Father’s Day Thoughts and My Musical “Education”

June 21, 2026

It’s Father’s Day, which has got me thinking about my dad and music. Not HiFi, mind. Dad never really got the whole HiFi thing. He did get music, but the thought of spending the price of a half-decent second-hand car on a pair of loudspeakers horrified him. He had an uncanny ability to look at something you were deeply enthusiastic about, shake his head, and ask one simple question. “How much?” He was the same about the big light, “Do you know how much that costs to run?” To be fair, he wasn’t entirely wrong with regard to the cost of HiFi.

My dad’s connection with music went back a lot further than mine…obviously. Back in the 1960s, he managed a band called The Citizens. According to him, there was some connection between the band and Tell Laura I Love Her. Exactly what that connection was remains one of those family mysteries that never really stood up to detailed questioning, and the older I get, the more I suspect it may have been what I now refer to as a Dad Fact. Whatever the truth of that particular story, music was always around when I was growing up. For the record, the band apparently broke up when my dad crashed the van with the band in it. Perhaps where the Tell Laura I Love Her legend comes from – well, the song is about a car crash.

My parents ran pubs from when I was about three or four years old, and, looking back, pubs in the 1970s were very different places from the pubs most people know today – the ones that are still open, that is. A lot of them had music rooms where bands played at weekends – tap room, best room or lounge, and a music room. Before I was old enough to go in, I used to sit wondering what all the noise was about. Then, eventually, I graduated to being allowed to watch. This being Yorkshire in the 1970s, that privilege apparently came with a half of lager and lime. These days, I think you’d have Childline on you faster than you can say “Half a Harp and lime, please”.

I can’t tell you much about the bands I saw back then, and I certainly don’t remember their names. I don’t remember what songs they played. I don’t even remember whether they were any good. What I remember is the feeling of it all. The excitement. The noise. The sight of musicians carrying gear in through the back door. The fact that music wasn’t something that happened on television. It was something real people did in front of you. That feeling of sitting, watching from the side of the stage, really has stuck with me – a kind of embarrassed-but-privileged-to-be-there kind of feeling.

One pub we had in Wath used to host many folk musicians. Looking back, I’ve probably seen people who were far more important in that scene than I realised at the time. To me, they were just the people who turned up with guitars and fiddles and made the back room of The White Bear come alive for an evening. Later, a different pub, The Wilthorpe, seemed to attract a steady stream of minor celebrities, football players, hoodlums, and Coppers. Famous darts players would arrive to play exhibition matches, and, on one memorable occasion, Mike Batt of Wombles fame attended a wedding there. For reasons I still struggle to understand, it never crossed my mind to ask him to sign my copy of Remember You’re a Womble.

There was always music in the flats above the pubs, too. There was a music centre in the flats, and when we weren’t in the pub, we’d often go out for a drive at weekends – mostly Sundays between closing and reopening. The car had an eight-track player fitted, and my parents would stick a cartridge in and off we’d go. I couldn’t tell you exactly what was playing all these years later, but I can still remember sitting in the back while The Carpenters and other records drifted through the car. If it wasn’t the eight-track, it was Sunday afternoon BBC One and that dodgy DJ from Leeds that no one talks about anymore. I remember later, when I’d become completely obsessed with music, sticking tapes by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Motörhead and all sorts of other bands into the car stereo on the school run. By then, Dad and I had reached a point where our musical tastes had diverged quite dramatically. He never really understood why anyone would want to listen to a whole album by one band when the radio would happily play a mixture of songs for free. But despite not really getting the music I’d fallen in love with, he never complained, and he never told me to turn it off. He simply let it play.

Nobody was trying to educate me in the ways of music, and anything high-brow was certainly off the menu. I think the first classical music I remember hearing was probably Dance Macabre at school during “dance and movement” class. Jazz never really figured, either. I do recall a Roberta Flack LP and definitely some Barry White. Oh, and ABBA.

Perhaps that’s how these things work. My Dad never really sat me down and told me music was important. He never lectured me about great artists or insisted I listen to particular records. Music was just part of the fabric of our lives, and it became part of mine too. A big part!

I wonder what my kids think of their musical upbringing…