Tag Archives: music

Desert Island Discs

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I know I’ve said this before but now that we are in the digital age, having a shed load of TV channels does not guarantee that us, the viewing public, will find anything worth watching.

The other day, after a troll through channel after channel I finally found something I thought might be actually interesting. It was a documentary on BBC Four about the long running radio show Desert Island Discs. It was actually an edition of the Arena documentary series and was first broadcast in 1982 which was the 40th anniversary of the programme.

The documentary featured some of the celebs who had been ‘stranded’ on the island and revealed some of their musical choices as well as some sequences staged for the camera.

One featured Roy Plomley reenacting the moment when, just as he was getting into bed he had an idea for a new radio show. Not wanting to forget his idea, Roy jumped up out of bed and began tapping away at his typewriter with his thoughts and ideas.

In case you have never heard of the show the format is pretty simple. Roy interviews various celebrities and asks them to choose 8 records to take with them onto a desert island. They are allowed one luxury and one book apart from the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare which are already there.

I can’t say I listened to many episodes and as a youngster I much preferred a rival show on either Radio One or Two hosted by Brian Matthew called My Top Twelve in which a celeb, usually one from the pop world, chose his 12 favourite tracks.

What I particularly liked about Roy Plomley was his measured even voice and how he would gently prod his guests towards each new record. He would stay quietly firm when they insisted on having something that is not part of the format, like a set of books instead of just one book

Paul McCartney was one of the guests featured on the programme and one of the records he chose was Beautiful Boy, a track by John Lennon from the album Double Fantasy. Did he really like it I wondered or did he just want to play tribute to his murdered boyhood friend and fellow Beatle, John Lennon?

Some of the other celebs featured in the Arena documentary were comedians Frankie Howerd and Arthur Askey. I’ve always found both comedians to be particularly funny. Frankie Howerd died of a heart attack in 1992 and his home, Wavering Down, in the village of Cross in Somerset, was turned into a sort of museum by his partner and manager Dennis Heymer displaying Howerd’s personal effects and memorabilia. I found it fascinating to learn that most of Howerd’s comic asides to the audience were actually planned and rehearsed in advance.

Arthur Askey was the star of numerous radio shows in the 30s and 40s. He was also a regular on television until his death in 1982. He had numerous catchphrases including I thank you and Hello playmates!

Another guest was John Kenneth Galbraith an American economist who served in the administrations of various presidents from Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson. He appears frequently in the classic documentary series The World at War. One of his musical choices was California Here I Come sung by Al Jolson. Film director Otto Preminger was also a guest and his 8 musical choices were all soundtracks from his own films and the book he chose to take to his desert island was his own autobiography.

Track 1

What would my 8 records be? Well, some time ago I did try to work out my all-time top 12 but the fact was, I could only whittle my choices down to 100. For this post though I’ve managed to choose 8 tracks although by the time this is published I might have a completely revised list.

For my first choice I’m going to go with Rock Your Baby by George McCrae because it was the track playing on the jukebox on my 18th birthday. I was working at the Refuge Assurance Company on Oxford Rd in Manchester and my colleagues took me to the pub for my first legal alcoholic drink back in 1974. Every time I hear that record, I think about that day and about the pub we went to. It was called the Salisbury and despite many changes in Manchester since then, the pub is still there. The inside has changed a little but on the outside, the Salisbury looks just like it did in 1974.

Track 2

Looking at my top 100 I was surprised to find Rock Your Baby wasn’t listed even though I had chosen nine other tracks from 1974. However, another record that I must include in my eight desert island discs is How Long by Ace. The lead singer of Ace was Paul Carrack who went on to work with other bands as well as working solo. In 1996 he released an updated version of How Long which I think is even better than the original so I think I’d choose that for my second track.

Track 3

Getting back to Paul McCartney I put one of his songs into my top 100 which I think I’ll have in my desert island discs. It was Listen to What the Man Said from when Paul was with his band Wings and was released in 1975. In 1974 I saw Paul and Wings live in concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. The ticket cost me only £2, can you believe it?

Track 4

10cc were a great Manchester band and they recorded my next track, I’m Not in Love at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. It started life as an album track but fans were desperate to hear it as a single even though it was rather long for a single in those days. The track was famous for its multi-tracked backing vocals and was released in 1975 hitting the top spot in the singles chart soon afterwards.

Track 5

I love the film Back to the Future and one of my theories about successful films is that generally they always have a great musical theme or song and that is particularly true of Back to the Future. The film features the song The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News. Huey even has a small cameo in the film when Marty McFly auditions with his band and Huey rejects them with the comment “you’re just too damn loud”.

Track 6

Moving away from the 1970’s my sixth track would be Walking in Memphis by Mark Cohn. The song is a tribute to Elvis Presley and the lyrics are well observed. My favourite verse goes like this:

Saw the ghost of Elvis on Union Avenue

Followed him up to the gates of Graceland

Then I watched him walk right through

Now security did not see him

They just hovered around his tomb

But there’s a pretty little thing waiting for the King

Down in the jungle room.

Track 7

A very long time ago when I was either a teenager or in my early twenties, my old friend Steve and I interviewed each other for our own personal Top Twelve favourite records. We recorded our interviews on tape and added the appropriate records. I used to play my tape quite frequently but I worried about it breaking so in later years I managed to digitise the whole thing and burn it to a CD. Later I decided to update the interview by adding new contemporary comments from myself. Looking back at the music my younger self had chosen I realised that my tastes had changed and so I cut a few tracks out and added some new ones. One of the new editions was The Way it is by Bruce Hornsby and the Range.

Track 8

So here we are, just wanting that final track. I thought about going for some more modern songs rather than the predominantly 70s tracks I’ve already chosen. I also thought about going for more of a soul track or something by a more folk or country singer. Eventually I thought I’d choose a song from one of my favourite writers, Burt Bacharach, Do You Know the Way to San Jose sung by Dionne Warwick.

Paul McCartney chose as his luxury item a guitar and in a similar fashion, George Formby chose a ukulele and Liberace chose a piano. I’m not sure what I would take but I would probably go for my laptop or at least a notebook and pen.

Which book would I take? Well, I thought about taking The Great Gatsby but even though it’s an absolutely wonderful read it’s a rather short book. I’d probably go for my favourite book which has long been Dicken’s David Copperfield. It is not only an amazing read but it’s a very thick book and would keep me amused if I was stranded for a very long time.

Roy Plomley died in 1985, 17 days after he interviewed his last castaway, Sheila Steafel. Roy had presented 1791 episodes of the show over a 43-year period. He was followed as a presenter by Michael Parkinson, Sue Lawley, Kirsty Young and most recently, Lauren Laverne.

Over on the downloads page you can download an excel file of my top 100 tracks. If you use Spotify click this link to listen to my top 100 tracks: 

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My White Jacket and my 70’s Pop Star Heroes

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I really loved that white jacket although now I come to think about it, I only ever wore it once. Oh well, before we get to it, let’s take a quick look at some of my 70’s pop star heroes.

David Cassidy

I wasn’t so much a fan of David Cassidy, I just wanted to look like him. I always thought he was a pretty cool dude and although I didn’t rush out and buy his music I always kind of liked him. Cassidy was an unexpected superstar, the son of actor Jack Cassidy who crops up frequently in classic Columbo episodes.

image courtesy wikipedia

David began working as an actor and musician and was signed up by Universal studios in 1969. He worked on many TV shows of the time like Ironside and Bonanza until he was signed up for a part in a show called ‘The Partridge family‘. Cassidy and the show became a runaway hit and ten albums produced during the show’s run sold over a million copies each. David became a teen idol and his personal concerts were sell outs but a Cassidy mania, not unlike that experienced by the Beatles years earlier, caused numerous problems and culminated in a stampede at White City stadium where many people were injured and one girl fan sadly died.
In later years Cassidy was still singing and writing and appeared in many stage shows and musicals. You might even have seen him in a TV version of his life story, ‘The David Cassidy Story’.

On November 18, 2017, Cassidy was admitted to hospital with acute liver and kidney failure. He became critically ill and was put into a medically induced coma. He came out of the coma two days later in a critical but stable condition. Doctors hoped that Cassidy would survive until a liver became available for transplant, but he died of liver failure on November 21, 2017, at the age of 67.

According to Wikipedia, his daughter, Katie Cassidy, reported that his final words were “So much wasted time.”

Gary Glitter

Gary Glitter’s first big hit, back in the early seventies was ‘Rock n’ Roll’ parts 1 and 2, a double-sided single which on part 2 was mainly instrumental with group chants of ‘rock n roll’. Glitter followed this up with a string of hits throughout the early seventies with singles like ‘I’m the leader of the gang’, ‘I love you love me love’, ‘Do you wanna touch me?’ and ‘Hello hello, I’m back again’. His career faded afterwards but in the early 90’s his records were discovered by a new generation of record buyers and many modern artists have acknowledged that he was an inspiration to them in earlier years.

