My mum, Janet Elizabeth, was born in Banstead, Surrey, in 1943 in The Woolpack, a pub run by her gran Elizabeth, her uncle Bobby and her parents Lucy and Jack Prevost. Mum and Nan would often tell the tale of the night in 1944 when a doodlebug took the top off The Woolpack whilst they cowered under the kitchen table in a Morrison shelter in my nan’s favourite nightie. The remains of which are in the Banstead History Museum. The doodlebug, not the nightie.

After time in Penge and Plaistow, they moved to Grove Avenue on the Kirby Road in Walton on The Naze, where her beloved brothers Robert and Teddy soon joined the family, and then moving Alfred Terrace just off the High Street where her dad Jack would chase her round the streets when she wouldn’t come in for her tea. She told me she loved her teenage years in Walton, meeting new potential holiday romance material off the train each Friday evening, having put the previous week’s holiday romance material back on the train to London a few hours earlier. There was also kissing on the back of a boyfriend’s Vespa, apparently. No doubt dressed in a stunning little mod frock, she’d brought with her Saturday Woolies wages.  

The family then moved to Bemerton Gardens in Kirby Cross, and it was there in 1967 that she met my dad, Jeremy Branch. After a brief time living in Crystal Palace with Twiggy (their cat), they settled in Jubilee Avenue in Little Clacton, where my sister Joanne and I were born. Mum and dad moved us to Frinton in 1975, renting 60 Pole Barn Lane off Granny Branch, but sadly, the marriage split two years later, leaving Mum to raise us as a single parent.

Times were tough. We never had much money, Mum made the bills as a cleaner for one of the big houses down the Avenues or working as a barmaid at The Essex Skipper, but we did have something important at the very heart of our family. A Garrard record player and Wharfdale speakers.  Mum taught me to appreciate good music from an early age – disco, Motown, Mantovani, Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk – and would lend me her favourite albums for my first job,  as Frinton Primary Class 6 Record Player monitor. A taste inheritance I will always be eternally grateful for. Yes, at times her love of a disco dance was mortifying – I’m still in therapy recovering from her entrance to the 1977 Frinton Silver Jubilee celebrations on a flatbed lorry accompanied by a West Indian Steel Band. And I’ll always remember when seeing me DJ at Brighton’s gay tea dance Sunday Sundae, she would forever ask every gay man she danced with if they were a hairdresser or did they work in the airlines!

Music meant everything to her. Pennies saved to spend on 7”s at Mann’s Record shop on Connaught Avenue, played loud in our lounge, more therapy needed to survive her choice of 70’s patterned wallpaper, carpet and matching furnishing. But we were lip syncing for our lives before RuPaul was even a camp twinkle.

So picking one tune to say goodbye to my filter-less yet fabulous, magnificent if occasionally mortifying, mother was never going be easy for this autistic DJ. There’s Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, the first 12” she ever brought home, a tune that got her all the way from Clacton flicks to Pole Barn Lane in her then-boyfriend’s Capri.  

And of course, there’s that one tune that describes Janet perfectly, Chas and Dave’s Rabbit Rabbit – I still don’t quite know how we are going to learn to live with the silence.  

And then there’s Barbra Streisand. I’ll pick Babs. Forever remembering coming home from school one summers day in 1976 to find every window wide open, the nets dancing in the sunshine, Mum following suit as she sashayed her way through the endless pots of almost re-potted house plants, a vision in floaty white embroider anglaise material she’d borrowed from Granny’s haberdashers, lace and beads flapping about as she sang along to Streisand’s The Way We Were.

Our relationship has been complicated over the years, clips round the ear, pride not spoken, family not always functional, but I’ll always thank you for that day, Mum. That summer was filled with music and that singalong. A singalong I’ve had so many times since, a singalong of tears and love, joy and pain and, when the windows are flung open and the nets are dancing in the sunshine, a singalong filled with memories of you that Streisand summer.  

One last tune, eh mum.

This filter-free autistic DJ had to make my filter-free mum a playlist. After all without her I would never have been quite so addicted to disco strings. Open the windows, play loud and have a dance for Janet.