The MP3 - and the Walkman before it - has allowed us to be the first generation to soundtrack our lives. Thirty years ago it would have taken a very obliging cabbie to let me cross Hong Kong by night to the strains of Santana's She's Not There, now he never even knows.
I suspect, for many of us, a snatch of song or a few half-remembered bars (in my experience, all the best bars are only ever half-remembered) are a enough to trigger emotional associations with the time we first (or most) heard them. We don't actually get much conscious selection time here. They can be songs we love, songs we hate, songs we can't get out of our heads 20 years on or, frequently, songs someone else loved.
While one poet measured out his life in coffee spoons, I think most of us have measured out ours in one-hit wonders, concept albums and almost-forgotten anthems that once matched a mood. Thinking of this, I jotted down ten which almost immediately sprang to mind. Another ten quickly followed. I've tried to put them together in some rough biographical order. The chronology of the songs themselves is almost irrelevant, with some of their chords striking me 20 years after they were first released.
This is not my 20 favourite songs. Some of them I don't even like and hardly any of them are on my MP3 at the moment. Anyway, here's the first one, with 19 to follow (time and inclination permitting). You lucky people. Technology permitting, you can even play them....
1. 1971
Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)
1971 was a momentous year for the music industry, Led Zeppelin recorded Stairway to Heaven, Jim Morrison died in a Paris bathtub, the Rolling Stones staged their first farewell tour and the Christmas No1 went to a middle-aged Southampton-born comic with a penchant for bitch-slapping bald dwarves and being chased by time-lapsed lingerie-clad nuns. Guess which one caught the imagination of Anthony William Murray, then aged 7 years and 11 months?
While wishing to claim that my early attachment to Benny Hill’s tale of double cream and double entendres was a precocious manifestation of the love of saucy seaside humour that was the mainstay of British comedy throughout the 70s and early 80s, the truth is actually much simpler. It had a horse in it. And I was 7.
Sadly, I never became a true innuendo aficionado, despite being brought up on the standard seventies sitcom diet of Love Thy Neighbour, On the Buses and Are You Being Served, as well as regular exposure to Mr Hill’s nudge-nudge, wank-wank ITV specials. I do, to this day, have something of a scatological mind-set, but always felt there must be more to humour than regular references to the “Madonna with the big boobies” or the occasional mention of any word that could be construed to mean “cock”. I still have a hankering, though, to write a zombie-apocalypse version of the Grace Brothers staff, but only so I can have Mrs Slocombe shreik that that undead Mr Inman is “eating my pussy”. I might call it 28 Gay Days Later, in honour of that other 70’s effeminocrat, Larry Grayson.
I never actually owned a copy of Ernie. In those days ex-hit singles were delisted faster than a superinjunction slapper. I vaguely remember trying to buy the single in Alty Woolworths, only to be met with a pitying glance and a shake of the head. Despite being a Christmas No1, Benny’s finest 3 minutes and 48 seconds was landfill by March. It was probably later reissued on a Best of Top the Pops long player, with someone who looked almost, but not quite, like one of Pan’s People on the front.
No comments:
Post a Comment