And before you all say, pull the other one, it stands for Musical Appreciation School Society – the one we set up at my secondary school during my final two years there, between late 1970 and early 1972. Andrew (my best mate at school) brought in his portable gramophone player and we played loads of different albums during the daily lunch hours.

I remember well the first one we played – Black Sabbath 1st album. I couldn’t believe how ‘heavy’ that was at the time when I hadn’t been exposed to such brilliant music, as I was more used to the more genteel Derek And The Dominoes (which was featured in one of the following weeks) and Free’s Fire and Water and the like.

Of course, with so many albums coming out around that time, we couldn’t afford to buy all of them that we wanted, so we set up a list of each of our faves and then listened to the others’choices during MASS. We even introduced an evening MASS where we went round to others houses and played albums on each other’s parents’ ‘stereograms’!

So throughout the final two years at school I managed to listen many times to Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman; Sabbath’s Paranoid; The Yes Album and Fragile; Deep Purple In Rock; Led Zeppelin III; Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother; Jethro Tull’s Benefit, Aqualung and Thick as a Brick; Moody Blues’ A Question Of Balance; Caravan’s If I Could Do It All Again… and In The Land Of Grey And Pink; ELP’s first and many many more.

The start of a life of music that persists to this day. And, If you like the music of 1970 then don’t miss my Special on CFRRock on 8th June at 7pm.