Don't take away my music...

Rare are the mornings when I wake up without a tune in my head. It might be a song I played the night before; it might be something I heard on the radio the previous day; it might be something completely random. The point is that music plays a huge part in my life. 

 I spend plenty of my days humming or singing something - and the great joy of my love of music is that it’s not restricted to one genre. A random trawl around my iPod throws up Alice Cooper, Tony Christie, Robert Plant, Meat Loaf, the Specials, the Clash, the Ramones, Albert Hammond, Bruce Springsteen, Green Day, Stonesour, Leonard Cohen, the Killers, Janis Joplin, Rammstein, loads of Motown, the Scissor Sisters, Motorhead, Dr Feelgood, Rupert Holmes....you get the idea. And there’s plenty of classical, as well.

 There’s not much I don’t like, with the possible exception of Coldplay. Yet this week’s musical adventures might, on the face of it, look absurd. The highlight of my TV viewing of the 2011 Glastonbury Festival was Biffy Clyro, the Scottish band who meld intense and interesting sounds into high-energy rock; on Tuesday, Mrs W and I joined 10,000 other music fans of a certain age to see Neil Diamond at Birmingham’s NEC; today, I visited the Home of Metal exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, a celebration of the heavy metal music born in the factories of Birmingham and the Black Country.

 Neil Diamond? Biffy Clyro? Heavy Metal? Oh, come on.....yet I don’t think there’s a problem here. I was brought up in the mid-70s listening to Mr Diamond’s music on the record player in our living room and once you get music into your life at an early age (I’m talking mid-teens here) I think it stays with you for ever. And if you listen again to some of his classic early music such as Cherry, Cherry and Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show (and look at some of the classics he wrote for other people), you’ll see that great emotional music is great emotional music, whatever the genre.

 It certainly gave me a sense of the power of music to move us. It made me realise that whatever music I was going to like, it would be music that wanted to make me get up and shout, sing, dance, smile.....feel better about life and about myself.

 The Home of Metal exhibition spotlights the great West Midlands bands such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, who could hardly be described as making you feel better about yourself but who made music that could not be ignored. I’ve been among crowds of people pogo-ing to Paranoid or air-guitaring the closing notes of Stairway to Heaven. I can’t remember who it was who said ‘If that song doesn’t move you, you’re already dead,” but that’s what the best music does, whether it be Neil Diamond, Led Zeppelin or the Specials.

 The list of music I want played when I’m lowered into my grave changes by the day but I know I will want something. I’m glad that my parents introduced me to music at an early age - and I’m not embarrassed that it was through the voice of Neil Diamond.

 * The Home of Metal exhibition is at the BMAG until September 25 2011. 

• Here are a couple of links to the music mentioned above: 
• Neil Diamond: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmP43qsAXvk&feature=related
• Led Zeppelin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9TGj2jrJk8