Dad was raised in a wealthy family in Scotland and went to boarding school from a very young age. A very posh, private boarding school that has been open since 1525. A glance at some of the school’s alumni reveals an impressive list of names; politicians, business people, sports stars, actors, authors, historians, archaeologists, zoologists and screenwriters..... to name but a few! It’s clear my father’s parents wanted to give their children opportunities and expected them to be high achievers.
My father took this very much to heart and, to this day, he always seems to wish he had done more, had ‘been’ more. In reality he raised my stepsister, sister and I in a house where we wanted for nothing.........apart from maybe more time with him. He was always working. When I was a teenager he was Managing Director of a large factory and President of the local rugby club.
Like many teenagers I rebelled. I rebelled hard. I rebelled against the life I was privileged enough to have. I didn’t want a nice house, an annual foreign holiday and to help serve drinks at dinner parties. I wanted to live in Portstewart or Portrush, get the bus home from school, hang out at the amusements all night with older friends who smoked and drank alcohol.
My rebellion was aided greatly by one, very important thing........ rock and heavy metal music. What better way to rebel against parents I saw as being stuffy than to blast some Metallica when they had visitors and shock everyone by coming downstairs in ripped jeans, DM boots and hair dyed a completely unnatural colour?? Perfect.
The reality of that teenage rebellion is that while the rich kids were at a local ‘cool’ nightclub doing drugs and getting into fights, I was at a tiny local rock club where everyone knew everyone else, with people who were really only interested in hearing a live band. To this day I still find myself standing beside some of those people at gigs and those same teenage rebels have helped me raise thousands for Macmillan Cancer Support. We’re all older, have families of our own and are generally decent, normal people.
So while my dad was listening to Holtz and Prokovief (ask me to hum Peter’s Theme from Peter & the Wolf and I’ll prove my background.....), I was blasting Megadeth and Slayer. As the years went on I expanded my music knowledge and have grown to love a wide range of music and artists. For me genre doesn’t really matter; if it sounds good to my ears then that’s good enough!
So no, I’ve never really seen my dad as ‘cool’. A good man, a man with a great sense of humour, a man who worked hard all his life to provide for his family, a man who’s come through some hard times emotionally and a man who loves me very much and is always there for me. But not a ‘cool’ man.
So finally, after far too many words as usual, I reach the point where I tell you of the few minutes last night when my dad became ‘cool’......... I was taking him to the airport to collect a friend of his. As always, we arrived early, and parked a few miles away to avoid extortionate car parking charges. I decided to put on some music and chose an album I remembered my mum listening to when we lived in Scotland; “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel. Dad said it was ‘quite nice’ and I told him I remembered my mum listening to it and, in fact, I even still have her old LP version of it that I inherited when we moved to Northern Ireland. I told him that, although I was only five years old when she died, I remembered mum listening to music. I remembered she liked Simon & Garfunkel, ABBA, Cliff Richard (in the ‘Devil Woman’ and ‘Carrie’ years rather than ‘Mistletoe and Wine’!) and Buddy Holly........
To my complete amazement my dad said “Yes, Buddy Holly. He died in a plane crash. Along with the Big Bopper.” My uncool dad knew about Buddy Holly??? Then he went further and told me they’d seen him in London!! At this point I’m looking at him with complete admiration..... “You saw Buddy Holly?? Live??” Instantly my dad became ‘cool’. Completely and utterly cool. Cooler than cool. He saw Buddy Holly????
My dad was born in 1944 and Buddy Holly died in 1959...... I should’ve done the maths and realised how unlikely it was that a teenage Glaswegian boy from a posh family would’ve seen him live in London, but I was too excited by this news and immediately asked him to tell me more.......“Yes”, he said, “It was in 1999. We saw it at the theatre in London.”
My dear old dad had seen the musical theatre show of “Buddy” about the life of Buddy Holly. The Coolometer score crashed from ‘totally awesome’ down to ‘moderately middle class cool’ in that one sentence....!! But do you know what? It doesn’t matter. My dad is cool because he’s his own man. He’s my dad. Who cares about his music tastes? Not me.
So if you think you’re cooler than other people, remember what Ben Folds taught us;
“Make me feel tiny if it makes you feel tall but there's always someone cooler than you
Yeah, you're the shit but you won't be it for long
Oh, there's always someone cooler than you
Yeah, there's always someone cooler than you”
From “There’s always someone cooler than you”, song by Ben Folds
Be cool, but don’t be too cool to care about not being cool!
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