Ian Whitwham, respectable schoolteacher, and Home Truths columnist returns with a woeful tale of age, music and daughters...
My daughter has great taste in music.
Mine.
Bits of my record collection have lately been kidnapped into her room. The better bits. She has an uncanny ear. This irks me.
I suffered for my vinyl. It has serious baggage. Me. My life. She can’t just nick it for mere fun.
The house rumbles with sound bites from my past. Her door opens and bits of my adolescence come crashing out…. Waterloo Sunset….Brown-Eyed Girl….Substitute….
…..I know exactly where I was when I hear each one…..I’m stopped in my tracks. And it can break out anytime. I was late for work the other morning because a sunburst of Spector came booming from her quarters. I had to wait for the last chorus of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’. It didn’t cut much ice with the boss - he’d never heard of The Ronettes…
If only her taste was worse. But it’s immaculate. Infallible.
And it’s my fault. I’ve banged on most drearily about my generation. She used to have no time for old Gits’ stuff. Now she is stealing it. I should be pleased. But I’m not. Just well irked. Especially the other night….
I’m tucked up sensibly with Herbal tea, Wife and Book at Bedtime….drifting into slumber.
Suddenly I’m jerked awake by a thudding. It is three in the morning. I recognise the sound. I should do. I’ve been listening to it for over thirty five years. Early Stones. The dark and visceral chords of Keith Richards rumble through the night at volume eleven. Jumping Jack Flash may indeed be a gas but he probably doesn’t have a mortgage.
I totter along the landing to the source of the sound. It really is a most excellent riff – an incandescent racket.
I must forbid it.
I knock. No answer. I knock and yell. Ditto. I knock and yell and kick the door. It is gently dragged ajar.
The sound gets fiercer. So do I – and peer with killjoy zeal at daughter and her louche cabal as they gaze upon a ruin in striped pyjamas. I have not always been crumbling, portly and raddled. I was once elegant, wasted and foppish.
I urge them to turn it down. Or off. Or give it to me. It is mine. Can’t daughter and tribe get their own music? That techno-whizzy stuff? That Lugubrious bleating? I saw the Stones at Ealing. I queued. I took Keith’s photo once – Bournemouth 1965. My girl companion went off with someone who looked like Brian Jones. I have suffered for this. I was listening to this lot before you were even born. And I was born in a Cross Fire Hurricane. In Chalfont St. Peter. Just behind the scout hut. We did Parklane and Tizer. I have queued with my brother all night in the freezing drizzle for The Who at the Lyceum – 1971. We nearly died before we got old. We were exploring our consciousness. We set fire to bananas and inhaled. We once cut a table tennis ball in half, placed the bits on our eyes – and gazed upon a light bulb. Then we played ‘White Rabbit’. This enabled us to see something or other and to feel marginally worse than usual.
And you had to have a catastrophic wardrobe. My daughter once stumbled on some photographic evidence – the Gong T - cosies, the kohl on the eyes, the Elf clobber, the spray – on Velvet Loons by which I rendered myself near infertile. It caused her cheap mirth.
And she’s rumbled something else. I seem to have claimed several generations as my own. I seem to have been around 19 for decades. How else was I a sound engineer at Sun studios, a roadie for The Stones and a discoverer of the Pogues?
The house continues to rock.
Then I hear Howlin’ Wolf booming out. She is rifling the early stuff. This is a difficult one. Was I a Sharecropper in Chalfont St. Giles in the 1920’s?
Did my Daddy have a Gator farm in the River Misbourne?
"·¡°ù"…â¶Ä¦
"Chill Dad – it’s just music."
The other day I heard something I don’t have. Rather good. Patsy Kline? No, my daughter informs me – it is Neco and her Imaginary Boyfriends. And you don’t have to suffer it to hear it. I’ll have that. That’s mine that is. I’ll nick it. I could improve my record collection.
