Welcome to a weekly newsletter for those who want to stay younger for longer, remaining upbeat. I’ve spent the last 30 years following the science of putting that into practice. It’s paid off because I’m now fit and well in my seventies. Some posts stray into other areas of my life and this is one of them. I could have written the post several times over with different choices of songs every time, as the 60s was a time of a great wealth of fabulous music and I couldn’t mention a fraction of it. I hope you enjoy what I’ve chosen.
The Fifties
Music has been an important backdrop to my life. It’s always been there, providing support, comfort, entertainment, and just sheer pleasure throughout the years. As a pre-teen in the fifties I loved to play on our cronky old record player, the few 78s we owned, which included Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers singing Why Do Fools Fall in Love? (1956). How we listen to music has changed so many times since the record player.
That decade saw the introduction of music for teenagers. We, in the UK, were listening to songs for children, like AFour Legged Friend (1952) by Roy Rogers, and Tubby the Tuba (1947) by Danny Kaye. Then for grown-ups, there were songs such as Love Letters in the Sand (1957) by Pat Boone, and Dean Martin’s Buona Sera (1956), all of which we listened to on the Light Programme during Two Way Family Favourites, a music request show on the wireless (radio) at the weekend.
When we children went to the Saturday afternoon matinee at our local cinema the music playing while we waited for the film to begin was usually Lonnie Donegan, he of the skiffle tradition, singing Rock Island Line (1956), or something classical, most often Mozart Molto Allegro.
My parents, especially my father, loved to listen to pop(ular) music. When I stayed with my maternal grandmother, Granny Lucy - my tiny grandmother who was registered blind due to diabetes, she listened to light classics on her wireless. Her favourite was Kathleen Ferrier singing Blow the Wind Southerly (1949). I enjoyed listening along with her.
Besides the wireless and the record player for listening to music, we had a piano. Sometimes, after a weekend evening out my parents would come home with friends and my mother would sit at the upright piano while they all joined in a singsong, remembering songs from the past. My mum’s piano playing left a lot to be desired. She wasn’t trained and played “by ear”, which meant quite a few bum notes, but it didn’t seem to spoil the enjoyment of the singsong for the alcohol-merry singers. I can’t remember the songs but they may well have been from the war years such as We’ll Meet Again (1939), by Vera Lynn.
The songs I remember from the fifties are: Perry Como's Catch a Falling Star (1957), The Platters’ Only You (1955), and Ruby Murray’s Softly, Softly (1955)- she was a favorite of my dad’s, and so many more. Then came the sound of Elvis Presley, who sang a new genre of music not heard here before - I wasn’t a fan of his. He became known as the “King of Rock and Roll” with Jailhouse Rock (1957). Cliff Richard was the UK equivalent. He didn’t have the bad boy image that Elvis did but also lacked the machismo, though he tried to emulate it. Rock music was born in that decade, and the American band Bill Haley and His Comets had a resounding hit with Rock Around the Clock (1955).
I really liked the American singer Eddie Cochran, who was a big hit in this country with his songs: Summertime Blues (1959), Three Steps to Heaven (1959) and others. My dad enjoyed his music, too, and we were devastated when the singer died in a taxi crash after a show in this country in 1960, at the end of his British tour.
The Sixties
For my thirteenth birthday in 1960. my parents gave me a transistor radio, it was pink and cream and had a carrying handle; I loved it. With it, I was able to pick up Radio Luxembourg. This first accessible radio station played the popular music of the time, such as Yellow Polka Dot Bikini (1960), by Brian Hyland, Chubby Checker’s The Twist (1960), which was also a dance that took the country by storm, The Everly Brothers’ All I Have to do is dream (1958) Jimmy Jones Good Timin’’ (1960), Helen Shapiro Walking back to happiness (1962), Floyd Cramer On the Rebound (1961), and Billy Fury Halfway to Paradise (1961).
When I was fourteen I went, with my parents, to see Acker Bilk, famous for Strangers on the Shore (1949), at the local dance spot, the Riverside Dance Studio. He was the big name in Jazz at the time. This became a regular thing as the organiser at the venue somehow managed to book big names. Our town was just a small town with four streets, yet I saw the likes of The Beatles, The Tremeloes, The Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers and so many more, performing there. They were the bands that formed the basis of the music genre, the Merseybeat and they were big names in the UK in the sixties.
The Beatles visited the venue when their hit song, Please Please Me, climbed up the charts in 1963, just as their fame was burgeoning. They wore leather jackets and longish hair, my dad came to meet me at the end of the event and as we turned a corner on our way home, there were the “fab four” in the street laughing and joking. My dad was quietly thrilled to have seen the members of this soon-to-be hugely famous band and would often laugh and joke about their appearance in retelling this encounter.
