Take A Look At My 7”

When I first learned to work the record player, rescued from the loft in my parents’ house, I inherited with it a stack of 7” singles. It was tinny and had only one built-in speaker, but it was my most prized possession. After reading Harriet’s recent blog ruminating on the merits of Little Red and a tenuous link to the olden days coming back in 2010, I thought I’d share my stack of old records with a handy link to a Spotify playlist (click here). 

Prince Buster – ‘Whine & Grine’ Being only eight, I had never heard anything like reggae in my life. Much less had I engaged with the big bad worlds of ska and rocksteady. Quite what my totally uncool Mum & Dad were doing with a copy of this is miles beyond me, too (my Dad likes Pat Boone and Neil Diamond). I instantly fell in love with Prince Buster’s thick Jamaican vocals, growing up in the middle of Sussex, it was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and it certainly beat the shit out of my Dad’s Pat Boone records. Later I would find that Madness took their name from one of his songs (it was called ‘Madness’ before you ask), which is also pretty cool. He is still going, having played a festival in Cardiff last year at the grand old age of 71. Ledge.

The Mar-Keys – ‘Last Night’ I used to get called a hippy for listening to records when I was at primary school, but a few years later when this song surfaced as the theme tune to the super-dangerous and occasionally sweary Friday night TV comedy punchup that was Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson’s Bottom, I thought I’d win them over by explaining who’d written it. Boy, did I get beats.

Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez – ‘The Happy Organ’ easily the most irritating sound ever recorded.

The Kinks – ‘Lola’ Quite simply the best song about transvesticism ever written. It set the standard nice and early, 1970 to be precise, and has not been bettered throughout all the Bowie, New Romanticism and androgenous pop malarkey of the inbetweening years. Plus, for the single version, in order to get it played on BBC radio, had to be re-recorded so Ray Davies could overdub the words ‘Coca-cola’ with ‘cherry cola’. Otherwise it would have been classified as product placement on a public service broadcaster, and that, kids, is almost interesting.

ELO – ‘Rock & Roll Is King’ is a truly awful record which aged 10, nearly made me boogie right through the floorboards in my bedroom. Not only is it a horrendously tacky rock’n’roll revival track from the mid-eighties, but it also uses got the tackiest of tacky musical devices: a false ending. It got me every time. Bastards.

Gene Pitney – ‘Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa’ This song helped my under-developed eight year old brain to understand that grown-ups could get really sad about love.

Simon & Garfunkel – ‘Homeward Bound’ This song taught me the dynamics of loud and quiet better than any other I remember from my past. It starts all hushed and mournful and then grows into a really worthy, almost Christian, whine about being away from home. Great, if you don’t mind its wholesomeness annoying you slightly.

Dionne Warwick – ‘Walk On By’ This is just the right side of Easy Listening. Although I wasn’t that excited about the vocals; it was more the chuck-chuck guitar, the strings and the horns that made me feel like a little ray of sunshine exploding my happiness all over the bedroom – don’t worry, you can take this sentence literally; I didn’t start wanking ‘til I was 12. Have I revealed too much?

Tom Jones – ‘The Green Green Grass Of Home’ The thing I remember most about this is that it was scratched to buggery. Well, that and the fact I absolutely hated every single second of it. Listening back now, it’s not got any better. Saccharine-sweet, horribly dated; a great big slab of shit.

Jimmy Dean – ‘Big Bad John’ Listening back, I’m really not sure how they got away with ripping off Johnny Cash’s ‘The Legend Of John Henry’s Hammer’ quite so shamefacedly. Or maybe I’m a bit ignorant and both songs are based on a similar sort of mythical character…

Louis Armstrong – ‘I’m A Ding Dong Daddy’ – not much to say about this, except it taught me how to do an EXCELLENT Louis Armstrong impression which I will gladly perform for you, should we ever meet.

The Platters – ‘The Great Pretender’ Knowing about this one once earned me an early night and a fiery introduction into the world of the social faux-pas. My parents were having a party and I was introduced to some adults who were trying to remember who had recorded ‘The Great Pretender’. Wanting to impress them, I announced, in a shrill know-all voice, “it was The Platters, and the b-side was ‘Only You’”. Understandably, I was met with raised eyebrows on high, before came the sarcastic retort, “What time do you go to bed?” Obviously this prick didn’t like being dished out a big bowl of facts by a confident eight year old. Ignoramus.

Some stuff that Spotify doesn’t have…
Dave Clark Five – ‘Bits & Pieces’ big 60s beats and a footy-crowd chorus. I stopped playing this when I realised that they play it at every Crystal Palace home game.
The Moody Blues – ‘Go Now’ this is probably their biggest song, and yet it’s not on Spotify. I’ve substituted it with a cover by Wings, which probably reflects its naffness.
The Beatles – ‘We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper’ The Beatles don’t really do internet accessibility, do they? Thus I’ve cheated a bit by substituting this double-A-side with covers by artists who are on a similar level of cool as the fab four. Hendrix does the honours with ‘Day Tripper’, and I’ve included Stevie Wonder’s ace cover of ‘We Can Work It Out’.