The greatest rock band of all time………..

My musical education started in the earl 1960s with the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Yardbirds and the godfather of British R&B Cyril Davis. I then began to investigate original Blues artists such as Sleepy John Estes, Sony Terry and Brownie Mcghee, Muddy Waters alongside the likes of Chick Berry and Bo Diddley who were having some commercial success because many British blues artists were covering their songs (listen to the Stones very first LP for a clear Diddley rip off).

Over the next 40 years I became an avid jazz fan and fell under the spell of the great Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett and many other esoteric performers.

I took in classical music from the minimalism of Arvo Paart and Terry Riley, the sweeping symphonic grandeur that is Mahler, Bruckner, Tchaikovski and the more contemporary composers such as Valentyn Sylvestrov, John Adams and James McMillan.

I have also embraced “world music” in the form of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen and the late great Ravi Shankar.

Whisper this quietly but I also developed a taste for “country” music in the form of late Johnny Cash, Linda Rondstadt and early Hank Williams.

It has to be said that the one genre of music that I tended to avoid was “heavy metal” as what little I had heard I could find no redeeming feature. That was until I stumbled across a live performance of “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin on YouTube……..and what a revelation this was. Thundering riff by Jimmy Page, John Bonham bashing hell out of his drums and Robert Plant singing like no one else can. They have often been “dubbed” the greatest rock band of all time and based on this performance you can understand why.

But I leave you to make your own judgement.