their costumes, the stage choreography and read the programme to me that we had bought on the way in.
Over the years since that wonderful night, I have been to ABBA The Movie, the stage musical, Mamma Mia three times, and the film version of the same name. Right up to her death in December 2006, my mum was just as big an ABBA fan as myself. In 2023, I went to London with two lovely friends to see ABBA Voyage at the Olympic Park literally streets away from where I was born. Again, it was a fantastic event, and my mum was paramount in my thoughts as I know she would have loved it all.
Other Artists
In addition to John Denver and ABBA, I listen to a lot of other artists as well, some of my favourites being: the Alan Parsons Project, Electric Light Orchestra, Bee Gees, Phil Collins, Genesis, Enya, Foreigner, Simon And Garfunkel, Chicago, Peter Cetera, Supertramp, Journey, Toto, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Lionel Richie, Belinda Carlisle and many, many more. My vinyl collection was slowly replaced by CDs in the 1980s, and have all been ripped to MP3 format so I can carry the collection everywhere with me on my computer. More recently, however, I have started streaming all that wonderful music from services like Apple Music, Spotify and Amazon Music with the odd monthly subscription and free trials.
However, there is one more band that I need to discuss here, music that has turned out to be my very favourite of all … enter Blackmore’s Night!
Blackmore’s Night
I was introduced to the music of Blackmore’s Night by a friend in 2022 when he texted me to recommend one of their songs called Ocean Gypsy. I had never heard of them before so I found the song and played it. What has since followed is my pure love for their music. Ritchie Blackmore, once of Deep Purple and Rainbow fame, is married to Candice Night. When they met, they discovered their love of folk and renaissance music. Together, they have blended as a formidable team to record a string of fantastic studio and live albums starting in 1997 with their first acclaimed album, Shadow Of The Moon. Candice, the lyricist and singer, has also recorded two albums in her own right. Ritchie Blackmore writes most of their songs and plays a plethora of guitars and other instruments. My favourite pastime at the weekend when I can chill out is to listen to their albums. Of all the music I own and love, Blackmore’s Night is now very definitely my favourite group. Her voice, his guitar playing, and the arrangement of their songs is a perfect blend that makes me so relaxed and refreshed. I would love to attend one of their concerts, but I don’t think they come to these shores that often which is a shame as listening to them live would be at the top of my bucket list of things to do. I suspect, given Ritchie’s age, they probably won’t make much more music, but I am glad to have been introduced to their albums, my life is all the richer for it.