SOMETHING I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT
By Simon Majumdar - January 20, 2009
As a child, I spent summer holidays with my family in Brittany, on the West coast of France. That sounds impossibly glamorous until you realize that each journey was topped and tailed with a horrific journey that seemingly lasted for days. My parents and three other siblings and I squeezed into the back of a car towing a caravan (or camper). To make it seem more like purgatory, my older brother, Robin, commandeered the front seat and put himself in charge of musical entertainment, forcing us to endure the complete works of various progressive rock bands along the way. Blodwyn Pig anyone? The one upside, however, was that his collection also contained the whole of Frank Zappa’s canon and, although my parents disapproved, by the end of one particular journey all four children were merrily singing “watch out where the huskies go and don’t you eat that yellow snow.” My passion for things Zappa continued and continues. I have every album he ever released on vinyl, CD and now on my I-pod and I can regularly be found practicing that instantly recognizable Zappa-esque sneer in the mirror. Now if only I could grow a moustache like that.
