Radio LBB: Generations of Felt 

I loved parties – at least what I can remember of them from before The Plague – but there was one question I always feared. You know the scene: you meet somebody new, three drinks down and you’re getting on like a house on fire and then… 

I clearly remember, sometime around the age of six, my mum sat me down and telling me, very seriously, that I was about to start my musical education. An education that ensured, early on, a slight deviance from the straight and narrow. So while my friends were self-educating on the latest 90s hits, my mother began to lay out her own curriculum starting with The Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, The Beatles, Abba, The Beach Boys, Fleetwood Mac and The Kinks. This education went pretty much to plan and I was soon tapping away to an interesting combination of Santana and Louis Prima. It wasn’t a Saturday morning if my mother wasn’t blaring Funk classics through the house while we danced together like demons’ possessed. She didn’t relent when my friends came by but, over time, they must’ve warmed to her eccentricity as they, too, would often join in. 

And then my Dad, never one to shirk a challenge decided he should begin his own quest for my musical education, spreading out in front of me many small titbits from the vast world of classical music. And so, with my favoured instrument in hand, while my friends were hanging out like normal teenagers, there I was, in the quiet of my bedroom, working out how to transpose UB40’s ‘Rat In Mi Kitchen’ for the French Horn. 

As I grew up, I learned to hide my love of buying single tickets to classical performances at the Southbank but for me, it was rarely an easy choice between Mahler in the Queen Elizabeth Hall or Wu-Tang Clan at KOKO.

And then there was Taylor Swift who opened the door to country music, and taught me a few things as I listened to her sing about the plethora of boys she had honky-tonk’ed her way through, like my love of a story in music and also, that I’m gay.

Discovering Felt was like stumbling through an open door and has given a wonderful opportunity to keep growing. So please, do me a favour, when THIS THING is all over and we meet for the first time at a party, just don’t ask me what kind of music I like, ok?