Everyone has a thing. For some people it’s running. For others it’s golf. For me, it’s music.
I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t something musical in my world. My parents loved music, and my dad in particular. When I was little, we did a lot together that revolved around it. Throughout the 1980s, most Sundays my dad and I would be crouched by the hi-fi recording the Top 40 onto cassettes so we could play them back during the week. If we weren’t doing that, we were playing records, talking about buying records, or discussing hi-fi equipment.
I started buying records as soon as I had money of my own. At first it was birthdays and Christmas. Later it was Saturday job money. I still buy them today, both digitally and on vinyl, and I doubt I’ll ever stop.
I started DJing nearly thirty years ago this year. I have a radio show. I still play gigs. DJing is its own topic though, and it deserves a separate piece.
This one is about something more specific. Looking back with the benefit of diagnosis, I can see how ADHD has shaped my relationship with music.
Reward
One of the simplest ways I can describe it is that I’ve always been drawn to music that creates a rush. Adrenaline. Dopamine. A physical lift.
ADHD brains are wired to chase reward. We look for stimulation that helps focus and motivation arrive. In that light, it makes sense that music with a visceral effect became my default. It is a safe, repeatable source of intensity.
I didn’t have the language for any of this growing up. I just knew what worked.
Edges
As a child I lived a fairly risk-free life. I was worried about letting people down and causing upset, so I was never going to go looking for danger in real life. But I did like music that felt edgy, even when I was quite young.
I always think of a neighbour who was a few years older and one of the coolest kids on our estate. He introduced me to underground genres like hip hop and rap. He could breakdance too, which I thought was the best thing ever.
I knew even then that this wasn’t a world I would inhabit in reality. It felt risky, and being risky felt like it would worry everyone around me. But music gave me a way to access that charge without having to become the person who lived it.
I would escape into the likes of Ice-T and sketch graffiti I was too straight to put anywhere near a wall. Looking back, I can see I was craving something even then. It was like I could scare people without actually scaring people. I also think about that when I remember my psychiatrist saying I should thank my parents for the structure they gave me.
There was a wannabe gangster in there, and the structure kept him theoretical.
Machines
Around that time house music blew up in the UK. Pump Up the Volume went to number one. It was another underground movement, and it caught my attention immediately.
Looking back, I can see two reasons it hooked me.
The first is technical. Early house records were often primitive in the best way. Drum machine loops with samples over the top. Made by DJs rather than classically trained musicians. You could hear the joins. You could almost hear how it was built.
I’ve talked before about reverse engineering computer code as a hyperfocus. You can imagine how intoxicating it was to reverse engineer something that had been part of my life since birth.
Scratching, in particular, blew my mind. Me and a friend even tried to create our own remixes using his dad’s hi-fi, cassettes, and a pause button. They sounded mostly awful and I’m sure we drove his mum mad, but it felt brilliant that it was possible at all.
Music was, and probably always will be, a hyperfocus for me.
Rhythm
The second reason house hooked me is that it is naturally focusing music.
House works on a dancefloor because it’s built on repetition. Relentless beats. Repeating motifs. A steady sense of forward motion. It keeps people in the zone.
I didn’t know the neuroscience, but I felt it. That solid foundation of beat and bass did something to me physically.
Not even house, but I always loved the bass hook in Mel and Kim’s Respectable. Not the melody, not the vocal, the bass. It is the sort of thing I can hum for far longer than is socially acceptable.
And it wasn’t only dance music. I went through a Jimi Hendrix phase at around thirteen. I still love him now. The track that really grabbed me wasn’t a guitar showcase. It was Hey Joe, because the rhythm section is so strong. The version that really gets me is his Monterey Pop Festival performance.
I’ve always been pulled towards the engine room of music. Bass, drums, groove, repetition. The part that keeps the body steady and the mind tethered.
Feeling
The final piece of the jigsaw is emotion.
I love soulful vocals. I love music with a strong emotional component. I want to be moved. I want music to register in my feelings.
I’m the sort of person who will deliberately put on a track that I know will make me cry.
I don’t know whether that is purely an ADHD thing, but there is one part that feels connected. Soul music often has soaring vocals. Long notes. Vibrato. Choruses that lift.
That lift feels like reward. It takes you from down low to up high, and it delivers a hit of the happy stuff.
This is also why I’ve always loved disco, and why disco and house sit so naturally together for me. They share a device that I can never get enough of. Tension and release.
A run-up that builds and builds before a release that feels euphoric. In house, it might be a drum roll that gathers pace and volume before everything drops out and a piano riff hits, often with a diva vocal over the top.
I have never been able to get enough of that sound.
Culture
There’s been books and papers now written about the higher than usual proportion of DJs who have ADHD. I interviewed a DJ/producer called Harold Heath who has written extensively about this, and without giving too much away, there are many moments of reward in club culture, plus the stability of repetitive beats and the darkness all have a role to play.
The idea did not surprise me at all, and it’s why it’s still part of my life even now.
Autist's Impression 
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