I was on the phone the other day when I was asked what the noise was in the background.

“That’s my Japanese music,” I said. It was an album entitled Music of The Floating World by the Yamato Ensemble. It’s basically Japanese poetry and traditional music played mainly on the shakuhachi flute and Koto, a kind of Japanese zither.

“My wife doesn’t like it so I can only play it when I am at home by myself,” I said.

“Oh, I understand.” In other words, the person I was talking to didn’t like it either.

Different strokes for different folks and that goes for music too.

Luckily my wife and I share some musical tastes which meant our three hours in the car getting to Brunswick Heads on the weekend (it’s a two-hour journey but that Gold Coast traffic is a killer) was relatively harmonious.

We listened to Rubber Soul by The Beatles, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and a reggae album featuring Max Romeo. Oh, and at one point we felt like something really mellow so my wife put on Pink Moon by Nick Drake. We both love that album.

So, there’s plenty of music we can share but there’s other music that we can’t. For example, lately I have taken a shine to the music of Estonian composer Arvo Part but my wife has turned her nose up at that so it goes onto the list of things I can only play when I am home alone.

Jimi Hendrix is on that list. As are The Rolling Stones. Sacrilege, you say? Yes, I agree but what can I do?

I’ve taken to playing a lot of jazz lately and Sandra likes some of it, Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock in particular. But I was playing John Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme the other day and she just turned it off.

I got the message. Now I know.

I already know that I cannot play any of my Chinese opera music, which I developed a taste for as a boy when we lived in Hong Kong. In fact, on a recent trip back to Hong Kong I went to a Cantonese opera performance. By myself.

I have an album of Buddhist chanting too that I bought at a temple in Singapore. It is also verboten.

One of my favorite records is entitled The Springtime it Brings on the Shearing by Gary Shearston, an Australian folk singer. I bought it in the now defunct Folkways in Sydney and it features Shearson singing and playing guitar accompanied by Richard Brooks on the harmonica with Les Miller on the banjo.

It’s on Larrkin Records and features liner notes by the label’s founder, Warren Fahey. I frickin love that album. My wife despises it. She will not tolerate hearing a single note of it. So, I just play it when she is out or in the car by myself as I have it on my phone as well.

We all have different musical tastes, don’t we? I, for example, cannot tolerate musical theatre tunes. They make my skin crawl. So, sitting through a musical is, for me, sheer torture. I have had to do a lot of it in my career and it’s always a challenge.

If I never hear that song from Frozen again (you know the one) it will be too soon. But if someone writes a musical about shearing, studded with tracks like Flash Jack from Gundagai, The Banks of the Condamine and The Shearer’s Dream, I’ll be there.