Into adult life I was well aware of how much I was departing from my upbringing. From as young as eight years old I had been drawn to the glamour of the 60's counter-culture. The Beatles had been the biggest cultural event of my youth when they burst on to the scene in 1963. I remember fondly the Summer of Love in '67 when All You Need Is Love was blaring from radios as I lay sunbathing on The Isle of Man. I thought the older kids looked so cool with their long hair and hippy clothes. I looked up to John Lennon as a super-hero. At fourteen I read Lennon Remembers which was a transcription of an interview he did with Rolling Stone magazine. It had a penetrative effect on me and influenced my suggestible teenage temperament. Not long after that my social life began to take on an identity consistent with the counter-culture. I started to experiment with drugs, and altered consciousness began to fuel this new adventure.

It is sometimes implied that altered consciousness had characterised the entire 60s generation. I doubt that. I think the vast majority of people remained conventional and were never touched in the way I was. With iconic movements, that is probably always so. The protagonists are usually small in number. What they represent radiates slowly and touches the wider society only in subtle ways. The effect is often exaggerated by commentators.

Anyway, my own journey took me far from the values I had been brought up with. I was so removed from my roots that I tended to ignore what influences they themselves had brought to my development. It was later in life that I would reflect on them and thus contrive a broader picture. I'm going to look here at how, in particular, the lives of my father and grandfather had direct parallels to my own and contributed to that picture.

My father's character and interests as a young man must have been unusual for his background too. He was a sensitive guy with aesthetic leanings. He was seriously interested in music and literature. Shakespeare, Shelley and Shaw were big in his book. So was Beethoven and an array of other musicians. He played piano himself. He regularly went to the theatre and to concert halls, sometimes alone. He particularly liked opera singers and saw Callas and Gigli perform in Glasgow. Along with a couple of friends he joined the Communist Party, a radical act at that time. He signed up for correspondence courses to broaden his education. He seemed then to live a life of meaning and purpose. In these respects there are clearly connections between my father's alternative experiences as a young man and my own. (That he ended up such an empty vessel is another matter, of itself worthy of being explored. That he was unable to take these interests and forge them into the fabric of his life was probably down to lack of ambition and opportunity. I suspect obligation engulfed him and took command at the expense of everything he believed in. As I was growing up, evidence of the earlier man he had been was almost completely absent outside of the odd family anecdote.)

Another interesting figure was my maternal grandfather. He was different to my dad in having stronger drive and determination. He was an entrepreneur in a community of jobbers. He pushed himself into electronics and by the 1940s had become a successful businessman selling and repairing appliances. I have some acetate recordings he made around 1947. They are mostly of family and friends singing as well as some recorded conversations. The recordings are interesting in themselves but even more so is that they existed at all. Recording machines of any kind would have been rare items then especially in a small Scottish village, in a Britain still subject to post-war food rationing. He even had a go singing into the mic himself and had not such a bad voice.

But here's the point I want to make here: my father and grandfather were promising young men both capable in their different ways. That I would go into music a generation later - in particular music production involving the latest technology - had much more of relation to my forebears than I was prepared to acknowledge at the time. My aspirations didn't represent as complete a break from my past as I tended to think. And yet, neither my father or grandfather, as they saw me make advances in these areas, showed any interest whatsoever. I can only speculate that if I had a kid who was showing serious aptitude in an activity connected to my own, that I would want at least show some interest, ask some questions, maybe input in some way with advice or comparisons with my own experience. These men did nothing of that kind.

Why should that have been I wonder? Was the modern age just too alien from what they knew? Possibly so, but the underlying similarities could not have been so hard to identify. At least my grandfather might have wondered about the particular technology we were using, as advanced in our time as his was in his. You would think curiosity itself might have been a factor. Or was it me? Was there something in my demeanour that shut them out? I certainly didn't have great admiration for them. I didn't like my grandfather much and was already on the way to disliking my father. They seemed to me men who had nothing to say, shadows of their former selves maybe. But then relations were cordial enough despite these feelings. And after all, I was just a boy. They still called me “Son”. Even if Son did have some attitude would it not have been incumbent on these men to get beyond that, to make even an attempt at communication and enlighten me about aspects of their own pasts that might be useful and relevant? No. I had to put the jigsaw together myself whatever way I could.

Attempts at communication with these men were not fruitful. How can a young guy understand the complexity of an older man's life in the absence of being told about it? All I got from them were fragmented anecdotes - Scotland’s favoured mode of speech. It was only from considered reflection in later years that I was able to infer more about their lives from these fragments. Only then was I able to build some kind of picture and have a rough understanding of their lives. Having done that, I ask these questions. Why didn't they show more interest in me? Is that not what kith and kin are supposed to be about? Maybe I wouldn't have been open. Maybe the prejudice I held against them wouldn't have allowed it. Maybe they didn't have the appropriate skills, or the inclination. Maybe they simply didn't like me enough. Who knows.

More questions than answers. I was hardly bothered at the time and didn't much need their input anyway. I pose this only to ask and wonder. I could speculate on answers which might illuminate. But for now I only raise this as a curiosity.