Saturday 26 January 2019

The first singles you ever loved

It was just a little box of second-hand singles, but I reckon that’s where it all began, the moment that music took on a lifelong meaning.  I can’t even recall quite how they came into our possession - something to do with my teenage sister; she’d either bought them for a few pence, been given them or swapped them, I think.  But I do remember that there was much excitement about their addition to the family’s music collection.

I would’ve been about 8 or 9 I think.  My personal record collection at that point comprised a 7” EP of children’s songs on yellow vinyl (‘How Much Is That Doggy In The Window’ being my fave track), some Pinky & Perky, something from the Nutcracker Suite, and a concerto by Handel, or was it Mozart, on 45 in a shiny picture sleeve.  I wasn’t able to discern between Pinky & Perky and Mozart - but how free you are at that age, totally lacking any self-consciousness about genre; as far as I was concerned each had their own merits.

Downstairs in the very modern Danish style G Plan cabinet where the hi-fi, books and my mum's pottery were housed there were a few other records, but nothing that was of much interest to me: some jazz, opera and classical, one or two Reader’s Digest freebie flexi-discs, Glen Miller I think.   So this box of singles made quite a statement; they were pop records.

Childhood memories are funny – the things that can seem quite unremarkable to an adult can be so vibrantly sensual to a child and imbued with the most vivid associations and feelings.  Those old singles do just that to me.  I can clearly remember the ones I really liked, their B-sides too.  They were about more than just the tunes, they were about the weight and the shine of the vinyl, the touch of the creased paper sleeves, and about the room and the rugs and the cats and the curtains.   Their labels are indelibly imprinted in my psyche too - the colours, the logos, the type style.  My mind drifts now to the way this is so perfectly expressed in the words to 'Over The Border' by St Etienne: 

 “…. green and yellow harvests, pink pies, silver bells…”   

We know what they mean!

In this particular box the pies/Pyes were blue, and a faithful terrier listening to an old wind-up  gramophone was silver on black.

Within this small collection was one of my favourite songs of all-time – one of my bestest, most favouritest songs ever ever in fact - so it deserves a post of its own some day but I can’t write about the rest without mentioning it here.  I was totally hooked on this song and still am.  I could play it over and over and never tire of it (and I did, probably driving my parents and sister mad). I wonder what it is that makes it so special and enduring, and what was it about it that appealed to me so much, even as a child?

The Kinks: Days
(eternal perfection)

But the others in the box all had their own unique appeal, here's what they were:

I loved the catchy soulfulness of ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ by the Foundations and was intrigued, and slightly unnerved by its contrasting B Side, ‘New Direction’ - a strangely doomy, jazzy/psychy number.

The Foundations: New Direction

'Do Wah Diddy Diddy' by Manfred Mann had obvious singalong appeal to a child of my age.  ‘What You Gonna Do?’ on the B-side was far less commercial – a classic example of raw ‘60s R’n’B.

Manfred Mann: What You Gonna Do?

'I’ll Be There' by the  Jackson Five - well,  a little later I had some pictures of the Jackson Five on my wall (next to the Osmonds), of course I liked it!

'Love Child' by Diana Ross & The Supremes - a song I still hear in my head with pops and crackles.  What a fine example of classy soul, not that I would have understood that word then.  

There were a couple of singles I was less keen on, one of them was '(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice' by  Amen Corner – I didn’t like the voice, I still don't.

And then there was also 'I Can’t Let Maggie Go' by the Honeybus – famous for its use in the Nimble advert and anyone as old as me will remember the girl in the balloon who "flew like a bird in the sky".  However, I much preferred the fabulous B side, ‘Tender Are The Ashes’ and I still really love this song with its uptempo groovy Northern Soul vibe.

The Honeybus: Tender Are The Ashes

Finally there was a record that always sounded a bit more grown-up to me.  I think it was because of the harmonica combined with the fact that it was an instrumental - it was 'Groovin’ With Mr Bloe' by Mr Bloe.  You know it, of course you do!

