The first record I ever bought, age 11, was Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin Polonaises 1 to 7. For a year I saved up the pocket money my grandfather gave me to get it. I played it on our record player, which was like a sideboard with built in speakers.
I had watched, on our little black and white TV, a biopic of Chopin called “A Song to Remember”. In retrospect, it was almost certainly both cheesy and historically dubious. I have never seen it since, but 56 years later I still remember two scenes.
The first is when Liszt, playing in a palace to an aristocratic audience, puts out all the candles, saying they should listen to his new piece in the dark. When the lights come up again, the audience gasps to find they have in fact been listening to young Chopin, to whom Liszt has just given his first big break.
The second is when Chopin, playing a concert, coughs blood onto the keys, before going on to die of tuberculosis in a suitably decorous manner.
I don’t recall if and how the film treated his romantic relationship with George Sand, whom nowadays we would call non-binary.
I loved the music, and Chopin has stayed with me ever since. So has that first record.
When I went to Dundee University in 1977, every possession I owned in the world fitted into one BOAC flight bag and a small cardboard box.
In that cardboard box were some books and a tiny cassette player with sixteen cassettes in a little case, one of which was Rubinstein playing Chopin, which I had copied from vinyl onto cassette using our neighbour’s stereo system.
I find that many people assume me to have come from a wealthy or upper class background. That is not true at all.
My father was one of thirteen children born in Edinburgh to an Italian mother and a Scottish alcoholic hotel porter who had survived the trenches of the First World War. They lived in deep poverty, first in the Old Town and then slum-cleared to West Pilton.
At 13, my father left school and went to work picking out reusable hemp with a spike from tarred and encrusted old ships’ ropes, at British Rope in Leith Docks. He was so tiny the workers sometimes used to hide him inside a coil of rope to let him get a break.
At 18, National Service in the RAF took him down to Norfolk. He was one of the few for whom conscription was a distinct improvement in living conditions and diet. He met my mother in Norfolk, and stayed.
He was an extremely talented man. He worked his way up to be in charge of all catering and entertainments on the then massive United States Air Force bases in Lakenheath and Mildenhall. He then left and put these skills to work in the private sector.
Between my being born in a grotty council house and my reaching the age of 6, my father had a meteoric rise to wealth and owned a Rolls Royce, two Mercedes and a yacht in the South of France. I never saw the latter but I remember the cars. We lived in Peterlee, County Durham. He also had an apartment immediately behind Selfridges.
Then it all came crashing down. The constabulary did not approve of the way my father had made his money. He had moved into the gambling industry and some of his methods were unorthodox. His business partner, Frank Hoy, was jailed for seven years.
My father was not jailed as he fled the country. I did not see him again for a decade.
We moved back to Norfolk and I grew up in real poverty. Rural poverty is often overlooked.
When I say poverty, I mean I was genuinely malnourished with permanent physical effects. All – and I mean every single item – of my clothing for a decade came from jumble sales, principally what was known as the “Church thrift”.
We were four siblings, aged from 9 to 1 when Dad left. We had a wonderful loving mother but she was somewhat fey, and her grip on reality was never terribly strong. She could not cope. My sister was the eldest and looked after us. In retrospect, we were feral.
It was however an extremely happy childhood. We roamed the cliffs, beaches, woods and fields. Nobody ever asked where we were or what we were doing. I was related, through my mother, to half the small town. I had grandparents nearby and a great extended family.
School was the only traumatic bit. I hated it. I passed my 11 plus and went to an extremely selective grammar school, 15 miles away, by bus every day. It had been a private school and still retained much of that ethos. They quite literally hit you about the head with the wooden-backed blackboard rubber until you spoke and behaved as English gentlemen.
My grandfather was deeply musical – he conducted the local brass band, and could transcribe by ear and arrange for brass band any music he heard. His collection of records was an important retreat for me, as were his books – he was a socialist.
My musical collection and my musical tastes expanded as I got older. Success at university and in the Diplomatic Service meant I could buy music I wanted, on vinyl, cassette or eventually CDs. I served in Nigeria and in Poland – great for Chopin.
