Music today has been Led Zeppelin II, I’m not sure if it was inspired by listening to The Cult yesterday. Led Zeppelin are always thought of as a seventies band but Led Zep II was in fact released in 1969. I remember listening to it and the other Led Zep albums a lot in my bedroom in the seventies, with an incense stick burning. I still burn incense, a habit I picked up from my father who had some kind of contradictory appreciation of the exotic from his normal life in the suburbs of Liverpool (The Wirral). I remember once he bought my mum a chunky pewter necklace that looked like it might have been worn by an Inca warrior, I remember she hated it. She was hard to please and was very specific in her tastes, I remember I once bought a teapot stand made out of carved wood, she hated that too. She’d be happy with a bottle of Estée Lauder perfume or perhaps a bottle of whisky and 200 Rothmans although she didn’t need those everyday items as a present. I never really knew what to get her, nobody did, chocolates maybe. She loved swing music but I don’t ever remember anyone buying her a record, I can’t imagine why. She didn’t drive, she worked 9-5 in an office my whole childhood into my teenage years and her biggest interest seemed to be watching the snooker. I suppose watching the tele every day was that generation’s thang. All she ever said about the music I liked was, “You can’t understand the words,” with a puzzled look on her face as if it was unfathomable that you could listen to a singer who didn’t have good diction. They stopped me from going to see Led Zeppelin in London in the seventies even though I had tickets, I wonder how much more damage I got from a house full of cigarette smoke than I ever would have after two days alone in London as a 15-year old, even if England were playing Scotland the same night in notoriously troubled contests. Haha, bless ’em and their ignorance, protecting and harming simultaneously.

Music Of The Daze

The musical musings in this post are an excerpt from my daily blog, TO WHERE I AM NOW, featured on my main website. Read the full blog post here.