The Soundtrack to my Life

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Steve Higgins

The soundtrack to my life? What’s that all about? Well, quite simply it’s music. I don’t know about you but I’ve been a music fan all my life and I have always bought records of one sort or another. Vinyl singles and albums, cassette tapes, CDs and yes, even the occasional download.

picmonkey-image My Christmas present in 1972, my shared present I might add, which I shared with my brother, was a record player. I don’t actually remember getting any records to play on it though but a few days afterwards I bought a collection of TV and film themes by John Barry in the post Christmas sales.. Barry scored the early Bond films and wrote the theme from the Persuaders, the 70’s TV show starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. So much is that record built into my memory that whenever I hear the tune from the Persuaders, it’s not Curtis and Moore that comes to mind but that small portable record player that spent much of its life in the bedroom that my brother and I shared many years ago.

31436280925_c1d7ff01eb_o The first single I ever bought was by my childhood heart-throb Olivia Newton-John. I actually bought two singles together, The Banks of the Ohio and What is life. A single back in 1973 cost thirty-eight pence if I remember correctly and as both those singles had dropped out of the charts I was able to get the two singles for half price, nineteen pence each. Olivia Newton-John started out as a country/folk singer but found greater fame as John Travolta’s co-star in the hit movie Grease. Sorry Olivia but Grease just didn’t do it for me.

Olivia Newton-John I’ve never been one for albums, I’m much more of a singles man but in the 1970s I was very fond of Elton John’s music. When I first heard his records I just assumed he was an American so I was pretty surprised to find he was English and hailed from Pinner in Middlesex. His first hit single was ‘Your Song’ from his second album, Elton John but the first album I bought was ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. Elton worked closely with lyricist Bernie Taupin to produce some memorable songs. Taupin wrote the lyrics in the fashion of poems, passed them over to Elton who worked them into a song, which is the way they work together today some five decades later. I still have all my Elton John albums but after Elton made Rock Of The Westies I lost interest in his music a little. In the CD era I picked up some of my favourites of his music on CD and I have found some of his newer work that I really like, in particular Made In England which must count to me as one of his best ever albums.

Back in my single buying days a work colleague lent me his copy of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. I didn’t really fancy it but my friend was insistent that I would love it and he was right. The idea of a whole album telling a single story including snippets of dialogue and sound effects is brilliant. I copied the album onto cassette tape and today I have two CD versions, one for in the home and one for my car.

It seems to me sometimes that back in the 70’s buying music was so easy. Hear a record on the radio, go out to the record shop and buy it; job done. Nowadays when I sometimes watch music videos channels like the Box, I hear something I like but there are no music stores to visit to buy the recording. Not only that, when and if you find one, they’ve never heard of the track that you noted down! Actually its much easier to just go online and search for the music you want and then its just a few clicks to download. However, I’m not convinced a download is what I really want. I want something physical, something I can pick up and look at, something with sleeve notes and inserts, that’s what I used to love about vinyl albums.

The last vinyl album I ever bouht, and the last one that John lennon made. Double Fantasy. £2.99, what a bargain.

The last vinyl album I ever bought, and the last one that John Lennon made. Double Fantasy. £2.99, what a bargain.

So, back to the present. The other week I was watching a programme on BBC 4 about Kate Bush. It was all pretty interesting and seemed to portray a Kate Bush that was a whole world apart from babooshka babooshka and Kath-ee, let me in at your window, the slightly scary Kate Bush that I remember from the seventies and eighties.

I did an online search and on e-Bay I found myself three fairly cheap CDs. 1: The Sensual World. (Sorry Kate, this didn’t do it for me at all.) 2: The Red Shoes. (Pretty good, nice album.) 3: Aerial. Now this was more like it. A cracking double CD. Actually more chill out than the Kate Bush of the seventies I’m used to hearing. It has not been off my in-car stereo since I bought it. It’s a fabulous album full of exciting rhythms and sounds.

aerial So, what music do you have on the soundtrack to your life?

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Will the Real Fifth Beatle Please Stand Up?

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Steve Higgins

The story of the Beatles is a story that envelops anyone who is interested in music. A whole generation grew up with them and watched them morph from mop tops to hippies and beyond. That same generation was shattered when John Lennon was killed and saddened when George succumbed to cancer. The Beatles have always been there and have always been a part of our lives. It seems to me that there is always something in the media about the Beatles and one thing that comes up time after time is the mysterious fifth Beatle. The fifth Beatle is a sort of honary title bestowed either by the media or the Beatles themselves. We all know who the Beatles were; John, Paul, George and Ringo, so who was the fifth Beatle? Here are a few of the contenders.