Back in 1976 my brother and I went to London to see him in concert. I’m pretty certain it was some sort of farewell concert but Gary soon made the first of many comebacks.

The late 1990’s saw his image become fatally destroyed by his arrest and conviction in 1999 for possession of child pornography. Some years later, in 2006, Glitter faced criminal charges and deportation from Vietnam after a court found him guilty of obscene acts with minors. Glitter was deported back to Britain and placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for life. These convictions turned Glitter from being one of the best-loved stars in British pop history, into a hated and loathed figure.

On 5 February 2015, Glitter was convicted of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault and one of having sex with a girl under the age of 13. On 27 February 2015, Glitter was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

On 3 February 2023, Glitter was released on licence after serving half of his sentence but on 13 March 2023, he was recalled to prison for breaching his licence conditions by allegedly viewing downloaded images of children.

David Bowie

Bowie is one of those stars who kept on making music throughout the years and constantly reinvented himself. One of the first tracks of his I ever bought was Life on Mars and a great early hit was Space Oddity. One of my personal favourites was The Laughing Gnome, originally released in 1967 in which Bowie sings with a ‘Gnome’ which was actually a speeded up vocal track.

Later Bowie created the character Ziggy Stardust and became one of the stars of the glam rock era. He changed style again with Young Americans, released in 1976. It was a big hit and even topped the US soul charts. In the 1980’s he had a hit with Under Pressure, a collaboration with Queen.

He also had numerous roles in the cinema playing an alien in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth and various others.

Bowie died while living in New York. He had contracted liver cancer and died on the 10th of January 2016.

Cliff Richard

Cliff’s career began in the 1960s and has continued almost to the present day. In the 1970s he had twice sung the UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest and had his own TV show on the BBC.

I can’t say that I was ever a big fan of Cliff however in the late 70’s and 80s he had a string of excellent hits that I really loved, songs that included Devil Woman, Miss You Nights, Carrie and Wired for Sound.

Cliff was involved in controversy in the late 1990’s when he complained that radio stations were not playing his records and he went as far as releasing a dance version of one of his songs under a different name to prove his point. The record was popular but radio stations stopped playing it when Cliff was revealed as the singer.

In 2014, Cliff’s property was searched in relation to allegations which arose from the Jimmy Saville investigation known as Operation Yewtree. The allegations were unfounded but Cliff was unhappy that they were broadcast on the BBC news and later sued both the South Yorkshire Police and the BBC receiving substantial damages.

According to Wikipedia, Cliff is the third top selling artist in the UK behind Elvis Presley and the Beatles.  John Lennon apparently said of Cliff that before Cliff and the Shadows, there had been nothing worth listening to in British music.

Elton John

In 1967 Reg Dwight answered an advertisement in the New Musical Express. Liberty Records had placed the ad as they were looking for musical talent and when Reg arrived at Liberty’s offices, he was given a sheaf of lyrics written by Bernie Taupin and so Reg promptly began writing music to Bernie’s words. When Reg decided to perform his new songs, he decided to use a different name and so Reg became Elton John.

1973 was probably my first record buying year. Up until then I really had little interest in music. The Beatles had pretty much passed me by and I was more interested in TV and film music rather than the pop charts. For Christmas 1972 my brother and I received a shared present, a new stereo record player. Of course, having a record player meant that I needed something to play on it. That’s when I discovered Elton.

I bought lots of Elton’s records throughout the 70s but I lost interest in his music in his later years.

In 2001 Elton released the album Songs from the West Coast. The album was received warmly by the media and I remember hearing many great reviews saying how Elton had returned to his piano based roots and so on. On Wikipedia I see that the album was recorded on analogue tape as Elton felt that gave the sound a warmer feel. OK I thought, sounds like a good time to try some of Elton’s latest music. While I was waiting to pay for the CD in HMV I noticed another album of Elton’s, Made in England, in the reduced section so I grabbed that while I was there.

Anyway, Songs from the West Coast was a total disappointment for me and not only that, I thought the whole thing had a tinny sound to it, not a warm one.

A few months later I noticed Made in England lying unplayed on a shelf so I popped it into my car to give it an airing. I’m so glad I did because Made in England is the album that to me, sounds much like his classic 70’s stuff with some outstanding tracks. A fabulous album, just as good as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Since then, Elton has been part of the first same sex UK marriage when he married his long time partner David Furnish and has seen his life story made into the 2019 film Rocketman starring Taron Egerton as Elton which includes a good many of Elton’s hits.

His latest album, Who Believes in Angels was released this year.

Marc Bolan

Bolan was a pop singer of the 1970s and is credited with beginning the glam rock movement by appearing on Top of the Pops, the BBC’s flagship music programme, with his group T Rex performing the single Hot Love wearing glitter make up on his face. The single was a number one hit and was followed up with my favourite Bolan/T Rex track, Get it On which spent 4 weeks at number one. Bolan and T Rex had numerous hits including Ride a White Swan, Telegram Sam, Metal Guru, Children of the Revolution and Solid Gold Easy Action. Bolan was great friends with David Bowie and Marc’s producer Tony Visconti later went on to work with Bowie.

In 1977 Bolan was involved with his girlfriend Gloria Jones. They went out to a nightclub in London, both had been drinking and Gloria was at the wheel of her mini when they crashed in south London. Gloria was injured but Marc was sadly killed. A shrine at the spot where they crashed is maintained by the T Rex Action Group.

David Essex

David Essex was another performer who made his name in the early seventies although in his youth he had ideas of becoming a footballer. He played the lead in the stage musical Godspell and then went on to star in the film ‘That’ll be the Day’. I remember seeing his album in a record shop and thinking what a cool dude he looked dressed in a white suit. The album was Rock On and the single went to number 3 in the UK charts in 1973. The next year David released one of my all-time favourite tracks Gonna make you a Star which went all the way up to number 1. He also appeared on the double album Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds and went on to star in many musicals such as ‘Godspell’ and Evita. In 2011, he joined the cast of TV soap ‘EastEnders’.

He is still writing, recording and performing today.

The White Jacket

When I saw David Essex singing ‘Rock On’ wearing a white suit on ‘Top of the Pops’ for the first time, I thought he was the epitome of seventies cool and it occurred to me that one way to transform my gangling self-conscious self into something better might be to get that very same white suit. I couldn’t afford a suit at the time so I settled for a jacket, a white jacket, and I well remember admiring myself in the mirror before my first Saturday night out wearing it, sometime back in 1973.

The first problem I encountered with the jacket came on the bus into town. I sat on the back seat and in those days, the back seats of our local buses were a little notorious for being dusty and grimy as they were over the engine and absorbed all the engine fumes. Also there were people who put their feet up on the seats leaving marks to which people like me (the twerp in the white suit) were highly susceptible. Another thing is that all my life I have been cursed with being clumsy and once I had met up with my friends I somehow managed to spill beer all down my sleeve. Anyway, the night went on, more or less successfully. I certainly remember having a good time although the white jacket failed in its primary function; that of attracting gorgeous girls.

Later on, we stopped at the kebab shop and somehow a sizeable portion of chilli sauce managed to attach itself to my jacket. Rather than feeling like David Essex, I felt a little like Alec Guinness in the film The Man In The White Suit‘, wanting to get away from everyone! I never wore the stained jacket again and it lingered sadly in the back of my wardrobe smelling of kebab, chilli sauce, beer and diesel fumes until my Mum, on a major clean up splurge, decided to throw it out.

Of course, it could have been worse: I could have gone out wearing jeans, a white t-shirt and a red jacket trying to look like James Dean. (Actually, that was another night!)

It’s only fair to mention that this post is a hugely updated version of one that I first published 10 years ago in 2015.

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10 Great Albums (The Final 6)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I was struggling to finish my post 10 Great Albums last week. I did manage to get as far as 4 albums along with a little background for each of my choices so this week I’m going to try and finish the job with another 6 albums. To do so I thought I’d open up my Spotify account and see what I’ve got in my favourites.

The Very Best of Sting and The Police

Looking back I think that the late 70s and early 80s were the height of my record buying life. I spent many hours each week trolling through boxes of vinyl singles in record shops. I rarely bought any single while it was still in or going up the charts, choosing to buy when the record was out of the top 30 or at least dropping down and in the half price section. The Police were one of my favourite bands and I bought many of their singles. They were formed in 1977 and the lineup stayed the same until they went their separate ways.

Sting, aka Gordon Sumner was the lead singer, bass guitarist and writer. Stewart Copeland was on drums and Andy Summers played lead guitar. Their first hits were Roxanne and Can’t Stand Losing You released in 1977 from their debut album Outlandos d’Amour. They had numerous hits, all penned by Sting until their eventual break up in 1986 although they returned for a reunion tour in 2008.

Sting went on to have a successful solo career. His first album was the jazz/rock album Dream of the Blue Turtles which included one of my favourite tracks, If You Love Someone, Set Them Free.

