Musical (Wheel)chairs

It goes without saying that music can be powerfully evocative. The who, the where, the when etc of the listening experience all add to our attachments to a particular songs, album or artists.

In my case the fondest and most powerful memories I have of listening to music revolve around my early to mid teens at school with my mates.

My entire school career was spent at a "special" school for kids with disabilities. I started there at the age of four and left at seventeen. It was one of the least "special" places I've ever had the misfortune to find myself in! Basically it was a residential school forty or so miles from my home town, that I attended from Sunday to Friday.

The only thing that made it bearable and compensated for things like the separation from family and local community, the teachers who, in our view, were only there because they were too crap to be employed in a "normal" school and the, with hindsight, "Just enough to perform" standard of education, (it wasn't until a left school and compared the educational attainment of my non disabled peers that I developed a deep sense of anger and unfairness about the schooling of kids with disabilities that remains a big concern even now) were the friendships I had .

One of the problems of "living" in two places is the issue of how you cart your music collection between one place and another. For most of us the solution was to have everything on cassette rather than vinyl, at this point we were all in buying albums rather than singles which might have been easier to carry, although one guy did have a portable record player for his collection which consisted exclusively of Elvis records. However the next consideration is choosing which albums to take. I think I had a cassette case that held 20 cassettes but even at this time I hadmore than that in my collection. So at the beginning of every term I sat with my collection and tried to decide which tapes to take with me and keep at school, I seem to remember keeping the player and tapes at school rather than cart them back and forth every week, and which tapes I'd play at home at the weekends. Generally, I took my favourites as I spent more time at school than at home.

The handy thing about the cassette players for us was that they were small enough to be tucked down the sides of the chairs, this was slightly before combined radio/cassettes came on the scene, which allowed us to push around the grounds of the school while we listened to the music (we considered the possibility of developing a personal music player that people could use to listen to their music via headphones but didn't think it would catch on !!)This happened a lot since the school didn't seem keen on us actually going out into the local community an integrating with the local kids, even as we got older! The other thing was that all the chairs were identical NHS issue ones and, in order to differentiate who's chair was whos, until we customised them with stickers etc, we had our full names painted in white on the back, so on the rare occasions we did go out, we'd get some smart arse shouting your name all over the place!

So we spent hours after lessons pushing around the school taking it in turns to play various albums. I was a huge AC/DC fan so I'd play Back in Black or Highway to Hell before someone else would play Whitesnake's Come and Get It or Saxon's Wheels of Steel, a strangely popular choice amongst us! Another favourite, usually played on the first bus journey back to school after the holidays, when we hadn't seen each other for the most part, was Thin Lizzy's The Boys Are Back in Town.

There is a flip side to this of course. One of my earliest music/school related memories relates to my very earliest days in the infants/reception class. In the evening the care staff (weirdly referred to as House Mothers) would put records on before we went to bed. Most of these were compilation albums like the old Top of The Pops Albums ( One day someone will do a PHD on the importance of "Top of the Pops" to "institutional" settings). Sadly this practice has left me with an abiding hatred of the Beatles "Michelle" which I seem to remember being played over and over again!!!