Stuart Sutcliffe.
Stuart was a great friend of John Lennon’s and John invited him to join the band despite his lack of musical talent. In fact he couldn’t even play the guitar properly which dismayed Paul McCartney no end. However, John was the creator of the band and the leader. John and Stuart met at Art College in Liverpool where Stuart had a reputation for being a talented artist. Stuart later went to Hamburg with the Beatles where they had a long term gig as the resident band at a club in the Reeperbahn district. There he met and became involved with a young photographer called Astrid Kirchherr and stayed with her when the rest of the Beatles returned to the UK. Sutcliffe enrolled in Hamburg art college to further his artwork. Astrid was a stylish influence on the Beatles and encouraged them to abandon Brylcream and try the now famous mop top haircut which was popular at the time with students in Hamburg. She was studying art and photography and took many famous photos of the group.
Sutcliffe began to experience severe headaches and after one such episode in 1962 he was rushed to hospital. He died on the way there, the cause of death later diagnosed as a cerebral haemorrhage.

Picture courtesy Wikipedia

Brian Epstein.
Brian Epstein was the manager of his family’s music store in Liverpool city centre, NEMS. Epstein worked hard to make the store a success and it became one of the biggest music stores in the North of England. The story goes that a local music fan came into the store and ordered a copy of ‘My Bonnie’ which the Beatles had recorded with Tony Sheridan in Germany. Epstein was curious and made enquiries about the group, later going to see them at the Cavern in Liverpool. Some have dismissed this story, as Epstein was bound to be aware of the Beatles through the local magazine Merseybeat which was on sale in NEMS and featured the Beatles in their second edition. Whatever the original facts are, Epstein liked the Beatles immediately, watched their performances several times at the Cavern and eventually approached them with an offer to be their manager. Brian Epstein went on to manage the Beatles until his death in 1967. His management of their business lives was not too successful as he was perhaps, like everyone, not prepared for the whirlwind global stardom into which the Beatles were catapulted. Marketing and licensing opportunities were lost and other artists that Epstein managed felt that they were overlooked as Brian concentrated on the Beatles.
Brian Epstein died in August 1967. The coroner recorded his death as an accidental overdose.

George Martin.
Brian Epstein made many attempts to get his band a recording contract with little success. One record producer famously told Epstein that ‘Guitar groups are on the way out!’ Epstein persevered and managed to get George Martin, a producer for the EMI label Parlophone to record the Beatles. Martin, who had previously worked on comedy records with stars like Peter Sellers, was reportedly not completely impressed with the Beatles’ music but more so with their wit and banter. Drummer Pete Best did not impress Martin either and he engaged a session drummer to work with the Beatles on their first recordings. That was to have important repercussions for Pete and the band later.

John Lennon and me . .

George Martin paired his formal musical expertise with the Beatles raw talent and in fact either wrote or performed many of the orchestral arrangements on their recordings. The violin quartet on ‘Yesterday’ was one of Martin’s ideas.
He died at the age of 90 in 2016.

Pete Best.
Pete Best joined the Beatles in 1960 on the eve of their departure for Hamburg. He became a popular member of the group, especially with the fans and was noted for his James Dean-like moody good looks.
His mother Mona, had bought a large house in Liverpool that was formerly the West Derby Conservative club and she modelled the basement into a coffee bar which opened in the early sixties as the ‘Casbah’ and Pete played there regularly with his group the ‘Black Jacks’. Paul McCartney spotted Pete there and convinced him to join the Beatles in Hamburg.
On New Year’s Day 1962 the Beatles, including Pete on the drums, recorded fifteen songs as part of an audition for Decca. Decca ultimately rejected the Beatles but Epstein bought the tapes and managed to get George Martin from Parlophone to listen to the tracks. He liked them, offered a possible recording contract to Epstein but wanted to record the Beatles himself first. In June of 1962 the group went to Abbey Road studios to play in the recording studio for George Martin. They played a number of songs but then Martin decided he wanted a session drummer to stand in for Best. Later, the Beatles learned that at the next recording session, planned for September of 62, the engineers still wanted a session drummer so they decided that it was time to replace Best. Their new drummer, Ringo Starr, was also replaced by a session drummer and George Martin has said he was surprised that the group wanted to get rid of Pete. Pete at the time, was the most popular Beatle with the fans. Whatever the ins and outs of the issue, whether it was Pete’s drumming, the fact that he was a bit of a loner and spent little time with the others, or just didn’t fit in well with them, we will never know for sure. The three other Beatles, Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison tasked Brian Epstein with giving Pete Best the sack. He was out and Ringo Starr was in.
Pete Best had missed out by a whisker on global fame and fortune on a massive scale.