I don’t know what happened to them in the end - they weren't mine! -  but I continued to dig them out and play them in the interim years and even after I started buying my own brand new singles.  By the time Abba, then Buzzcocks, etc. each arrived on the scene for me, records from the previous 10 years seemed bloody ancient.  But there was something about this small selection that made them immune to my teenage prejudice against the past and all things out-of-date. The feelings, those first far-reaching feelings, endured.  I think it must simply be because that’s where my love of music all began.

How about you?


Pinky & Perky
(and a very scary duck)

24 comments:

  1. What a fantastic post - and a great set of tunes. A fine selection to inspire a musical devotion.

    I have written about my first single previously. and it's too embarrassing to mention here. But I have similar memories of the sleeves & labels of some of my first 7 inches. Some were ex-jukebox records too, with the big hole punched out of the middle, so you had to get one of those little discs that fit over the turntable in the middle before you could play them.

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    1. Thanks Rol. I'll be delving through your archives! I find it interesting to think about what first caught our attention before we were buying our own singles, and what might have shaped our future taste - or did we already have our own individual tastes forming and some things just fitted it before we even realised? Who can say?! I still have a soft spot for Pinky & Perky...

      Ex-jukebox records were in abundance at one time, weren't they? I remember having an adapter thingy for the turntable too. Grey plastic.

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  2. When I was at an impressionable age I too 'inherited' a clutch of 45s that changed my life forever. I wrote about it over at my place a few years ago - one of those scratchy singles was 'Can't Buy Me Love'.

    The first one I bought with my own money? That's easy.

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    1. Good to hear you had that same experience with a clutch of 45s that started you off. And that's a very cool first single purchase! Mine was either Abba's Dancing Queen or Johnny Wakelin In Zaire. Several other Abba singles followed...but it's still those first singles that I didn't actually buy, but had access to as a child, that made the most impression.

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  3. Great writing C. My similar memory is of an album my mum bought us (which we played on a Dansette obvs), one of those cheap compilations of songs re-recorded by studio musos- it had Harlem Shuffle, Galveston and Get Back on it.

    Days is an inexplicably good song- as in its impossible to explain why it is so good and as you say, so enduring.

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    1. Thanks SA, some good tracks on your mum's comp album, a great way to start!
      I know - just something about Days, I can't put my finger on what exactly makes it so special, but it never fails.

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  4. What a great set of records and a lovely piece of writing from you - Really sums up how we felt about those first pieces of vinyl.

    My first appropriated records were actually 78s - My mum and her brother had bought a mono record player and records in the early 1950s and these were by people like Patti Paige and Doris Day - I still would know all the B sides however as I played them such a lot. We too had a few flexi-discs, one voiced by Jimmy Young advertising a set of albums called Festival of International Hits. We got snippets of Girl From Ipanema and Herb Alpert. I loved that flexi-disc as I had nothing of my own yet. That changed when Donny Osmond came along!

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    1. Thanks Alyson, I think it's something we all identify with, it's just 'in there', isn't it? Interesting to see if there's a bit of a pattern with people's first experiences of those appropriated records - I can see some links to our subsequent (and current) tastes. Mr SDS, for instance, had an uncle who wasn't that much older than him, who was very much into music and through him he got to borrow records by bands like the Kingsmen, Duane Eddy, Stones, etc., which I think definitely had an influence.
      Flexi-discs were funny things, weren't they? Seem to remember getting lots of free ones for advertising. A favourite I remember us having was the song/jingle for 'Cherry B'!

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    2. Oh heck, these first "singles" make be sound so old, but just what my first memories are of. Not sure if they did inform my later tastes but then again I was always a great fan of MGM musicals and still prefer ballads to crash metal, so who knows.

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    3. No, that doesn't sound "old" - just like all of us over a certain age we have the beautiful richness of experience! (Or so I tell myself.) Re. the informing of taste - I'm thinking it's not so much the songs or artists themselves from our childhoods, but just the way they made us feel that resurfaces in the things we get into later? When my sister started buying new records she was into rock - Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, Led Zeppelin, and although the punk I got into seemed very different to that, looking back now I realise it was actually a lot closer in sound/mood/instrumentation.

