Desert Island Discs

If like me, you have a wide and seemingly endless back catalogue of music spanning decades, the prospect of choosing just eight records to take with me to a desert island would be very challenging. Of course, this is very subjective as we all seem to fluctuate in our tastes with the passage of time. As the youngest of four siblings, it is inevitable that my earliest exposure to music would be influenced by my brothers and sister. As such, I began seriously to take an interest in music from about the age of eight. I recall my earliest interests included groups like the Boomtown Rats and Squeeze. My sister being older than I was an avowed devotee of disco. I was not. My brother on the other hand was close to the New Wave groups which had began to displace punk music. Then, out of nowhere, Two Tone arrived. The Specials were the best with raw, edgy songs like Monkey Man, Concrete Jungle and The Man at C and A. This was music that had something to say and was overtly political. The reggae influenced sound just topped it off for me. The Selecter, the Beat and others were all enticing but the Specials left a big hole when they disbanded three years later.

While my peers at Boarding school were all keeping up with the synthesiser based music of the early and mid 1980s, I was now taking an interest in the Rhythm and Blues music of the 1960s and had grown very fond of the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Spencer Davis Group, the Who, the Stones and most of all, the Small Faces. Even now I think the Small Faces are the group I dip into the most when immersed in this genre. Sometimes a group is assembled and everything just looks, feels and sounds right. In particular, I think Tin Soldier is a fine effort with the late, great Steve Marriott at his matchless best.

During this time I also developed a lifelong passion for Classical music. This interest began with Tchaikovsy ballet music and some Beethoven symphony music. However, even though I continue to frequent the ballet at least once a year, my real loves in the classical world are now the quartet of Schubert, Liszt, Mendelssohn and Mahler. If I could be granted any wish it would be this: to be able to play note perfect Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

In the last ten years or so I have discovered the first two albums of Crosby, Stills and Nash and these have left an indelible mark on me.

So to my choices of eight records:-

1. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, Crosby, Stills and Nash
2. Seventeen Come Sunday from the English Folk Song Suite by Ralph Vaughn Williams
3. The Autumn Stone by The Small Faces
4. The waltz from Les Sylphides by Frederic Chopin
5. Say You'll Be Mine by Colin Blunstone
6. Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt
7. If I Ruled The World by Tony Bennett
8. The Nocturne from A Midsummer Night's Dream by Felix Mendelssohn

Nothing too heavy or too rocky but no shortage of melody of clever lyrics. What do you think?