Derek Taylor.
Taylor was a journalist who worked for newspapers in the North West. He wrote a review of the Beatles in concert and gradually became a trusted insider and confidante of the group. Later, Brian Epstein asked him to become their press officer. He left the Beatles after their US concert tour in 1964 but returned in 1968 to become the press officer for the Beatles’ Apple Corps. In the late seventies Taylor collaborated with George Harrison on his memoir, ‘I, Me, Mine.’

Derek Taylor died in 1997 while still working for Apple on the Beatles’ Anthology book.

Neil Aspinall.
Neil Aspinall was the Beatles’ road manager and personal assistant and surprisingly, he was originally employed by Pete Best on behalf of the band. Neil drove the band up and down the UK to various gigs in a small Commer van for which he paid £80. Aspinall was a great friend of Pete Best and offered to resign from his work with the Beatles in sympathy with Best’s sacking but Best apparently felt Aspinall should carry on. Later, Aspinall became manager of the Apple Corps when Brian Epstein died. He was the executive producer for the Beatles’ Anthology.
He died in New York in 2008.

Murray the K.
Murray the K was a New York disc jockey in the early sixties. When the Beatles first went to the USA in 1964 Murray was an instant hit with the band. He accompanied them to various events in the US and even broadcast his radio show from the Beatles’ Plaza hotel suite. He claimed to have been named the fifth Beatle by either George Harrison or Ringo Starr and his radio station WINS built him up as the ‘Fifth Beatle’ in their publicity.

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Have Movies Influenced your Music Choices?

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Steve Higgins

Classical Music and Three of my Movie Favourites

I’m not a great lover of classical music but the classical music I do know and love has come to me through the medium of film. Yes, movies have inspired almost all of my favourite classical music choices.

The Blue Danube

The Blue Danube is a waltz written by the composer Johann Strauss II. He was an Austrian composer known as the ‘Waltz King’ and was largely responsible for the popularity of the waltz in Vienna in the 19^th century. I first heard the music in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the memorable sci-fi movie directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick used numerous classical pieces in the movie and the Blue Danube is used during the space station docking and lunar landing sequences.

I first saw the film in the summer of 1968. I was only 11 at the time and I remember my Mum being surprised I had spent hours at the cinema on a lovely hot day. I watched the film in the huge movie theatre in Northenden, now a Jehovah’s Witness assembly hall. There were only a few people in the picture house that day and it was wonderful having this huge place almost to myself and seeing this incredible film in 70mm on the big screen. I recall being somewhat confused by it all, especially the jump from neanderthal times to the future, until I bought the novel by Arthur C Clarke which explained things in a way the movie did not.

2001 is a particularly visual film. Kubrick cut out a lot of dialogue because he wanted the film to stand as “basically a visual, nonverbal experience” that “hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting.”

Picture courtesy Flickr.com

According to Wikipedia, despite the few people in the cinema with me that day in 1968, the movie went on to become the highest grossing North American movie of that year.

2001 set the pace for the sci-fi movie with its depiction of spacecraft drifting slowly and silently through space. The first Star Trek movie was heavily influenced by 2001 which made it look a little dated when the movie Star Wars was released and did the opposite thing, showing spacecraft whooshing across the screen at incredible speeds.

2001 is a wonderful movie and as well as continual enjoyment, it has also given me a love of Johann Strauss.

March of Pomp and Circumstance.

The March of Pomp and Circumstance was written by Sir Edward Elgar and there are actually six marches altogether. The most famous is the ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ march which traditionally ends the last night at the proms. I first heard this classical piece in the movie ‘Young Winston.’

The music for the movie was written by Alfred Ralston and includes his original work as well as arrangements of Elgar’s music. I used to have the soundtrack to Young Winston on vinyl and on the back cover there were extensive notes by the producer. He rather pompously announced that neither he nor Richard Attenborough, the director, had any interest in making a film about the British Empire, which is rather sad because the British Empire, in my view, was something we British should be rightly proud of. Anyway, Churchill himself was certainly proud of the Empire and his part in it, and in making this film the producers therefore did what they say they didn’t want to do. The movie is based on Winston’s early life, indeed his autobiography of his early days was entitled just that: ‘My Early Life.’ It is a wonderful read and has been made into a lovely film.