Sixties music was that of my formative teenage years, appropriately it was known as soul music. As I was experiencing the depths and heights of emotions, the Phil Spectre Wall of Sound dominated the airwaves from 1961 to 1966, with The Supremes Baby Love (1964). The Ronettes’ Baby I Love You (1964), The Four Tops Baby I Need Your Loving (1965) and so many more. It was also the time of protest songs, with Bob Dylan The Times They Are a-Changin (1964), Joan Baez We Shall Overcome (1963), Donovan Catch the Wind (1964), and Sam Cooke Change Gonna Come (1964).
In 1964, I was sixteen and my boyfriend at that time had a Lambretta scooter. He would have been classed as a Mod, rather than a Rocker. Rockers rode motorbikes and preferred rock music while Mods listened to soul or Motown music and rode scooters. It was a year that changed my life forever. On May 18th, my mother’s birthday, which fell on a bank holiday, I went to watch my boyfriend play cricket in an away match. When we left in the morning, all was well with the world. When we returned later that evening, after a day at the local Countryside Show with my mother, my father had suffered a massive heart attack and died while taking a nap in his chair in the late afternoon. He never woke up and I never saw him again.
One of the songs I connect with that time is Dionne Warwick’s If You See Me Walking Down the Street (1964), written by Burt Bacharach, the man who wrote so many hit songs of the 60s. I was reminded of this sound when Mark Ronson produced the music co-written and sung by the Welsh artist Duffy in the early noughties, particularly the song Warwick Avenue (2008).
During the summer after my dad’s untimely death (he was only 52), the song The Crying Game by Dave Berry felt appropriate for my deep sense of loss. There was also The Drifters with Under the Boardwalk, The Animals House of the Rising Sun, Astrid Gilberto and Stan Getz The Girl from Ipanema and Mary Wells with My Guy. Then later that year, the relationship with my boyfriend ended. I suspect that my grief at losing my father was too heavy for him to cope with. I listened to The Righteous Brothers singing You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling (1964) constantly.
In 1965, when I had turned eighteen and found it difficult living with my mother, I left home and went to live in Islington in London. I shared a flat with Jane, a teacher. Our flat was at the top of a terraced Victorian house. The middle flat comprised two floors and the main tenant, Eddie, was a fan of Beethoven and the Beatles so music emanating from that flat would have been something heavily classical or a track from the album Revolver or Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Len, an ardent fan of Roy Orbison, Only the Lonely (1961), and Oh, Pretty Woman (1964) lived in the basement flat and played his music nonstop.
The only way I remember listening to music in our flat was on my radio. By then radio stations playing dawn to dusk pop music were easily available. Radio Caroline was the first to get around the monopoly of the BBC by setting up on board a ship outside the legal waters of the UK in 1964. I do remember having some Bob Dylan EPs stolen after a party at our flat so Jane and I probably had a small record player for our collections of music.
The highlight, musically, of the two years I spent in London was going to see Simon and Garfunkel at the Royal Albert Hall, with my friend Jenny in 1967. It was part of their first European tour. They performed The Sounds of Silence (1964), Homeward Bound (1966), and The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy) (1966), amongst others. I did go dancing at the famous nightclub Tramp as well as The Marquee, The Club A’Gogo and the Hammersmith Palais to all the fabulous soul music as well as the Beach Boys - another group I loved, particularly Good Vibrations (1966), California Girls (1965), and Wouldn’t it be nice (1966).
The seventies brought different sounds and new life experiences which I write about in Part 2, along with the music of the Eighties and Nineties.
Are you a pop music fan?
Does music play a backdrop to your life?
Do you like any of the music I’ve linked to above?
I’d love to know your thoughts on this post, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d leave a comment and/or tap the heart icon to leave a like for it.
What a gift that you and your father got to see the Beatles laughing on the street! Great article! Music is an important part of my life. I enjoy all types, even some opera and rap.
My mom and the movie, American Graffiti, helped me enjoy the music from the 50s. “Earth Angel” was the song my mom used to sing to me while hugging me.
I was born in1962, which helped me love the music from the 60s. My father had the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s album, the Rolling Stone’s Between the Buttons album, and Cheap Thrills album by Janis Joplin (Big Brother and the Holding company). Thus, influencing my love of rock and roll.
I also love anything Motown! And I was a huge fan of the Jackson Five. I’m looking forward to part two. Have a musical week!
Hello Pat, I loved your post. |To me you seem like an actual time traveller. It's amazing that you saw the Beetles in your hometown before they became famous.
Music does chart a course through your life. What we were listening to at the saddest moments. What we were listening to when we were happy. I can remember listening to the Rumours by Fleetwoodmac. It was the 80s and it was a strange feeling to listen to music my mum had listened to before she was my mum. As a small child, it can be difficult for you to imagine your parents having any other role in their lives, apart from being parents.
I remember listening to The Joshua Tree, or Achtung Baby by U2; this was always in the car on the way to the seaside. As I formed more solid ideas about what I liked I listened to Nirvana was my first real musical obsession. When you're a teenager and you feel like the world is against you, you search for things that give you anger and pain a voice. You feel elevated above the level of your parents; whom you consider to be Palaeolithic creatures with no idea of the world you've been born into.
I can't wait to see what you write in part 2.