It’s reasonably inevitable that people of my generation will have a particular perspective on what’s gone down over the past forty years, and it’s going to be a perspective that differs substantially from that of a person born, say, ten years earlier or ten years later.
If we were born ten years earlier we might have caught the first wave of rock’n’roll but would probably have settled into the same path of careers, kids and conventionality that our parents fell into once they’d met their life partner by the time the sixties rolled around. In that scenario the events that shaped Hughesy’s attitude to music would have been irrelevant, incomprehensible or insignificant.
If I’d been born ten years later, I’d probably have been caught up in the punk/new wave thing and have a different perspective on the way things stacked up on the path to generational revolt against the dead hand of the ageing rock’n’roll dinosaurs.
So everything that follows in these pages is the opinion and experience of someone who came to an interest in music at a particular time (the mid-sixties) and in a particular place (Townsville in northern Queensland, Australia).
What I’m writing is an attempt to sort out those experiences in my own mind and reflect on what’s gone down since 1966. While it may seem at times like I’m heading towards some sort of Grand Unified Theory Of The Place Of Rock In The Pantheon Of Pop, if I am that’s just, to quote the Temptations, my imagination running away with me.
I’m definitely not trying to rewrite history to exclude everything that I’d consider to be unworthy of a place in my own personal musical pantheon.
If I don’t like it, I’ll ignore it, but I won’t try to pretend it didn’t happen. While I could put forward the proposition that Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols, the Eagles, and, say Fleetwood Mac are all irrelevant because they don’t occupy spaces in the hallowed ground of my personal taste I’ll prefer to view them as part of a separate musical universe.