One interesting feature of ‘Young Winston’ is that at the end of the film there is a rather poignant scene where Winston, in his later years, falls asleep in his study and has a dream about his late father, his relationship with whom, as we see in the movie, was not good. In the sequence his father, Randolph Churchill, returns to him; he and Winston discuss life and finally part with a sort of understanding nod to each other. I have always thought that it finished the film off rather nicely but whenever I see Young Winston on TV, that scene has been cut. Years ago I bought the video version and the scene had been cut on the video too, so if I ever decide to buy the DVD version, I’ll be checking the running time before I buy!

Manhattan

Manhattan is Woody Allen’s ode to New York. I have always loved that opening sequence with the monologue by Woody. He narrates the opening of his book and is not satisfied with it so starts the book over again. The dialogue goes something like this;

‘Chapter one. He adored New York City. He idolised it out of all proportion.

No, make that he romanticised it out of all proportion.

To him, no matter what the season was, it was a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwyn.

Oh no, let me start this over.

Chapter one . . .’

When he finally gets the book opening he wants, then the music of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody In Blue’ roars into focus. Manhattan is a movie shot in black and white and is one of Woody Allen’s most famous and successful films. Allen plays a 42-year-old writer who is involved with a 17-year-old girl played by Mariel Hemingway. The photography is wonderful as is the movie. There is a lovely part played by Meryl Streep who plays the part of Allen’s ex-wife who has written a book about their former life together.

How have the movies influenced your music choices?

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10 Random Hits from the World of the Vinyl Single

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Steve Higgins

As a teenager there was one, really important thing in my life. Music. And by music I am talking about singles. The BBC top twenty was all important to me and every Saturday night my mate Steve and I would drink beer and talk about women, sci fi and music. I bought numerous singles every Saturday. It’s very rare that I would buy something already in the charts for the full price. I’d usually wait until the record I wanted started to drop down the placings then I’d snap it up for half price. I spent a lot of time flicking through boxes of records in record stores with the end result that now, in 2016; I have a considerable amount of boxes of records. Ninety nine percent of them are singles. I was never one for albums because mostly albums let you down. You’d hear some great single by somebody new, buy their album and it rarely lived up to the single.

Singles are a whole different ball game in these days of downloading. There are those with even more records than I have but my records fill half a small room, whereas my young friends today have their entire music collection on their mobile phone or mp3 device. Not for them the allure of the soft dark vinyl or the album art or sleeve notes. No personal annotations like there were on my record sleeves with the discreet addition of the date I bought the record. The first single I ever bought was in 1973 and it was Olivia Newton-John’s version of ‘If Not For You’. Reduced to half price it was 24 pence. One day I’ll have to sit down and work out which was the last ever vinyl single I ever bought.
Here are a few of my very favourite singles.

I’m Not in Love by 10cc
Forget about the Smiths and Oasis and all those other whiney bands. 10cc were a proper Manchester band making some great music from the early seventies all the way through to 1983. There were two distinct groups within 10cc, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme and Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman. Godley and Creme left in 1976 to work with a musical device they invented called the Gizmatron and Stewart and Gouldman kept 10cc going until 1983 although the band did reform in later years. This fabulous track was recorded at Strawberry studios in Stockport and was originally an album track until public demand made the group release the track as a single.

I’ve Got the Music In Me by Kiki Dee
Most people associate Kiki Dee with Elton John and the hit single ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ but Kiki had a pretty successful solo career and this is a great up-tempo rock number.

Escape (The Pina colada Song) by Rupert Holmes
This was a hit in 1979. What I really love about it are the lyrics. It’s about two lovers who have perhaps lost each other but then find each other again.

Yesterday by the Beatles
Hey, it’s a list of great music! Of course there is going to be a Beatles track! This is really something of a Paul McCartney solo piece and it’s interesting to wonder how it might have turned out without the influence of George Martin, the Beatles’ producer but anyway, it’s a wonderful song. (I have to admit that this is one single I don’t have on vinyl though!)

Only You by Yazoo
Yazoo comprised Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke who later went their separate ways. There was a cover version of Only You by the Flying Pickets, a vocal group who were a group of out of work actors. Their version was just as good as the original and was a Christmas number one in 1983.

Into the Groove by Madonna
This was the theme from the movie ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, one of my all-time favourite films. It’s actually a great candidate film for a 21st century remake because the plot of the film which involves a girl who follows the personal ads in a newspaper would be perfect for the current internet social media age. Check out the video below with clips from the movie.

