WE WAS THERE

My mother is 85 on Wednesday. To celebrate her forthcoming birthday, I dug out some of my old pop singles from the cardboard boxes in the china cabinet. I haven’t listened to them for years. I picked out a few and put them onto the record-player. They all meant something to me for various reasons and once again I sifted through my memories to see what the impact of each was. Firstly, I selected ’What Now My Love’ by Sonny and Cher – a Spectoresque extravagance of chiming bells and nasal harmonies. A school girlfriend gave me that as a Christmas present in 1965. Later, I slipped a note into her duffel-coat pocket on the platform of Wallsend station which said I wasn’t much interested in seeing her again. Then, I went for ‘We’re Going To Save The World’ from 1969,a clever, subversive protest song by none other than Matt Monro, who normally sang extremely predictable and boring ballads. Matt, a former bus driver, could hardly have envisaged the proto-feminist fervour of the song, which was sung from the narrative point of view of one Annie Harris, who left the tedium of the office to demonstrate in the road, whence she was arrested by one of the boys in blue. I sang it to myself in the extensive grounds of Wallis’ Holiday camp (slogan: ‘Walli-days are jolly days’) whilst trying to avoid a plumpish, curly-haired girl who seemed keen to get to know me better. She was persistent, so I had to fall back on my time-honoured escape-clause of pretending to be ill and getting my mother to answer the door of the chalet with that particular message. Then I picked ‘Saturday Night At The World,’ one of more obscure yet stunning folk-rock ballads of 1969,sung by Mason Williams, a guitarist who had a big hit with ‘Classical Gas.’ In trying to deconstruct the lyrics of the song, I arrived at the conclusion that it was either allegorical or downright pornography. Then I took from the largest box ‘Ragamuffin Man’, the last hit for the old Manfred Mann (1969). I used to sing it to myself whilst wandering along Wallsend High Street, impervious to the fact that I must have looked slightly dotty. Then, I picked ‘A Little Love And Understanding’ by Gilbert Becaud, a delicious piece of nonsensical whimsy sung in an ‘’Allo ‘Allo’ English accent by the Frenchman Becaud. Finally, before packing the boxes away, I listened to a song I hadn’t heard for 45 years – ‘You Were There’ by Heinz. He was the former bass player in the Tornados, and he looked like Spike from ‘Buffy The Vampire-Slayer.’ The song made the lower reaches of the charts in 1964. I used to think Heinz was extremely cool, with his peroxide hair, his petulant expression and his leather trousers. Listening to the disc again, I realised how deluded I was as a teenager, for here was a thin, weedy Beatles pastiche of absolutely no musical merit, wretched production values, and with risible lyrics, sung by a man with a voice like a Kenwood mixer. I came to the conclusion, not for the first time, that nostalgia is a Very Bad Thing and memories should be left in a cardboard box in the china cabinet alongside the records.