Burgoyne Burbidges & Co chemical works in East Ham looms large in my family's history. The company began trading in the Hackney area in 1714, before moving to the East Ham location in 1892. Several aunts and uncles, not to mention both my parents, worked there at one time or other before it closed for good in 1952. The land has been completely redeveloped over the ensuing 70 years, though the original entrance facade on High Street South still remains and I nod to it every time I pass by. Here's Dad aged 22 (looking straight at the camera in the open neck shirt) with some of his colleagues at Burgoynes, shortly before the company closed down. The chap with the tie and Harry Hill collar to Dad's right looks a bit of a character.
One of the earliest photos I have of Mum & Dad, taken in 1953, two years before they were married
It was an unexpected delight to hear Robyn Hitchcock perform 'On the Street Where You Live' on a recent Live From Tubby's House streamed show and an even greater joy to discover a studio recording had dropped through my digital letterbox a few days later, via his Patreon account. It turns out that the song has held a special place in Robyn's heart since his childhood. Mine too.
My Dad was a noisy man, there's no getting around it. He sang, he whistled and he blew his nose, all at considerable volume. 'The Street Where You Live' was one of the songs I remember him bellowing out around the house when I was but a wee young lad. Actually, I very probably have a recording of him singing it (along with a couple of Gerry & the Pacemakers hits and this by Anthony Newley) on one of the surviving family reel-to-reel tapes. Unfortunately I've had nothing to play those tapes on for thirty years or more, but at least I know that his voice is over there in the cupboard, waiting for the day when I track down a reasonably priced reel-to-reel player, so that I can hear that noisy fella who gave me my love of music singing once again.
I'm not sure which version of 'On the Street Where You Live' was Dad's particular favourite, goodness knows there were plenty to choose from in the 1950s and 60s. I enjoy Bobby Darin's sprightly jaunt through the song and also Nat King Cole's more measured reading. This live performance from Perry Como is rather good too.
The first two or three years seemed to pass slowly, perhaps because I was concentrating so much on Mum's health and wellbeing back then, but suddenly it's 15 years ago today that Dad died. Who knows where the time goes. He'd not been in great health for a number of years, though the end came very quickly and unexpectedly. I won't go into it all again now, but I wrote about that day in some detail here.
The family archive contains many photos of me as a youngster as well as plenty of me with Mum and other relatives. Photos of me with Dad are less plentiful for the simple reason that he was the family photographer. Here's a fun one though, of us in 1964 on a seaside miniature railway, no doubt taken by Mum as she shouted at Dad to make sure I held on! That's us two thirds of the way back, with Dad obeying Mum's instructions to the letter and me smiling at the camera like butter wouldn't melt.
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Spencer Krug is a prolific Canadian musician, one of those artists whose output, across several simultaneous bands, is a devilishly tricky business to keep up with. I have nothing in the collection by Fifths of Seven or Moonface for instance, but I do own fine albums by Frog Eyes, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake and these guys. If you know only one song by Wolf Parade, it's probably this corker.
One day in the mid-1980's, very quietly, without fuss or announcement, Dad stopped eating meat. Never once, from that moment until he passed away in 2007, did I ever hear him use the word vegetarian to describe himself, yet he never ate meat again. He'd simply finally reached the point where he could no longer square his love of animals with the consumption of dead flesh. He made no big deal of it, felt no obligation to justify his decision and never attempted to persuade anyone else to do the same thing. It was purely a line he felt he could no longer cross. Indeed, Mum continued to be a meat-eater for the rest of her life and it was a further 5 or 6 years until I became a vegetarian.
Dad's love of animals extended well beyond our family pets. Mum's eyes would roll as she'd tell me about car journeys delayed by Dad pulling up to rescue a injured bird (they then drove around for a couple of hours looking for a vet to leave it with) or, in this particular case from 1983, to free a sheep caught in a barbed wire fence on a remote country lane. He wouldn't use any tools to do the job as he neither wanted to accidentally hurt the sheep or damage the fence, so he untangled it painstakingly by hand. The sheep remained calm throughout the lengthy process apparently, seemingly well aware that Dad was friendly and there to help.
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Today's soundtrack is provided by Welsh guitarist Toby Hay, who has released three albums under his own name, another in tandem with Jim Ghedi plus a number of EPs. 'Sheep Song' is Hay's contribution to the 2020 Tompkins Square compilation album 'Imaginational Anthem Vol. X'.
