I gave you my music, made your song take wing...

We started working on a Phantom of the Opera medley at choir last night. The first two sections we covered were “Music of the Night” and “That’s All I Ask of You”.

I sort of grew up with this stuff: neither of my parents are big music listeners and we didn’t have much in the way of records or anything when I was growing up. My dad grew up in a pub and apparently went to sleep every night with the sounds of “Top of the Pops” records playing in the lounge bar downstairs. Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s shown almost no interest in music of any kind since. My mum I think is a little bit more interested, but not really interested enough to buy much or even to listen to much. She once heard Coldplay’s first album on the PA in Homebase or somewhere, and after a bit of detective work to try and work out what it was, for a couple of years that was a fruitful source of presents for her… either a new Coldplay album or Keane or something similar. The only other music I can really remember her having was a cassette by someone called Peter Skellern, a little bit of classic Cliff Richard and various Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, most notably Cats and Phantom. She liked Michael Crawford, I remember and this would have been about the time that he was starring in the West End version with Sarah Brightman.  We mostly used to listen to those tapes in the car when we were driven to and from school. I thought they were alright.  You know.  As you do when you're about 12.

Anyway. I’ve had “That’s All I Ask of You” in my head all day today. When I mentioned this to a colleague, she called me highbrow.

Highbrow? You think that humming a song from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical makes me highbrow?

Oh wait, does considering Andrew Lloyd Webber a pretty damn long way from highbrow actually just prove that I am indeed highbrow?

Dammit.