Friday 29 March 2024
Friday Photo #62
Friday 22 March 2024
Friday Photo(s) #61
Tuesday 19 March 2024
Together Riding On a Crest, It Was Swell
Back in the 1970s, most of the Friday morning playground chatter concerned the previous evening's edition of Top of the Pops. A lucky few of us would've recorded selections from the programme on our new fangled cassette machines, turning to shush our parents as we held a microphone up to the tiny tinny speaker next to the screen. The rest relied on mental highlights, etched into transfixed memory and enhanced by the shared recollections of classmates. Memorable performances seemed to come thick and fast for us throughout those years; David Essex's extraordinary 'Rock On', Leo Sayer's pierrotesque tour-de-force 'The Show Must Go On' and our first glimpse of the unique genius of Sparks, via 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both of Us', to name but a few - all of these before we even start on the likes of Bolan, Bowie, Slade, Sweet etc. The cultural impact of Top of the Pops may have been tarnished by the evil actions of some of the presenters and dimmed by the passing years, but those performances resonate with me to this day. Another that stands out is Cockney Rebel's 1974 TOTP debut with 'Judy Teen'. The following morning, before the school-bell rang, a group of us huddled together beneath the netball hoop to exchange our thoughts on the brilliant quirky oddness of the song and frontman Steve Harley's strangely alien appearance. It was the stuff we lived for. Needless to say, the BBC have wiped that particular edition of the show, though a later TOTP version of the song is preserved on YouTube.
I happened to be in London on Sunday, just half a dozen miles from my childhood stomping grounds, when news of Steve Harley's sad passing pinged onto my phone. In The Boleyn later that evening, I raised a pint of Five Points Best to Steve and to all those pals from the old schoolyard.
Friday 15 March 2024
Friday Photo #60
Greatest Hits
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It's the summer of 1974. Go down to the bottom of my road, through the park, round the edge of the allotments beyond, on past the cricke...
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I started to seriously look into my family tree over the past winter, in an effort to make sense of the paper trail left by Mum. In the 1980...
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There's been a lot of stuff going on lately, some happy stuff, some sad stuff and I'll get back to all that in due course with any l...
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Somehow, don't ask me exactly how it happened, I seem to have reached the grand old age of 57. Last time I checked, I could've sw...
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Since last Sunday, I've been mostly laying in a pool of sweat, in bed or on the sofa, as I struggle with a heavy feverish cold. I manag...