SINGY BOYS

The very first memory of a record that had my two sister's dancing around their Dansette (see below), and getting me to join in, was this one, by Bobby Vee......








Dansette.....every UK household with teenage kids had one of these by about 1960...

My Aunt, who was in high school when i was just a toddler, had a similar one, but it had a crank handle on the side, so that you could get the turn table spinning, and then switch to battery power. Saved on battery power, and my sister and i would jump around and play the fool "dancing" while my aunt and her girl friends laughed themselves sick.

And, of course, this........

Poetry In Motion....



There then followed a period of time when they (my sisters) almost fought cat and dog about who had what wall space in their shared bedroom so they could put posters up of their respective idols. One was for Elvis, the other for Cliff and The Shadows.

I also remember a string of "tragedy" songs that came along, which had all the girls weeping. They seemed to be all the rage for a while.

I shall dig out one or two.

Tragedy song one.....

This Ricky Valance version made it big over here.....

Tell Laura I Love Her




And the other one was Leader of The Pack, by The Shangri-Las, which would sidetrack this man only thread.

They both had boyfriends who rode motorbikes and wore leathers, and I distinctly remember one of my sisters bringing home that record and playing it for the first time, and both of them crying. They then played it again. And again.......... and continued to cry.

It was at that tender age that I discovered that young women were quite, quite strange.....

They would play songs like this--although by the time this rolled around, my aunt was getting ready to go off to college:

I wonder how many of those things they sold around the world during the late 50's early 60's?

I remember my Mum buying our first supposed stereogram. Years later when we took it apart and threw it away, it turned out that the "stereo" element was a long cardboard tube which carried the mono sound to both ends of the stereogram. Gullible or wot?

This was a big hit in those old-timey days, but i don't know if i remember it from then, or later:

Capitalism is a wonderful thing. I remember that the really "serious" music lovers were into hi-fi, high fidelity sound. They held out even after stereo came in.

Going back to my earlier reference to Cliff and The Shadows, I now realise that the USA would probably not have a clue as to who he/they are.

Cliff Richards, for a while, was considered to be the UK's answer to Elvis. His backing group The Shadows had many instrumental guitar hits in their own right, and in the three or four years leading up to when The Beatles broke, they were pretty much megastars of their day.

In this video, look out for Hank Marvin in the backing group. He's the one who looks like Buddy Holly.
Years later, I was (along with three mates) in training for a half marathon and we used to jog round and round our local recreation field.
One day, out of the blue, Hank Marvin and his Irish Wolfhound turned up on the scene and asked if he could join us.
He did a few laps and then went off, but turned up on many occasions without the dog, and ran with us for miles.
He was apparently getting himself fit for a comeback tour of Europe.

When I wrote and told my sister who had by then emigrated to Oz, she couldn't believe it, as he was the one she idolised with all those posters, years before.

So, here is the English Elvis, with my old jogging mate.

Stop laughing at the back.

Some people knew of Cliff Richards, but it was a cult thing. You had to get a god-awfully overpriced record from a merchant seaman who had been to England. There's apparently some copyright spat between the UK and the US which affects music and books. The list of Beatles albums, for example, doesn't match the US list.

We didn't get a television until 1956 (small-town America, we had to wait for a nearby city to get a television broadcasting station). When we got one, at the insistence of my grandmother, no one watched it but her. We all went into another room to listen to our favorite radio programs with my grandfather. One very popular program was the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. But when that came on television, my grandmother was able to seduce us from our former loyalty--the lure of the flickering screen was irresistible. I remeber this song, which was a big hit in 1958. It's based on the story of a murder in North Carolina in 1866. The song went to number one in the US.

Now for something completely different . . . David Byrne singing in front of Talking Heads . . .

Buddy Greco

Nat King Cole's brother Freddy Cole

One of my fave songs.

Billy Bragg.

A Barking boy, born and bred. Just down the road from the Dagenham Ford Factory.

Nice to see Kirsty MacColl.

Definitely
Alan Price was a force.

The Band (from Music From Big Pink)

Can't forget Little Willie John and his most famous song