Musings from the grey cells.
Music has been a huge part of my life since I got my first little Phillips record player for my fifth birthday. It was a second hand one from the son of one of my mum's friends, and along with the player came one E.P. Mantovani with Rawwicz & Landauer on pianos. It featured the Legend of the Glass Mountain.
Within a short space of time I was given a few more singles by an older cousin, some of which were "Rocking Goose" by Johnny and the Hurricanes and "Lonely Pup" by Adam Faith, the B side of which was a track called "Green Finger" that I liked better than the A side. It was all about a guy who buys what he thinks is a gold ring, but really wasn't and the end result is his girl gets a green finger and things just don't work out!!
Then almost , to me anyway, there was The Beatles, then The Stones, Kinks, Small Faces and what seemed like hundreds of pop bands and singers all crying out to me, buy our singles. It was a constant battle to persuade mum or dad to take me into Mansfield to spend what must have been hours in Syd Booth's record shop trying to decide which single to buy that week.
Then there was all the great stuff coming from America, which back in the early sixties was to a young lad, a million miles away, and I remember seeing The Nashville Teens on the TV and thinking these are amazing Singing "Tobacco Road" and only finding out weeks later, they were British after all !!
Well done. I look forward to reading more. And I must remember to write mine at least once a month
ReplyDeleteI thought I might add a tune of the day, songs from my personal collection. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteEnjoyable stuff Mel. It's funny - I've been saying to people about how much things have changed in my lifetime. It's difficult to get across how difficult it used to be to find things out - you could listen to an album and know nothing more about the band than what was said in the liner notes, which I used to read obsessively. Obviously now you can go straight online and find out everything you would ever want to know.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, you could hear the name of a band or artist and think they might be your type of thing but it might be a few years before you heard anything by them - unless you were willing to order their record blind.
Of course, the internet has changed all that. And it is fantastic. I love reading review of a band who I've never heard of and then going on Spotify or YouTube and checking them out. I've got into quite a few bands this way. But there is part of me that misses the challenge of being into music, that great feeling when you find an unknown or obscure gem.
Excuse the typos - writing this on my phone on the way to work.
ReplyDeleteElbows.
Hi, thanks for the comments. Kids today are truly spoilt with the internet, but at the same time they don't have that buzz of going to the record shop, browsing through boxes of 45's on the counter, listening to the chatter going on around and hearing about artists you've never heard of. I got to hear loads of stuff just standing in Syd Booths as a kid, then asking someone who was that?
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