YAM YAM

David

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SPECIAL COLLABORATOR: Crossover Team

Member since: 6/16/2011 • Forum posts: 5597 • Last visit: 1/27/2025 5:21:31 PM EST
Location: Kerberos

Progressive Biography

I'm a retired electro/mechanical engineer who was born in the mid 1950s, and who has loved music of all kinds right from being a very small child. I would play for hours with a tiny, plastic child's battery operated record player, which had crude, push-in metal spikes as styli, and played small (about 6 inches) 78rpm shellac discs...even before I could talk! I also had another similar player which had to be wound up with a metal key shaped not unlike the ones you still find attached to cans of corned beef, before it would play anything.

In those days kids were allowed to go into pubs with their parents, and when I was a few years older, while mine were busy getting their fill of their favourite tipple, I would wander off to the juke box to see what selections were available, and would watch in amazement as the automatic mechanism picked each disc out of the rack and transferred it to the turntable to be played. With the one installed in our 'regular' pub, I soon learned how to defeat the need to insert a coin by making my selection at a certain point in the cycle, and it was several months before the landlord got wind of what I was doing, and had the machine replaced!

I didn't begin building my own personal record collection until I started receiving pocket money in my early teens, and the first single I bought was "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum in the early summer of 1967, though I had no idea at the time what 'progressive rock' was - if the term was even in use that early in the decade. My schoolmates began discussing what they considered to be 'progressive rock' at the beginning of the seventies, but the kind of psych/blues bands they were mainly into, such as the Edgar Broughton Band, didn't really appeal to me at that stage of my life.

My listening to, and purchasing of music thus remained largely focussed on the UK singles chart until I watched a relatively unknown Dutch band called Focus play the songs 'Sylvia' and 'Hocus Pocus' on BBC2's 'Old Grey Whistle Test' programme in December 1972. I was instantly transfixed by this music, and bought their first three albums the very next day, with albums by ELP, Yes and Genesis following in quick succession. I can't remember buying another 45" chart single for myself at any time since then, though I have done on occasions to give to friends. I managed to build up quite a large collection of prog on 12" vinyl during the 1970s, though I never really bothered with the cassette format that had become very popular at the time. I still have quite a few of those LPs now, never even taken out of their sleeve these days of course, and I guess one day they'll all end up in a charity shop.

My first 'proper' job was as a fire vehicle mechanic, working in the repair workshop of a local County Fire Service, but my collecting of prog albums was put on hold pretty much throughout the eighties and nineties when I changed jobs and began working as a travelling service/commissioning engineer, firstly for a standby generator manufacturer, and then for a welding equipment distributor. Both jobs required me to travel around all over the country in a van, and live my life moving from hotel to hotel. The radio was more or less my only means of listening to music throughout this period, since none of the vans I drove had a cassette player incorporated into them.

I spent the best part of two years working in Saudi Arabia in the mid-eighties as part of my work with the standby generator manufacturer, and the only source of western music over there was the unauthorized, mainly 747 or IMD branded cassettes that were widely sold in the souks and roadside shops at the time for next to nothing (less than one US dollar each). These tapes were imported into the country from Malaysia or the Philippines, which were the two main countries where the unofficial duplication took place, and I had well over 100 of them by the time I finished my first stint in the country, but gave them all away just before I returned home. I believe they're a collectors item now, so I guess that wasn't the greatest decision I ever made in my life with the benefit of hindsight!

I developed a love of natural history and the environment at around the turn of the century, and gave up working as an engineer to attempt to find work as a nature reserve warden. This entailed several years of doing a variety of paid part-time work, and the rest of the time working as a volunteer on various local nature reserves. I was now able to begin building my collection of prog again and making up for lost time, though now mostly in CD format rather than vinyl. However, there was a really excellent 'Aladdin's Cave' type secondhand vinyl record shop in my hometown from where I was able to pick up some real classics that had long been unavailable in that format, though it sadly shut down quite a few years ago. Unfortunately Council cutbacks meant that staff were constantly being culled rather than recruited, and the opportunity to find a full-time job working in the environmental sector thus never materialised.

I finished my working life with a job at a local supermarket, starting in September 2007 and finishing in April 2016, when I retired early to spend more time with my nine year old boxer cross dog before he became too old to enjoy long walks anymore. Music and gardening were now my two main interests in life when I wasn't out with the dog, and my collection of prog grew rapidly from this point onwards, both on CD and also digitally. My old dog left this mortal coil in November 2022 after a long and healthy life, enjoying a three and half hour walk around our local nature reserve just three days before he passed. Apart from having the occasional litter pick in the area around my home, from November to early April music now takes up virtually all of my spare time, though it has to be shared with gardening and walking in the warmer and drier months of the year.

You'll notice that I haven't written any reviews for the site, or indeed any other prog site or publication, and that's because as a non-musician myself I don't believe I really have the right to criticise something that folks who are considerably more talented than I am may have put a great many hours of work into creating, so I just don't do it. My literacy skills aren't that great in any case, so I doubt that I could transfer the feelings that a piece of music might have inspired in me into a coherent description of what I was hearing to begin with. I'm not too bad at searching out various bits of information about an artist from the Internet and compiling it into a useable biography though, so that's what I tend to focus on with this site.

My parents did try to get me to learn to play the piano when I was in my early teens, but though I could just about read music to an extent, my brain wasn't capable of providing quick enough eye-to-hand coordination to be able to play it at any speed other than a slow crawl, and all I really wanted to do was play football with my mates in any case, so I gave it up. Of course I regret that deeply now, and have three digital keyboards in the house that I keep saying I'll have another go with, but with my eighth decade on the planet about to start, if I couldn't manage to pick it up aged 11, then I certainly won't be able to now!

Reviews distribution by sub-genre

	Sub-genre	Nb of reviews	Avg rating
1	Neo-Prog	1	3.00
2	Progressive Metal	1	3.00
3	Heavy Prog	1	3.00

Reviews and Ratings

3 ratings/reviews total Sort by By ratings | Alphabetically | Chronologically(default)

VEIL OF CONSPIRACY Me, Us and Them

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GRACE The Poet, The Piper And The Fool

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VULTRESS Distance

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