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  5. I have a very definite memory of a newsagents in the city that had a carousel rack of 7" singles to browse through, cheaply priced. A lot of them had an extra large hole in the middle that needed an adaptor to play on a regular turntable, so, looking back, they were probably ex-jukebox discs. I bought some right old rubbish out of that rack because, when you're that young, price is a factor. And when I say bought, what I actually mean is persuaded my mum to buy for me. The first 7" I actually purchased myself, handing my own money over the counter from my own hand, was Talk of the Town by The Pretenders. But prior to that, the newsagents rack had furnished me with a lot, from the sublime (Beatles, Abba) to the - well, let's just say less sublime (Brotherhood of Man...)

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    1. That's a first single purchase to be proud of! Those cheap singles from the newsagents (the sublime ones, anyway!) started you off well - don't you think there's something special in the way that only a child can truly feel about music before it becomes personal, if that makes sense. Before it becomes a teenage thing, an identifier, and when you are totally open to everything without any bias or outside perspective whatsoever.

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    2. I wonder if, subconsciously, it is the growing realisation that the things you like are something you can control - important at a time when so much of what you do is controlled by parents, teachers, others...

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    3. Interesting - I hadn't thought of it like that before - it could well be.

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    4. Coming soon to a blog near you - child psychology 101. Or not. I have few enough readers as it is!

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  6. My first 7" purchase with my own money was Golden Brown. Which isn't a bad start.

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  7. When I was 10 I saw a cartoon of the Beatles on TV. The episode featured Strawberry Fields Forever. I ran upstairs and asked my mom of she had ever heard of the Beatles... if you can imagine. That's the day she showed me her record collection. She had albums and singles of the Beatles, Kinks, Beach Boys, Herman's Hermits, Monkees and many more from her era. I put away my bike and most of my toys that day. Straight from school to the hi-fi in the living room from then on. About two years later I got a paper route and started buying my own records and finding my own path, but it was Mom's records that instilled my love for music.

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    1. Love this, Brian - I can imagine your Mom's reaction when you asked about the Beatles, ah the innocence of youth.
      Her music collection sounds ace and I can certainly understand its influence on you!

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  8. Gosh, I wish I'd been gifted a box of 45s when I was young. A little bit of me (ok, a big bit) still hopes it might happen one day.

    My grandfather had a turntable, the kind you had to wind up to use, built into a cabinet, because apparently you had to disguise the fact you owned a record player in those days. He also had a few 78s, the only one of which I recognised was the James Bond theme tune; my brother and I used to play it on repeat, whilst rolling around on the floor and pretending to shoot each other in the head. The olden days' equivalent of a child being handed an iPad and forced to watch Peppa Pig, I think.

    Back home, we inherited - from whom I know not - one of those turntables which you could stack a load of singles onto the spindle, pull the arm across and the records would magically drop into place at the right time. But we only had our parents' records to rely on, and they owned about three that I liked (which I won't divulge here, I feel a post coming on - credit will be given!).

    And so it must have been around then that the idea of buying singles myself must have been hatched. I wrote about the first singles I bought when I first started blogging so won't repeat here (also: mine are nowhere near as cool as those mentioned above - although mine was retweeted by Bob Stanley (**CLANG**) so I'm comfortable with them!)

    But as Martin says, I think it's interesting that, back then, the idea that you could control what you bought/listen to was such a revolutionary (in our heads) idea. We watched what was on TV, but suddenly we had on outlet and could choose what we listened to....

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    1. Hi Jez, it's lovely to see you here, thanks for dropping by! Love the sound of your grandfather's disguised turntable... you got me thinking too how we used to have one of those old tellies with a wooden shutter (!) that you drew across when not in use - there was obviously a belief that these new-fangled entertainment gadgets were not nice to look at in their own right and should be made to blend into the furniture (oh, how times have changed). And the stackable deck - yes, pure magic. Look forward to a post at your place about your parents' records and I must have a root around in your archives to read about the ones you first bought for yourself (nice one re. Bob S!)

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  9. Just gave these a listen this evening. Thanks for the personal stories associated with them. I particularly enjoyed discovering The Foundations b-side, as you said quite dark compared to the popular a-side!

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    1. Glad you enjoyed that Foundations track, Chris - yes very different from the a-side, I like them both.

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