666 : Passing the torch - Should we indoctrinate our children?

My passion is music. It's my release and it's my obsession. My close friendships are based around music. My downtime is based around music and I met my wife through a Guardian soulmate ad which read "Musical obsessive seeks indie chick for passionate pogoing”. Yet, I'm not sure where this obsession sprung from. My parents were not great muso's and if the radio was on in our house, it was Radio Four. I did not have any great compulsion about musicality passed on to me, it just happened quite randomly and quite organically.

I tell you all this because I have three children (the eldest is twenty-five and the youngest is seven) and I wonder a lot about how they will find the music that will matter to them. Unlike my parents who didn't foist any tastes onto me, I have tried very hard (and in the main unsuccessfully) to brand my children with my own particular musical appreciation. Despite taking him to multiple arena shows and festivals when he was much younger (Green Day, The Darkness, leeds and V’s) my eldest has shown no interest in heavy rock or heavy metal and instead has grown his own appreciation of hip-hop and dance.

I was so heavy on the indoctrination that I actually turned him off the music that I adore and he went in a very different direction. The same is becoming true of my middle child. She is 11 and is at that wonderful blossoming age where she is just discovering pop music. Her burgeoning adoration of Ed Sheeran and George Ezra scares the Jesus out of me, and I have done everything in my power to stop it from happening. I've taken her to rock shows, I've incessantly played her rock music, and I've tried to calmly and logically explain to her why the bands that I love are better and more musically relevant than the bands that she wants to listen to. As you can guess I have been as successful as a Biffy Cyro side project.

At this week's Finntroll gig, ROCKFLESH’s illustrious Satanic Overlord and I spied an obsessive metal-head with this obviously bored out of her skull teenage daughter. This made both of us contemplate whether we are doing the right thing trying to supplant our musical obsessions on our offspring. Should we be instead letting them find their own ways into the things that they love rather than subjecting them to the torture of having to accompany their parents to shows that they don’t want to go to, by bands that they have no interest in? Is constant bombardment going to make them open their hearts to the music that we want them to listen to? My failings with my first and second born and that look of utter detachment and horror by the young lady at Finntroll have perhaps made me realise we are on a losing wicket.

But there is a chink of light and there is perhaps another way of looking at this. Firstly, whilst my eldest doesn't care at all for metal, rock or anything that I think is halfway decent, he does still love music. More importantly, he's more interested in the underground and extreme ends of the hip-hop scene than he is in the more accessible commercial shallow ends. He hasn't taken my attachment to a specific genre, but what he has inherited is that desire to go deeper and discover different things, to want to be musically challenged. Perhaps that's more important than the love of a particular type of music.

Secondly, there is a tale of my youngest. I've not tried to foist anything on him yet inexplicably at seven years old he has developed a love of Iron Maiden. He now regularly goes upstairs to his room and asks Alexa to play ‘Run To The Hills. So maybe there's hope. Maybe it's a case of not trying at all and they just letting them naturally drift toward the good stuff.