Loves Theme by the Love Unlimited Orchestra.
Love Unlimited were, if you didn’t know, Barry White’s backing band and if you’ve never heard this before just imagine one of Barry White’s tracks without him singing and you’ll get the idea. I’ve always loved this single and there used to be a bar in Manchester I used to frequent called the ‘Playground’. It was a sort of disco bar and the DJ used this as his theme song. Read more about the Playground in my novel Floating In Space.

How Long by Ace.
Now this is a serious contender for my all-time favourite single ever. Written by Ace vocalist Paul Carrack who went on to work with other bands like Mike and the Mechanics and later become a solo artist. Paul’s other great songs include ‘The Living Years’ and ‘Over My Shoulder.’

The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby and the Range.
A great eighties track dating from 1986. Bruce Hornsby was an American singer and songwriter. I’m not sure if Bruce had any other hits but this one is a great piano driven rock song that I’ve always loved.

Gonna make you a star by David Essex.
This was a hit in 1974 and I have written a post already about David and his white suit and the impact it had on me. Read more about it here. One quick word of advice though, don’t travel on a grimy old bus wearing a white suit!

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Manchester, Saturday Night, and Floating In Space

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Steve Higgins

My book, Floating In Space is set in the Manchester of the late seventies. A pint of bitter was 25 pence. There were no smartphones, no Internet and no wireless networks. In fact ‘wireless’ was an old fashioned word for the radio. I’m tempted to say that things moved at a slower pace then but that’s not true. Things just moved at a different pace. In 2015 you hear a lot about pubs closing down but back in 1977, pubs were far from closing down; at the weekend they were the place to be! That was where my friends and I met up, drank beer, listened to music and chatted up the ladies. Saturdays were the focus of our week and here’s an excerpt from Floating In Space where Stuart, the narrator, talks about the upcoming Saturday night.

Saturday night was in a lot of ways the culmination of the weekend. I always preferred it to Friday nights because things were more relaxed, there was no rushing home from work, no rushing to get your tea down your neck so you can get changed, then leg it out for the bus. Saturday, you could take your time and leisurely work up to things. Sometimes I would go out shopping and buy myself something new to wear for that evening, a shirt, or perhaps even a new pair of trousers. Then later I would have a long relaxed soak in the bath, and dress unhurriedly in my room to the tune of my favourite music. In 1977 my favourite album was Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick road’, and as I dressed I would mimic Nigel Olsson’s measured and rhythmic drumming to ‘The Ballad of Danny Bailey’, or ‘Candle in the Wind’.

There was something about Saturday nights in Manchester. Some quality of security, of expectancy, a feeling that the night and the future were going to be good. A feeling that you might just ‘get off’ with some gorgeous girl and that even if you didn’t it didn’t really matter because there was always the excitement of the people, the music, the drink, and everything else that made up the evening. And then there was always the expectancy of the next night, and the next, and on and on into the future. The past building up inside you like a great data bank, reminding you, reassuring you, like a light burning in some empty room in the corner of your mind.

The main venue that night, and on many other Saturday nights like it, was the ‘Playground’, a small disco bar on Oxford Rd in the town centre. Flickering multi-coloured spotlights rotated across the red carpeted room, which, on Fridays and Saturdays was generally packed. It had a small dance floor sunk low like a pit, where people up on the raised bar level could look down at the gyrating girls, and where also, on week day lunchtimes, a topless dancer appeared at the stroke of one o’clock to translate the soul and disco music of the time into pulsating physical motion, the eyes of jaded office workers glued to her as she did so.

My friend ‘Matty’ Edwards and I used to meet up in the Salisbury, by Oxford Rd station, have a few pints and a bit of a natter to any Regal cronies who we might find there, then make the short walk to the Playground. There was a paltry fifty pence charge to get in, the solitary bouncer was silent, but not unpleasant, and the DJ, who always began the night with ‘Loves Theme’ by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, played alternate sessions of rock, disco, and chart music. We were both mad about Jenny, the barmaid. She was lovely. She had a kind of round, open face, framed by thick blonde hair and her skin was a creamy white. She served us Worthington ‘E’ and we melted into the hubbub of people on their Saturday night out while the music of the seventies drifted through us.

Matty was tall; he had lazy, rather hayfevered eyes, and a biggish nose over thin lips. His brown hair was short and untidy and he dressed smartly, but had a sort of ‘middle of the road’ taste in clothes.
“Jenny’s looking gorgeous tonight,” he told me over his pint of Worthingtons.
We were propped up at the bar in a convenient spot where we could eye up any possible female talent, and cast a fond eye over Jenny’s appealing form.

