A musical journey

O2 at North Greenwich

Music, as you all know (or should do by now!) plays a big part in my life so visiting Britain's Museum of Popular Music yesterday at the O2 sounded like my kind of thing.  A friend had a 2for1 offer so how could I resist.

After we had somehow managed to enter by the exit we bought the tickets and watched the entrance show which tells you all about the different zones.  Then we were off discovering music from 1945 to the present. Here you could see outfits, instruments, albums covers, hand written lyrics and listen to the music from the different eras.  Every zone had a table with headphones to listen to interviews or learn about something as well as other touch screen points which churned out news from the time as well as music. In some zones there was also an area with old 45 singles in them and you could listen to these as well as other songs.

The exhibition held museum pieces of record players, tape decks (reel-to-reel), music centres, the first TVs and radios - all that stuff I'd grown up with and doesn't seem that old to me!!

We had a go on the dance pad and danced the twist with Chubby Checker.  Our dance was recorded but annoyingly the playback was broken.  This was one of the disappointing things - the fact that several things were not working.  Still it was good fun and despite saying 'no, I'm not doing that' I did.

Finally there was the learn and play room with various instruments.  I'd quite fancied a go on the drums but both lots were occupied so I headed to the electric guitar and chose the intermediate lesson where I learned a riff and played along to a K T Tunstall number which was recorded but because the buttons were not clear I managed to delete my effort instead of save it.

It was lovely going down memory lane with groups from the past.  Songs remind me of where I was and what I was doing at the time I heard them.  Ah! nostalgia.  My one gripe is that I expected the exhibition to be bigger.  Some of the tough screen instructions were not very clear - I couldn't seem to match the relevant keyboard touch screen to the numbers on the exhibits.  Even so a pleasant afternoon with music that brought back so many memories and a chance to sing along to the likes of Queen, Gerry and Pacemakers, Procul Harum and many, many more.