Once upon a time there was a small brown mouse who lived in a shed. As all mice, he could squeeze into the tiniest spaces and limbo under thin cracks under doors. For a long time he managed to evade the giant feet that often came into his shed, his home, his domain.
His prize possession was a large chunk of Danish Blue that was proudly displayed on a wooden cheese board. It had been placed there one day by the kindly gardener who owned the giant feet.
Ahhh! his cheese, the love of his life. It was beautiful. It was golden with thin streaks of blue. It was smelly…but he adored it and sang and played his banjo to it every evening. However, as the cheese sat in the corner radiating light and ever more pungent smells over time, the little mouse increasingly had strange thoughts and feelings. His stomach started to rumble and his mouth salivated with desire. He began to dream about nibbling around the edges of his beautiful cheese. Maybe he could just try a morsel, most of it would still be left to admire….
One morning, overcome with hunger, he made his way across the shed floor towards the wooden cheese board and as he did so he sang a little tune, I Love My Cheese…
The rest is history.

This weeks’ Music Weeklies Challenge www.musicweeklieschallenge.com/home was on the theme of #Cheese and this got me thinking about genres and styles of music.

I have been releasing music for about 20 years and when I started out, the tag of Melodic Electronic / New Age had a bad reputation, especially in the UK ( I feel it still does). It always seemed to me that if you wrote melodic multi-layered synth electronic music, it somehow became undervalued, even ridiculed, some might even use the term ‘cheese’. However, not everyone thought that way and I looked across the pond and found an audience who was more receptive, appreciative of my craft and less critical. I still feel awkward at times about my more melodic side although not so bothered now that I’m older and it seems that melodic synth music has recently garnered a wider appreciative audience from younger more open minded listeners.

This week’s challenge also led me down that infernal memory lane again as ‘Tales of the Riverbank’ came to mind. It’s title music – Mauro Giuliani – Andante in C has stuck with me all these years, as well as the quiet adventures of Hammy, Roderick and friends, and so my cheesy tune is an imagined episode of a children’s tv show, of how a mouse fell in love with a blue cheese and lost his tail.

If you want cheese, I can do that but I am no longer embarrassed or apologetic to say I sometimes still write melodic electronic music.

In case you don’t remember here’s one of my favourite guitarists playing Tales of the Riverbank-