Thirty years after I bought Rubinstein playing Chopin, home computers had reached a stage where you could transfer music from cassette to CD, cleaning it of hiss in the process.
I sat in the tiny spare room of my home in Gravesend many evenings transferring vinyl and cassette to CDs. I printed out disc-shaped labels of album art to attach to the CDs. Sometimes you could find that art online. Otherwise I would scan the cassette or LP artwork.
So by 1998 Artur Rubinstein had moved from vinyl to cassette to CD. I had over a hundred of these homemade CDs, soon greatly outnumbered by music CDs bought as I went on to serve in Ghana and then Uzbekistan.
All of my music always went with me.
I have fought against bipolar my entire adult life. It has at times been crippling or dangerous. As you will have gathered by now, I have a deep emotional response to music. I was probably aged about 25 when I realised that this could exacerbate my bipolar. I tended to listen to music which reinforced the mood swing.
Put simply, if I were depressed you might find me in a darkened room listening to Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathétique. If I were manic, you might find me bouncing to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.
So I started to use the music the opposite way, to try to moderate mood swings. This had limited success. But then I perceived that the kind of music I was listening to could prefigure a manic or depressive episode, when I was apparently still “normal”.
I devised a system where I would only play my music entirely at random, with a closed eyed selection. This seemed actually to work for me as a prophylactic against bipolar.
So I bought an amazing Sony 400-CD rotary jukebox style player, with an external amp and speakers. This enabled me to random shuffle my music automatically, and play not just albums but individual tracks randomly shuffled.
I found this really did work against bipolar. The effect seemed significant. Of course this is self-referential but it did correlate with a significant reduction in attacks. I understand my music therapy may have just been a prop to reinforce control of my own mind, but it worked, so who cares?
By 2001 I had three of these Sony 400-CD players, which you could link in series, and in a slot in one of them sat Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin.
Then it was the turn of CDs to be redundant. In another decade or so, random track selection could be done from a phone, without a metre-high stack of heavy Sony units. Rubinstein moved to a shelf.
Until now. Life goes in circles, and being again rather straitened, I had to save up to buy a Brennan ripper, but now I have it. Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin is now safely digitally encoded inside it, and I am working on all my other CDs.
I presume these units appeal only to nostalgic boomers like me, who want to converse in the musical idiolect of our collection curated over a lifetime, rather than get lost in the universal availability of streaming.
It is a sobering thought that, if I listen to my music, at random, for an average of one hour a day, I am unlikely to live long enough to get through every track.
I have eighty very narrow shelves of CDs, integrated into my bookshelves. I just pulled out a handful from one shelf, appropriately at random, to tell you what is on it, without much detail.
Boccherini – Guitar Quintets 4, 7 and 9
Beethoven – Complete String Quartets (4 Discs)
Tchaikovsky and Arensky – Piano Trios
Fred Astaire – Let’s Face the Music
Rick Wakeman – Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Saint-Saëns – Cello Concerto No 2
R.E.M. – Reveal
The Animals – Greatest Hits
Glenn Miller – Jazz and Blues
Chopin – Mazurkas
Battlefield Band – Threads
I do have recent music, just not in that particular batch. Of course, playing random tracks loses the pleasure of hearing an entire symphony or album straight through, but I occasionally still do that.
It is going to take a long while to load everything on this Brennan. When I finish, before I go into my randomised permanent therapy, I shall listen to Artur Rubinstein play Chopin Polonaises.
You never know which will be the last time.
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Chopin was piano teacher to the Rothschild women at James`s 9TH Arrondissement Parisienne house , Jewish women were not allowed to work in the bank. I remember from Niall Fergusons biography of the Rothschild family ,he also said Chopin was subject to an enforced wage reduction at the illustrious gig.
Blue in green 1958 by Miles Davis is my go to therapy ,
although attributed to Miles Davis ,
it was written by Bill Evans, his solo versions on piano are masterpieces.
