A musical post…A Random, Eclectic taste… but I just love this

I appear to have a soft side when it comes to music. I think it comes from my background to be completely honest. Living at home as a youngster I probably started getting interested in music when I was about eleven or twelve. My mum was more varied when it came to listening, everything from Barry Manilow, Barbara Streisand and Abba with some chart singles thrown in. Tthis was borderline acceptable. My dad on the other hand was a classical person..Pavarotti and the other tenors we put up with for years. It was the “in” thing at school if you were either in to MOD, SKA, Punk, Rock, Ted or Funk…If you wore the clothes to match you were bona-fide and well recognised. I did it…yes I did. I had never seen myself as going down this road as one of the “cooler” group at school and I am not entirely sure if I really was, but whatever…… it sounds good now.  I was in to SKA. Two-Tone heaven…this incorporated the groups like Madness, The Specials, The Selecter, Bad Manners and The Jam. Ok, let me take you back in time and give you an example. Here is the top twenty chart singles for January 1980:-

1    The Pretenders        Brass In Pocket
2    Pink Floyd        Another Brick In The Wall
3    Billy Preston & Syreeta    With You I’m Born Again
4    Abba            I Have A Dream
5    Madness            My Girl
6    KC & The Sunshine Band    Please Don’t Go
7    The Nolans        I’m In The Mood For Dancing
8    Fiddler’s Dram        Day Trip To Bangor
9    The Tourists        I Only Want To Be With You
10    The Beat        Tears Of A Clown / Ranking Full Stop
11    The Specials        Too Much Too Young (The Special AKA Live! EP)
12    The Sugarhill Gang    Rapper’s Delight
13    Booker T & The MGs    Green Onions
14    Styx            Babe
15    The Clash        London Calling
16    Rose Royce        Is It Love You’re After
17    Dollar            I Wanna Hold Your Hand
18    Dr Hook    Better Love Next Time
19    The Three Degrees    My Simple Heart
20    Joe Jackson        It’s Different For G

Right, all that does is demonstrate that I can copy and paste from the internet. You are correct, but wait a minute. Out of that list I owned Madness, My Girl…. The Tourists, I Only Wanna Be With You….The Beat, Tears of a Clown….The Specials, Too Much Too Young…..Booker T & The MGs, Green Onions…and finally The Clash, London Calling all in 7 inch Vinyl. I suppose when I stand back and look at this very small selection of my music collection from that era you can see a framework for a varied taste. There is a definite SKA trend going on with a little bit of Punk sprinkled in for good measure. Fair Enough.

What this chart fails to show is the difference between what I owned and listened too and what I told my school mates I owned and listened too. Now, before we go on, I never lied about what I owned because that would have really dropped me in it when a friend visited and realised whilst flicking through the vinyl that I was a closet Dollar fan. Just quickly, I really was a closet Dollar fan, well half of Dollar anyway (Does this mean I am a 50 cent fan….there is a joke there somewhere) because the blonde bird was fit…Thereza Bazar went to bed with me every night when I was 12 and my centre page pull out from Look-in was pride of place on my wall. I didn’t know much about the bloke from Dollar, I don’t even know his name to be honest, looking him up I find his name is David Van Day. He certainly wasnt part of my poster collection and I seem to recall any posters that he happened to be part of were manually edited with a pair of Sheffields finest scissors. Now lads you can all stop Google-ing “Thereza Bazar”… but if you didnt here is a link to the search lol…

Moving on, lets compare the chart above with the following month February 1980 and this time I will be truthful…

1    The Specials    Too Much Too Young (The Special AKA Live! EP)
2    Kenny Rogers    Coward Of The County
3    The Nolans    I’m In The Mood For Dancing
4    Madness    My Girl
5    The Whispers    And The Beat Goes On
6    Joe Jackson    It’s Different For Girls
7    The Boomtown Rats    Someone’s Looking At You
8    The Pretenders    Brass In Pocket
9    Styx                Babe
10    Keith Michell    Captain Beaky / Wilfred The Weasel
11    Jon & Vangelis    I Hear You Now
12    The Regents    7 Teen
13    Billy Preston & Syreeta    With You I’m Born Again
14    Booker T & The MGs    Green Onions
15    Cliff Richard    Carrie
16    New Musik    Living By Numbers
17    The Ramones    Baby I Love You
18    KC & The Sunshine Band    Please Don’t Go
19    Queen    Save Me
20    Selecter    Three Minute Hero

There wasn’t a massive change between January and February that year but I would have quite happily listened to that whole chart on a Sunday evening. In those days it was presented by Tony Blackburn (you can see the complete list of presenters here ) and was live on Radio One at 17:00 until 19:00.  I can recall being in my bedroom sitting next to the radio with a tape recorder ready to press Record +Play to make sure I didn’t get the presenters voice or a jingle on the recorded tape. It makes me laugh when I think about it….There was one of my favourite songs of that era “Rat Trap” by The Boomtown Rats that I recorded and half way though the song whilst Bob Geldof is in the throes of his routine you can clearly hear my mother shouting “ Mark……Paul…..Your tea is ready…….” closely followed by my brother Paul shouting back “Awww Mum ssssshhhh I’m taping “. When I look back I find this hilarious….I suspect every kid of this era has done this at some point. A complete C-90 Cassette filled with that week’s Top 40 Chart all ready to play that week when I came home from school. Have a look at the Radio One Schedules from that era here

One of the biggest problems I encountered ( I say “I” but I mean “we” as my brother suffered the same fate) was the timing of the Top 40. Five til seven was very inconvenient to the “then illegal” taping enthusiast, simply put “It was Tea-Time” and there was no way that I could have taken my tea upstairs to complete my two-hour taping marathon. It would be impossible to persuade mum and dad and even more impossible to persuade them to let both of us do it. And you know how it is, you can’t let one do it without the other. This left me with a choice. Do I miss the songs whilst I eat my tea? or do I press record and play, get the songs I missed and cope with Tony Blackburns’ voice in-between them? Difficult choice. Looking back I really do giggle, between Paul and I we used to brag to each other that we had managed to capture a certain song by chance on one of the breakfast shows….What we never considered in those days was tape to tape….It would have been so easy.

I could write for ever about my past and the music I listened to but it would be so lengthy you would be asleep by paragraph two….Yes it was weird, and it still is. You only have to look at my CD collection and my 102,000 songs on iTunes and you will see such a varied style.

Everything from Madness to Buble, Shalamar to Spandau Ballet, Roxette to Sky, Alan Parsons to Kiss and Sinnead O’Connor to Blondie… Marillion to The Jam

There is nothing wrong with it you know….take a look at your own collection and see the contrasting music over the eras. I will leave you with this song by Andy Burrows called “If I had a heart” which I love. I know its soft, but as I am constantly reminded by my kids….I’m getting old. Thanks for reading.