Some Personal reflections About music

One of the greatest pleasures in music is its ability to bring people together to share the experience. That’s why for us it has always been as much about the social side as the music itself and why we started the Queensland Live house concerts, which have seen a succession of acoustic artists play sessions for a carefully screened audience in our living room.

It’s impossible to do justice here to the enormous effect music has had on our lives. Our first date was at a Martyn Joseph concert in Cambridge and since then attending and organising gigs, listening to our latest purchases and scouring charity shops for obscure vinyl has occupied a large portion of our leisure time. (Although the last one may be more one sided than the others.)
 

Alison

Music – a backing track to life - the songs that evokes emotions and take us back to moments in time, situations we lived through, people we knew. My earliest memory of lying in bed as a child, listening to the sound of Dad playing the piano downstairs; feeling comforted by that. Thinking that my Dad wrote every song he played and asking why Elvis was singing Dad's song on the radio.  Singing in the school choir, singing ‘backing vocals’ for my Dad's songs when he recorded them, playing cornet in a brass band (so cool I know!), appearing in a production of ‘Joseph…’; singing in the church music group, singing with Sarah on the piano on a Sunday evening, constantly having a song running through my head. A perfect moment at age 18 hearing Paul Simon perform Sounds of Silence live at Wembley. Family gatherings with sing songs round the piano (one year having the piano wheeled out into the garden) and being thought of as odd at school for knowing all the words to ‘My Grandfather's Clock’. Seeing Dom sing along to Dad playing nursery rhymes on the piano. My first music festival and my first punk gig at the age of 40. The first ‘mix tape’ Ray made me, left with a rose on my doorstep – music to fall in love to…

Ray

My mother playing marching songs on the piano when I was 4, my father playing the bugle as a Boys Brigade Band Leader, learning to play the recorder (badly), being asked to sing at my first primary school nativity, never being asked to sing again,  listening to Radio Luxembourg in hospital on a transistor radio with a crocodile clip aerial, buying my first record, learning the guitar (badly), volume wars between my mother’s dance classes and my latest Status Quo purchase, writing for punk fanzines at school, playing a borrowed bass for two weeks in a punk band (very badly), hitching home from gigs, working at Snape Maltings concert hall, discovering pirate radio, learning the piano (guess),  building racks for the record collection, selling the record collection, my first festival weekend, James learning the keyboard, Matt asking his guitar tutor if she knew any Foo Fighters because he didn't like Kumbaya, James discussing Bob Dylan’s Hurricane with his primary school teacher, Matts first keyboard, James practising Blackbird all night, my first go as a DJ (not as bad as you might expect), working at festivals, putting on gigs, falling in love to Martyn Joseph…