When I was a teenager my dad, who hated rock music, told me in no uncertain terms that I’d ‘grow out of it’. That I'd reach an age where this racket would be as unappealing to me as it was to him. It hasn’t happened yet, quite the opposite.
I always knew I wouldn’t, it went far deeper than that. So I thought it’d be good to discuss the records that he hated or was puzzled by and couldn’t understand why I thought they were great
Motorhead - Motorhead
You might have forgotten just how disturbing this was at the time in 1977. Brutal and loud. It was a severely aggressive experience. I loved it. It exorcised my teenage angst. I remember bellowing out Born To Lose with Lemmy, the double bass pounding. I think there’s a nihilism to it that scared my dad but being 16 is nihilistic and it expressed that perfectly.
Deep Purple - Made In Japan
‘Can we have everything louder than anything else?’ said Ian Gillan during these dates in typically humorous style. You might not think this is that heavy but it is very, very noisy and on constant rotation at home. I was forced to listen to it, only on headphones because Dad hated it. I remember him asking me why I wanted to listen to ‘that noise’ especially Space Truckin’ he just heard bleeps and burps whereas I heard art. Blackmore sculpting a solo out of feedback was breathtaking on Black Night, but was ‘just noise.’ if you didn’t understand.
ELP - Pictures At An Exhibition
More noise, Emerson’s keyboards looked like a telephone exchange and squealed like treading on a cat's tail. Brilliant. At times it feels barely controlled, like it might fall apart at any moment but was certainly not ‘normal’ music, even to my dad, who thought it was like the bastard child of classical music and that something was wrong with people who played and listened to music like this.
Hawkwind - Space Ritual
This frightened my dad. It seemed to belong to a world that was weird and strange. Which is why I loved it. What was this aural assault mixed with poetry and a dancing naked woman? It seemed to live in a different moral universe. But a man shouting verse through a loudhailer didn’t seem scary to me. Like so much, I just took it in my stride. I think I internalised the weirdness as an alternative normal.
Tangerine - Phaedra
‘That sounds peculiar,’ he said of this entirely new sounding music. In fairness, plenty of my contemporaries thought it was too weird in 1973 but it always ‘fitted’ my brain and I found it exciting and meditative. Not noisy at all, I don’t think my dad understood why you’d want to listen to sequencers making noises. It was an entirely foreign language to him, not frightening like Hawkwind but incomprehensible.
He didn’t mind some stuff. Country rock for example, but these records were entirely alien to him.