Here's a photo taken on June 18th 1955 - 66 years ago today. Mum and Dad, newly wed, being greeted with a storm of confetti outside St Andrew's Church, situated on the Barking Road in Plaistow, East London. They enjoyed a long and happy marriage until Dad passed away very suddenly in 2007, with Mum re-joining him in 2010. It was only when clearing my parents' house that I found their wedding photos up in the loft, buried in a box of general family ephemera. I'd never seen them before. I've previously shared my absolute favourite of the bunch, a beautiful shot taken at the alter (here) and whereas that one captures the solemnity of their vow-exchanging, today's example really exudes the communal joy and happiness of their big day.
To soundtrack the photo is an appropriately titled slice of the Bakersfield Sound, produced by Buck Ram and released in 1961.
When I was very young, Dad seemed to be constantly decorating in some part of the house and whenever he decorated, out came his reel to reel tape player. He would hang wallpaper, hammer nails and slap on paint whilst singing along to the likes of Frank Sinatra, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison and even early Bob Dylan - all artists who I came to appreciate in later life. Dad had been into music from an early age, visiting Ronnie Scott's and the coffee bars of Soho in the 1950s to hear his first love - jazz. In later years he listened more to classical music, but in the early 1960s he enjoyed many pop hits of the day - I still have tapes of him singing Freddie & the Dreamers and Gerry & the Pacemakers songs with me. Dad's love of music was a constant throughout his life and the care with which he organised and notated his LPs, Cassettes and CDs as he got older made me smile - I could see where I'd got it from.
In his later years, in addition to failing hearing, Dad struggled terribly with his legs. He could barely walk more than a few steps and was in constant pain. His bolthole was the back room, where, with headphones on, he would listen to an album or two every evening, while Mum watched the soaps on TV in the front room. Unfortunately, because of his deafness, such was the volume coming from the the headphones, the music was still quite audible all over the house! The tinny, distorted sound of a symphony orchestra in full flight would often be the first thing I heard on stepping through their front door when I visited.
During a period of personal domestic upheaval in the 2002, I found myself hurriedly and unexpectedly moving from a large shared house into much smaller accommodation and I had no option but to stash my own, by now very large, record collection back at my parents house. Rather than leave piles of heavy boxes stacked up all over the place, I simply reconstructed the free-standing metal shelving units that I'd bought with me, spaced them around the walls in my old bedroom and filed the records away again. This left little usable space for my parents in what was now essentially their spare room, but the arrangement was only meant to be temporary.
Ever the opportunist, Mum hung a makeshift washing line from shelf to shelf across the room - handy for when the weather was too wet for drying clothes on the line in the garden. One day Dad was hanging some washing on Mum's indoor line and, because of his unsteadiness, lost his balance, snagging the line as he fell, bringing three floor-to-ceiling shelves full of LPs crashing down, trapping the lower half of his body beneath them. He wasn't hurt at all, but didn't have the movement in his legs to free himself and Mum couldn't get to him for the piles of records and twisted metal shelving. It was the middle of the day and the neighbours weren't at home, so, in a panic, she called the fire brigade. It must've been a unique call-out for them. They diligently made a pathway across the room to Dad, helped him to his feet and, bless them, apparently did their best not to damage any of my records in the process.
The condition of the records was the furthest thing from my mind when Mum told me about the accident on the phone that evening. I was utterly mortified by the news. At the soonest possible opportunity I went home, dismantled all of the shelves and boxed up my records again. Thankfully he was none the worse for his ordeal and we were all able to laugh about it later when I suggested that, as he had instilled such a love of music into me at a very young age, Dad had literally brought the accident on himself!
Dad passed away 10 years ago today. Here's one that he and I sang together back in 1963.
When I was a very young child, I lived in constant fear that after my parents had come in to my bedroom to say their goodnights, they would leave the house, never to be seen again. Dad was always the last to try and settle me. Very early on, I was unhappy with the actual word 'goodnight'. To my young brain, it sounded too much like 'goodbye' - too final. If he accidentally uttered 'goodnight' while tucking me in, tears of panic would ensue and it would take some time to calm me down. Eventually, after much trial and error, he found some words that I was okay with. 'Nighty night for now', he'd say cheerily, as he switched out my light. My infant logic determined that Dad's calming phrase contained a firm promise that the night was only temporary and everything would be as it should be come the morning. I slept easy.