Dance for the New World

I’ve always been a bit of a jazz fan and perhaps that’s why I like a lot of Sting’s jazz orientated work. Back in the 90’s I was a big fan of the radio station Jazz FM. Jazz FM started up in 1990 and they played a lot of modern easy listening jazz and soul. In 2004 the station was rebranded Smooth FM and began to play a mix of classic pop. Back in their Jazz FM heyday, they played a lot of tracks from Dance for the New World, an album by modern jazz pianist Rob Mullins. I loved it straight away and bought it despite it having a hefty price tag as it was a US import.

You can find out more about Rob by clicking here.

Favourite track: Dance for the New World

Aerial by Kate Bush

I don’t know about you but in the past I’ve never had any real interest in Kate Bush. I’ve never disliked her but I’ve never felt compelled to buy any of her music, in fact, her early work has always sounded good but sort of odd if you know what I mean. Her slightly screechy ‘It’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home’ was interesting but I never bought a copy and ‘Babooshka Babooshka‘ was ok but again, I never felt compelled to buy Kate’s work.

Kate topped the UK singles chart in 1978 with Wuthering Heights when she was only 19. She has had various hits over the years including Running Up That Hill which first charted in 1985 and was a recent hit due to its use in a Netflix series, Stranger Things.

Some years ago I watched a documentary about Kate on BBC Four and I found myself liking the sounds and the melodies I heard. Straight afterwards I started searching on eBay for her records. Aerial is a double album full of lovely rhythms and melodies. It’s perhaps more akin to music that comes under the genre ‘chill out’ than her earlier frantic singles. I love the quick changes of direction, the way one track merges into another or into some soothing morning birdsong. The tracks on this album do not comply with the standard three-minute rule and they ebb and flow with Kate’s mood. Lovely stuff but be prepared to sit back and enjoy. This album is not something that can easily be put away.

Favourite track: Sunset.

Remote by Hue and Cry

Hue and Cry are a Scottish duo comprising brothers Pat and Greg Kane. Their first single Here Comes Everybody was released in 1986. It wasn’t a hit but it caught the attention of Virgin records subsidiary Circa Records and they signed up the duo. They released I Refuse on Circa, one of my favourite tracks and then went on to make Remote from which they released a couple of hit singles.

My favourite track on Remote: Looking For Linda.

Images by the Crusaders

I bought this album a very long time ago. I’m not sure where I first heard it but back in the late 80s I used to listen to a Manchester radio DJ called Mike Shaft who used to play a great deal of soul and funk and jazz/fusion. There was also that great track which was a hit in 1979 Street Life, featuring Randy Crawford.

When I was a budding amateur video maker I made a number of videos using this album as the soundtrack. Most of those videos are over on YouTube but I did have to substitute the Crusaders for some copyright free music. Pity because I do love this album. I used to have one of those programs where you can connect your record player to your PC and digitise your tapes and vinyls. Sadly, the result sounded really tinny but happily in recent years I was able to find Images on Spotify which I tend to play quite a lot.

Favourite track: Bayou Bottoms.

 Greatest Hits of James Taylor

I’ve got pretty a wide taste in music and I do like a good folk or country singer. I’m not sure when I first heard James Taylor but he was one of the first people to be signed by the Beatles new record label Apple. According to Wikipedia he is a six times Grammy award winner and was inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame in 2000.

Taylor started out as a singer in New York, part of a group called The Flying Machine but he fell into a cycle of drug taking and the band split up. He became hooked on heroin until his father came to New York, picked him up and took him home. Later he decided to have a new start by moving to London where he met Peter Asher who worked for Apple records and was instrumental in signing up James to Apple. He later became his manager.

Favourite track; Carolina on my Mind.

Spotify

As it’s close to the end of the year Spotify comes up with a whole lot of statistics that are pretty interesting. My top five most played tracks were a complete surprise to me, for instance my most played track in 2024 was Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty. In second place was Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel which of course featured Gerry Rafferty.

Third was Escape, the Pinocolada Song by Rupert Holmes. I’ve always loved that song, particularly the theme and the lyrics. It’s about a couple who are bored with each other and decide to meet someone else who likes Pinocoladas and getting caught in the rain but is not into yoga and has half a brain. Guess who they meet on a blind date? Each other of course.

At number 4 was The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News and number 5 was Top Hat sung of course by Fred Astaire.

In complete contrast, my top artist of the year was Nora Van Elken. Well, I did say I’ve got a pretty wide taste in music although you’ll probably find no new tracks or artists in my choices this year. Oh well, perhaps I should widen my taste a little for 2025. Spotify does recommend a lot of new music for me but I’m not sure I’ve actually listened to music that much lately, except in that one spot where I need advertisement free music; in my car.

What did you listen to in 2024?

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(Slightly Less Than)10 Great Albums

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I can’t say I had any great interest in pop music until my brother and I received a record player for Christmas 1972. I always rather liked Olivia Newton-John but to be fair, my interest in her was based more on her looks rather than her singing. The very first singles I ever bought were two 45s by Olivia. Both had dropped out of the charts and my local music shop were selling them for half price so I picked up The Banks of the Ohio and What is Love for a grand total of 48 pence.

That was the start of my music collection although back then I always went for singles rather than albums which of course makes this post so much harder. Anyway, I did buy a few albums. I bought quite a few by Olivia although I can’t really say they are ones that I have loved ever since. One of the first albums I did buy was Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and that is one album I still play today.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was released on October 5th, 1973, two days after my 17th birthday. I’m not certain when I bought it although I reckon it was probably the following year. Numerous singles were released from the album, notably the title track and Candle in The Wind, a song about Marilyn Monroe. Another hit was Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting. Interestingly a big hit in the USA was Bennie and the Jets which was seen as a soul track in the USA and Elton was even invited onto the US show Soul Train to perform the song. In the UK the song was on the flip side of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

I saw a TV show about the making of this album on the Sky Arts channel a while ago and Elton’s guitarist Davey Johnstone told some interesting stories. Elton and his band had wanted to record in Jamaica but the facilities at the studio were basic and rudimentary so they flew to the Château d’Hérouville near Pontoise in France, where they had recorded previously for Elton’s album Honky Château . One rather surprising thing was that when Elton and his band arrived at the studio they had no songs written. Elton composed all the songs from the album while at the studio. In some cases he wrote the music, ran through it with his band and then they went into the studio and recorded. As usual Bernie Taupin wrote all the lyrics. Dee Johnstone was on bass guitar and Nigel Olsson was the drummer.

Singer Kiki Dee helped with backing vocals as did the other band members. Davey mentioned that Elton was notoriously difficult to be with when he didn’t have much to do so when everything had been recorded he left and the rest of the band got on with recording the backing vocals without Elton ‘getting on their nerves’. Presumably then Gus Dudgeon, the producer made the final mix.

I still have my original vinyl album as well as a double CD version. I lost interest in Elton in later years and I never liked his work throughout the 1980s but Goodbye Yellow Brick Road remains one of my favourite albums and something that I play frequently on long car journeys.

Favourite track: Difficult but I’d go for The Ballad of Danny Bailey.

Band on The Run by Paul McCartney and Wings.

I can’t say I’ve ever been a really big Beatles fan. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the Beatles. A few years ago I decided I was going to buy all the Beatles albums on CD but the more I bought, the less I liked them. The Beatles classic hits are wonderful of course but I found that there is a lot of other stuff on the Beatles’ albums that I just didn’t like so I just stopped buying them. In 1974 I went to see Paul McCartney and Wings at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Their tour had been in part to promote their album Band on the Run which had been released a few months before in November of 1973. A number of tracks had been hit singles but I’ve always particularly liked the title track Band on the Run.

Just like Elton John, McCartney wanted to record an album in an exotic location and found that his record company, EMI, had a studio in Lagos, Nigeria. Prior to leaving, McCartney and guitarist Jimmy McCullough had an argument and McCullough quit the band. Danny Seiwell the drummer also left the group on the day before the band flew to Lagos. This meant that McCartney himself would play the drums and lead guitar with his wife Linda on keyboards and Denny Laine on rhythm guitar.

The studio in Lagos was disappointing. It was a ramshackle establishment and there was only one tape machine and the control desk was faulty. Even so, the band stayed in Lagos and began to record. Lagos had just experienced a civil war and corruption and crime was commonplace. One night Paul and Linda went for a walk and were mugged at knifepoint and as well as losing valuables they also had a bag of demo tapes and lyrics stolen. On another occasion McCartney keeled over gasping for air. Everyone thought he was having a heart attack but the eventual diagnosis was a ‘bronchial spasm’.

After six weeks of recording, the band returned to the UK where the 8 track recordings were converted to 16 track and various overdubs added as well as orchestral arrangements.

Perhaps inspired by the cover for Sergeant Pepper, McCartney decided to create another noteable cover. This time Linda, Denny and Paul posed as prison escapees with various celebrities such as Michael Parkinson, boxer John Conteh and film actor Christopher Lee. Also included were TV personalities Kenny Lynch and Clement Freud.

