The Music Man
I’ve got a degree of instinctive musical ability in that, untrained, I seem to understand how the distances between the keys on a keyboard or the frets on a fretboard relate to the notes produced. This means that I can usually, albeit amateurishly, plonk out a tune by ear. This instinctive ability has, however never been capitalised on because I’m too lazy and ill-disciplined to put in the necessary practice to learn an instrument properly or sight-read music (I read music at a laborious pace, one note at a time!). As I get old, this is probably my only regret in life – that I failed to capitalise on the head start that my musician father’s genes had gifted me with.
Despite my indolence, I’ve nevertheless loved music for all of my life and have crossed paths with a number of more dedicated musicians.
I guess it all started when I was at St Benedict’s junior school in Small Heath. On our way home, we would often pop into the local newsagents and buy a penny bag of broken biscuits, then go and sit in the front garden of a house on the corner of Coventry Road and Heather Road where there would be a local pop band rehearsing in the front room. They seemed very good, and even as nine-year-olds, we would enjoy listening to them working on their act while we munched our fragments of biscuit. The house on Coventry road belonged to a Mr and Mrs Edge, whose son, Graeme, had recently formed a group calling themselves the Moody Blues. They went on to be quite successful, I believe.
The Moody Blues © raythomas.co.uk
Music at Waverley
Elsewhere in this scholarly tome, the more attentive readers will have spotted that Waverley Grammar School was very big on music. The school was extremely open-minded when it came to encouraging our interests in this area, so when we asked if we could bring a record player into the classroom to play records during lunchtime, they readily agreed. My mate Tony brought in a stereo(!) which was fairly rare in the late 60s (most record players were still mono) and we duly set about blasting out our sounds. There were several camps operational in the school at that time, so we had to accommodate the various tastes. One day, we may have Rock, another day, Pop, another day Soul and so on. This was a good thing as it kept the interest levels high. A wide variety of artistes would feature on the playlist, ranging from the likes of Family, The Nice, King Crimson and Deep Purple through to Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Four Tops and Supremes, via the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel. The school even let us pin album covers to the wall if they were deemed to be suitably artistic, for example Anyway by Family featured a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci:
Cover of ‘Anyway’ © dustygroove.com
The ‘Conservatoire’
After leaving school, some of my friends went to the Birmingham School of Music, nowadays rather pretentiously known as the Conservatoire. They always had a more than decent student orchestra, who with typical Brummie self-deprecation, would refer to themselves as Stan’s Band.
