Excerpted from:
Jazzfinger, It's Easy When You're Beautiful

HAS GAYLANI: I have no memories of my father. He left when I was very young. I remember living in a house with my grandparents, my mother and two uncles. My dad went back to Baghdad. The only time I heard from him was via solicitors on my twelfth birthday. There seemed to be a panic on in case his family came over to take me away to Baghdad. I was called into the headmaster's office at school and told to raise the alarm if any strange Iraqis wanted to drive me home from school. Living with a lot of relatives and then with my mother was great. It was only the other kids at school who made me feel that it was wrong not to have a father around. I got subjected to some pretty intense racial abuse over my name, but I was generally happy. The first music I heard as a kid was what my mother and her brothers would listen to - Beatles, Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Elvis, Roy Orbison, Tom Paxton, Ray Coniff, Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Yes, Uriah Heep ... I always loved it when they were playing records. My earliest memory is nearly drowning in a big swimming pool in Germany. I don't swim, but it was quite a nice experience. I remember sinking down in all this blue and thinking it was totally beautiful. I remember really enjoying it at the time, this blue, still, nice land.

NEIL CAMPBELL: How often do you think about it?

HAS GAYLANI: I dream about it a bit. I seem to tell a lot of people about it.

NEIL CAMPBELL: Ben, can you compete with that?

BEN JONES: No. My earliest memory is sitting on a large marble work surface in a kitchen, next to a window on the second or third floor. I was having an argument with my mother about someone on the street below that I thought was a friend of hers, but she was having none of it. That was when I was a year old or thereabouts. Apart from that, I remember being in Canada, which is totally bilingual. I kind of knew where France was, but couldn't speak the language. The winters were great, though. I remember throwing a bucket of water and it just turning to snow before it hit the ground. We had to wear little thermal all-in-one suits to school.

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