I used to hate it when my mum would say things like “turn that noise down!” And I would always say back: “it’s not noise!” and she’d say, “It is. It’s noise!” I really couldn’t handle that. I had to say who it was that she was calling noise. I had to yell back something like, “it’s not noise, it’s Jimi Hendrix!” Or, “it’s Led Zeppelin, actually!” And she’d always say, “well it’s crap. It’s too loud. And I don’t like it”. And then I’d say, “well you have [either] Jimi Hendrix [or] Led Zeppelin in your music collection. So you must just listen to noise [!!!] too?” And then she’d get me, she’d win the argument, make me see the error of my ways, and make me feel really dumb (not to mention bad, for annoying her); she’d say: “Well when I listen to them, they’re not noise”. And despite a lack of anything approaching logic, she would have me stumped.

And that’s how I discovered headphones…