Musical Memories of David Stenning

My relationship with music is unsophisticated; I like and remember songs that appeal to me at first hearing and as a result, have not been able to enjoy those categories which require effort and education to appreciate such as opera and classical music.

There were few records in my household when growing up but I was an avid consumer of popular music from an early age. I used to listen to week-end shows on the radio such as Children's Choice with Uncle Mack, Family Favourites and Pick of the Pops. This latter show on a Sunday afternoon had a section on new releases which I monitored closely. Later, I absorbed everything that Juke Box Jury (Oi'll Give it 5), Ready Steady Go, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Top of the Pops had to offer on TV.

My song choices tend to have good melody, meaningful lyrics and interesting singing voices and I find as I get older that it is harder to find new music that I like. I put this down to the fact that my favourite artists were at their best when they were young and also that with today's new music, it is so easy to publish that bad stuff swamps the good. Fortunately, there is plenty of new "old stock".

Johnny Cash has an unmistakeable voice and is perfectly suited to the Nine Inch Nails' song Hurt. This tells of the pain caused by drugs and was recorded shortly before the singer's death in 2002. After listening to this song, I can say that I am turning to Leonard Cohen to be cheered up. As a poet turned singer/song-writer, I have enjoyed his mournful lyrics since the 1960's. Famous Blue Raincoat is in the form of a letter to a male friend with whom he had a lover in common. LC asks his friend "Did you ever go clear?" which some think is a reference to a level in the Church of Scientology which LC was a member of for a while.

Ex Police man Gordon Sumner (What's that you say, Gordon, you want us to start calling you Sting?) is a gifted song writer but an ordinary singer so I much prefer his Fields of Gold delivered by the silky, effortless vocals of Eva Cassidy. Her talent was sadly discovered post mortem when she was aired on Radio 2 in the 90's.

Whilst living in Yorkshire in the 1980's, I came across the phenomenon of Northern Soul where special venues in the north celebrated Motown and other American soul artists many of whom were rejects in their own country. Frank Wilson was one of these who pressed his only record and then destroyed most of the copies when he was not satisfied with it. Only a few survived and one copy sold for $25,000 at auction. His song Do I love you? is considered as the Northern soul anthem.

When I come across a favourite song covered by another artist and the result is better than the original, I hang on to it. Some diverse examples of this are Tori Amos singing the Nirvana song Smells like Teen Spirit and Grace Potter thumping out Cortez the Killer by Neil Young. An unlikely pairing in 2015 was Simon and Garfunkle's Sound of Silence and the heavy metal band Disturbed. The gentle folksy original is transformed into a passionate cri de coeur and the video of the live performance is riveting.

Mark Knopfler and his band Dire Straits impressed me when I first heard them. If he were only a good songwriter with an interesting voice, he would have a lot of appeal but with his sublime guitar playing, his performances are thrilling. There are several favourites including Romeo and Juliet where I think Mark's "You and me, Babe. How about it?" is equal to Shakespeare and Tunnel of Love with its beautiful guitar riffs but Sultans of Swing is my choice. It has all the elements together with a good story.

Although the Punk scene passed me by at the time as I was busy with child rearing and evening classes, I have paid it a lot of attention since. As a reaction to the dreary mainstream music of the early 70's, it engaged many young people and was an alternative outlet for their anger and energy. The New York poet and performance artist, Patti Smith sang her version of Van Morrison's Gloria in1975 and it was claimed to herald in the Punk movement. One of Patti's band members was Richard Sohl and he must have had a difficult time when he was at at school.

Music that tells stories of sunshine, surfing, girls in bikinis and hot rods racing makes me feel happy and wishing that I was on the beach in California. Brian Wilson formed the Beach Boys with his brothers and friends and wrote and produced these songs. Good Vibrations is a complex studio production described as a pocket symphony that I will never tire of. "I don't know where but it sends me there."

I was swept along on the wave of Beatlemania in the early 1960s and my interest in the group deepened as they developed. I had to write an essay in my 11 plus exam on "a person that I admire" and based it on Paul McCartney which was a risk that paid off. It is difficult to select a single song to represent the importance of the group but Strawberry Fields Forever is my choice. There are many reasons for liking this song but I particularly like the pervasive emphasis on the subdominant and the tonic reached through plagal cadences.

As a school-boy and in my career as a bean counter, I can say that I always longed for the week-ends to come and enjoyed songs that reflected this. The Easybeats from down under captured this in Friday on My Mind and David Bowie has an even better version. I think that The Cure really loved Fridays too and this comes over in their happy melody, Friday I'm in Love. Coming from Crawley, they probably welcomed the chance to go somewhere else on a Friday.

The idea of a self publicist writing about unhappy and inadequate people like fat girls and vicars wearing tutus would not have been expected to be popular in the 1980's but Morrisey's distinctive voice and language and Johnny Marr's guitar brought The Smiths to the attention of John Peel and the rest is history. There is a light that never goes out is a love song expressed with powerful imagery and was voted by the New Musical Express as the 12 th best song of all time.

When I first heard Bob Dylan, it was the sound of his voice that attracted me rather than the lyrics. As I got to understand the meanings of his songs, he became a hero for me like millions of others round the world. I much prefer his earlier work and the Freewheeling album in particular. Don't Think Twice It's Alright is so evocative of this time and I used to hope the girl he was moving on from was not the one on the album cover.

When I saw and enjoyed the film Withnail and I in the 1980s, the theme song was an instrumental of Whiter Shade of Pale which was a favourite song by Procol Harum. It was played by saxophonist King Curtis and created exactly the right ambiance to introduce the film. When considering this piece as one of my choices, I compared it to another instrumental, the Air on a G String by Jacques Loussier, better known as the Hamlet cigar advert. It would have been obvious to classical music fans, but not to me, that these two pieces are the same. Gregor Fisher must have had fun telling his luvvy pals that he was doing Hamlet again.

Killing Me Softly by Roberta Flack was released during my courting days in the early 1970's. I identified with the lyrics and liked her poignant delivery of the song and it always reminds me of those happy times.

There are lots of rock songs built around an infectious riff that make you feel like getting up on your feet and strumming that air guitar. Sweet Child O' Mine is one of them which has been highly acclaimed and which I enjoy in my car at high volume.