“You’re not wrong mate.” I agreed. “I wouldn’t mind getting a grip of that myself.”
I caught Jenny’s eye and ordered two more pints of Worthington ‘E’. It wasn’t a great drink but we were tuned into it now for the rest of the evening, and anyway, I hadn’t as yet developed any clearly defined tastes in beer. The first pint I ever ordered myself was a pint of mild, and that was because I had nervously entered a Cheshire country pub after a long cycle ride and hesitatingly asked for a pint of ‘beer’.
“A beer?” asked the barmaid.
“Yes,” I replied, “A pint, please.”
“A pint of what?”

I realised, uncomfortably, that something more was required. I had thought that ‘a pint of beer’ would have been enough, but what the barmaid wanted to know was did I want bitter, or lager, or mild even? My first tentative forays into the world of the alcoholic drink were with my friend Mike Larini and it was always he who had done the ordering. What did he ask for, I thought? I couldn’t remember but down the bar the faint voice of an old man asking for half of mild drifted along to me, and so I went on to drink mild.

Later I changed to bitter, and even now I was currently considering another change as someone had given me the cheerful news that bitter ‘rots your guts’. Perhaps it had been that eternal pessimist Matty Edwards with his inside knowledge of beer. His father was a Didsbury publican, and Matty’s drink changed from pub to pub. Sometimes it was lager, sometimes bitter, but here, in the Playground, it was that now long departed brew, Worthington ‘E’.

You can read on and find out what happens to Matty and Stuart on that and other Saturday nights. Click the icon below to go to my Amazon page or click the links at the top of the page to find out more about Floating In Space.

12 Chart Hits from a Decade when Pop Music was Fun!

Posted on November 7, 2015 by Steve Higgins

quotescover-JPG-88 Bored by the latest music chart? Remember when the music charts were fun? Well, maybe you don’t but back in the 1970’s, the decade covered in my book ‘Floating In Space’, the music charts were a whole different ball game. Every taste of music was covered from soul to rock and back again. TV theme tunes made it into the charts, as did comedy and novelty records. Here’s a quick selection of ten of the most memorable. Can you think of any others?

Toast by Street Band (1978. Can you spot a young Paul Young?)

King of the Cops (1975)

Mr Jaws by Dickie Goodman. (1975)

Renta Santa by Chris Hill (A sort of British Mr Jaws using the same idea of music clips. 1975.)

Theme from Van Der Valk by the Simon Park Orchestra (a number 1 hit in 1973!)

Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West (Benny Hill reached the Christmas number 1 slot in 1971)

The Monster Mash (Bobby Boris Picket and the Crypt-Kickers! originally from 1962 but re-released in 1970.)

The Wombles (1974)

Convoy: C W McCall (1975)

Convoy GB By Laurie Lingo and the Dipsticks (1976)

Ugly duckling Mike Reid (Number 10 in 1975!)

Car 67 by Driver 67 (My favourite oddball hit of all time from 1978!)

Floating in Space is a novel by Steve Higgins set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information!

10 Things you didn’t know about American Pie

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Steve Higgins

Well, here’s the first thing that perhaps you didn’t know; The lyrics to American Pie, or more correctly, writer Don McLean’s sixteen page original draft of the song was sold recently at an auction in the USA for 1.2 million dollars, that’s £806,000 for us here in the UK. That’s a hell of a lot for a few song lyrics but to be fair, American Pie has the most interesting and fascinating lyrics of any pop song ever.

American Pie debuted in 1972 and reached number 2 in the UK charts. I didn’t really get interested in music until 1973 when I started buying singles but also, in that same year, a magazine was launched in the UK called ‘The Story of Pop’ and in one of the issues there was a lengthy article about the song and what it meant and ever since then I’ve been fascinated by the lyrics and what they may or may not mean.

The day the music died

This is generally thought to refer to Buddy Holly’s sad death in 1959 at the age of 22. Holly was only at the beginning of his career and would have gone on to greater success. Even so, he was inducted into the rock n roll hall of fame in 1986.

The Jester

The Jester is Bob Dylan and the coat he borrowed from James Dean can be seen on the cover of Dylan’s album ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.’

The King

The King is of course the King of rock n roll, Elvis Presley, and it was his crown that the Jester stole when the King was looking down.

The beginning of the song looks back to a golden time for Don McLean, the fifties and the birth of rock n roll and artists like Presley and Holly. The sixties gave birth to a new freedom for young people and it was expressed in music and in the use of drugs like marihuana. No wonder the ‘half time air was sweet perfume!’