According to Wikipedia, the album did reasonably well in the music charts then began to drop down a little. Later, buoyed by the success of two tracks released as singles, Jet and Band on the Run, the album began to rise up in the charts, hitting the top spot in the USA in June and in the UK in July.

The album sold 6 million copies and became EMI’s best selling album of the 1970’s.

Favourite track: Band on the Run.

Rumours by Fleetwood Mac.

Rumours was released in February 1977 after recording the previous year. The album was recorded with a background of relationship breakups and heavy drug use by the band members. I first came to be interested in Rumours as I loved the four singles from the album, two of which I bought as vinyl 45s. I’ve never been much of an album man but when more tracks were released as singles I thought it made more sense to buy the album rather than more singles.

The album was recorded first at the Record Plant in Sausalito which consisted of heavily soundproofed small wooden rooms and the band were not completely happy but Mick Fleetwood insisted they stay. John and Christine McVie had recently split up and would not talk to each other except for musical matters. Apparently it was only later than the group realised that many of the lyrics revolved around relationship issues.

After spending two months in Sausalito, the band decided to test some of the new songs by performing them in concert. Later, they returned to the studio, a different studio, to complete the recording sessions.

Favourite track: Go Your Own Way.

Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.

Back in the late seventies when I used to work for a bus company, one of my colleagues was a guy whose name I can never remember. His nickname however was Clouseau as he was the image of Peter Sellers’ famous creation, Inspector Clouseau. Clouseau, my Clouseau, was a former disc jockey who talked non stop music. He ran a mobile disco and still dreamt of being a radio DJ. He was always giving me albums to take home and listen to and was always eager to get my opinion. Some of the music he gave was good and a lot of it just wasn’t to my taste but one album he insisted I take home and play was War of the Worlds and I loved it pretty much on first hearing it.

Jeff Wayne was a producer and musical director working with singer David Essex and he was looking for a new project, a story that he could give a musical interpretation to. His father suggested War of the Worlds and the idea caught Jeff’s interest. He acquired the musical rights to the story and even booked a recording date in advance to give himself a deadline to work to for creating the music. David Essex appears as an artilleryman as well as singing and Justin Hayward and Phil Lynott also sing. Jeff convinced Richard Burton to record the narration and the project was ready for the recording.

A prototype 48 recording system was used which apparently malfunctioned numerous times but the resulting double album was released in June of 1978. According to Wikipedia it was the UK’s 32nd best selling album of all time.

I still have my vinyl version plus the CD version. There have also been remixes, new versions and even a live concert.

Favourite Track: Forever Autumn sung by Justin Hayward.

I did mention earlier I’m more of a singles man rather than an album lover which is why I’ve only covered 4 albums rather than 6. I could add in various Greatest Hits albums from my collection to make up the 10 albums I mentioned in the title but I think I’ll save them for another post.

What are your favourite albums?

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20 Outstanding Instrumental tracks (2024 Update)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As it’s been such a dreadful summer here in the UK, I think it’s high time for another music post. In the past I’ve done posts about Christmas chart hits, one about comedy chart hits and one listing some random hits from pop music’s vinyl past. These days I do like listening to chilled down electronic dance tracks, so I thought ‘what about a blog post featuring instrumental hits?’ Anyway, here we go. I’ve tried to find advert free videos where I can but it’s not always been possible. Some tracks are film themes, some are TV themes and some are just great pop, jazz or soul tracks. This post by the way is an older one that has been subtly updated from 19 Outstanding Instrumental Tracks to a round 20.

Theme from Rocky

One of the best things about the Sylvester Stallone movie Rocky has to be the theme tune. For a long time I used to have it as my ringtone on one of my first mobile phones. Its proper title is Gonna Fly Now composed by Bill Conti and the track made number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, the year the movie was released.

Axel F

Axel F by Harold Faltermeyer was the theme to Beverly Hills Cop, a forgettable film starring Eddie Murphy. If not for this catchy tune the film would long have been forgotton. The track made number 2 in 1985 but younger readers may remember the 2005 Crazy Frog version.

Theme from Hill Street Blues

Hill Street Blues was an outstanding TV show from the early 1980’s about a police station in an unnamed US city. The show won critical acclaim and according to Wikipedia won a total of 98 Emmy Award nominations. The show featured a lot of hand held camera work which gave the series a documentary look and the theme written by Mike Post reached number 10 in the Billboard top 100 and number 25 in the UK singles chart.

(Angela) Theme from Taxi

Angela was written by jazz pianist Bob James. The theme was written for episode 3 in the series but the producers liked it so much it became the main theme for the show.

Theme from Miami Vice

Miami Vice was an American TV cop show from the 1980’s and the theme music written and performed by Jan Hammer was released in 1985. The single reached number 5 in the UK charts.

Love’s Theme by the Love Unlimited Orchestra

Okay, that’s the film and TV themes sorted, let’s move on. Love’s Theme was by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, Barry White’s backing band. I’ve always loved this track and many years ago I frequented a bar in Manchester known as the Playground where the DJ used it as his theme tune. Every time I hear it I never fail to be transported back to those days in the 1970’s.

Apache by the Shadows

The Shadows were British singer Cliff Richard’s backing band and this worldwide hit made it to the UK number one spot in 1960.

Classical Gas by Mason Williams

Classical Gas was a track by Mason Williams and it was a one hit wonder from the year 1968. Steve, the Matty character from my novel, Floating in Space played it for me back in the 1970’s and I fell in love with it straight away.

Pepper Box by the Peppers

Pepper Box by the Peppers is a track you may think you have never heard of but as soon as you hear it, you’ll probably recognise it. It was a popular track way back in 1974 when it peaked at number 4 in the UK charts.

The Hustle by Van McCoy

The Hustle, what a great track! It just brings back memories of nightclubs back in the 1970’s. The Hustle was a single by Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony. It went to number 1 on the Billboard chart and number 3 in the UK. Even better, here’s a clip from 1975’s Top of the Pops with Pan’s People dancing to the track.

Pick up the Pieces by the Average White Band.

I’m not totally sure how to categorise this one. I suppose it’s 70’s funk but feel free to tell me if it isn’t. It was released in 1974 but failed initially to chart in the UK. After it took off in the USA the track begin to sell in the UK and eventually made the number 6 spot.

Hocus Pocus by Focus

Hocus Pocus is a song by the Dutch rock band Focus, written by vocalist Thijs van Leer and guitarist Jan Akkerman. It was recorded and released in 1971 as the opening track of their second studio album, Moving Waves. I remember hearing it originally on the Alan Freeman radio show. Heavy rock isn’t usually my cup of tea but I kind of like this one.

Time is Tight by Booker T and the MG’s.

This track was recorded in 1968 and was used in a film called Uptight released that same year. A slightly slower version of the track was released as a single in 1969 and reached number 4 in the UK charts.

Soul Limbo by Booker T and the MG’s

Soul Limbo was a hit for Booker T and his MG’s in 1968 but is probably best known in the UK for being the theme for BBC TV’s cricket coverage.

Garden Party by Mezzoforte

Mezzoforte were a jazz fusion band formed in 1977 and their biggest hit was Garden Party which made it to number 17 in 1983.

Song for Guy by Elton John

Elton is not exactly known for instrumental works but this was released as a single in December 1978 reaching the number 4 spot in January of 1979. Elton dedicated the song to Guy Burchett, a messenger at Elton’s record company Rocket. Guy was killed in a motorcycle accident on the same day that Elton wrote the song.

Jazz Carnival by Azymuth

Azymuth are a Brazilian jazz funk band formed in 1971. Jazz Carnival was a 1980 hit for the group reaching number 9 in the UK charts.

Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet

Take Five was composed by Paul Desmond and originally recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in New York City on July 1, 1959 for their album Time Out. Two years later it became a hit and the biggest-selling jazz single ever. Numerous cover versions have been produced since then.

Theme from Shaft

The theme from Shaft was written and performed by Isaac Hayes and was the theme to the 1971 film starring Richard Roundtree as private eye John Shaft. The song won an Academy Award for best original song. In the UK the track reached number 4 in the music charts. I remember hearing this back in 1971 and after buying the single just playing it over and over. The flip side, Cafe Regio, was pretty good too and looking back this was the track that started off my love of soul and funk.

Fanfare for the Common Man by Emerson, Lake and Palmer

This was a 1977 hit for Emerson Lake and Palmer. It was a track from their album Works Volume I and was adapted by Keith Emerson from an original 1942 work by Aaron Copland. The single reached number 2 in the UK singles chart.

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Captain My Captain

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This will be my 592nd post and as you can imagine I sometimes struggle for new ideas. Scrolling through the internet the other day I chanced on something about Robin Williams and the post mentioned the film Dead Poets Society. It isn’t one of my favourite films but if you’ve ever seen it you might remember the poem O Captain My Captain by Walt Whitman which features a lot in the film. It got me thinking about Captains so I thought I might kick of this post with a few words about my favourite captain, James T Kirk.

