Music

Living with a music person has had a volumable impact on my aural world, if not my spelling. It's made me realise how fickle music can be. Some music you love, and will continue to love, till death doth you in. You know the stuff, lose yourself, 'Mummy's busy, go play with the iron, darling' music.

And other music makes you want to shuck your own ears off in a hurry. FOr me, the late sixties is shakey ground, producing the kind of music you can only listen to if you imagine that every beat of that tamborine is connecting with the forehead of that wailing, doe-eyed white songstress with split-ends. The rise and rise of the macrame headband is no mystery to me.

And then there's the more quixotic love-hate stuff, where you start off thinking; 'Hey, this could have legs! And after a month you're thinking very dark thoughts indeed. Devendra Banhart, you smarmy hippy, I'm looking at you.

There's also music madness. I had no idea I was pregnant at all, until I heard the Dixie Chicks. Suddenly I was in some kind of low-slung, dirty, heart-rending rapture. Maybe it was simply nature's way of telling me I'd never get into my Daisy Dukes again. Thankfully, birth cured me.

This post is where I oppress you with my favourites which are standing the test of time. It's nowhere near an exhaustive list, just the tip-of-my-tongue favourites.

Top of the list is a compilation of Nyahbinghi* drumming referred to as the "Trojan Box Set". Sparse, melodic, beautiful. This is my fix-everything music. Next, there's Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. And oldy but proving to be a perennial goody. Then the Heliocentrics. And the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble.

You're unlikely to hear this stuff on the radio, so you'll at the end of each song you'll just have to imagine what a great interest-free deal on bedding and lounge suites you could be missing out on.

But they're worth it.


*Nyahbinghi, I am reliably informed, is a type of music, characteristic of the most something-or-other of rastafarianism. This information is best relayed from the afficionado to the neophyte with a sort of weary sigh.