One Sunday morning in 1965, in the days when
you could still do that kind of thing, Dad
and I wandered along Downing Street and he
took a couple of photos of me outside Number
10. Despite voting in every General Election,
Dad never once discussed party politics with
me when I was growing up. His main concern
was to teach me the distinctions between
right and wrong, thus enabling me to decide
for myself between left and right when the
time came.
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If you'd have told me six months ago that one
of my favourite albums of the year would be
by Idlewild, I would probably have shot you
my best withering stare. I own nothing but a
couple of early singles by the band and the bulk of
their career has passed me by completely.
'Everything Ever Written', though, is an
excellent, mature piece of work that I would
wholeheartedly recommend to everyone. Here, on decision day for us in
the UK, is 'So Many Things to Decide'.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
When Dad's car failed its MOT at the end of
2006, the garage told him that it was beyond
repair and, after a few months cogitation, he
bought a tiny second hand Daewoo Matitz to
replace it. He was initially reluctant buy another car at all, finding driving increasingly
tiring, but at 76, unable to walk more than a
few steps and too stubborn to entertain the
idea of a motability scooter, a car was the
only way he could leave the house and go
anywhere with Mum, who had never learned to
drive.
Mum & Dad in 1953, two years before they were married.
One afternoon in May of 2007, after Dad had
pulled up in front of their house, Mum
started to get out of the car, but caught her
foot in the seat belt and rolled, rather than
fell, onto the grass. It was a drop of around
nine inches, but enough to break her hip.
Until this point Mum had been a very active 73 year old. As a result of
standard tests before her hip surgery, it was
discovered that Mum had Myeloma, failing
kidneys and a weak heart. Serious problems,
but manageable with medication, at least in the short term. Dad nursed Mum with great
tenderness as she convalesced after her hip operation, which was difficult for him given
his own poor mobility. He did his best to
hide it, but I could see that he was really
shaken by her accident and subsequent
diagnosis. By the November of that year,
however, she was recuperating well and was walking again with the aid of a
stick.
Riding a miniature railway. 1964
I was alone at work on the evening of
November 25th, cashing up at the end of a
hectic day in the coffee shop, when I got a call from Mum's
mobile phone. The line was very poor and it
took her several attempts to make me
understand what she was saying. Dad had been
taken ill. She was with him at Ipswich Hospital. Come quickly. Then we lost the
line. I was 45 miles away and didn't own a
car. I threw the takings into the safe and
headed to the train station, arriving just as a
train was pulling out. It was a 30 minute
wait until the next one. 45 minutes later my
phone rang again. It was Mum, the line even
worse than before. She was in the back of an ambulance.
Dad was being taken to Colchester Hospital, a
further 20 miles away. I heard the siren wailing in the background, then we lost the line again.
Their last holiday. Cromer 2005
I left the train at Ipswich and got a taxi
across town to pick up Dad's car from outside
my parents' house, then drove on to
Colchester. Throughout the train journey I'd
been trying to get hold of Mum again with no
joy. I tried and failed once more when I reached the car park at Colchester
Hospital. It had been nearly two hours since
I'd spoken to her and I had no idea where in
the hospital she and Dad were. The staff
at reception couldn't locate them at first
either, but were very helpful and phoned around various parts of the hospital for me. Finally an orderly called me
over and asked me to follow her. She ran off
quickly, which alarmed me, and I struggled to
keep pace. We ran down corridors and up
stairs - I'd never been inside Colchester
Hospital before and was completely lost. She
suddenly stopped running and opened an
unmarked door. Inside was a tiny room where
Mum sat in the corner cradling a cup of tea,
a nurse at her side. Mum looked up as I
entered the room. She was pale, wore a blank
expression and seemed terribly, terribly
small. She was in shock. As I stood in the
doorway, catching my breath and looking at Mum in a state of confusion, another nurse, standing to my right, put her hand on my shoulder. '.....I'm very sorry.....' she said, '.....we lost him
10 minutes ago.....' I was too late. Dad was gone.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
'Tanx' 10 Years Early.
Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, even Frank Sinatra.
All artists introduced to me by Dad. Pretty
good really. He could so easily have gone
down the Black & White Minstrels route like
many others of his generation, then where
would I have been? Anyway, add Dusty to the
list. The Springfields were big favourites of
his, particularly popular, I seem to
remember, as a soundtrack to any decorating
going on in the house - an empty room devoid
of wallpaper providing the perfect acoustics
for Dad to sing along.
'Say I Won't Be There', a slightly punchier single than some of
their folkier efforts, still sounds fine.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of my life...so far.