Captain James T Kirk

The first series of Star Trek starred William Shatner as Captain James T Kirk. Forget Captain pointy head Picard, Kirk is a proper Captain and after a good twenty minutes of any episode he will usually have blasted a number of aliens with his phaser (a sort of ray gun) and done some pretty serious kissing of any beautiful girl, alien, android or otherwise, within a 100 yard area. Mr Spock was played by Leonard Nimoy. He is the ship’s science officer and as a Vulcan rarely displays emotion, logic being his primary motivation. Doctor McCoy played by DeForest Kelley is a doctor of the old school and he and Spock frequently get into verbal confrontations. Together they are the chief officers of the starship Enterprise on its five year mission to go where no man has gone before.

william_shatner

As a schoolboy I wrote to Desilu studios where I believed Star Trek was made, based on credits shown at the end of the show. After a while I received a set of glossy pictures of the show’s stars. They were all signed by the various actors, Shatner, Nimoy and so on but the signatures, I have long suspected, were made by a machine.

The original Star Trek, like many TV programmes of the sixties was shot on film and today it looks pretty sharp compared to shows from the 80’s that were shot straight to video. It was given a digital makeover a few years back with digital effects and new CGI spacecraft and is looking pretty good these days. Which was my favourite episode? Well I’d have to say it was the one that fans voted the best Star Trek episode ever; City on the Edge of Forever. The crew of the Enterprise arrive at a distant planet searching for the source of some time displacement. The source is a time portal, left among the ruins of an ancient civilisation which although abandoned, still emits waves of time displacement. In the meantime, Doctor McCoy is suffering from paranoia brought on by an accidental overdose of the wonder drug cordrazine which any Star Trek fan will tell you can cure any known Galactic ailment. McCoy in his crazed state bumbles through the time portal, back to 1930’s America (handy for that old 1930’s set on the Paramount back lot) and changes history. Kirk and Spock are forced to also go back in time, stop McCoy from changing history and restore things to the way they were. Joan Collins plays a charity worker at the core of events; does she have to die in order to restore normality?

What happened to Kirk? Well in the movie Generations, the character of Captain Kirk was sadly killed off. Generations which started off pretty well, combining the usual sci-fi elements of Star Trek with an intriguing mystery; who is the mysterious Soran and what is he up to? As it happened what he was up to wasn’t really that interesting, but the film marked the cinema handover from the original Star Trek cast to the new one. Pity really because as I mentioned above, I never really took to the Next Generation. However in the last two Star Trek films, the producers returned to the original characters, Kirk Spock, McCoy and Scott and with new actors playing the old characters, the story of Captain Kirk continues. As I write this William Shatner, who played the original Kirk is still active even though he is in his 90s. Wonder if they could get him to play Kirk one last time?

Captain Scott

Captain Scott planned to make an expedition to the north pole but then changed his mind and went for the south pole. At pretty much the same time Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, decided he also wanted to make the trip so a kind of race began. Who would get to the pole first? Amundsen decided to travel in classic fashion with teams of dogs pulling sledges. Scott decided he would use new mechanical devices, vehicles with caterpillar tracks, all of which broke down in the cold. Scott also used ponies but they were not acclimatised to the cold and fared poorly. Amundsen’s dogs turned out to be the best choice.

Why either of them would want to go to the pole is completely beyond me. All that they found there was a shed load of snow and ice which most people could have predicted anyway.

As we all know, Scott got beaten to the pole by Amundsen. The gallant British explorers then had to face the task of getting back to civilisation, however the weather worsened and the men froze to death in their tent.

You can watch the story of Captain Scott and his tragic expedition in the film Scott of The Antarctic. It is a sad film although John Mills as Scott plays a good part as usual and James Robertson Justice plays a serious role for a change, that of Captain Oates who disappears into the snow after telling his friends that he ‘might be some time.’ Oates perished like his friends but his courageous actions have never been forgotten.

Captain James Cook

Captain Cook was born in 1728 and died in 1779. He was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, who left behind a legacy of geographical and scientific knowledge.

He achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. His mapping of the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand changed the face of world geography. Before his famous three voyages to the Pacific and Australia, he also had made detailed maps of Newfoundland.

Cook was attacked and eventually killed by the natives in the Hawaiian Islands, during his attempt to kidnap the Hawaiian chief to reclaim the cutter stolen from one of his ships.

Captain Scarlet

Captain Scarlet was a TV puppet series made by producer Gerry Anderson in 1967. It was the first of Gerry’s puppet series to use puppets with realistic body proportions which although they looked more realistic were difficult for the puppeteers to manipulate. The idea for the series was that earth was under attack from the mysterious ‘Mysterons’, a race from the planet Mars that had been disturbed by the Zero X Mars exploration missions. The Mysterons have the power of ‘retrometabolism’, a way of reconstituting matter after an object or person has been destroyed. Captain Black has been recreated in this way and is under the control of the Mysterons. A similar thing happens to Scarlet but somehow he has broken free from Mysteron control. Scarlet is a member of Spectrum, an organisation set up to defend earth. All the agents have colour code names, hence captain Scarlet, voiced by Francis Matthews and Captain Blue, voiced by Ed Bishop.

A computer animated reboot was broadcast in 2005.

Captain Nemo

Nemo was a character in the Jules Verne novel 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea. The novel was first published in 1870 and reappears in another of Vernes books, Mysterious Island written five years later. In the first book a French scientist has joined an expedition to find a sea monster. They ship is attacked by the monster and the biologist is surprised to find the monster is an advanced submarine. He and other members of the ships company are taken prisoner where they meet the mysterious captain Nemo. Not much is ever revealed about Nemo except that he seems bent on revenge after his homeland, wherever that was, was conquered by a powerful imperialist nation.

There have been numerous film versions but my personal favourite Nemo was played by actor James Mason.

Captain America

Captain America was a comic book hero first created in the 1940s. Steve Rogers is a frail man who volunteers to use a new serum which will rapidly boost his physical powers. He combats the nazi menace with his sidekick Bucky Barnes but an accident leaves him in a state of suspended animation until he is revived in the modern era and becomes the leader of the super-hero group The Avengers. I can’t say I was ever a great fan of the captain even in my younger comic reading days. Youngsters these days may know Captain America from the current wave of super hero films. Captain America: The First Avenger was released in 2011 starring Chris Evans as the eponymous hero.

Captain and Tennille

Captain and Tennille were a husband and wife recording duo who had most of their success in the 1970s. Daryl Dragon was known as the captain because of his habit of wearing a captain’s hat when he was the keyboard player for the Beach Boys. He and his wife Toni Tennille had a number of hits throughout the 1970s although the one I particularly remember was ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’, a number one hit in the USA.

Captain Von Trapp

Never heard of captain Von Trapp? Well clearly you haven’t seen the Sound of Music. The story of the Von Trapp family of singers is actually a true story and Maria Von Trapp wrote a memoir about her experiences which was published in 1949. The book was made into a German film in 1956 and was so successful that a sequel was produced. Naturally Hollywood became interested but before that producers Leland Hayward and Richard Halliday secured the rights to make the story into a stage musical. They employed Rodgers and Hammerstein to write new songs as the German film had no original songs and just used Austrian folk songs. The musical was a huge hit and later became the famous hit film. Julie Andrews starred as Maria, the trainee nun who becomes a nanny to the Von Trapp children. Their father, Captain Von Trapp played by Christopher Plummer eventually falls for Maria and the family manage to escape from Austria just as the Nazis take hold of the country.

I’m not a great fan of musicals but I do love The Sound of Music.

Captain My Captain

O Captain My captain is a poem by Walt Whitman about the death of Abraham Lincoln. As I mentioned earlier it is perhaps most famous for being used in the film Dead Poets Society starring Robin Williams as an unconventional teacher.

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Return Journey (More Thoughts in my Car)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week’s post is a sequel to the one last week and I’m going to talk some more about the thoughts and ideas that come to me while driving. OK, I’ve left my house in Manchester in good shape, trimmed the privets, cut the grass and tidied up inside. Final check in the fridge, nothing left behind that is liable to go off. OK, pack the car and let’s get off back to St Annes on the Fylde Coast.

Returning to St Annes is always a nicer journey that the one on the way down. I’m not sure why but perhaps it’s that all the bad traffic areas are closer to Manchester and generally I get them out of the way first and so I can then relax and drive along to some good music. I always tend to return via the M60, the M61, the M6 and finally the M55 motorways. The M60 is always busy around the turn off for the Trafford Centre which is a huge American style shopping mall. I’ve never been that keen on it and on the few occasions when I’ve been there I always have a job trying to find my car again in the huge car parks.

