What a subject area. I missed this one much earlier.

One of the first bands I was into was ABBA, thanks to a box set that my parents still have. I used to listen to it several times when I was at my most autie.

My favourite music from the ’60′s are by The Beatles and the Beach Boys. Most of my favourite music comes from the ’70′s and ’80′s. I too am a big fan of Supertramp (having nearly all their albums), ELO (a logical progression from the Beatles – for myself – and in lead vocalist Jeff Lynne’s terms) and I like the Pet Shop Boys (Actually is my favourite album of theirs).

I also like electronic music such as Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Gary Numan.

Stuart Vallantine,
Travelling Poet and Supertramp fan.

if we studied carnivores, would this also be meaty-orology?

Donna *)

blah blah blah blah!
hehe
AI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dag

I’m a complete dag when it comes to music. I lack the conformity gene, I’m sure. So I love classical music, Andrea Bocelli, Edith Piaf, Aretha Franklin, Louis Armstrong – folks with passion and you can hear it. They could sing a commercial for toilet rolls and I’d be moved.

OK, so, pop music… wow, well I was born in the 60s and one of the songs I adored was Mel Carter’s Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me. I was about three and its got incredible crescendos. It’s really classical music morphed into pop. And Petula Clark’s ‘Don’t Sleep in The Subway’, Lulu’s ‘To Sir With Love’ and ‘Oh me, oh my’ and The Platters. Fat’s Domino could cheer me out of any hole and Chuck Berry, Little Richard.

Then 70s glam’s Suzi Quattro’s ‘Devil Gate Drive’, The Sweet’s ‘Peppermint Twist’ and their comeback with ‘Ballroom Blitz’, as well as Alice Cooper’s ‘Welcome To My Nightmare’ (meant a lot in my teens when I was living one!), and Abba, Abba, and did I mention Abba? And Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ album…I must have worn through that record I played it so much. Then ELO debut and Supertramp’s ‘Breakfast In America’ album.

By the 80′s Adam Ant and Devo, Robert Palmer, Boy George (and there’s a man who doesn’t hide his passions – ‘Victims’ is stunning), Pet Shop Boys, Wet Wet Wet, The Cars and Racy. I was too poor to buy albums though

By the 90s the corporations had killed live music, and rap held some promise till it was co-opted, commercialised, packaged and every one of them sang the same broken record 2D emotional imagery as if life was always a bitch and you’d swear these guys needed a damned big rib tickle to cheer em up because that production line tough-guy scowl was looking almost plastered on. We now had models (did underwear modelling stop hiring?) lip syncing and feigning soft porn trying to pass it off as emotional passion (well they essentially had no lyrics, so what was left) and the wonderful diversity of singers and vastly different competing musical movements was gone. Now we have maybe four at any one time ‘lullaby boy’, ‘bravado boy’, ‘lullaby girl’, ‘porn girl’… that’s it. The mainstream seems like a musical desert.

Yes, you are totally right, today bands like Cat Empire and Green Day do give some hope and Farnham has always produced very hooky songs.

Donna Williams *)

http://www.donnawilliams.net

I can usually distinguish between a good track and an earworm.

Ben Lee’s We’re all in this together is a good track, and so is The Cat Empire. We had a lot of them during the Commonwealth Games. So are any of John Farnham’s albums.

What was the first pop music that captured you as pop music? A lot of Generation Y really respects the pop music that went on during your teens and twenties.