Welcome to this short series of Music Monday posts. Through the next five weeks I’m going to be talking about pieces of music that shaped my tastes and steared me one way or another, and the first of these is Robert Miles’ 1995 hit, Children.

I’d always held fairly ecclectic musical tastes as a child, but by my middle teens my tastes were narrowing. I disliked a lot of what was in the charts with varying degrees of either apathy or outright hatred, depending on what it was, MTV Europe (with its occasionally off-the-wall European pop) had been replaced with MTV UK (which was just the same as what I heard on radio) and I was more or less listening to the same three albums over and over.

Then this little piano-based trance piece came out.

It was so simple and utterly delightful and it made music interesting again to me. A large part of what I loved was the way the vaious elements of the melody were layered up – it starts with piano, then there’s guitar added, then the drum track and effects. Strings are used to support the melody . And it builds, from nothing, to a grand finale in a style that’s similar to a more classical composition. All in all, it very quickly became one of my favourite pieces of music from the 90s…

…and I wanted more like it!

Of course, in 1995, apps like Spotify were yet to exist, so it was a bit harder to branch out from one song to find similar things, but I bought the subsequent album (Dreamland) and over the next year or so (partly as a result of the success of Children), other trance and dance music hit the charts and then Enigma released Beyond the Invisible and from there it was a short hop to early Within Temptation, Delerium, Avicci and all sorts beyond.

And those three albums I mentioned? More on them, next week!

That’s all for now. Happy reading and listening!