I have blogged in the past that tracks like “Levels” by Avicii and “Titanium” by David Guetta featuring Sia started my EDM journey. These songs, however, appeared pretty late in my love of music.

Although I had liked a few songs in my childhood, I was fortunate that my adolescence coincided with the birth of rock’n’roll. The charts were full of songs by the likes of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard and the Everly Brothers. It was a great time to develop a serious interest in pop music.

I had started to learn to play the piano at the age of five, taught by my talented brother, Robert, and had managed to keep it going off and on. I had advanced to playing Mozart’s Sonatas and would often play these at after-school parties to the appreciation of the adults present. It was about this time that pianist Russ Conway burst onto the scene with UK number one hits “Side Saddle” and “Roulette” and a top five hit with “China Tea”. I quickly learned to play these – quite well, if I say it myself – and played them at the after-school parties. All of a sudden, there was considerable interest from some schoolgirls present and Mozart’s Sonatas were sadly a thing of the past.

My interest in pop music developed and I soon accrued a great selection of records which led to invitations to parties, which had now moved to the evenings and beyond. I had a particular liking for the Everly Brothers, Neil Sedaka and Del Shannon who were successful at the time. I particularly remember one party where I turned up with just one single to the dismay of the hostess. It was “Please Please Me”, which had just given the Beatles their first top ten hit. I told the assembled party-goers that it was the only record they were going to need.

My interest in pop music continued through the sixties with acts like the Beatles, the Kinks, the Hollies, Manfred Mann, the Yardbirds and the Turtles, and into the seventies. It peaked again in the eighties when, for seven years, I became a part-time DJ in Gosport, Hampshire. It was a pleasure playing records by Madness, ELO, David Bowie, Queen, the Police and Michael Jackson. I also enjoyed playing most of the New Romantic music. I spent a lot of time in the British Newspaper Library and on my Tandy TRS-80 computer compiling a database of the pop charts as used by the Guinness Book and was in discussions with the Official Charts Company when it formed.

The nineties saw me step away from DJ-ing and, although I still followed the music and kept the charts up-to-date, it wasn’t quite the same as before. That is, until I heard “Levels” by Avicii.