Just as I pass the Trafford centre the signs for ‘Reports of an Accident’ pop up on the VMS (variable message signs). The traffic slows to a crawl and I start to wonder if I should perhaps divert to the M62. I can see the M62 turn off up ahead but I decide to stay on the M60 for a while. When you see Accident on a sign it usually means that is a genuine confirmed accident but when the signs say Reports of an Accident, well there might not be an accident at all. Most of the accident reports come from motorists who dial 999 and tell the police what has happened. The big problem is that a lot of people don’t actually know where they are. They might tell the police they are travelling towards Manchester from Staffordshire and that they are on the M6. The last junction they noticed was junction 16 so they might perhaps reckon they are between 16 and 17 although in fact they might be further up the motorway than they thought. In some cases the informant might even get the motorway wrong saying M6 instead of M60. Anyway, my colleagues and I in the motorway control room would have checked the cameras and maybe we would find the incident on CCTV. We would also task a patrol to run through the area and check.

Approaching the Trafford Centre

Of course all that is behind me now. I’m retired. The traffic begins to speed up and soon we are back to normal speed again. It could have been there was no accident at all or sometimes the cars involved just get going again and leave the scene.

In some ways I miss my life at Highways England or whatever name it is going by now. (Actually National Highways.) In other ways I don’t miss it at all.  I had a long drive into work, forty-two miles and I certainly don’t miss that journey although on the positive side, most of my ideas for blog posts used to come to me while driving. Somehow concentrating on driving always seems to free up another part of my brain and lots of ideas will come. I even have a dictation gadget in the car so I can blab my ideas into that and save them for later.

Another thing I used to do was to create a room in my head for those ideas and make sure to leave those ideas in there. That might sound a bit silly but a long time ago I read a book by Jack Black called Mindstore and it involved using various techniques to help the reader. I bought the book to improve my confidence, especially in job interviews. The writer asked his readers to relax and create a house inside one’s own mind. In the house would be various rooms which one could use for different things. A bathroom with a shower that washed away any problems or negative energy and so on. Another was one for rehearsing events in a positive way, like a job interview for instance. You would rehearse the interview in your mind, imagine being successful and then save the result on a big monitor screen. One of my rooms was for storing my blog ideas.

An RTC on the motorway from quite a few years ago.

A big accident hotspot on the M60 motorway is junction 13. The big problem here is that traffic is entering the M60 from the M62 and the M602; this traffic is all merging to the right while traffic already on the M60 wanting to leave at 13, which comes up pretty quickly after junction 12, is trying to go left. I always try to stay in the outside lane and avoid all this although further up the road I’ll need to get over to the left to exit onto the M61.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve copied a whole lot of audio onto the SD card I’m using in my stereo so no need to be constantly changing discs in my CD player. The next item comes up and it’s not music but Dylan Thomas reciting his work. He reads some poems which really is what got me interested in Dylan. I like to read his work but it’s the power of his recitals that really hooked me. Dylan wrote various plays for radio and one of my favourites pops up now. It’s called Return Journey. It’s a brilliant work read by Dylan himself in which he imagines his older self going back to Swansea in search of his young self.

Anyway, time to get over to the left and merge onto the M61. The M61 is a busy road and once you come on to it you have to beware of traffic coming over to the left from the A666. The traffic is heavy but so far it all seems to be moving well.

Return Journey was inspired by the devastation Dylan saw in Swansea after the town suffered the blitz of WWII. His broadcast begins with ‘It was a cold white day in the High Street, and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the Docks, for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea lay their blitzed flat graves marbled with snow and headstoned with fences.’

Later Dylan is in a Swansea pub asking the barmaid if she remembers young Dylan. He describes his younger self to her and she replies ‘There’s words, what d’you want to find him for. I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole’.

Later he meets the old park keeper in his childhood haunt, Cwmdonkin Park. Does the park keeper remember him as a boy? Of course, replies the man, he remembers all the boys who played there even the ones who would ‘climb the reservoir railings and pelt the old Swans. Run like a billygoat over the grass you should keep off of.’  It’s a very moving piece indeed.

I notice accident signs on the message boards and the traffic begins to slow. Ahead I can see the flashing lights of a Highways Traffic car, slowing the traffic down. A year ago one of my jobs in the control room would be running an incident like this. For a rolling road block the patrol would call for a dedicated radio channel and someone like me would shout up that they were ready to take over. On the M61 the dedicated channel was 28. We had dedicated channels so that any police patrol nearby could also change over and assist us. I’d confirm the patrol were on the channel and drop the speeds down on the motorway signals. The patrol would slow the traffic then sometimes bring it to a stop while they shifted any accident damaged or broken down vehicles to the hard shoulder. A quick sweep of any debris and the patrol would move to the hard shoulder and wave the traffic on.

Me in the Highways Agency Control Room

One particular traffic officer used to make me laugh. When he returned to the main radio channel he would always hail the control room and advise Romeo Echo Three One: Back from the dark side!

As we leave Greater Manchester and enter Lancashire, traffic begins to thin a little although on summer weekends the M6 gets busy with holiday traffic making to the Fylde Coast as well as the Lake District.

I pass a Police car on one of the Police Patrol parking points. They are distributed about on various points of the motorway network. There was a Police desk in our control room and I’m happy to say that generally we at Highways had a good relationship with them. The big surprise to me working with the Police was that I always thought the Police were, well the Police. The thing is, the UK Police are not just one single organisation, they are numerous separate Police Forces that actually all work differently and independently.

Appropriately The Greatest Hits of Sting and the Police starts up on my stereo. I’ve always rather liked the Police and I do love the music of the eighties.

Anyway, getting back to the actual Police, Lancs Police do things differently to Greater Manchester Police and Cumbria do things differently to everyone. Why there isn’t a more centralised Police Force I’ll never know. In our control room the Motorway Police Group is headed by Cheshire Police. They used a computer system that wasn’t compatible to the one used by GMP. When an incident occurred that came from GMP the staff at Cheshire had to copy the incident over to their system. We both used a system called Command and Control. They could then send the incident electronically over to us so we could set the motorway signals and respond with our patrol.

When I left in 2022, Highways had a new system called (I can’t remember!) and Cheshire Police had a system designed by Saab. I know it sounds a little controversial but why don’t all the Police and even other emergency services use the same system? Wouldn’t that be better?

The Police are singing Every Little Thing She Does is Magic just as I take the slip road onto the M55 for the very last leg of my journey. There are roadworks here that seem to have been going on forever. They are making an entirely new junction and of course all the slip roads and overhead bridges have had to have been constructed. A lot of it is nearly ready but it is still a 50mph zone.

Sting is the frontman to the Police and I read somewhere he got the nickname Sting because he used to wear a black and yellow sweater. His real name is Gordon Sumner and I’ve always thought his attachment to the name Sting kind of silly but what the heck, I still like his music. After leaving the Police, Sting went on to a successful career as a solo artist.

Just as I pull up at home, one of my favourite Sting tracks comes on; If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free. I’m tempted to sit and listen to it but I flip back to the beginning and switch off my stereo. Sting will be all ready for me on my next journey.

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Thoughts in My Car

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Every couple of weeks or so I hop into my car and set off on the journey back to Manchester. I usually have some provisions packed although a lot of the time I will pop into the shops and pick some things up, a loaf of bread, a bottle of milk. I’m a man of simple tastes.

The car starts up fine and I’m off down the drive and heading towards the M55 motorway.

Once I’m moving I crank up the stereo and settle back to drive and listen to my favourite music. I hate adverts. TV adverts are bad enough but radio ads are the ones I really hate so no commercial radio, just CDs. My stereo takes five CDs which is great as sometimes I might get bored with the current CD and I like to click forward to the next one.

Coming along Queensway towards the M55 and there are roadworks ahead. There’s not a great queue but the only other route involves a huge excursion to bypass the area so I reckon I’ll just stick it out.

My much missed Renault convertible

My car is a Skoda Octavia Scout 4 wheel drive. It’s not anything I’ve gone out of my way to buy it just happened to be available when I wanted to change cars so I went for it. The only car I’ve ever really gone out of my way to buy was probably my last car which was a Renault Megane convertible. I don’t suppose I took the roof down that much now I come to think of it but a convertible was something I’d always wanted. I really did love driving on a warm summer’s day with the top down. My previous car was a Rover and it had a somewhat old fashioned radio and tape player. Not that I minded having a tape player. Ever since my teenage days I’ve enjoyed copying my vinyl 45s to tape and making what they call these days a mixtape, although back in the mid seventies that wasn’t a phrase I’d ever heard of.

Anyway, I loved tapes and I enjoyed compiling them. If the tape broke: no matter, they were only cheap, throw it away and record another. Bored with a tape? Again, no matter, just record something else over whatever was already on there.

Tape cassette

Finally through the roadworks on down towards the M55 motorway.

When I moved up to the Renault my collection of tapes was consigned to the storeroom and I brought a box of CDs into the car. I wasn’t totally happy but then I realised I could continue in my mixtape recording by just creating collections of my favourite music on CD. I began to copy CDs onto my laptop so I could burn my favourite tracks to new CD collections. I even had a program in which I could digitise some of my very best mixtapes which had clips from TV and film shows and burn them to a new CD.

