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With BBC4 and radio2 doing a whole load of nostalgia at the moment about the vinyl album I thought I would come out of the cupboard and admit to the first music I owned, which actually may surprise you but also explains why I still have such an eclectic taste in music.
So starting with the first single:
I remember cycling down the country lanes around the village were we lived singing this at the top of my voice to the fields.
Into the next decade and I went out with my own money and rather than buying another single blew all my money on …..
drum roll ….
are you ready for this?
I played it so much that my mother also got to know the songs and could be heard singing her favorites around the house! But neither of these was the first music I really listened to.
I can not remember how it happened but somehow I acquired, rather than was given, an old bush radio – you know, the kind with the big dial which is now all the retro rage. Listening to this radio was the reason behind me screaming around the house Blockbuster or Young Hearts Run Free or Werewolves of London to name but a very few. I would tune into Radio Luxemburg and listen to it until the crackles became too much, then if re-tuning and trying to find something else didn’t work I was left with two choices.
Downstairs I could ask permission to go and listen to the old gramophone, yes it was a proper gramophone with the volume control being how wide open you had the doors. On that I would play one of three records my parents owned. Two were 78′s Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song
and Spike Jones and the City Slickers Cocktails for Two
The third record had Paul Dukas’ L’apprenti Sorcier on one side and on the flip side Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, while I would sing along or dance to the 78′s, if I put this record on I would lie on the floor with my eyes closed and imagine dancing on stage as a prima ballerina to them.
If, for whatever reason, I couldn’t play a record I would borrow my mothers Andy Williams best of tape or The Carpenters – Now and Then and retreat once again to my bedroom to listen to it on a battery driven cassette player. Even now if I hear a track off either of those cassettes I will immediately start singing the next track when it finishes.
But that was then, what, you may be wondering is my latest musical purchase, well it is Emma’s Imagination – Stand Still. I am slightly late to the party with discovering her but as they say better late than never.
