MikePadgett.com

Three cheers for Dads’ music tastes

— Looking at today's pop music scene, I reflect that my dad's music isn't so bad after all.”

I was having a conversation with a colleague recently about musical interests and it turns out a lot of people are into the music they first heard their parents playing at home when they were kids.

Now I’m the same, even moreso in recent years. The sounds I may once have thought were horribly unfashionable I find myself hunting out in music shops today.

With the odd notable exception, I haven’t bought ‘current’ CDs in a long time, certainly not a Rock/Pop one.

There must be a reason for this. Either a) today’s music is rubbish or b) the good bands and artists just aren’t getting through.

My dad called me ‘sad’ the other day for code crunching to a soundtrack of Carly Simon, Supertramp and Pink Floyd. But can you blame me? If you listen to a lot of today’s bands, you can hear a couple of things.

Supertramp – great for coding to

One is that new stuff – the stuff you couldn’t write off as guff within a nanosecond – sounds similar to U2, the Cure or Elton John in their formative years, and the other is that you can’t see these new kids on the block sticking around for longer than, say, New Kids On The Block.

I (like many people, I expect) have long since given up on this 15-minute celebrity culture and looked backwards to discover some old gold. After all, you can only take so much of these multi-’talented’ people like 50 (pronounced “Fiddy”) Cent and Beyonce Knowles who, not content with polluting your ears, seek also to invade your DVD collection and sell you perfume in 50 languages.

When I was a kid of ten, it seemed like every week down the village institute we had these amazing birthday parties. The same local DJ (Andy Town) was hired over and over again for every gig. He spun on every occasion what must have been Erasure’s entire back catalogue alongside De La Soul, London Beat, Blackbox, Starship, Technotronic, DeeLite, Salt n Pepa and the occasional Michael Jackson number.

London Beat: still touring

All of these were great tunes. No matter that they were released and fronted by temporary gay icons, stoners, alleged kiddie fiddlers and a model hired to put an acceptable face on a ragtag collection of ill-fitting Lolleata Holloway samples; because as a kid back then, you couldn’t really appreciate the irony, could you?

A village institute similar to that described

Imagine that sweaty village institute today, where the girls sat on one side sending messengers over to the boys on the other; where Janet Wade or a bunch of pally mothers did the catering in back; where some kids derived unfathomable pleasure from skidding around on their fast-thinning trouser knees; where these same kids tried constantly to trip up their friends and mortal enemies; where many kids spent happy evenings until 10:30 at the latest, some grabbing their first kisses with tongues in between acrimonious sessions of Spin the Bottle and Musical Chairs to the beat of Right Said Fred.

Right Said Fred and Spin the Bottle: hideous combo?

So imagine that and try to put in there today’s top ten singles, in which phrases such as “my sexy ass”, “put it on me” and “ready to do it, ready to bone” rub eardrums with clumsy ‘autobiographies’ of dealing, champagne materialism and cut-for-the-radio-edit-but-still-clearly-obvious expletives than you’d care to name delivered to you in a mutter that barely approaches serviceable English.

Of course, that’s not to say that I’m Mary Whitehouse. In the 50s, people thought Elvis was filth. Fact. But how much further can you now go? I’ve often joked that any ‘street starlet’ role model who’s doing some time inside to show the kids that life be tuff could save a lot of effort for herself by recording a five second soundbyte that encouraged the listener directly to initiate bodily congress. The cash revenues from this auspicious attempt to end pop as we know it would flow like Cristal at an aftershow party, whilst saving me the aural pain of idiot neighbours testin’ they watts.

So my dad has always had an excellent range of music, I have come to realise. And if I don’t particularly like a particular band, I can always be sure it will lead on to some other fascinating nook of musical history.