31 March 2025

Listening through my father’s ears

The bond between me and my dad is too deep for words – but music comes close to expressing it.

Illustration by Celina Pereira

Pop music is often thought to be a rehearsal for adult experience – a space in which teenagers explore the complicated shades of romantic feeling they haven’t yet met in the world. I think it can be something else, though – a form of regressive longing, taking you back to your earliest feelings of love. It is part of an adolescent’s job to regress like this – to seek some rejuvenating return to childhood feelings amid all the new experience. Music is the quickest route to it, offering a kind of direct line to the soul.

I say all this in order to justify my extraordinarily neurotic relationship with pop growing up – how desperately I wanted my parents to love the songs I loved, how my heart would thud so loud in my ears, when I pressed play, that I couldn’t hear a thing. If my music wasn’t received as I wanted it to be, was met with indifference or even worse, talked over, I’d fall into a secret – always secret! – rage, taking refuge in the fields outside our house in Norfolk. I’d leap angrily from one ploughed furrow to the next with my dog following behind me, trying not to jog the CD on my Discman, which was invariably something by Queen.

The most alienating part of the traditional teenager narrative, for me, is the part that says we want to listen to the music our parents hate. This idea of rebellion informs every pop origin story – it is the only explanation for the power that music has in the life of the young. It is untrue for many of us. My purpose in life was to convert my parents to my tapes; I feigned sleep when bad “album tracks” played in the car, and was transported to the numinous if I heard my father humming along, under his breath, behind the wheel.

He was a musician when my parents met, aged just 16 (she was 20) and already playing jazz guitar for beer money in the Birdcage, a little club in the Northumbrian town of Alnwick and a spot on the circuit for Sixties jazzers travelling north. After they got together and moved to London he was no longer interested in pursuing a musician’s lifestyle and became a house-husband, which was unusual at the time, while she went to work at a school in Tottenham, north London. For my entire childhood, the phone always picked up after one ring.

My dad was a second “mummy” to me and the bond, physical and mirroring, was too deep for words, but something about music came close to expressing it. These days the black and gold Les Paul sits in the corner of the living room and sometimes – very occasionally – when everyone is out, he will play twiddles of John McLaughlin through a Marshall amp. His musical taste was always “sophisticated” – it was from him that I came to believe music in which you heard a lot of notes was music to be admired. The first record he bought was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, at ten, and by 15 he had painted a life-sized portrait of Eric Clapton and Cream on his wall. He considered Clapton to have “peaked” at 20, and when he sees him on TV now, playing standards, my dad just looks embarrassed. But he wasn’t a music snob. He bought a Tina Arena album on CD in 1995. I’ll never forget him pulling up outside my school with Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” playing at high volume. “Are you thinking of me when you f**k her?” I was so proud.

At the start of 2024, I was walking on Hampstead Heath – the wild bit on the hill above the ponds, where you forget that you’re in a city – and I was listening to one of Glen Campbell’s gospel albums, as I often do there. Glen made a few gospel records in the Nineties after a down-the-dumper Eighties; he’d been baptised and born again, and you could hear it in the music. I adored the sincerity of it: “Show me the way oh Lord, and I will give myself to thee!” Whenever I am out of sorts, I put these songs on and I connect with myself internally, like a little train slipping back on to the right track. Halfway through one of them, I realised I was doing a very strange thing, and it had to do with my dad.

Some mental habits are so hardwired in us as to be invisible. Then suddenly, one day, you notice yourself and the weird things you do, and you’re never quite the same. It was a cover of a wonderfully gloomy Jimmy Webb song called “Where I am Going”, the first line of which is Glen announcing, in a crumbly voice, “Feel like I’m comin’ out of a storm”. I noticed I was stopping the track after a few moments and skipping back to the start, in order to hear that line again and again as if for the first time. I wanted to feel the emotional impact repeatedly – but not for myself, because the ears I was imagining hearing it were not my own. They were my father’s.

