So I feel like I’m in good company as I float back in time recalling the music which, if not actually shaping my life, has defined it and provided the backdrop through childhood to adulthood and on to adult-acting-as-childhood! Music has always been an important part of my life, especially when growing up. A snatch of an old song can easily whisk me back to a particular place and a specific point in time. A melody can even conjure up a scent (garden flowers, car polish!), sitting on a school field, a holiday picnic or dancing with friends at a village hall disco.
In articles or autobiographies, it seems de rigeur for musicians or pop stars to cite their parents’ musical tastes as their own major influences. However, I can’t say that’s true in my case. Dad always preferred classical music and opera, what Grandad Grimble called ‘bellyache music’! He also liked his old-school jazz from the likes of Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt, and enjoyed listening to Benny Green’s Radio 2 show on the old songwriters from the forties and fifties. None of that has rubbed off on me at all! Mum was more into the heyday of Hollywood musicals like ‘Carousel’ and ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’, a taste inherited in part from her own parents. What few records we had in the house were predominantly LPs (never ‘albums’!) associated with shows or films they had attended together, mostly during courtship. As I discovered after Mum’s death, their first date had been to the cinema to see ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’, and so the theme was played at her funeral.
I was born in 1961 and, from an early age I became familiar with the scratchy soundtracks to ‘My Fair Lady’, ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Mary Poppins’. However, I don’t recall liking them much myself. I was more enthusiastic about playing the handful of ‘45s’ dating back to the early ‘60s. I’m told I danced the Twist at the age of one to Chris Montez’s ‘Let’s Dance’, and this was played more than any other. There were also Helen Shapiro’s ‘Walking Back to Happiness’, Little Eva’s ‘Like I Do’, Frank Ifield’s ‘I Remember You’ and a couple of EPs featuring Mark Wynter/Joe Brown and the trio of Kenny Ball, Chris Barber and Acker Bilk. The best known was probably ‘She Loves You’ by The Beatles. I once let curiosity get the better of me and asked why this was in the collection, apparently so at odds with her primary musical preferences. She replied simply that it was because everybody else was buying it!
All of these were played frequently on a heavy boxed record player. We could stack up to six 45s at a time but since we probably had no more than that number in total, there was never a danger of overloading the equipment.
At Nan and Grandad Smith’s house in Southampton, an upright piano was a familiar fixture in the dining room. However, my sole musical memory was hearing a few Fifties-vintage 78rpm records like Perry Como’s ‘Catch a Falling Star’ and Harry Belafonte’s ‘Banana Boat Song’ played on their radiant radiogram. This was a vibrantly varnished piece of furniture, containing the only shellac 78s I recall holding in my young hands. I reckon It was under strict supervision; those big black discs were notoriously brittle!
As far as vinyl is concerned, family-purchased music took a sabbatical thereafter. Consequently, it was left to me to plough my own furrow where musical tastes were concerned, based on what I heard on the Light Programme (later Radio 1) and saw on ‘Top of the Pops’.
I’d been watching the Beeb’s weekly TV pop show at least since the age of five, my memories stretching back with certainty to 1967. On the radio I can recall sitting in the kitchen over weekend breakfasts listening to ‘Junior Choice’, a request show broadcast simultaneously on the new networks Radio 1 and Radio 2. I remember only Ed Stewart presenting it but apparently Leslie Crowther was the host prior to February 1968.
The grown-ups had their own request programme, Radio 2’s ‘Two Way Family Favourites’. On air later in the morning, I think, this was more to Mum’s liking. Linking Forces personnel abroad with their families back home, the music seemed to emanate from prehistory: I hated it!
So it was really left to telly’s TOTP to drive my musical education. Long before I started my own diary in 1973, I had no means of recording what I heard. Pop was ephemeral and with a young child’s developing brain, some melodies stuck, some were discarded. It sometimes takes something later in life to jolt memories back to life. In the mid-Seventies, we discovered Radio 1’s ‘Double Top Ten Show’. This became as integral a part of our Sunday lunchtimes as Mum’s roast dinners. We now know that Jimmy Savile was not only an idiosyncratic DJ but also a sexual predator on a huge scale. Nevertheless, it was his programme which for many years introduced me to a whole new world of music, of which more later.