The Sergeants played a marching tune

The Beatles are the Sergeants, fresh, no doubt, from their Sergeant Pepper album.

I saw Satan laughing with delight, the day the music died

Jack Flash is the Rolling Stone’s Mick Jagger and it is he that McLean sees as Satan. ‘No angel born in hell could break that Satan’s spell.’

This part of the song refers to the Rolling Stones’ concert at Altamont Speedway in northern California. The event was a free one and was anticipated as a sort of ‘Woodstock west’. Various bands played including Santana, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and The Grateful Dead. The fans however, were stoned on drugs and drink and the atmosphere deteriorated, so much so that the Grateful Dead declined to play. The local chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang were hired, supposedly, to take care of security but they later denied this and said they had been promised $500 dollars’ worth of beer merely to keep people away from the stage.

During the concert a fan by the name of Meredith Hunter was killed by a Hells Angel. Hunter had tried to get on the stage during the Stones performance and the Hells Angels had pushed him away. Hunter returned and pulled out a revolver from his jacket. Hells Angel Alan Pissaro charged Hunter; pushed the gun aside and stabbed him. The incident was caught by a film crew which helped Pissaro’s self-defence plea later on in court. Pisarro was acquitted. The clock had turned full circle from the innocence of the fifties to the disillusionment of the late sixties and Don Mclean’s classic song is a wonderful and lyrical evocation of the times.

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Four Random Thoughts on a Sun Lounger

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Steve Higgins

One

Lying on a sunbed under a blue sky and a hot sun must be one of the most relaxing and therapeutic things I can think of. The only sound is the rippling of the water in the heated pool and the rumbling of my own thoughts and I am thinking that as I write this it’s the last day of my holiday and in a few days time I’ll be back at work again, ploughing through a thousand e-mails, if not more. Tomorrow someone else will be sitting here, in my villa, in my seat, drinking wine from my glass and contemplating the blue sky that I so love. I particularly like the heated pool and it has been great to swim every day and my fitness levels must have improved. A few years back I hurt my neck and it’s hard for me to twist and take a breath in the water so what was so good for me was that I was able to swim the whole length of this rather small pool in one breath. When we stayed in Portugal last year and had a big pool I was struggling to get to the other end underwater!

Two

One other thing that I enjoy when lying in the sun is listening to music on my MP3 player. As much as I have embraced technology I have been a bit of a late starter when it comes to MP3 players. It was only about two or three years ago that I changed from a car with a tape player to one with a CD player and since then I have had to start making CDs to play when I’m motoring rather than the tapes I’ve been making ever since cassette tape recorders appeared in the early seventies. Of course, once the CDs are copied to your PC it’s a pretty easy matter to then pop them onto your MP3 player. Quite recently I came across some software that has enabled me to digitise some of my old tapes and vinyl records. One of my favourite tapes was something I concocted over thirty years ago and has soundtrack music from my favourite films and TV shows along with some of my favourite dialogue too, things like Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, James Garner and Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, and Michael Caine in Alfie. It’s almost surreal to lie here under the warm sun listening -not to the latest downloads but to a compilation I put together over thirty years ago!

Three

This is a lovely villa, near to the bars and restaurants and from the balcony I can see the flickering of the flags on the boats in the harbour. At our favourite bar the Café Beruggo, the staff turned out in force to say goodbye which was really nice. Of course the last days of a holiday are always sad and it’s hard to hand over the property to the next holiday maker. It was just as hard when I was much younger and the holidays of my childhood were spent in rented caravans in places like Skegness, Prestatyn, Blackpool and Rhyl. I remember one such holiday when my brother and I ran excitedly through the caravan park following instructions on the lines of ‘go to the third row, turn left and your caravan is at the end with the red roof.’ Well, we went past lots of modern looking caravans, turned left but the one at the end was an old van, looking for all the world like one of those caravans you see seemingly abandoned in some corner of a farmer’s field or on a construction site. That couldn’t be our van? Surely not! When my dad tried the key and it worked, we entered into this old and rather dingy caravan in a state of disappointment and settled down for our week’s holiday. It was so ancient that it had gas lights that were lit by a match. The van filled with that aroma of calor gas that I always liked and I remember playing cards and board games at night lit by the glow of those lamps. Those were the days when Mum booked the holiday from a classified advert in the Manchester Evening News so we never knew what to expect. That particular caravan was a disappointment but there were others that she booked that were wonderful.

