[Thor Joachim Haga]

I’m curious:

Is there a particular YEAR you consider your big MONUMENT year (or ‘watershed year’ or whatever you want to call it), i.e. a year when you fired on all cylinders, when you found your OWN musical identity in things, away from children’s records or whatever the other kids listened to?

I think my year is 1990. I was 12 for most of it, but turned 13 in November. I’m guessing whatever year you turned 13 would be applicable to most of us. So much happening this year, I think, in terms of finding my own musical taste. And it’s not even film music. I mean, I was probably aware of it at the time (TWIN PEAKS etc.), but I was busier opening my ears to orchestral music via those LSO Plays Classic Rock albums, discovering oodles of electronic music and Jean Michel Jarre, latching on the prog rock that I inherited from my dad’s collection. Etc., etc.

No doubt the next 5-6 years were more powerful in terms of absorbing things – like a sponge, I was – but I think 1990 is the big monument year when it all started. Prior to that, it was children’s records first and then bits and bobs of whatever was popular in the 80s, or some of those old 50s and 60s rock’n’roll artists I dug (I sung Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” in front of parents during a show in 1988, for example, dressed in a yellow Hawaii shirt….).