Finally I turn on to the M55 motorway. I see I’m perhaps a little short on fuel but I’ve got easily enough to get me to Manchester and back. It’s always worth checking your fuel as when I was a motorway traffic officer, running out of gas could be a big problem. So many stranded motorists used to call up and mention they had run out of fuel as if we were going to pop down with a tank of petrol. No, we would be towing their car away and charging them £250 for the privilege, assuming the police didn’t get involved and give them a ticket. Imagine if they had run out of fuel in the fast lane or on a motorway with no hard shoulder; that could be dangerous and even fatal. Always check your fuel before going onto the motorway.

After a while I thought about actually having my original CDs in the car rather than copying and editing them. After all, if you come to a dud track it’s easy to just flip to the next one. So I brought a couple of boxes of CDs into the car, one in the passenger footwell and another in the boot. Every so often I’d rotate them.

Not so long ago I was stuck in a traffic jam. I was a little bored with my current five CD selection and wondering if I should reach over and select some new music from the zip folder of CDs in the glove compartment or even reach down to the box of newer CDs on the floor. We started to move up slowly but just then my eye happened to catch something on the front of the stereo. There was a small slot I hadn’t seen before and was that worn mark the symbol of a SD slot, you know, a slot for a memory card? We started moving and I made a mental note to look into that later.

By now I’d reached the junction with the M6. I took the slip road for the M6 south but I knew that soon I’d have to make another decision. Should I go M61 south and then M60 ring road or stay M6 south and then M56? Decisions. The M61 is not one of my favourite motorways. It always seems to be busy and then there’s the confusing link to the M60 anti clockwise where you have to move over to the right but traffic from the A666 that wants to go M60 clockwise tries to go left. It’s an accident hot spot and I can almost hear myself in former days when I was the radio dispatcher: Romeo Lima three four. Can you make to an RTC southbound M61 just by the junction with the M60 clockwise?

‘State five, Hotel Alpha’ would be the hoped for response, state five is code for enroute to the incident. Hotel Alpha was my call sign. Anyway I decide to stay on the M6 south. It’s a bit of a risk as I know there are roadworks and a 50mph zone but I still reckon it will be better than the M61.

Police and Highways dealing with an incident. This was on the M25

I checked the stereo and guess what? Yes it was a slot for an SD card. Now it just so happens that all the music I have copied and digitised I had already placed on a micro SD card for my MP3 player. I copied all that to a standard size SD card, popped it into my stereo and now I can listen to my entire music collection without changing CDs, without rotating boxes of CDs, without having the footwell of the passenger seat full of CDs. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. OK, I’d have to copy all the newer CDs in my collection that I hadn’t already transferred to the SD card but even so, I still have a huge collection of music on that card, all of which I like and all advertisement free.

I’d hit the roadworks on the M6 and dropped to 50mph as per the speed restrictions. A lot of people look down on my Skoda but Skoda is actually part of Volkswagen and the engine is basically a Volkswagen engine so really the car is actually a pretty impressive vehicle. I’ve got a cruise control so I set the speed to 52 MPH and glide gently along in the slightly faster moving outside lane. I’m gradually working my way through my SD card and along comes some music I haven’t heard for a while, the soundtrack from the film Aliens.

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley from Alien

Aliens was the James Cameron sequel to the Ridley Scott sci-fi horror film Alien. Alien is a sci-fi classic and I’m never sure which is the better film Alien or Aliens. The other sequels in the Alien series were poor and even the prequels weren’t that good, even though Ridley Scott himself directed them. The first was Prometheus which he followed with Alien Covenant. I tried to watch Prometheus but just got bored with it. Alien Covenant was much the same.

Alien had a top-notch cast including Tom Skerrit, Sigourney Weaver, Ian Holm, John Hurt and others. The actors in Covenant were good but I just didn’t have any interest in them. The plot seemed pretty similar to Alien; a spacecraft receives a distress call and goes to investigate. This involves a long hike through the countryside although why they couldn’t have landed closer, I don’t know. Instead of the eggs and the face hugging parasite from Alien some alien spores are encountered by one crew member. He is taken back to the spacecraft and to the medical bay. One crew member gets locked in with the deteriorating man and guess what, an alien bursts out of his body and attacks the other one although just about then I switched off. Why is Alien so good and Alien Covenant so bad? It’s hard to say. Was it just the charisma free actors in the latter or the slow pace? Alien ticked along fairly slowly too but the director always kept the viewer interested in what was going to happen, plus the actors in Alien were so good.

A dubious area of the M6 is around Warrington where the M62 joins us and things always seem to get busy. There are queue caution signs up but these are automatic signals which are activated by a system called MIDAS. Motorway Incident Detection and Signalling. Slow traffic has been detected but then it is always busy in this area. Things speed up and we are soon over the Thelwall Viaduct and onto the M56.

I click onto the next CD on the SD card and it’s a singer called Rumer. Rumer is a British singer-songwriter with a really lovely voice. I reckon it’s just as good as Karen Carpenter and both have the same smooth and warm tone. The album that’s playing is one that has a fabulous version of a Carpenters classic, I Long to be Close to You.

Listening to the wonderful voice of Rumer, I pass the airport, another incident hot spot, without any problems and soon I’m pulling up at my mother’s house. I’ve got my laptop with me and I’ll have a few days to write a new blog post.

Not sure what to write about though.

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If Music be The Food of Love, Play On

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A few weeks back I wrote a post about things I couldn’t do without. It was pretty light hearted and I wrote it after reading a similar post in which the things that the writer couldn’t do without actually turned out to be things that not only could I fully do without but in fact, didn’t even care about at all.

One particular thing that I didn’t mention in my post was music.

It was a little like the time I worked out my top 10 favourite films of all time and then later, realised I missed out one of my absolute favourites. It was a momentary error, a quick brain fade but something that needs redress. So here it is, a post about music and just to make it more interesting, I think I’ll throw a few links in to some of my favourite tracks.

This isn’t the first music post I’ve written. I did one a few years back called The Soundtrack to My Life. It was all about my favourite singles and then I followed it up with one about my favourite albums and as I wasn’t feeling particularly creative that day, I called it The Soundtrack to My Life Part 2.

Way back in 1972 when everything was black and white and the internet hadn’t even been invented and wireless was an old-fashioned word for the radio, on Christmas Day that year my brother and I received a joint Christmas present. It was a stereo record player. It was a compact model and the twin speakers clipped onto the top and there was a carry handle making it easily portable.

Another present was a record to go with our record player. I can’t remember if it was another joint present but the record was The Persuaders. It was an album of TV and film themes by John Barry who wrote much of the music for the James Bond films as well as the theme from The Persuaders. I still have that album today so it was either my personal present or I have just managed to keep it away from my brother for the past fifty years. (Fifty years! I can hardly believe it’s been that long. He kept the record player by the way so I think I can count the record as mine.)

The following year, 1973, I was keen on expanding my record collection and I began to purchase a lot of similar TV and film themed albums. Then I discovered Radio One and I moved on to the pop music of the time. Back then the new Top 20 was released every Tuesday and the Radio One DJ Johnnie Walker did a show counting down through the new chart, finishing with that week’s number one. Later on Thursday, the BBC show Top of The Pops did a similar thing on TV.

The first single I ever bought was by Olivia Newton John, my teenage heart throb and in fact it was two singles, Banks of the Ohio and What is Life and as they were no longer in the charts, I managed to get them for half price which initiated a lifelong passion for flipping through half price vinyl singles in record shops. I say lifelong passion but then again, these days in 2022, finding a record shop isn’t easy and even if I could find one, I doubt if there would be many 7-inch singles on sale. Having said that, I keep reading that vinyl is making a comeback so maybe it’s not impossible after all.

Back in 1973 I started a record collection that just grew and grew and today occupies a great deal of space upstairs in my back room. I’m not sure what was the very last vinyl single I ever bought. I guess it was sometime in the 1980’s but one day I’m going to go through those records and find out what the heck it was. One day I started buying CDs and today I must have two or three boxes of them although only a few are CD singles. I used to spend a lot of time in places like Woolworths flipping through CD collections in the reduced section. One of my best buys was a compilation that I bought just for one track which was A Horse With No Name by America. I love that track but another track on the album I was surprised to find was Desiderata by Les Crane, a musical version of the poem by Max Ehrmann, a track I love which I hadn’t heard for years.

I’ve got a lot of Beatles CDs, in fact for a while I decided I was going to buy, one by one, all the Beatles albums on CD. What I found though, and I’m guessing this might be a bit controversial, was that a lot of their album tracks just weren’t that good. Their hits are of course, absolute classics but a lot of their other album tracks really weren’t my cup of tea so after a few disappointing buys I gave up on that particular project.

A similar thing happened with Elton John. I stopped buying Elton’s albums in the 1980’s after all, people get older and tastes change. Later I started buying his albums on CD, not all of them, just the ones I particularly liked which were mostly his pre-1980’s albums. One later album I did like very much was Elton’s Made in England. I’d seen Songs From the West Coast get some great reviews and picked it up in my favourite music shop HMV. As I was about to pay, I saw Made in England in the reduced section and picked it up. Songs from the West Coast wasn’t that good so I never played Made in England which was a pity because when I finally picked it up months later, I thought it was outstanding.

