If you ever wondered where Kevin’s love of neatness comes from – best expressed in the filing and storing system for his CDs, records and tapes (yes, Liz, you are right – they are all still in the garage, dated and labelled…) – you need not look any further. Liz is the best Mum and friend, and makes the best cottage pie on the Isle of Man (sorry Donna!).

Well, where do I begin with Kevin’s music?  I wish his dad was here to remember when he started Kevin’s interest in music.  As far as I can remember the first LPs were possibly Rainbow and Black Sabbath.  This could have been round about the time when he got his first record player.  But maybe earlier memories are him playing  Shakin’ Stevens and learning to dance like him (yes, I know it seems hard to believe…).

He used to play music every morning before going to school – that’s primary school.  Of course, he progressed a lot from there. We used to have the endless lists at Christmas and I used to go to the record stall in Nelson to order these LPs, Aerosmith, Guns’n’Roses,  AC/DC  etc., etc.

Can you believe we went to a Tight Fit gig and Sad Café? But the best was seeing Robert Plant and The Who on the Isle of Man.  Kev would go anywhere to see Robert Plant and once met him and shook his hand. Robert Plant and The Who gigs stand out more in my mind – absolutely fantastic. I believe he’s gone to see The Who again last night at Wembley with his mate Shaun.

We had the John Peel days as well. By this time Kev was sometimes out, so we were instructed to remember to change the tape, as he used to set up the tape recorder to tape John Peel on the radio. So Saturday mornings were taken up with him going through all the tapes and deleting/listening to certain numbers.

I bet he’s still got all these tapes in a big box somewhere.

As far as music was concerned, nothing was too much trouble for Kevin. He’d find tapes or CDs if we so much as said we liked a certain group. He just loves music.

He used to do quite a lot of compilations for his Dad to play on the car cassette player, e.g. listening to Madness while going on holiday, or Cocktail /Billy Joel. Maybe that was our music and not Kev’s. I suppose Kev has always been brought up with us playing music every day, but he did get into the deeper rock bands and some of the posters on his bedroom were awful – I can say that now.

When I think back he was always plugged into a cassette player in the early days, now his music taste is, well……………………………………

I nearly forgot to add the Metal Hammer magazines you bought, remember Kev you’d keep most of them always referring back to some music piece etc.

Happy 40^th Kevin, keep on gigging and strumming!

Love, Mum x