Music seeks us out at different times in different ways, but it always find us. When I was 10 years old, it was the Beatles music that found me.

I remember like most eighties kids having a passing interest in music, mostly novelty stuff and the usual obsession with Michael Jackson and the Bad era, which hit us all at that time, but it was my first listen to the Beatles that actually got me to sit down and listen rather than stand up and move.

My mother had an old wooden suitcase record player from the sixties and bored perhaps with the novelty 45s I had collected, I snuck a few records from my parents collection, playing them too fast to start with before I worked out what a 75 was.

Of those discs my father had three Beatles albums, the red and blue compilations and Sgt Pepper. As I was told that Pepper was not to be played (fair enough but odd I thought, why have a record you won’t play) I dropped the needle on the other two and from that moment on I was hooked.

My father preferred the more glam rock of  the 70s and bands such as Sweet and T-Rex to the fab four, but it was his late mother’s love of the Beatles that fed his interest and that interest was passed on to me.

Over the next decade I took a fair bit of stick for liking a band from the sixties, especially when most people only knew Love me Do, but I stuck to my guns and when I could afford to and had money of my own, I started to replace those old records with CDs and found myself making my own compilations of the best Beatles album tracks and then making a hobby out of pointing out all the Beatles influences in the music my friends were listening to. At that time mostly throwback mod rock, with Britpop bands like Oasis (never has a band tried harder to be the Beatles) and Ocean Colour Scene (Never has a band tried harder not to sound like the Stones).

When my parents parted the red, blue and Sgt Pepper albums were given to me, I had played the first two the most out of all the family after all and it didn’t seem right to split those three up, so I got Pepper too. I had heard most of the tracks off the album on CDs and slowly downloaded mp3s to fill in the gaps, but listening to Pepper on my own vinyl copy for the first time cemented my love for the band and made me realise why it was not to be played, it was in homage not only to the Beatles themselves but also to my late grandmother’s love of them and preserving the record was a way of preserving her memory too.

Over the years the band drifted in and out of my life in between other musical rabbit holes I went down, including a deep obsession with the Doors and the melodic rock of the 70s. But I kept coming back to the Beatles, choosing them as my inspiration for my final year university assignment, much to the dislike of my Swedish professor, and then years later picking Here, There and Everywhere as the music for my now wife to walk down the aisle at our wedding. Somehow they have always been with me.

Around 10 years ago, however, I took the plunge and started reading deeper into the history of the band whose music I loved. With more time on my hands, having hit 30 and with a decreasing desire to party, I read all I could get my hands on, with a particular fondness for old reviews and thought pieces from the NME and Rolling Stone. I just loved the freedom of expression that came from the music journalists of the time, it seemed freer than a lot of the Beatle books I had read which seemed to lack the bravery of offering an opinion.

This latest obsessive period, of the last year or so, unlike the others just won’t quit and I decided to take one last deep dive into the band, before planning to finally put the Beatles scholarship to bed and pursue other interests, including just getting back to listening to their music.

It dawned on me about a month in that I should document this, give my own view on the band and perhaps give some structure to the reading I wanted to do and the things I wanted to find out.

This is where I hit on the idea of tracing the impact of the band. After all they have influenced so many parts of my life and I wasn’t even there, how much of an impression must they have left of those who were there, living around the band or at least in their glow.

So here we are, 8 months or so deep into documenting my latest and possibly last deep dive, which has turned into writing my first book. For me the reason why has been there for a while, I long to have something concrete to show for my years of fandom and now I want to be able to pass this to my daughter the way that my grandmother passed it to me via my father but not just in the form of the records themselves but with a little something extra.

It is strange how music seeks us out and hopefully one day soon I will be quoting the very words from the band that found me and asking… please sir or madam will you read my book, it took me years to write will you take a look?

I hope that you will.