Give Birth To A Smile

 I think I'm getting slightly ahead of myself. Let's go back to the record player that my Dad brought home from work one day in 1978. It was made by Fidelity and thanks to the power of the Internet, I found a picture of it that I show below......

It was very, very simple to operate, and as anyone of a certain age will attest to the likes of this type of record player provided a portable, yet slightly cumbersome, way of listening to your records in any part of the house there was a plug socket. The generation before me would routinely take these contraptions around to their friends houses, sometimes carrying them on public transport.

The spindle in the centre of the turntable could hold a number of records on it, secured into place with the return arm. So after a record finished, the next one would drop down to play. It was an ingenious mechanism, and surely the forerunner of the shuffle-play facility we have on our modern digital phones.

So I learned how to operate the record player, and found a load of 7" 45-rpm singles in the pull down cupboard - none of them had covers. No Beatles singles, oddly, but loads of other gems.

Off the top of my head, there were singles by The Animals, Jess Conrad, Deep Purple, Russ Conway and Jimmy Dean. And without the means at that time to buy new singles, these were the records I grew up with - for better or worse. So when I wasn't in school, or I wasn't asleep, or playing football on a Liverpool street, I'd playing records on our new toy.

I doubt I'll ever find out where Dad got the record player from?

There were a number of 12" albums as well - including some of these Beatles albums I still have. Most had covers, but none were in a fantastic condition. My parents played records a lot!!

There were long-players by Duane Eddy, The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, Gene Pitney, and a real oddity by Roger Waters and Ron Geesin called "Music From The Body" which I no longer have, but is worth a lot of money now. The title of this post is a song off that album.

So that was my introduction to physically record music, something real, really. We had 194 Radio City on the radio all the time at home, Phil Easton's "Great Easton Express" was a particular favourite. On television we had "Top Of The Pops", "Supersonic", and even mad stuff like "Shang-A-Lang" starring the Bay City Rollers. Unlike today, music wasn't as disposable as it can seem now. There was so little of it via the media, one REALLY had to take notice of the little that was provided. Same with records. I treasured them as I listened, even if I didn't appreciate as an 8-year old that they shouldn't double as frisbees!!