55 From 55 - 1969

55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of my life...so far. 

Excuse me while I bend my own rules. I've written previously (here) about the adventures Dad and I shared around the speedways of London and the South East in the 1960's and 1970's. We went to many tracks, but my favourite (and local) team was the Hackney Hawks, whose stadium stood in Waterden Road, on a site that is now occupied by the soulless edifice of the Olympic Stadium Media Centre.

The Hackney Hawks 1969. Biggs, Silver (Promoter), Gooch, McGillivray, Erskine (Manager), Middleton, Leonard, Etheridge, Pratt (Captain, on the bike), Smith (insert).

The public address system on match days at Hackney, was little more than a series of tannoy speakers mounted high on wooden poles around the track, connected by low swinging wires. Hi-fi it wasn't. The sound dipped in and out with every breath of wind. Yet it was here, in 1969, between race announcements, where I heard the song that would become the first single I ever bought for myself.

A back garden speedway star in 1969

And this is where the rule bending comes in. 'Sweet Talking Guy' by The Chiffons was originally released back in 1966, but the reason that it was being played so frequently at Hackney in 1969, was that it had been re-issued - so it counts, doesn't it? Anyway, the song got its hooks in me to such an extent that I ventured into a record shop (on the corner of Church Road and Lea Bridge Road in Leyton, a few yards from my Nan's house) on my own for the first time and bought a copy of the single. And it had 'One Fine Day' on the flip - result!

Still got it!

My Back Pages

Dad took me to a speedway match for the first time in the Summer of 1967. I was seven years old and instantly hooked. For the next nine years we traveled all over London and South East England attending three or four speedway fixtures a week. Now I look back on it, we must have gone to around 500 matches in all that time, just me and Dad - originally on his Honda 90 motorcycle and later in his trusty Hillman Imp.

Memories of those many happy hours spent enveloped in diesel fumes, diligently filling in programmes, collecting autographs and cheering on my favourite riders, came back to me recently when I unearthed a couple of pages torn out of two very old speedway magazines, which I found buried at the bottom of a box. The pages feature crowd photos from speedway matches, with a lucky supporter circled on each - a weekly competition in this particular publication. The first one I looked at featured a crowd scene from Romford, taken one Thursday evening in the summer of 1969. And there we are. Dad with cigarette in mouth and programme in hand, and me leaning on the barrier. We're deep in conversation and oblivious to the photographer, unlike the lucky winner! 

The other page is from April of 1968 and features a similar photo, this one taken at Hackney, home of my favourite team, 'The Hawks'. Every Friday evening, Dad and I would grab our preferred vantage point high on the 4th bend, by the pits, which happened to be the very section of the stadium that the photographer chose to take his snap. This time I obviously spotted him, as I've worked my way down towards the front and, bobble hat on head, am looking straight at the camera. Still not a winner though!

And Dad? When I came across these pages a couple of weeks ago, I initially assumed that he hadn't made it into this particular shot. On closer inspection, however, there he is, right up at the back, in the shadows, this time smoking his pipe.

Though neither of us turned out to be lucky winners back in the 1960s, rediscovering these old torn out magazine pages in 2015 is a pretty good consolation prize.

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