There really was a lot of music in the home when I was growing up. My parents were great fans of jazz, particularly swing jazz, so our house was just filled with the music of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson. When I was a toddler, my parents had a Frank Sinatra album called A Swingin’ Affair! I just loved it as a little kid. My mother tells me that I would pick up the cover, which had a photo of Sinatra with his trademark fedora on his head. I would point at it and say “the man in the hat! Let’s hear the man in the hat!”

Tom BurlinsonTom Burlinson. Photo © supplied

That album! It was something about the music of Sinatra and the arrangements of Nelson Riddle and the songs of the Great American Songbook that captured my imagination at a very young age. But of course I was also a child of The Beatles...