Music and records

This story is not about a human ancestor, but about something else very close to my heart: popular music.

Nowadays, anyone with access to the internet can listen to their choice of music instantly via a streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music, or via YouTube. Long gone are the days when the only way to listen to a favourite song was to actually own a physical copy of a recording. Typically, these copies were in the form of a vinyl record, which holds sound encoded into analogue audio signals and stored within a single groove which spirals towards the centre. When a stylus, also known as a needle, makes contact with the grooves and the record spins, the stylus vibrates according to the variations in the groove’s shape. These vibrations are then translated into electrical signals and amplified, ultimately producing the sound that corresponds to the recorded music. Before the invention of digital recordings, sound could also be stored on magnetic tape within compact cassettes, then listened to on a compatible player. Many of my friends copied music from records onto tape or tried to record their favourite songs from the radio or a television programme, but in my experience the results were, unsurprisingly, not very successful.

In the second half of the 20^th century, mass-market recordings of popular songs were usually on a ‘single’, a seven-inch black vinyl disk that was played at 45rpm (revolutions per minute) on a record player with a turntable. Each single had an ‘A-side’ and a ‘B-side’, which each played for up to four minutes, with the A-side being the featured song (the one that the record producer hoped would be played on the radio and become a ‘hit’), while the B-side, or flipside, was a different song usually by the same artist. LPs (for ‘long playing’), also known as ‘albums’, were available on twelve-inch disks which played at 33 1/3 rpm and squeezed about 25 minutes of music on each side.

My Dad, who was a big music fan and owned a huge collection of jazz, folk, calypso, and blues records, treated himself to a shiny new Hi-Fi stereo system with separate components including a turntable, amplifier, and speakers in the mid-1960s, so he gave me his old 1950s Bush record player. In its day, it had been rated as one of the best performing players with great sound output and four speeds, so could be used to play different formats of records. This machine featured a two-valve amplifier which produced a warm and rich sound, two internal speakers, plus rotary controls for the volume, treble and bass, and had been marketed as ‘portable’ with a carrying handle on one side, but as it was mains powered only and weighed around 10kg, this was a bit of an overstatement.

Despite its lack of portability, I was thrilled to bits, especially as it featured an auto-changer which allowed up to six records (of the same format) to be stacked one on top of the other at the top of a central spindle. You’d flick the switch to play the first record which dropped down onto the turntable then, when the record had finished, the pick-up arm lifted and moved away long enough for the next record to drop down, before the arm swung back into place and the music continued. Although this seemed like a great feature, it wasn’t particularly good for the records as, rather than sitting on a nice grippy rubber turntable, they sometimes started to slip on the record beneath and damaged the playing surface. The upside of the auto-changer was that instead of having to change the record every few minutes, you could listen to about half-an-hour of music without having to intervene.

My first few records included some LPs which featured several pieces of music on each side, including the ubiquitous ‘Peter and the Wolf’, a classical composition for children where each of the human and animal characters is represented by a different musical instrument; the film soundtrack to ‘Hans Christian Anderson’ featuring Danny Kaye, a popular American entertainer of the 1940s and 1950s; and the hugely popular ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets, one of the first big rock’n’roll anthems of the late 1950s, which I absolutely loved because of its raucous rhythmic sound and great bass line that made me want to dance around the room.

I also had an eclectic handful of singles including ‘The Rocking Horse Cowboy’, which may have originally been given to my brother as the cover looks very like him dressed in a cowboy suit (although we never had a rocking horse).  Other singles included the wonderfully sultry Eartha Kitt’s ‘Old Fashioned Girl’, a song about a young girl hoping for a millionaire to take care of her; Lonnie Donegan’s music-hall style ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’; toothy Tommy Steele’s “Little White Bull”, Rolf Harris’ ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport’ (now contentious for racist lyrics); and a popular folk-song (I can’t now remember the artist) ‘Lizzie Borden’, based on the true story of a 19^th century American woman who had been tried and acquitted of killing her parents with an axe!   

When I was about ten, my real love affair with music began when I was given a pile of old singles. My grandmother’s neighbour’s daughter had moved out a few years previously, leaving behind an outgrown collection of pop music including several singles by the Rolling Stones and lots of blues, funk, and soul records on the classic labels of the period such as Atlantic, Chess, Stax, and Tamla Motown. There were also a number of other ‘hits’ by artists or bands that had been popular with teenagers in the mid-1960s such the Animals, Beach Boys, Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, Small Faces, Yardbirds, and (curiously) Jethro Tull, a lesser-known band who strangely mixed flute with folk and blues-rock music. I think my grandmother’s neighbour was just glad to see the back of these records and clear some space in her now-spare room, but that moment of generosity changed my life forever. I spent hours listening to my ‘new’ records over and over again. It didn’t matter to me that the songs were no longer mainstream and regularly played on the radio, but it gave me a chance to understand what music I really liked, rather than being influenced by the latest teenage trends.

From that original pile of records, there are some tunes that I still love today such as – in no particular order – Archie Bell & the Dells ‘Tighten Up’, Rolling Stones ‘Play With Fire’ (which was actually a B-side to ‘The Last Time’), Etta James ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’, Otis Redding ‘Try a Little Tenderness’, Animals ‘House of the Rising Sun’, and Sam Cooke ‘Twisting the Night Away’.