Four

One final thought on caravans. Once, a few years ago, Liz and I stopped for a few days at a caravan park in France. Our van was opposite the touring section and I remember one day, sitting in my deck chair in the sun reading a book when a foreign motor home trundled over and parked up opposite. The motor home was towing a small car which was unhooked and parked. Then a huge awning was wound out from the motor home, a ground sheet dropped down, and various items of garden furniture appeared. Not long after that our new neighbour rolled out something that looked like a circular wheelie bin. As I gazed on over the rim of my paperback the top of the object opened and a huge satellite dish that surely must have been NASA surplus stock was raised and aimed at some distant TV station. The Germans had arrived.

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Quiz night, Frank Ifield and a very Tricky Customer

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Steve Higgins

Years ago a very tricky customer on my one man bus gave me seventy pence in penny coins for his bus fare. He thought this was pretty funny at first but I can be just as tricky so I gave him seventy penny tickets in return. He wasn’t amused.

I was tempted to save that gem to the end of the blog to finish with something of a bang, but what the heck, using it at the beginning enables me to link one tricky customer to another and to explain further, I’m referring to Mike, our very tricky pub quizmaster.

Mike runs the quiz night at the Lord Derby in St Annes. Liz and I are not accomplished quiz people but between us we have a fair knowledge of most things and when it comes to music we both have our ‘specialist’ areas. Mine is the 1980s and Liz is pretty good with the 1970s. Neither of us are that great with the sixties though (we’re both far too young) but it’s even harder when you have a tricky quiz master to contend with.

The quiz starts off as usual with the picture round. Twenty five pictures of famous and not so famous people and always portrayed in the picture sheet at their very worst so as to make it so much harder to guess who they are. I have to say we are pretty good at this round but there are always the problem faces and sometimes we have to barter with other teams (tell me number four and I’ll tell you number fifteen!)

On one occasion I was foxed by a picture of a football manager but I was pretty certain he was an Italian. I texted my friend Andy ‘Tell me some Italian football managers who manage a UK team!’ Andy gave me various options, none sounded right but I chose one. The guy turned out to be Jose Mourinho, a football manager from Portugal! Sometimes, no knowledge at all is better than a little! Oh well, another point lost.

The next part is the music quiz. Ten decades and two tracks for each decade. Our quiz master will usually give us a bit of a clue so he’ll throw in two numbers to help us with the years. Now on the particular occasion I want to talk about he gave us 1 and 7 so the first year would be 1961, the next 1967 then 1971 and so on. Now, and this is pretty important, Mike mentioned that as usual, the year he is after is the year of highest chart placing. Starting to get a hint of his trickiness? I thought so!.

We quickly identified the two sixties tracks, Del Shannon and the hit single ‘Runaway’ and the Kinks with ‘Waterloo Sunset.’

So, all the sixties tracks out of the way so we could concentrate on the others and in this endeavour we usually invite John and Kurt, two young guys in their twenties to our table for their up to date music knowledge. (You can see how ruthless we are!)

Frank Ifield

However, our wily quiz master had set a trap because the final track he played was another sixties release, Frank Ifield and the yodelling song! We should have been ready for it really because, as I’ve said, Mike made much of the importance of the year of highest chart placing, however, we were snookered. I personally thought Runaway had been a re-release and we changed our answers but the sad truth is that Frank Ifield’s single ‘She taught me how to Yodel’ was re-released in 1991 and was a bigger seller then than in the sixties.

Oh well, no barrel of ale on that occasion. We’ll be back next Thursday for another shot.

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Music and the Fifty Year old Teenager

800px-nadelaufplatte Many years ago in my mid-teens I was in Manchester doing pretty much what I have always done, then and now, whenever I have free time on a Saturday, either looking at records in a music store or looking at books in a book shop.

In 2014 there are not many record stores left; the whole culture of buying records is a different ball game these days, downloading instead of taking home a hard physical copy. You might be thinking hey: haven’t we had this blog already? Yes but the other day I went on to talk about James Dean, today I want to carry on with music.

As a teenager Saturday afternoons meant one thing to me, going into town, probably Manchester, and flipping through records and books. 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. 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 had become 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 disapeared 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 a 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. The strange thing is, my teenage counterparts in 2014 probably have a similar size collection only without the physicality. A huge stack of music kept on a hard disc or MP3 device, kept forever in cyberspace. 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 shed load of CD’s I’ve picked up over the years and I’ve gradually started to use my MP3 player, especially on holiday and I even have fun making up playlists 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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