When the music stopped

How many people, I wonder, listened intently to the Top 40 on a Sunday afternoon with a finger poised over the record button on their tape recorder?  I'd listen to the dross for an hour on more and then still miss the first few bars of my favourite song.

I think back to the soundtrack of my youth, from the first album I bought - Duran Duran from Woolworths in Durham - to U2's Joshua Tree on my Sony Walkman, listening when I should really have been revising for my O levels.  'White Wedding' always reminds me of a brief encounter under a Christmas tree at a sixth form party.  The Cure and The Waterboys kept me company through my student years.  Not in a bedsit exactly, but the mood was the same.   I wandered the streets of Heidelberg singing Smiths songs with my best friend.  I listened to Joni Mitchell with the same friend in a flat above an accordion shop in Switzerland and then, after I graduated, I drove around London in my sales rep Sierra to the sound of REM.

But then, at some point in my mid twenties, the music stopped.  I had a career, married, started a family.  There is no soundtrack to these years, unless you count The Tweenies.  I didn't notice it at the time, but now I wonder at this silence.

It's only gradually that I've come to miss the music.  I can't after all, spend the rest of my life listening to eighties bedsit music.  Through my husband's band, whole new musical vistas have been opened to me.  I am certainly a latecomer to The Ramones and The Sex Pistols. Next week I'm taking my daughter to her first 'big' concert - Katy Perry at the MEN.

It's time for a new soundtrack.  My song of the moment is by a local band called The Lovely Eggs.  What's yours?