What a terrific post. I can relate to so much of this, my dad having made his way from collecting waste paper to sell to wholesalers, door-to-door insurance, to British Rail ticket clerk having missed school qualifications due to the way disabilities were unschooled, having myself attended a former private school (but no 11+) that retained the potential for physical violence (albeit uncommon), and then found myself pursuing music. Poor and working class culture is so much more variegated than it’s presented, and it gives you a distinctive perspective on the world if you get to mix with power or the hoi polloi without conforming to it or taking seriously the ‘naturalised’ right to privilege they enjoy.
Thanks for sharing your early life. Have you found listening to Bolero or Stranger on the Shore therapeutic? I ask because some tunes (like these two) might be imbued with what I understand some mystics call baraka, or spiritual influence, which might have beneficial psychological effects. In the Old Testament, lyre or harp music seems to have been therapeutic (cf. 1 Samuel 16:14,23).
I’ll leave it to medics to talk about any possible value of Zinc in the diet.
Craig.
On 28/07/2025 ABC (Australian Broadcasting Australia) main TV channel broadcast a very interesting program about a woman suffering bipolar disorder type 1. This suggested that absence of certain microbes in the gut necessary to produce chemical precursors to dopamine after multiple treatment (10 I think) with antibiotics caused her to develop the disease and treatment with a fecal transplant sourced from her partner’s gut cured her. Here is the link for the program on iview.abc.net.au. I am not sure whether one can access iview from outside Australia you may need a VPN that allows access to seem to abc.net.au. You need to set up a logon for iview.
The title of the documentary is “Gut Instinct – Jane Dudley”.
More and more news items related to the gut microbiome and presence in it of harmful or the absence of necessary bacterial species causing different diseases are appearing recently.
What’s a gramophone Grandad. Rowan Atkinson can help out…
https://youtu.be/dSINO6MKtco
Craig, that’s an amazing and moving account; heartfelt thanks. If we ever find we’re about to discuss it, well if we’re sat by a bonfire then ok, but if we’re indoors somewhere let’s go sit in front of the speakers and crank up the volume instead 😀
The Comet Is Coming – All That Matters Is The Moments
Craig, here is one of my Chopin favorites.
https://classicalclips.com/videos/chopin-military-polonaise-op-40-no-1-in-a-major-by-tzvi-erez/#google_vignette
Talking about Grandads, I used to watch the old Flash Gordon series with Buster Crabbe as Flash, it was only many years later I found out the theme music was by Liszt, ‘Les Preludes’ In the Thirties Universal Studios used the main theme as background music for the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials. Yes I am that old.
Ah… the Emperor Ming…. We used to watch them at Film Soc
Ming the merciless actually, I do remember an episode when Flash is flying on a commercial passenger plane {on earth not the planet Mongo] and the flight attendant warned of very bad weather ahead, then said to flash there is a parachute under your seat if you need it. How many modern airlines have that essential extra? Richard Branson should take a tip.
Here is that episode at approx 4 mins in.
https://archive.org/details/flash-gordon-episode-1-1936-colorized-serial-720p-hd/flash+gordon-episode1-1936-colorized+serial-720p-hd.mkv
personally I would never fly in a modern aircraft unless they guaranteed me a seat inside the black box, and only flew at twenty feet, I can jump that far.
No airliners provided their passengers with parachutes. You can tell the authors and film-makers – a surprisingly large number – who had never flown because they put in scenes like that.
Nice one Craig.
Keep up the good work.
Please speak to Jeremy
Lovely story. Do you play any instruments, Craig?
Boccherini’s Quintet in E Major winds its way through the Ealing Comedy ‘ The Ladykillers.’ Worth a watch
Lovely post Craig,
Have a listen to this doesnt get much better for chill out:
J.S.Bach Guitar Suites
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qWli4mESroA
George in French is a woman’s name (masc. Georges). So the relationship was orthodox.
I hope this helps.
She was very far from orthodox! Openly bisexual, and dressed as a man. Victor Hugo said he did not believe that she knew herself whether she was a man or a woman, and that he did not care.
Sand’s relationship with Chopin seems to have been maternal rather than conventionally – if that’s the right word! -sexual.
Merci bien.
