It's Christmas 1969 and I'm staying with my dad and his girlfriend for the first time. Saturday morning, ten o'clock and I discovered their record collection in the closet to the left of the sliding doors with glass. I am already a music lover myself, although I am just nine years old and my curiosity has been awakened. There is also a sound system on the board below. An amplifier in a red metal cabinet with a white aluminium front with lots of buttons and a Dual plate player. The amplifier my father's friend's cousin built for her, as I'll hear later. I can't wait to hear that play, I'm just used to the old radio with white plastic pickup in a big wooden dense console that my uncle made for my mother. I'm browsing one by one because of the many lp.
All classical music I notice disappointed. I discovered about four years ago the origin of pop music and I am only interested in it. So far I can only get through the pirate channels on the middle wave and a couple of singles, which my grandmother bought for me on the offer and "A Hard Days Night" from The Beatles, which I got through her from an unknown second cousin.
Suddenly I encounter a cover with a hypnotic photo with Droste effect, on which four men with very long hair, and I think aha, this is interesting! The band is Pink Floyd and the album Ummagumma. I'll ask if I can set it up. That's okay, and he's gonna be put on for me.
I'm going to sit in the old armchair, with a green with blue and purple striped cover over it, opposite the white with black speakers on top of both cabinets. It's that as a little boy I'm hiding deep in the big armchair, otherwise I would have fallen out! I am carried away in a panorama of ominous musical sounds. Dark vibrating basses, accompanied by heavy dark drums and very light fast taps on high heads. An electric guitar whines right through it and someone sings, screams an incomprehensible text. The whole thing is exciting and quite frightening, but beautiful, beautiful! It touches deep into my heart and soul.
This is a completely different world. This is my due, that's how I want to live, going through me. Then my dad's girlfriend comes into the room with a moaning vacuum cleaner. I object, but it shouldn't help, but I know what to do. The music I have listened to so far is no longer enough, I have found my passion. I'll write this right after Easter 2024. I still have that lp of my father, who has long passed away himself, and hardly a week goes by that I do not turn at least one side of this double lp and get caught in rapture. While I now own many hundreds of albums and CDs. I know there have been quite a few moments in my life, which have turned out to be a true revolution, a revelation, but this was, I think, the first, and as far as I am concerned, one of the most beloved and with the most profound consequences and the deepest effect. It turned my life upside down.
