Daily Express 20.8.2024
The trouble with technology is that our present so quickly swallows our past. I didn’t mind so much when digital photography made our family photograph albums look like medieval relics, because we could always copy our old pictures and leave them to our descendants. But albums? That’s different. That really is personal.
If you’re anything like me, you must have spent much of your life collecting pieces of black plastic which came inside dazzling, groovy, often psychedelic looking covers. We used to call them long players in those days.
Did you stack them on shelves, or were they collected in those white thirteen and a half inch boxes from Habitat when that was the place for modern furnishings?
They looked so pristine, didn’t they. So grown up, standing in ordered attention alongside the record player. An anthropologist’s investigation of them would reveal your life’s journey, from teenage back bedroom, to student bed-sitter and on to your first shared flat, then the second, then the third, and so on into cohabiting, maturity, marriage and a mortgage.
No matter what, the albums always came with you, with their number increasing through the years.
Better than any diary they told the story of how you became you, of the highlights in your life, the parties attended, exams taken, lonely nights when they were your sole consolation; and then of jobs applied for, dates hoped for, love affairs started, hearts broken, couples settled and babies born.
As the decades went by, they still accompanied you on your journey, though perhaps not played very often and kept now in the spare room since the children grew up and left home. taking their CDs with them.
And now that you’re getting on a bit, going to more funerals than rock concerts you’re beginning to wonder what is to become of your lifetime’s collection. The obvious recipients would be the grandchildren, until it is tactfully pointed out to you that most of their generation don’t really know what records are.
In a world now drenched in popular music they all know about Spotify, YouTube., Taylor Swift and Glastonbury. But most of them have probably never seen a working record player, and never known the anticipation as the pickup alights on the first track of a spinning thirty three and a third album track.
But, worse than that, they don’t even see the point in record players when their phones and computers, radio and TV stations offer them ear to ear music of every kind and at every second of every day.
All of which is leaving war babies, baby boomers and other refugees from the Sixties like me with something of a problem. Because in the inevitability that one day I won’t be here to play my twelve hundred and thirty two albums, a couple of hundred seven-inch singles and a few ten inch 78s, my grandchildren won’t want my archaic musical archives cluttering up their world either.
I’ve long known that one of these days I’m going to have to get round to letting my collection go. But it will be a terrible wrench to abandon a hobby which began in boyhood and continued when I got a job interviewing rock stars and reviewing their records. For years record companies rained records on me.
I should really have got rid of the lot decades ago. But you know how we boys are with our record collections, going to the shelves every now and then just to be sure that Creedence Clearwater Revival are still there. Actually, I played Bad Moon Rising again this week, just so that I could imagine again the film ‘American Werewolf in London’ in which Jenny Agutter played a hot young nurse and Creedence provided the werewolf’s musical motif. This, of course, was decades before Jenny televisually took the cloth and became Sister Julienne in Call The Midwife.
But isn’t that always the way with music, providing an ever-opening door to our memories. A couple of bars of the Who’s My Generation, and I’m fifty years younger and Pete Townshend is explaining how his stage performance which looked like that of a windmill was devised to take the fans’ attention away from the size of his nose.
By that time I already had quite a collection. It had begun at school, when I would get off the bus a stop earlier so that I could gaze at the cover of the first Elvis long player in a record shop. Basically, it was just a black and white photograph of the boy singer looking as though he was howling at the moon, with his name in two splashes of pink and green. But it was a revolutionary image. I couldn’t afford to buy it., mind you. That had to wait a bit.
Then a friend in my class happened to mention that his dad worked for a juke box company (which sounded to me then like the best job in the world), and turned up the following day with a box full of the latest American hits – Everly Brothers’ Cathy’s Clown, Buddy Holly’s ‘Every Day and Eddie Cochran’s Three Steps to Heaven.
There were dozens more. I still have them and years later bought a juke box on which to play them, along with Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing In The Dark, the Rolling Stones’ The Last Time, Dire Straits’ Romeo and Juliet and, of course, Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come.
That juke box had to be musically the best dressed in the country, so it was a sad day when the love of my life decided that it was a garish, chrome and glass monstrosity and that it clashed horribly with the George III desk in the dining room. It had to go.
I kept the forty-fives of course. They are still in a suitcase under our bed.
John Lennon didn’t have décor trouble with his juke box. It was marital problems that did for him. On one occasion while I was staying with him when he’d first gone to live in New York, he told me how he’d lost track of all his early Elvis singles in his divorce from his first wife Cynthia.
It was such a sad story from a fellow collector that I rang the Press office at RCA Records the next day, and, explaining the loss, asked them if they could spare one or two old Elvis hits for John Lennon.
Within a week a whole box of them had arrived, John quite rightly throwing out most of the later ones. But it pleases me to know that nine years later, on the day he died, he still had Hound Dog backed with Don’t be Cruel on his juke box in his and Yoko‘s Dakota kitchen.
To tell the truth I was always more of a singles man than an albums devotee. Greatest Hits collections were usually my favourites. Over the decades thousands upon thousands of twelve track albums have been released, but how many of the songs that weren’t hits can we remember?
I also aways preferred records to live performances, too. Seeing David Bowie at Glastonbury might have been an exciting occasion, but nothing could ever surpass his Rebel Rebel on disc. Only on record did any artist ever get it just right.
Frank Sinatra was wonderful when I saw him at the Royal Albert Hall. But he’d been better when he’d made his album Songs For Swinging Lovers with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra a dozen or more years earlier.
And exciting though it was to be at Madison Square Garden when George Harrison got Bob Dylan and his other pals together for the charity concert for Bangla Desh, it was George quietly singing Something on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album for which we will always remember him.
Multi-million dollar arena concerts with dazzling light shows and leggy, sexy, over made-up pretty girls, like singing Television Toppers, are the fashion these days. But it’s always the recorded song, that initial performance probably heard first on the radio, that finds a home in our memories.
Abba were right when they declined all offers to come back and tour again after the worldwide hit show, Mamma Mia. As William Wordsworth wrote, ‘nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower’. And nothing can again make Agnetha Faltskog into that delightfully pretty blonde, 24 year old, in the blue jump suit with matching cap that she was when Waterloo won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974.
When Joni Mitchell re-recorded her biggest hit Both Sides Now a few years ago some reviewers told us that she#d grown into her own song, and that her husky, ageing voice suited the lyrics better than the young woman she’d been when she first recorded them.
I disagreed. She wrote her song for the soprano she was then. To revise it when she was an old lady was interesting, but no more. When, in my imagination, I hear her singing of ‘rows and floes of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air’, it’s Joni, a poet in her early twenties, whom I hear.
As you can imagine, I have all these records in my collection, but what I’m going to do with them I still don’t know. Maybe while I’m thinking about it, I should put on an old favourite – Yesterday Once More by the brother and sister duo the Carpenters.
You should give it a listen some time. You’ll find it on your computer. That is, unless like me, you have it on an album… and, again like me, something to play it on.
Ray Connolly’s memoir Born At The Right Time is available from Malignon Press on Amazon.
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