Over recent months you will have seen my passion for football and especially after the remarkable journey my beloved Lincoln City have been on this season. One of my other big passions - among others - is music. And I am not alone here. Almost everybody has a passion for music even if their taste is somewhat eclectic and not specifically genre defined.

I, however, fall into the latter category. My musical tastes were well defined by the end of my tweenie years and before the onset of my teens. Those of you who follow me might well know already.

My passion is for heavy metal and my journey is slightly unusual in that I started at a certain point on the musical roadmap and went backwards before I went forwards.

The central figure in helping me to develop my musical taste was my uncle who I simply call Simon. Strictly speaking he is my step-half-uncle (he is my step-father's half-brother), but he is only a couple of years older than me, so given the amount of time he spent with us (my slightly older brother and I) he was more like an older brother and in many ways he was my hero.

I watched him in pure admiration as he grew and figured out his own musical taste as he sampled rock n roll and ska (think Madness) among others before he started listening to early eighties metal. Aware of what he was listening to and the fact that I liked it the first album I ever got was Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, which served not only as a ground breaking and classic introduction to the roots of hard rock and heavy metal, but also as an introduction to Ronnie James Dio - the Man on the Silver Mountain. So, as I said, I went backwards before using it as a springboard to go forwards.

It was around about 1982 - 1983 when Simon lent me a significant portion of his growing record collection and I was introduced to Iron Maiden, Metallica, Dio (now with his own band), Ozzy (I might have mentioned this in my tribute post almost a year ago after his death) and WASP among others. I also started listening to Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show that was broadcast between 10 and 12pm every Friday Night. I had what we used to call a Ghetto Blaster and would have it next to my pillow and listen to it on a very low volume because my parents would have disapproved of me doing such a thing so late at night.

This led me to further discoveries and particularly of bands and I had never heard of from the relatively obscure Norwich based band Deep Switch, through niche bands like Nottingham's Sabbat (I actually came across them first through a flexi-disk, which was free with White Dwarf - a roleplay / Wargamming devoted magazine published by Games Workshop) and Queensryche who in my opinion produced Operation Mindcrime, the greatest and most complete album ever recorded.

Of course I started gigging too and have seen many of the biggest bands in the world and in some cases multiple times and with System of a Down I saw them before anybody had ever heard of them back in 1999.

Maybe it is an age thing, or maybe it was just grunge, but around about 1992 my taste was established and it was very rare for a new band to shake up my musical tastes although I don't mind a bit of ArchEnemy, and I love Devin Townsend (although he goes back to Strapping Young Lad - Check out Detox).

So there you go. Something a bit more about me.

As always stay safe and well my friends