In the early 1970s pop singles were accessible and almost affordable at around 50 pence each from high street chain stores such as Woolworths, WH Smiths, or independent local record shops, so new records could be bought with birthday or Christmas money. These singles were often released as a stand-alone track by artists to showcase their work and perhaps promote an upcoming LP. As far as I can remember, new LPs were around £4 each, but they didn’t really interest me at that time, and I’d rather spend any money I had on buying singles. There was an affordable (cheap!) series of ‘Top of the Pops’ LPs that featured a collection of cover versions of hit records from the previous 12-months, but these were to be avoided at all costs as they were not the ‘proper’ versions (never mind the tacky covers showing scantily-clad young females in awkward poses).

Fortunately for me, in Weymouth, the nearest town to my grandmother’s house, there was a second-hand record shop that sold ex-jukebox records for just a few pence each. OK, so these weren’t brand new but at least I could afford them, and I began to collect second-hand singles, picking up music that was no longer in the charts relatively cheaply. Often, I would select records based on their label, such as Decca, Motown, or Atlantic, as they tended to distribute music of a similar genre to songs or artists that I already knew and liked.

The downside to ex-juke box records was that they had been ‘dinked’ and the centres had been pushed out to fit the juke box mechanism, so a plastic adaptor, or ‘spider’, was needed to play the record at home.  I did manage to get hold of a few, so I could still stack several of my favourite singles to play one after the other on my record player.  Occasionally, however, the adaptor slipped out dropping the record down prematurely and causing the needle on the pick-up arm to scratch the record below causing irreparable damage.

Despite my early efforts at individuality in seeking out music that I liked, within a couple of years I had become a teenager and was keeping up with the latest styles and trends in music along with my friends.  At the time, it had suddenly become important to be fitting in and wearing mini-skirts, hot-pants (much more practical than a mini-skirt, but banned at my school), bell-bottomed jeans (very practical, until it rained when they soaked up water like a sponge), and platform shoes (hopeless for someone as tall and awkward as me) or canvas plimsols (also practical, until it rained). 

My classmates and I would avidly scrutinise the BBC’s ‘Top 20’ list of popular singles, based on sales figures from record shops during the previous week, which was announced about lunchtime on Tuesdays. In 1971, this announcement happily coincided with the end of our weekly PE lesson, so a small battery powered transistor radio was regularly smuggled into school and we could furtively listen to the new chart in the PE changing rooms knowing full well that, should we be caught, the ‘tranny’ would be confiscated and we would be given a detention.

The early 1970s saw rise in popularity of more genres of music than ever before. Descendants of the guitar, bass, and drums rooted rock’n’roll of the late 50s and early 60s included glam rock, hard rock, and soft rock, whilst disco, funk, and soul had descended from blues and R&B that typically included piano and saxophone as well as guitar, bass, and drums. New varieties of energetic and up-tempo music influenced by calypso, jazz, and spiritual were also emerging from Jamaica in the mid to late 1960s, including ska, rocksteady, and reggae, and although these were generally less mainstream, I can still remember my joy and delight in the dank school changing room when I heard that a bass-heavy reggae tune ‘Double Barrel’ by Dave and Ansill Collins had reached number one in the pop charts!

Around that time, I had taken on a series of Saturday jobs, and with my newfound income, I could finally indulge in purchasing LPs for the first time. My favourite artists encompassed bands such as Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Tex, as well as solo singers including David Bowie, Elton John, Marvin Gaye and Rod Stewart. It was quite a diverse – yet still mainstream – mixture, which often earned me contempt and derision from adults around me, including my Dad, who had been a jazz drummer in his youth. He insisted that this new breed of musicians were unable to hold their instruments correctly – but I didn’t care! These bands and artists were loud, flashy, full of energy, and I believed had something to say about the era we were then living in.

On the surface, the early 1970s appeared to be a grim period to be growing up, marked by power cuts, three-day weeks, strikes, terrorist bombings in London, and the harrowing violence in Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles.’ The prevailing atmosphere suggested a lack of hope for the future, with the world appearing depressed, drab, and damp, whilste everything stank of tobacco smoke.

In retrospect, however, it was also a transformative era as young people were breaking away from past stereotypes. Both boys and girls could adopt similar clothing styles—my personal wardrobe consisted primarily of jeans, T-shirts, and denim jackets. Meanwhile, my bedroom walls were plastered with posters of long-haired androgynous young men clad in denim or tight and vibrant outfits, and sometimes even wearing makeup! Looking back, I believe we were fortunate to have had the opportunity to express our individuality during those years through fashion, music, and pop culture.

And what of my extensive vinyl collection today? I’m sorry to say that when I moved to my current home about 18 years ago, I realised that it was time to say goodbye as I no longer had the means to play the records, nor the space in which to store them. A friend’s neighbour was a record dealer, and I knew he would be able to pass them on to someone who would enjoy and cherish them again. Nevertheless, it was a horrible day when I watched him load box after box of my teenage memories into the back of his van. Although I felt genuine grief during the ensuing days, sadly I knew it was the right thing to do…

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