It’s funny how certain music can become the soundtrack to your life without you even realising it until years later.....

It is a Sunday night in September and I am sitting in my room, doing some band work on my bed, and my mum decides to re-discover the pile of old cassette tapes which have made a comfortable life for as long as I can remember next to the half broken CD player in the lounge room.  They are all recordings of mum and dad in the band they had for so long before we were born and then grew into toddlers.  There’s ‘Jimmy Mac’, ‘Afternoon Delight’ and then comes ‘Message to my Girl’, all songs that I know all the words to - not because I’ve sung them before, but because I’ve heard them sung by mum and dad so many times at band rehearsals over the course of my life from the next room.  They called it the ‘Thursday Night Social’, and damn it was fun!  I mean, I didn’t understand at that age why it was so fun for all the adults, and what all the jokes were about.  But it was fun as a kid watching a whole lot of people laughing and having live amplified music in the house that I could dance to in my PJ’s.  ....

These songs; ‘Blame it on the Boogie’, ‘Ride Like the Wind’, ‘Ticket to Ride’, ‘Boy From New York City’, I will always remember fondly.  They represent a time in my parents’ lives that is closer than ever to what stage I am at in my own journey now.  Call me daggy, but I’ve decided it’s kind of nice to get an insight into what your parents were like at your age.  All of a sudden, there is an explanation for why we are the way we are…..and never before quite known why.