I've written about Dad's love of music a few
times, how it drifted from Jazz in the 1950's
to Pop in the 1960's and on to Classical in
later life. He was never interested in
Rock 'n' Roll, yet owned virtually complete
sets of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison singles,
many of which I still have. I think it was
the quality of the songwriting that attracted
him to these particular artists. He had good
taste too. All these years later Buddy and
Roy are legends, while other popular artists
of the day have faded from memory.
Are you laughing at my hat? The Swede in '61.
The drama of Roy Orbison's songs captivated
me as soon as I was old enough to pay
attention, evident even in lesser hits like
'Blue Bayou' and 'Borne on the Wind', but
dominant in 'It's Over', 'In Dreams' and most
of all here, in 'Running Scared'. One day (I
don't know how old I was, 5, perhaps 6) as I
listened to this song, I can remember feeling
my eyes tingle and tears starting to form. It
was frightening, I thought something was
wrong with me, but, even at such a young age, I was already picking up on
the emotion in the writing and
performance. 50 years later, it's still a
challenge to make it through 'Running Scared'
unscathed.
In 55 days I will turn 55 years of age. To
mark this...ahem...momentous occasion, I'm
going to attempt, over the next 55 days, to
post a song for every year
of my life so far. Some will be personal
favourites, others obscurities. I'll try to
avoid anything I've already posted (or have
made other plans to use in the future) and
will also exclude the obvious towering
presences in my musical life - so no Dylan,
Clash, T.Rex, Miles Davis, Lee Perry etc. Oh,
and of course, only one song per artist.
Could be tricky.
Having a laugh at a few months of age.
So let's start at the very beginning. Number
1 in the charts on the day of my birth, and
for most of April 1960 in fact, was 'My Old
Man's a Dustman' by Lonnie Donegan. Before I
came along and before he married Mum, my Dad
was a frequent visitor to Soho’s Jazz clubs,
often to see Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen or Chris
Barber’s Jazz Band, both of whom featured
Donegan on guitar and vocals. Dad continued to
follow Lonnie for a while after he went solo
and I still have a few of his original
records in my collection.
Donegan was a very influential figure in the
pre-Beatles UK charts, amassing a total of 31
top 30 singles between 1955 and 1962, several
of them interpretations of traditional American Folk and
Blues songs. 'My Old Man's a Dustman' was one
of his occasional Music Hall inspired novelty hits, which perhaps
diluted his true legacy a little for later
generations, though even on this single, the b-side
featured a strong version of the Child Ballad
'The Golden Vanity'.
Becoming aware of Dad playing his 'My Old
Man's a Dustman' single in the early 1960's
counts as one of my very first musical
memories. Dad sang along, very loudly, with
most of the records he played and songs he
heard on the radio, a habit he never grew out
of. (To the extent that, following his death
47 years later, Mum claimed one of the greatest
challenges she had to face, was to become accustomed to the deafening
silence that settled on the house.) In the case of 'My Old
Man's a Dustman' he also had to try to
explain the lyrics to his little boy. 'What
are 'cor blimey trousers' Dad?'
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.
My Great-Aunt Maud was quite unwell and
confined to her bed, so to keep
her company, and her mind occupied, Mum and I
sat with her and sorted through all her old
photos. The year was 1969 and Mum knew only a
few of the faces staring out of the ancient
images, I of course, knew none at all. One by
one, we showed them to Aunt Maud and asked
her to put names to the anonymous faces, Mum
then wrote the details on the back of each
photo. Looking back, I'm sure Mum was worried
that we might lose Aunt Maud at the time, but
happily, not only did she recover from that
bout of ill health, she actually lived until
1983, by which time she was in her late 80's.
In the four years since Mum herself passed
away, I've often recalled that day sitting at
Aunt Maud's bedside. The reason? If I'm ever
looking through a box of old photos and
wonder who on Earth the subject of a
particular snap is, how they relate to my
family or where the shot was taken, I turn it over and invariably Mum has provided
me with some or all of the required
information, written on the reverse. You
might think that this isn't unusual, it's
something many of us have done with old
photos, but Mum took the idea a stage further. I've found that she
also added hidden handwritten notations to
several of her most treasured possessions. To
aid her own memory, or as information for me to find later?
I don't know.
Here are two examples. Meet Nobby and Rover, frail mantelpiece ornaments discovered packed away in Mum's loft, who've apparently been in the family since 1955, possibly given
as wedding gifts to my Parents.