I learned about artists previously unfamiliar to me from the fifties. I knew a bit about Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley; after all they were still chart staples. However, I was now becoming aware of Lonnie Donegan, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, The Shadows, Little Richard, Connie Francis and their ilk. I didn’t like all of it, but I lapped up this new musical universe opening up before my ears each Sunday. There I’d be at the dining table, chewing on my roast, notebook and pen at the ready, assiduously jotting down the top tens. I’d then do the same over tea with the current Top 20s announced on Sunday evenings.
While it was undoubtedly fascinating to hear what people were buying before I was born, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Savile’s radio show was that I was finally able to put a month and year, and often an artist’s name, to songs already lodged in my memory banks, provenance unknown. ‘Honey’ by Bobby Goldsboro? Ah, yes. I could remember watching him sitting alone on a stool miming his tear-jerking ballad on TOTP, and now I knew it was in 1968. There were lots of similar scenarios, memories unlocked from maybe only five years earlier, and they were revelations.
It can be difficult to distinguish genuine memories of contemporary listening from what I have unearthed since. I’m pretty sure that I don’t remember actually listening to material from before 1966-67. Reminiscences from around that time are blurred with snatches of song experienced more recently on the radio, archive TV shows and YouTube. In many cases, I can recall, in the words of Carpenters, “every sha-la-la-la, every wo-oh-wo-oh”. For others, it may be a few dusty sequences of ancient Top of the Pops performances dredged not from the internet but my own personal brain vault.
This memoir aims to focus not on a history of pop music but those real memories, and how they are interwoven with my own life, from childhood to adulthood. They aren’t all about the big number ones or the classic albums; sometimes it’s the more minor hits which stick in the mind. There may be a connection with a time and place; often there is no obvious reason at all.
Because I didn’t grow up in a
record-buying environment, those contemporary memories have been nurtured by
popular radio and ‘Top of the Pops’,
perhaps with a splash of ‘Whistle Test’,
Eurovision and a host of Saturday night variety shows across the years. The
seven-inch single ruled. LPs, aka ‘33s’ or ‘albums’, are conspicuous by their
absence. We never bought them in the family, and it was a long time before I
dipped a toe into the deep, murky waters of the 12” vinyl, where the familiar
tracks rubbed shoulders with the obscure fillers.
Unadventurous soul that I am, when I
did progress from merely sifting through the album racks to parting with money
for their contents, it was mainly in the shallows of ‘best of’ collections.
Safety-first buying, I know, but on occasions those compilations revealed
tracks I hadn’t known about or had forgotten. Hidden treasures can still be
discovered.
And guilty pleasures can be re-discovered. Nobody expects songs we
loved at the age of eight to remain amongst our favourites four decades later.
Yet, I still have fond memories of, say, many Sixties and Seventies hits and
still get enjoyment from hearing them. Maybe it’s the nostalgia factor, maybe
the possibility that what attracted me at the time continues to work its magic.
Of course, there’s no winning formula
for what makes one song a perennial favourite and another in the same genre a
personal object of hate. Nobody would have a personal roll-call of raves
identical to anybody else’s. Moreover, my most recent attempt to draw up my own
all-time favourite fifty – some time in the late eighties/early nineties, I
think – would be totally different from one I’d compile now. And not
necessarily because it would be full of more recent material. Fortunately this
is not about lists!
I find it impossible to categorise my
musical tastes. A bit of classic rock, Seventies glam, late Eighties dance,
Nineties Britpop, maybe. Yet many of my favourite artists probably would not
fit snugly into any of the above. Also, what I might enjoy listening to on a
chilled-out evening at home may contrast starkly with music I’d bop to on a
night out or sing along to on a lengthy car journey. The CD compilation
producers have finally cottoned on; you can now acquire bargain 5-CD sets on
just about any genre imaginable. Although, of the 100 ‘hits’, only about 30-40
are songs you’ve heard of, it’s usually great value for a tenner
So what follows is the soundtrack of
my life. An ordinary, unremarkable life, perhaps, but it’s my life. It’s not
just about the stuff I’ve loved, either. There have been plenty of tracks
assailing my ears no matter how hard I tried to avoid them. Still, more often
than not, this reminiscence is about stuff that has meant something positive,
life-affirming. The music may appear on other people’s personal soundtracks,
too. I’d be surprised if it didn’t. Nevertheless, if I get as much pleasure
from writing about these songs and artists as I did when hearing them for the
first time, it will be a worthwhile experience.
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