Nowadays, even CDs seem to be on the way out. The usual way to purchase music today is to either download it or stream it. I have downloaded a few albums even though I mostly burn them to a CD and play them in my car. If I want to listen to music at home, it’s so easy just to click on the Spotify app on my iPad and slip on my earphones. In fact, I’ve got so used to Spotify I wish there was a way I could perhaps link my phone or my iPad to my car radio and play the stuff I listen to at home while I’m driving.

A few years back I decided to compile my personal top twenty. I did it years ago back in the 70’s and in fact my old friend Steve and I made a short audio tape in which we interviewed each other and talked about our favourite music Desert Island Discs style. When I went to do it once again a few years ago I found it was pretty hard to do, in fact I ended up making a list not of my top 20 but my top 100. I even made it into a spreadsheet so I could sort it by artist or year of issue. Later I made it into a Spotify playlist. Technology, isn’t it wonderful?

I like all kinds of music although opera and rap really don’t do it for me at all. I’m not a great classical music fan but there quite a few classical pieces I enjoy and interestingly most of those have come to me through my love of the cinema. Things like The Blue Danube by Strauss from 2001 A Space Odyssey and March of Pomp and Circumstance from Young Winston.

Just recently I saw a short video on TikTok. It was a young lady playing the cello in a wood and as she played, animals from the wood cautiously came forward seemingly to listen to the music. I loved that music so much I had to get it on a CD. It was Bach’s suite number 1 for cello.

A lot of the music I listen to these days is chilled electronic music and one of my favourite artists on Spotify is Nora Van Elken. Now I’ve never seen a CD on sale by Nora. Not only that I have no idea what she looks like or even if Nora Van Elken is a group rather than a person.

Having said that I thought I’d do a quick search on the internet. The answer from cyberspace is that she is an American producer and DJ. I couldn’t find much else about her but does that mean she doesn’t write songs but just produces them? Basically, I don’t know so I might as well plug my earphones in and just carry on listening.

My Top 100 singles can be downloaded as a spreadsheet. https://stevehigginslive.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/100besttracks.xls

Listen to my Top 100 on Spotify! https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3QSNCQYaOpE6W49AdWN3RY?si=ZD41K1M1S7C7TA3GeFpnQw

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Blogging Out Loud

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s really quite fascinating the way digital publishing is moving ever forward. Although I suppose I’m very much still an amateur writer I publish a blog post every weekend just like this one. I can also be found in various videos over on YouTube and many of my blog posts can be listened to as a podcast. I say many although in fact there are only nine podcasts available at the present time. I could make more I suppose, after all, I’m now retired and I’ve got plenty of time to make them as well as owning that special essential, a top quality microphone. The thing is I’m not really sure how I feel about my podcasts. I’m not a trained actor or public speaker and I’ve never been that keen on my voice. Someone once told me I sounded a lot like Terry Christian. You may not have heard of him but he’s a Manchester DJ and minor TV personality and he sounds a lot like a very northern working-class Mancunian which is pretty much how you might describe me.

A few years ago I wrote a poem about the way I sound over on Writeoutloud. I won’t reproduce it here because it wasn’t that good (although feel free to click that Writeoutloud link) but it did get a lot of comments. In the poem I mentioned that I wanted to sound like Richard Burton. I’ve always admired Burton’s rich speaking voice. He made many films and I listen to him from time to time on my CD recording of Under Milk Wood. Of course, Burton’s voice didn’t come naturally. He was a miner’s son from Wales and was born Richard Jenkins. He spent many years perfecting that wonderful voice under the tuition of his teacher Philip Burton.

To improve my podcasts and voice-overs I have subscribed to a couple of YouTube channels which explain the rudiments of public speaking and voice control but even so, I still reckon I sound pretty much the same.

I’ve mentioned many times that one of my favourite writers is Dylan Thomas. Dylan had a wonderful voice and made many recordings of his poems and plays. In fact quite a lot of his plays were written for the radio. One of the keys to appreciating Dylan’s work is his love of words, particularly the sound of words, which is at the heart of all Dylan’s work, especially his poetry. If you think about it, there must be a connection between the sound of a word and its meaning, a deep organic connection. After all, how did words begin? Imagine some ancient caveman, just wanting to get some concept over to his mate. What are the deepest and strongest feelings for a human being? Well, for a caveman food must be one, and love too. Surely love was present in those primordial days when every caveman went out on Saturday with his club looking for his mate. There must have been a moment when ancient man strived to say something to his mate, tried to express his feeling and a sound that was the precursor to the word love slipped uneasily from his lips.

Terry Christian. Picture courtesy BBC

I make great use in my video voice-overs and podcasts of one particular program on my laptop, my Magix sound mixer. I’m able, to a great extent, to cut out my mumbles and ums and ahs, add some bass and make myself sound just a little bit better than I actually do.

On one of my short videos, I once tried to dub my own voice with a new recording. You’ve probably seen on TV and films how this can be done. There are some amazing over dubs in the Bond films for instance. In Goldfinger, Gert Frobe played the eponymous villain but the actor was German and spoke poor English. His voice was dubbed by an actor called Michael Collins. Many films in the 60’s, particularly European films were made with a fully dubbed soundtrack so how hard could it be?

I got set up with my video, the text of what I was saying and my microphone and off I went. About two weeks later having got about ten seconds of useable video and having come pretty close to smashing my laptop to pieces, I finally realised that audio dubbing wasn’t as easy as I thought it was and made the video in a different way.

Over on Anchor where I produce my podcasts, they have the facility to take one of my blogs and convert it into a podcast by having it spoken by an electronic voice so none of the recording and editing that goes into making a podcast would in theory be necessary. Some of the voices available actually sound pretty real but they all fall down in things like pronunciation of odd words or names or sometimes when I’ve tried to render a particular accent into the text. Yes, I think I’ll stick to my own voice for the time being.

I’ve always found it fascinating how a particular sound can jog our memory. Some time ago I wrote a blog about Mr Todd’s projector. Mr Todd was a teacher from my junior school and every Christmas he set up his projector and screen in the hall and put on a film show for the school. The films were mostly cartoon shorts like Sylvester the cat, Daffy Duck and even some of Disney’s wildlife films. I loved those Christmas film shows and what brought back the memory was that wonderful sound of the projector, that clickety click sound of the film running through the machine.

One year, I think it must have been my last at the school, Mr Todd retired and there was no final Christmas film show. Instead, we were treated to some dreary school choir or something which was such a disappointment. Of course, there had been a final film show. It had been the one the previous year, only at the time, like many things in life, we didn’t know it would be the last.

Here’s one final thing about sound. Music. I do love my music and like most people I associate various songs and music tracks to various times in my life. The very first vinyl singles I ever bought were by Olivia Newton John and since then I’ve amassed quite a collection of records, tapes and CDs. My record collection fills a small corner in the spare room in my mother’s house but these days, youngsters have even bigger collections than mine kept either on a small device or in cyberspace. I have to say I do like to have physical versions of music. I like my record and CD covers. I like the sleeve notes and I like to see the small notes I have made myself on my own records, things like the date of purchase and so on.

Many years ago one of my favourite things to do on a Saturday afternoon was to sift through racks of records in the music shops in Manchester. It’s hard to even find a record shop these days. I was a big music fan and back in the seventies and eighties singles were marked down in price as soon as they dropped out of the charts and vultures like me were there to buy up cheap records. I started buying singles in 1973 and the last one I bought must have been in the late eighties or early nineties. I wish I knew which record it was. In the eighties I started buying picture singles which were singles in clear vinyl with a picture running through. My favourite is probably Alexi Sayle singing ‘Hello John, got a new motor’ which comes in the shape of a Ford Cortina With Alexi Sayle on the bonnet.

The day came, probably sometime in the nineties, when the pop charts became a mystery to me, singers and bands were in there that I’d never heard of with records I had no interest in buying. Just then, almost like a thief in the night, vinyl disappeared and the CD era began.

In the box room at my Mum’s house are four or five boxes of my singles, another box of LP’s and two boxes of 12 inch singles which started out in the eighties as a single but with a longer or different mix or sometimes with an extra track. I like my vinyl records, I like the smoothness of the plastic, the static electricity, the album covers, the sleeve notes (can anyone really read the sleeve notes on CDs written in that tiny writing?) and the inserts. I still have all the booklets that came with Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy and I so wish I’d written the lyrics to that Cliff Richard song, ‘Wired for Sound’; power from the needle to the plastic.

I’m not much of a downloader but I do have a shedload of CD’s I’ve picked up over the years and I’ve gradually started to use my MP3 player, especially on holiday. I even have fun making up playlists on Spotify just like in the old days when I’d copy my vinyl singles onto cassette tapes.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve really changed at all from the teenager I used to be.

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