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The Musical Box

My earliest memories of music are of listening to my parents' cassettes on car journeys. My dad enjoyed classical music and a highly select selection of pop artists, such as Boney M, Abba and the Spinners. As a family we saw the Spinners live in Huddersfield, probably my first gig.

In 1984 I discovered rock music by accidentally tuning in to Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show on BBC Radio 1. I was instantly hooked and delved into heavy metal to a massive degree, from classic hard rock to new genres like thrash, death and black metal. I saw many of the thrash greats live in Bradford in the late eighties and early nineties and got into the demo scene too.

Even while immersing myself into the extreme music of the time, I dabbled in other genres and these have only diversified over time. I listen to classical music and thoroughly enjoyed a series of concerts at Square Chapel in Halifax, mostly string quartets. I enjoy country and western (and can now tell the difference between the two), blues (especially by blind guitar pickers), folk, electronica and especially many forms of world music. The band I've seen live more often than anyone else is the British taiko drum group known as Mugenkyo, though I wonder how long it will take for their Phoenix equivalents, such as Fuschiko Daiko, to take over that mantle.

This page links to a variety of writing, including the Musica Extremis series of articles that is on hold for now while I concentrate primarily on The IMDb Project. There's also a major article on the RIAA.

There's a major page devoted to free legal music downloads, admittedly based on information a year or two old but that I will update and expand once I get back onto a broadband connection.