The soundtrack of your soul

What was the soundtrack of your early childhood? I’ve been thinking about this lately, hunting back through the mists of memory. Back to a very young me in a house with no television, no car, no washing machine, no heating but with a large ungainly record player. I’d thumb through the album sleeves, even then choosing by image, not name (I still buy some books purely because the cover flirts with me).
Firstly I remember a lot of classical music. Nothing to scare the horses, very traditional tastes: Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Grieg. My favourite was Rachmaninov – with a cover of pebbles in a fast-running stream.  Years later I heard it out of the blue and found myself dissolved into tears. Why? I have no idea. What limbic memory did it recall? I have no idea.

My brother and sister were a lot older than me. Yet my sister and I shared a room and, as a very small child, I would love to listen to her playing her singles, sharing secrets of her teenage love life. Sandie Shaw, Petula Clark, Lulu, The Beatles, Dusty Springfield. She played this one for years - over every lost love.



My brother was of a deeply esoteric bent. We sat and tried to get our ears round this kind of thing a fair bit.



But then one day he brought home an album with a gloomy-looking bloke on the cover – and we all fell head over heels in love.


My mother loved to dance. She should never have been snared in suburbia. She adored this...and turned it up loud, despite shocked looks from the neighbours. Funny eh?  It was considered pretty risque then.


My father banned it. She laughed. He broke the record. So she played this instead...


How does it shape us, the music of our childhood? The sounds we hear in our formative, most suggestible years? Does it seep into our souls by osmosis? Does it set a seal? What are we setting in motion in our own children by our current music choices?

Music chimes deep, so deep.  In one of my all-time favourite books, The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse said: 'Music arises from Measure and is rooted in the great Oneness. The great Oneness begets the two poles; the two poles beget the power of Darkness and of Light....
Music is founded on the harmony between heaven and earth, on the concord of obscurity and brightness.'

But anyway.  Tell me: what were your childhood sounds? What made up the soundtrack of your youth and do you think it affected you in any way? Feel free to take this and write up your own – but do link back to me and let me know, so I can sneak a peak into your soul too.. :-)