Thanks to my daughter, I discovered one of the greatest albums ever

I mentioned this in one of my stories — I might be the biggest rock-pop music junkie from Russia. Already in the 80s, as a kid growing up in Soviet Moscow, I was in love with Western music, thanks to my Dad’s love of this music too.

It was a forbidden fruit, as most other things from the “West”, but somehow, in plentiful supply, at least in my family. My dad listened to Queen, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, and others; Russian rock music too. There is a famous pedestrian street in central Moscow, Old Arbat. On this street, in its less visible passages, there were kiosks that sold tapes. That’s where we got our music. We came home and played them on our magnetophon in the living room. It was some Soviet brand tape recorder and it was pretty good. It had a digital screen with green lines moving, in an oscillating rhythm, with the music.

In 1988 Pink Floyd gave a historic concert in the USSR. I had to stay with my grandparents while my parents attended the concert, but the buzz from the event engulfed me. My parents shared their amazement at how lasers beamed and the huge pig rose above Olympisky Stadium.

I continued to explore music in my teen years. We had English at my school but I learned a lot of it by listening to music. The early 1990s in Russia had seen the launch of the first FM radio stations, and music played every waking hour on my Phillips Hi-Fi, my best-ever present from my parents, received on my twelfth birthday. I…