Listening to music through my father’s imaginary ears – it is that strange – has characterised my whole life. It is something energetic and formative in my psyche that I can’t quite explain. The effect is physical for me: the thrill of an unusual chord change, the hair raising on my arm, is always doubled because I’m “sharing” it, internally, with a version of him. It is there in my neural pathways: four ears not two. In recent years I’ve come to see it as a slightly lonely thing – I am unable fully to experience the music I love as mine because I keep stopping and starting, and handing it over to the Imagined Dad.

It is obvious to me now that this part of my brain turned me into a music journalist. In my work at the New Statesman, and previously at the music magazine the Word, I found myself ineffably drawn towards artists of my father’s generation, with whom I felt mysteriously and instantly at ease. I would be far more playful in an encounter with Ray Davies or Johnny Rotten than I might be with, say, Patti Smith. I can only describe it as some kind of recognition, taking away all my usual self-consciousness and filling me with warmth. I felt so sure, for the most part, that me and my ageing rockers would get on, I pushed more with my questions, asked them more personal things, “knowing” I couldn’t cause offence.

One of these “instant affinities” came with Jeff Beck, whom I met in the spring of 2016. It is entirely possible that the connection I felt was only in my head, but as far as I see it, that doesn’t really matter. I went to his record company offices in Kensington, west London – he was promoting some album or other – and, feathered of hair and bulbous of nose, he rolled through his cartoon rock ’n’ roll rivalries, clearly amusing himself: “I can’t deal with people who have no humour,” he said of Clapton. He promised to get us both tickets to see the guitarist Pat Metheny together at Ronnie Scott’s but he warned me that, Pat being much better than him, he might not be able to stand it (I still have a follow-up email from “Geoffrey Beck”, saying he’d not forgotten the gig and was “working on those tickets”).

Beck once compared his 1967 song “Hi Ho Silver Lining” to having a pink toilet seat hung round his neck for life – he was not keen on his big hit. He was asked to join the Stones in the late Seventies and flew out to Amsterdam to meet them where, he told me, “I’d been there two days and I hadn’t seen a Stone, and I thought, ‘Right, I’m witnessing what it’s like to be a Stone – not playing, and having single malt whiskies.’” Beneath all his jokes lay a profound feeling for music. His bandmate Billy Cobham “danced” with the drums, “like a butterfly, all over them, you know?” George Martin, who produced his 1975 jazz rock album Blow by Blow, “gave me wings”. That Stones gig, he concluded, would have “truncated my whole being”.

Because Beck had lived a musical life below the radar, pursuing only the music he wanted, neither me nor my father were aware of what he had achieved. He became our shared musical project for a decade or so, from the late Noughties: it was a gift that we came across him later in life when he was still regularly touring in all sorts of different creative get-ups, and the albums were frequent enough to make it almost a yearly event.

These concerts we would attend together, without my brother or my mum, and they held a rare thrill for me, as I walked to the venue at my dad’s side puffed up by, and unable to quite release, all the things I wanted to say to him. He would get the train from Norfolk and we would meet at King’s Cross and quietly make our way to the Albert Hall by Tube, or the Chelsea Hospital, where the pensioners peeped at Jeff’s stage from behind their curtains. If he got another esteemed guitarist on stage he would fold in half, sweeping floor in a display of mock humility, or holding the imaginary hems of their garment.

Beck died, bafflingly, from a bout of bacterial meningitis in January 2023, when he was still touring the world. The father-daughter gigs have largely stopped since then, because so many of the people we would want to see are gone or retired. My dad is 72 this year. I think that Beck represented, to both of us, the secret musician, tinkering with his machine and driven by sheer emotion to play only the stuff he liked. But I know that for my dad and me, sharing him was about something else too. As the recent discovery of my bizarre, imaginary “quadraphonic” listening habits revealed to me, I will always need my father to love any music I think is my own.

Kate Mossman’s “Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters with Rock Royalty” is published on 3 April by Nine Eight. She discusses her book in the New Statesman podcast