4. Marvin GayeWhat’s Going On
This, like The Carpenters, came from my parents’ record collection. My mum is a huge fan of Motown and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre. It really was an essential part of the soundtrack to my childhood – Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye – they were always playing. Of course, these artists all had such beautifully produced records and I still wonder if that’s where my passion for record production initially came from. On Sundays, all I ever remember is my mum putting an album on while she was making lunch and we’d all listen to it and dance around the living room to it. I have vivid memories of being told not to jump up and down too much because it would make the record skip.
What’s Going On was one of those that was frequently played. At the time, I was obviously completely unaware of the political weight it had. It’s an album I’ve revisited so much over the years and I’ve been able to lean into the lyrics more and more as I’ve gotten older – much more than I did when I first heard it as a three-year-old.
My parents had this really big speaker system and all these vinyl records that my siblings and I would get to choose to play on a Sunday while lunch was being made and eaten. It’s a record that if I put it on now, it takes me right back to that smell of roast potatoes cooking in my mum’s kitchen. A lot of music I do find really evocative and has the ability to ‘pull me back down another year’, as Tori Amos might say, and really go back to a more innocent time. My love of music and its power to move me emotionally was a seed that was planted very early from the environment that I grew up in. My parents’ record collection was a great education in music history.
