Soundtrack of My Life – Introduction

Congratulations — you have won the chance to share the results of the project I, an ancient 78-year-old British man (as of 2024), have been working on for far too long but have found an enjoyable exercise.

Despite being a melancholic introvert (an ideal temperament for a Leicester City fan), I am a man of many passions, one of which is music. So I would like to share the soundtrack of my life while I am still here. These are tracks which I especially enjoyed when I first heard them and which I still enjoy to this day.

In hindsight, 1946 was, musically, a great time to be born. It meant I encountered the birth of rock and roll just prior to adolescence and then enjoyed the sixties as a teenager and all the glorious music since then.

It has been difficult to have to exclude very many wonderful recordings, but there has to be a limit. I have realised, e.g., that I did not include Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, with its great guitar solo at the end. Neither is there room for Deana Carter’s wonderfully titled Have I Shaved My Legs for This? (Worth a view!)

The first episode will be coming out shortly, and there will be a fair amount of text just to set the scene — but I hope to be less verbose in the future. If you have any comments, I will be interested to hear them, and maybe this will prompt you to compile your own soundtrack.

As there was no TV in my home till I was 12 or 13, my exposure to popular music of the day was either by listening to my parents’ radio or by going to the cinema. In the 1950s, in Leicester, there were at least 25 cinemas scattered around the city.

I lived in a deprived area and was something of a street urchin. Along with my fellow urchins, we would stand outside cinemas and ask passing adults if they would let us go in to see the film with them (as we wouldn't be allowed in on our own). Looking back, we took quite a risk. No safeguarding issues in those days! But I survived — and my first 3 tracks are from films I saw as a child.

Think that's enough for the introduction.