主播大秀

Today, in a rather dark - but atmospheric - room in the bowels of the 主播大秀, Brian has agreed to talk about growing up at home in Coventry. He remembers there was a "great of music around the house. My father was a conductor and arranger for brass bands. My mother was a singer and they frequently had musical 'at homes' - she played piano and had various visitors. She was a contralto and sang in oratorios and recitals.

He played every instrument under the sun except the piano

"When I was a tiny little boy, about three years old, I went with my father to rehearsals for the City of Coventry Band - he was the conductor at that time - and I can remember clear as day clutching to his trouser leg, in awe and bewilderment. But I only went once. Strange, really, I'd have thought he'd take me more often.

Brian's father had a sizable and thorough record collection, especially "for those days. All classical music of course - he wasn't aware of any other kind of music, at least not until I instructed him in it, in due course! But he instructed me, to put it fairly, as he had a great number of Gigli and Caruso records - he was very keen on opera singers as well as piano and orchestral music - so I got a good grounding in that, before I ran away and found relief in simpler stuff!

"He played every instrument under the sun except the piano. He seemed to be able to just look at a brass instrument and play it, right the way through the range, from cornets through to bass. His actual cited instrument was the euphonium, but he could, with ease, play all the others. Amazing, really. He tried to teach me to play all of them along the way, and failed miserably. I got on fairly well with a cornet first of all, and then I switched to a trombone, which I was very poor at... I just could not latch on to the seven slide positions. Valves I found easy. When I was evacuated with my school to Lincoln, I bought a relatively rare valve trombone - it worked fairly satisfactorily and I played trombone in the school orchestra... so I suppose I got a bit better at it. I don't make any pretence in being any good at it at all, but I did try.