Regrets, I've had a few...and many of them concern
artists I never got to see in concert. Roy Orbison
is a prime example. Thanks to Dad's record
collection, I'd been listening to Roy Orbison
since before I could walk - to this day 'Running
Scared' can reduce me to tears. By June 1985,
however, neither Dad or I gave serious
consideration to travelling the barely one mile
from home to see him onstage at the Ipswich
Gaumont. Dad's tastes had moved away from 'pop'
towards the classics and I was concerned that, by
now, Orbison's performance would be a pale,
embarrassing, showbizzy, shadow of its former
glory, replete with lazy vocals and greatest hit
medleys.
A week later, I ran into a friend who'd attended
the concert. My heart sank as he raved about the
show, confirming what is now commonly known to be
the case, that Roy Orbison never 'phoned in' a
performance in his life, not even in the lean
years. His voice, a magnificent mystery, hit every
glorious note and continued to do so, right up to
his untimely death in 1988, 25 years ago today.
Dad had a good eye for a photo opportunity and, in the 1960s at least, owned a reasonably good camera. He felt that he couldn't justify the expense thereafter and made do with a series of cheap and cheerful point and press cameras for the rest of his life. Here are a couple of his snapshots from our travels in the 1960s.
At the time, I wrote 'The best photograph Dad has ever taken' on the back of this one.
Yours truly at the beach. Eat your heart out Gered Mankowitz.
Mum: What, in this weather? It's the winter of 1963 you know, this snow won't clear until March and they'll still be banging on about how cold it is in 50 years time - you mark my words.
Me: Pleeease?
Mum: Alright then. I'll get a broom to clear the path.
Mum: Brrrr, it's cold out here. Are you all done up?
Me: (Impatiently) Yes Mum.
Mum: Ooh look, Dad wants to take a photo of us in the snow.
Me: OK, hurry up Dad!
Dad: (to Mum) Take one with me in it.
Mum: Pose nicely.....
Me: (Sigh) Alright just a quick one. I want to get on with riding my bike...oi Dad! Don't sit on it, you'll break it!
Me: Right, that's enough photos. Give me that broom Mum, I'm going to get this path clear. Honestly, if you want a job done you've got to do it yourself!
I didn't fly for the first time until as late as 1993, but during the 1960s, Dad would occasionally take me out to Heathrow Airport to watch the planes taking off and landing. In those days there was an open-air gallery on the roof of a nearby building offering uninterrupted views across the terminal and runway. It was quite an adventure to see planes so close and loud and one that I enjoyed and appreciated more and more with each visit.
I was probably 10 or 11 the last time Dad and I made the trip to Heathrow, but the first time, I was a mere 2 months old! I'm not quite sure what he thought I would get from such a noisy environment at such a tender age, but the trip is immortalised by a strip of images from a photo-booth at the airport, the best of which is this one.
I don't know if I was spooked by the flash or the noise, but whatever it was, made for an amusing photo - I haven't changed a bit!
Mum and Dad flew just twice in their lives, to Jersey and back for a holiday in 1991, but looking back on our trips to the airport in the 1960s, I sense that Dad had an unfulfilled hankering to explore further afield. Mum, however was less than impressed by the whole experience! Indeed she recorded the following in her diary immediately after her first flight, 'Didn't think much of that!'
Tomorrow it will be five years since Dad passed away. Here for him, from his over-excited little boy on a noisy rooftop a lifetime ago, is an appropriate pair of Lee Perry produced David Isaacs singles from 1969.
As the shutter clicked, capturing a happy couple in the East End of London exchanging their wedding vows, 225 miles to the North West a young man was enjoying his first day as a teenager. The date was June 18th, 1955. The couple getting married were my parents. The boy celebrating his 13th birthday was Paul McCartney.
The photo obviously means a lot to me on a personal level, but over and above that, I think it's such a wonderful image. It captures the moment beautifully, under what, I imagine, were difficult conditions with the poor light in the church and primitive technology of the day...also the bored choirboy is a nice touch! Today would have been my parent's 57th wedding anniversary. The last they celebrated together was their 52nd.
Macca, of course, hits 70 today. To try and sum up his life, work and influence in a few words would be futile...so let's have a song. 'Press' may be considered a minor work, but it makes me smile every time I hear it - particularly if I hear it in conjunction with the video which is an absolutely joyful celebration of McCartney in 'Thumbs Aloft' mode. To this day, if I'm on the London Underground, I never miss an opportunity to do the 'walking down a wind tunnel' bit!
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