I remember he wrote a truly amazing piece on Sweet. 'When I joined Sounds, in 1974 I think, Pete was so kind to me,' says former Classic Rock Editor At Large Geoff Barton, 'and I was in awe of his relationships with Purple, ELP etc. January: Sweet, Deep Purple, Average White Band February: Ritchie Blackmore, Hawkwind, Cockney Rebel March: Russ Ballard, Peter Sinfield, Golden Earring, Edgar Winter, Brownsville Station April: Jan Akkerman June: PFM, Uriah Heep, Ronnie Lane, Stray, Fruup, Lynyrd Skynyrd July: Sparks, Jon Lord August: Greg Lake, Sweet, Grand Funk, Badfinger September: Todd Rundgren, Trapeze November: Deep Purple, Johnny Winter, Steve Harley December: Alvin Stardust, Deep Purple. He was hoping to track them down and republish them online. Pete recently made a list of interviews he’d done over the years. It was the first of many stories he filed for the paper. 'How would you like to come on tour with us in Europe?' It was Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. The following week the phone rang in the Sounds office. When no-one at the paper wanted to review Deep Purple's Made In Japan in December 1972, Makowski did the honours. He joined Sounds music weekly aged 15 as a messenger boy, and was soon reviewing albums. He was one of the first music writers to take hard rock and heavy metal seriously. “Our tastes only started to differ when he discovered bands like Grand Funk Railroad,” says Yvonne. When their father got a new pair of headphones, the two of them would sneak downstairs at night to listen to Todd Rundgren in the dark. “I’ll never forget the look on Pete's face the first time he heard Younger Than Yesterday,” she says. Pete’s sister Yvonne, four years older, remembers playing him Buffalo Springfield, The Electric Prunes, The Band, Steppenwolf, French singer-songwriter Jacques Dutronc and more. In London, as if to drown out the past, the Makowski house was filled with music – Elvis, Hank Williams, Edith Piaf – their music system their most prized possession.

Joseph Stalin didn’t like anyone who disagreed with him and thinking differently ran in the Makowski blood.

Pete’s dad Jerzy Makowski also did time in Stalin's Siberian gulags. He became one of an estimated 22,000 members of the Polish intelligentsia and military executed in 1940 by the Soviet secret police in what became known as the Katyn Massacre. Pete's grandfather Artur Jerzy Gorski had been the Editor of Polish magazine ‘Nowa Epoka‘ in 1930s Poland. His real name was Peter John Mark Makowski (pronounced Ma- kov-ski), born in London to Polish parents who moved to Britain after the war, fleeing not Nazis but Communists.

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