I've been downloading a few albums I've been fascinated by but never got around to buying today:

• Led Zep's greatest hits
• Cream's greatest hits
• Nirvana's back catalogue
• Pantera's back catalogue
• Three volumes of Air Guitar classics

Now, my Missus and I have a game we play with compilations, which basically involves me trying to name tracks from the first few bars. I did wonderfully well on the 80's collections we got recently and reasonably well on the Air Guitar albums, but it got me thinking, what if I'd been born ten or twenty years earlier and gone through my formative years in the 60's or 70's? What music would I have been into?

Well, I know I would have loved the Beatles for a start - the psychedelic stuff of their later period for sure. I like Aerosmith's 70's tunes nad I've always had a weak spot for Dylan, Hendrix and Marley. On the other hand, I love Motorhead and Rush. On the whole though, I think I'd have been a hippy.

Queuing up Led Zep and Cream in Winamp, I skipped quickly through the Led Zep classics - Kashmir, Whole Lotta Love, Dazed and Confused, Immigrant song (I avoided Stairway to heaven), but sat entranced through Cream's sublime sound. Clapton surely is a god.

Yeah, I would have been a hippy - until 1976, then it would have been punk time. After that? Well, it's gotta be rock, heavy metal and grunge. All this interspersed with healthy doses of live jazz and good ol' chicago blues.

Yep, that's me. Contradictions all over the place.

(For the record, we have about three and a half weeks of continuous music on our computer, two and a half days of which is bloody christmas music. Now I know at least two people who are reading this and thinking "is that all?" Well to you I say "Yep, and I'm happy with it")