Wow, this resonated so much. I’m autistic (late diagnosed, only 3 years ago and I’m 61) and music has always been my bane and my salvation. The stuff I like is older than yours… Palestrina, Tallis, Beethoven… nothing post Schumann. But it’s stabilised me and thrown me into chaos. Play the wrong music (Jazz, Blues), I get lost in the supermarket and can’t remember what I came in for. Play the right music (Classical, classic rock) and I may cry tears of relief.
I have been folllowing your posts for a long, long time, and you are one of the few people in the world I truly admire. This was an intensely personal one and I thank you for it. It’s always great to learn more about an idol. I too grew up poor, but not as poor as you, since Germany had a decent welfare system by the time I was born. Oh for the good old days.
I can never remember which email address I used last, so you may not recognize me as the person who would really love to meet you in Stirling (and I could promise a good whisky). Or the person who really wants to read your book on Lord George Murray. I still hope to meet you one day.
Very touching and informative post, Craig. Those of us who have lived through the myriad changes in music formats can recognise this description with great sympathy, and not a little nostalgia. The great thing, as you allude to, is that our first purchases, when we had a ‘library’ of half a dozen LP’s, is the lasting and deep affection for those records and the music therein. We are imprinted at that age, with the result that a deep, soothing return to those is often a highly therapeutic experience. I am therefore not surprised it is also a balm for troubled minds, although I did not realise the effect of randomising the selection.
Great detail about your background, which i found fascinating and plenty to empathise with, not least the freedom we had to run around, explore for long days without anybody, even our parents, worrying about where we were. Happy days. I wish the world could be like that again, especially for children.
You can watch ‘A song to remember’ on YouTube. Here’s the link.
https://youtu.be/rvX2C1AfOkI?si=1FF7FZlO6lDIA4j7
As good as your post is, and it’s very good, it has cost me money! It made me realise that I have never really listened to Arthur Rubinstein so I have just downloaded some of his work from iTunes, including the Chopin Polonaises. I’m sure it will be worth every penny.
Your taste seems more sophisticated than mine but I also shy of Spotify etc. I have the radio on most of the day, but only a couple of BBC programs.I often hear music I like in a pub or restaurant, even a supermarket, and I shazam it and obtain it. My acquisitions have become more random with age and in my case time constraints due to domestic matters. I have just digitised my old cassettes. Great to hear them again, not minding the reduced quality. I rarely have time to use the hi fi. I seem to get just as excited listening on my pc speakers, as long as I can turn up the volume. I have just about anything. Classical, Rn B, Funk, Latin, Brazilian, Cuban, Pop, African, Caribbean, Ska, Gospel, Swing, Disco, Soul, Folk, Prog rock, 50s Pop, Exotica.
Wonderful post, Craig. Thank you for sharing this. I love music and was introduced to rock and pop through my parents having the radio on at home and also they had a small collection of vinyl records (literally, about a dozen). I played three of them constantly when I was a wee boy: “Tears” by Ken Dodd, “Deck Of Cards” by Wink Martindale, and “The Carnival Is Over” by The Seekers.
I suffer from depression (have done for over half of my adult life – I’m 62 now) and to relax/chill at night I watch about two hours of YouTube videos of dash cam journeys through countryside (with the sound muted) and open another tab with my own uploaded YouTube music playlists from my own channel, which has music from the 60s to the present day.
I’ve only heard about 30 to 40 classical compositions, and my favourite is Beethoven’s 6th Symphony: The Pastoral.
Anyway, the point is: a very moving, personal post and I very much enjoyed and appreciate it. Thanks again and all the very best to you and yours.
I am into books mainly novels and had to build an extension to my house to be able to shelve over 10,000 real books and the same again as e-books. It helps that I am a speed reader and can read 100 pages an hour. I have read about 75% of the real books and 50% of the e-books.
Boccherini – Guitar Quintets 4, 7 and 9
Is this Narciso Yepes? I have this CD, along with The Animals Greatest Hits. I have way too many CDs (at least, my wife says so).
