'Private Passions'

 I don't think I've made a Private Passions list yet, just in case I get invited onto Radio 3's version of Desert Island Discs. You get an hour and most people fit in 10 pieces of music. Being limited to 100 would be hard enough and so 10 means leaving out a lot of absolutely essential things.

It's among the 'Also appearing at' links above and is in some way an autobiography in music but it's for Radio 3 and so slanted towards the 'classical'. I'm not at all sure I've got the right three to represent pop music but what can you do.

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I have very few early, pre-school memories but the most significant early musical memory is of Doris Day, Move Over Darling, on the wireless and it's become officially my first favourite record. Of course, The Beatles (yeah, yeah, yeah) and The Monkees and I was strangely aware of Jimi Hendrix and Simon Dupree while nobody could be unaware of Procul Harum but The Tremeloes, Silence is Golden, was also a favourite.

1971 was a crucial year in which I became devoted to the hit parade and while the likes of T. Rex and David Bowie led the pack of those hundreds of artists that were of interest, Lindisfarne and their Socialist firebrand poet, Alan Hull, were top of my personal charts, which were diligently compiled each week as a priority. But the first chart record I bought was by Mozart - the user-friendly version of Symphony no.40 by Waldo de los Rios- and so he was the first 'classical' infatuation. Three out of ten pieces here are from opera which is less due to me listening to opera 30% of the time than composers, I suspect, saving their best tunes for their staged dramas. And so, Soave sia il vento from Cosi Fan Tutte edges an all-but impossible verdict as to what to represent Mozart with.

Aged 13, my idea was that I wanted to find the weirdest available music and The Faust Tapes helped a lot with that but perhaps that led me to think that there was better yet to be had in contemporary classical music and also that pop music was trivial and so I devoted myself to taping Beethoven symphonies, and Shostakovich, very badly from my transistor radio. Most memorably the Shostakovich String Quartets nos. 3 and 8 but Spotify doesn't have the best bit of no. 3 so I gladly put in the Viola Sonata recently heard to such stunning effect.

Coming back from exile from pop music I was a changed person and Al Green's Greatest Hits defined the shift to something more credible than overblown 'rock' bands and I'm Still in Love with You is one of any number to feature one of the very greatest soul voices, Aretha notwithstanding.

1977 seemed at the time to redress pop music but it didn't last long. That particular 'new wave' brought Elvis Costello with it and suddenly the idea of breaking down barriers so that reggae could be mainstream. I certainly did not go along with the fashion for John Coltrane's uber-chic suffering at university but the likes of Gregory Isaacs, the anti-disco of Public Image Limited and the definitively disco Chic were all eminent players in my rapid turnover of preferred pop acts but all the time it was becoming clear that J.S. Bach was something else entirely and that the consternation I had felt at school, circa 1974, when our music teacher had told us he was 'better than Tchaikovsky', had been misplaced. The Well-Tempered Klavier is not only the most essential desert island commodity but something like one of humanity's greatest achievements.

But there might not have been quite the same Bach if there had not been Dietrich Buxtehude and, rather than his solemn Klag-Lied or anything so profound, the Trio Sonata BuxWV255 is joyful invention made out of next to nothing.

Far and away England's greatest composer was a German who wrote Italian music, we can't be having too much of a morbidly religiose programme and so even the Tallis Spem in Alium, amazing though it is, can't be found space for because Handel, who only does grandeur but always does it grandly, has to be in and Va tacito from Guilio Cesare compacts all the stately mannerism with as much strut and verve as he ever did anywhere.

But if there was ever a right answer to pop music it was the Tamla Motown hit factory and if any one act defined Motown it was Diana Ross & the Supremes and so, with apologies to Smokey Robinson, and by extension The Ronettes, Come See About Me is for some reason a more perfect product than Stop! in the Name of Love or even Miss Ross's solo heartbreaker, I'm Still Waiting.

A concert by Ensemble Clement Jannequin in Portsmouth Cathedral circa 1989 opened up the whole new world of Renaissance music previously labelled 'Early', subsequent concerts by the Tallis Scholars and The Sixteen, and another composer to squeeze into my Top 10, Josquin DesPrez, who never did it more succinctly or movingly than in his tribute to his precursor, Johannes Ockeghem.

Pop music included long-lasting devotions to R.E.M., the indie heroes of choice, the Jesus & Mary Chain and my interest was extended for some years by the luckiest break of all, being introduced to The Magnetic Fields and the darkly sentimental insouciance of Stephin Merritt's songwriting. One either 'gets' things or one doesn't and I absolutely did but otherwise pop music became for the most part a heritage thing and even a belief in 1971 or the 70's in general was modified into something earlier, somehow more seemingly innocent and fresh in the likes of Petula Clark.

The Magnetic Fields provided some of the best live pop gigs I ever saw because they were downbeat, ironic and gorgeous, not designed to generate undue hysteria. Classical concerts were always the preferred live performances and one for the very shortlist of those was a Prom of the Monteverdi Vespers with Carolyn Sampson by which one was utterly transfixed. 

No map of music, however briefly sketched, looks right without Monteverdi on it and I'm having to omit Bowie, Marc Bolan and Spem in Alium to accommodate him but Philippe Jaroussky is persuasive on the love duet, Pur ti miro from L'incoranazione di Poppea. 

The Shostakovich would make for a better finale, staring bleakly into eternity, but it was brought into the story earlier and so we end almost inadvertently sublime.