Born just 8 years after the war, me too suffered through malnutrition in my early childhood, like the rest of the Soviet kids. But I had witnessed the dramatic improvement in the quality of life through the 60s. This is why the generation 5-10 years younger than mine are much more anti-Soviet. Unlike us, by the time they grew up they saw only stagnation of the 70s.
But when it comes to music I am not into Chopin. I am into sturm und drang, from Mozart and Haydn to LVB and Schubert. Still, I have a dozen Chopin’s music CD though I haven’t played any for centuries. And if I pick something, those would be the Ballads or the Preludes.
To each his own music. Thanks for sharing, though.
Very entertaining Craig. it reminded me of a friend who when depressed used to play Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. His wife undertook a radical move to cure his depression she broke the record over her knee and sent him out to work! It worked but he did die of liver failure due to alcohol intake so not a complete success!
“I presume these units appeal only to nostalgic boomers like me, who want to converse in the musical idiolect of our collection curated over a lifetime, rather than get lost in the universal availability of streaming.”
Or to anyone who likes to keep their stuff under their own control rather than under a big company’s, and to listen to stuff without being under (obvious) surveillance.
Let’s hope some youngsters reading this get the point here. I’ve never streamed anything or used the cloud in my life. When I want a film I haven’t got, I download it as a torrent. Use mobile phones as little as possible. They’re Satan.
The Brennan sounds great, although AIUI without its own speakers and I prefer kit that fits in one end of a suitcase. It takes a lot of effort nowadays to find a device that can play music saved in MP3 format from a USB flash drive (my preferred input method), is robust enough to be properly portable, has its own speakers that can play at an audible volume, and is able to play off batteries as well as to charge them while playing off the mains. And this is even given that I probably care less about reproduction quality than you do.
Incidentally and on a slightly different tack, the Sansa Clip+ MP3 player that needs external powered speakers is also good kit and while I’m no hifi head and this is mere “consumer grade” it’s still the only bit of audio equipment I know of that’s increasing in price on the secondhand market. (It can play from far higher-capacity MicroSD cards than advertised.)
Bloodyhell. Glad you like the Animals.
Your autobiography would be a great read.
Thanks Craig, this got me thinking. My early life was similar although after being born in a house with gas lighting, no hot water & shared outside toilet, the move to a council house was a great improvement. I too passed the 11 plus, went to Grammar & then Uni in 1977 (punk-times). My parents listened to Sinatra a lot but my dad also had Pete Seeger & Dylan. The first 45 I bought (age about 11) was Good Morning Starshine by Oliver, followed by Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman. I now have a large collection of music but thinking back 55 years later, those 2 singles defined/directed me somehow as I consider myself a kind of ‘hippy-anarchist’.
“… You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day, week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt ! …” 🙂 Monty Python, ‘We Were Poor’ .
Now that we’re all agreed we are working class, can we join Jeremy’s party ?
Thank you for this poignant but uplifting article and a nice change from usual. For me music wise it is always back to Bach. I am resolved if and when I am in a terminally ill stage where life is slowly ebbing away and in a semi – conscious state to eschew any assisted dying and have Bach continuously into my ears, into my brain and through my whole being. That will be (as they say) “a good death”.
You can just strip the DRM off your mp3’s and flac’s and keep the convenience of the small form player without putting money in the pockets of the tech ghouls (I am assuming part of the purpose of the trip down memory lane is the insertion of US big tech Fascism into our lives courtesy of US employee of the month Kier Starmer? Spotify will rightly die a death through their own miscalculation but they already deserved it prior to this given how much they fleece artists).
A beautiful breath of fresh air much needed with the horrors surrounding us..
Let it also be observed that the absolute coolest piece of c.1980 behaviour in the entire world is nostalgia for the Texas Instruments TI-59 programmable calculator.
Seriously, the clicks that the buttons made must have outdone the door closing sounds on anyone else’s dad’s Rolls Royce.
Sorry for posting it here, but probably no one’s still reading the previous thread.
A name for the new party : follow the Greek example after the colonels, and call it NEW DEMOCRACY.
It says it all and is un-attackable.