1973 was really a significant year for me. It was my first record buying year and the year I left school and for this week I thought I’d have another look back in the dusty avenues of my memory and see what was happening back then.
For Christmas the previous year my mother had given my brother and me a shared present. It was a portable stereo record player. At the time neither myself nor my brother were that interested in the pop charts. The first album I bought was a collection of TV theme tunes by composer John Barry. Barry wrote a number of famous tunes for both TV and the cinema. He is probably best remembered for a tune he didn’t write, the James Bond theme tune. There was actually quite a controversy over the authorship of the tune. Monty Norman is credited as the writer of the music although it was John Barry’s jazz arrangement of the theme that most people are familiar with.
Monty Norman won two libel actions against publishers for claiming that Barry wrote the theme, most recently against The Sunday Times in 2001.
The theme is used in the first Bond film Dr No and then in all the subsequent 007 films with varying different arrangements reflecting the musical tastes of the times in which the films were made. In Daniel Craig’s first Bond film Casino Royale, the theme isn’t heard until the very end of the film.
The title track from the album is the theme from The Persuaders, a TV show starring future James Bond, Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The pair played Lord Brett Sinclair and US businessman Danny Wilde who are recruited by a retired judge to fight crime. Tony Curtis drove my favourite car of all time in the series, a Ferrari Dino 246 GT. Price tag today, anything between £500,000 to a million.
In 1973 Roger Moore made his debut as James Bond in Live and Let Die. My brother and I went to see it at the cinema. He enjoyed it, but as much as I’ve always loved Roger, I wasn’t keen on his Bond films. The film’s theme song was written and performed by Paul McCartney and Wings.
What else was on TV in 1973? The pilot episode of Porridge starring Ronnie Barker was first shown on BBC1. Another great comedy series making its TV debut was Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. The series was in the news a few years ago when Rodney Bewes who played Bob sadly passed away. He had wanted to appear in a follow up to the series set in the present day with the two ‘likely lads’ as old men. Co-star James Bolam declined and in fact there was a lot of talk in the media about a falling out between the two and the pair never speaking to each other again.
Bewes died in 2017 and Bolam denied any feud telling BBC Radio, “This is what happens in acting; you work with people, you get to know them, you like them, we have a great time and the job finishes and you go off and it all starts again with other people and you can’t keep contact with everybody that you know.”.
Two series from the US that I was very fond of were MASH and Kung Fu.
MASH was a series based on a book and film about US army surgeons in Korea who worked in a mobile army hospital unit. Alan Alda played the wisecracking Hawkeye Pierce and the series ran for many years combining humour and drama in a most impressive way. It perhaps ran a few years longer than it should have done and the later episodes were not as good as the earlier ones, at least in my opinion.
Kung Fu was a cowboy western series with a twist. It wasn’t about gun slinging cowboys but about Kwai Chang Caine, a half American, half Chinese boy who is accepted into a Shaolin monastery in China and tutored in the arts of philosophy as well as martial arts. As a grown man, Caine is forced to flee to America. Cue some impressive slow-motion fights where Caine, played by David Carradine, wipes out numerous knife wielding and gun toting bad guys. Cue a load of flashback philosophising too. I loved it and looking over at my DVD shelf where I can see Kung Fu and MASH DVD boxsets; I suppose I’m still fond of those shows today.
In 1973 I bought my first vinyl singles. They were Banks of the Ohio and What is Life both sung by Olivia Newton John. I got them for half price each as they were no longer in the charts, 48 pence if I remember correctly; what a bargain! Later in the year I discovered Elton John and began buying his albums. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was the first one I ever bought.
The poster that graced my bedroom wall back in 1973
My singles collection began to pile up as my interest in music flourished. My brother and I used to tape the weekly BBC Top Twenty and in the summer holidays we were glued to my combined radio and tape deck listening to the new chart which Johnny Walker played on a Tuesday lunchtime on Radio One.
My brother later became rather jealous of my singles collection and he saw an advert in one of those pop newspapers, New Musical Express or Rolling Stone perhaps, and bought a huge collection of ex jukebox records. We had a lot of fun sorting through and playing them and we commenced what would be a lifetime of swapping records which would end up, months later of repeated scenes of me finding a record in his collection which I claimed was mine and he would counter ‘yes but I swapped that one for this one so it’s really mine!’
What was happening in the UK in 1973? Well, I vaguely remember the ‘cod wars’ which was a dispute between the UK and Iceland over fishing rights. The Royal Navy even sent frigates out to protect British vessels.
The UK joined the EEC, the forerunner of the European Union.
On the 26th March, Noel Coward died. He was in bed reading a book by one of his favourite authors, E Nesbit. I knew Noel was a great fan of Nesbit and I’m sure I had heard or read somewhere that when he died, he was reading his favourite of that author’s books, The Railway Children. A quick bit of internet research and I see that Noel died after reading Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle. Coward discovered the books as a child and revisited them many times during his life.
In 1973 President Nixon began his second term as US president and not long after he signed a peace accord with Vietnam, ending the Vietnam war.
Later in the year the Watergate scandal seemed to grow and grow and numerous people were fired by Nixon. Various others resigned and in July, it was revealed in senate hearings that Richard Nixon had installed a tape recording system in the White House.
The former Refuge Assurance building
On October 20 the so-called Saturday Night Massacre began. President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to dismiss Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Richardson refuses and resigns, along with Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Solicitor General Robert Bork, third in line at the Department of Justice, then fires Cox. The event started calls for Nixon’s impeachment. Nixon finally resigned in August, 1974.
In 1973 having left school clutching my four O levels I went for two interviews in Manchester city centre. One went really well. It was in a steel and glass modern office block with open plan working areas. I really liked the place and was hoping to get the job. Next, I had another interview at the Refuge Assurance Company on Oxford Road. The building and offices were very old fashioned and I didn’t really fancy working there. As it happened, Refuge offered me a job and I started work there a few weeks later.
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.
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 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.
One day in December 1980 I was working as a bus driver and I was driving one of our old half cab buses into Manchester. My conductor, Bob, was kept pretty busy as we took a bus load of passengers into Manchester city centre for their jobs in shops, offices and other places. At one point Bob poked his head through the little window into the cab and told me that he had heard from a passenger that John Lennon had been shot in New York. It was shocking news and when we arrived in Piccadilly, we both ran to the news stand to read the news in the morning papers. There was nothing about Lennon in any newspaper and we wondered if it had been just a mad rumour. Later when we went back to the canteen for our break, we heard the news either on the TV or the radio. Lennon had indeed been shot and was dead.
So why did Chapman shoot John Lennon? Apparently, Chapman had been a fan of the Beatles and John Lennon’s solo music but felt that Lennon had become a fake, a ‘phoney’, someone who preached peace and love to the masses while his music made him a multi-millionaire. Chapman signed out of his security job as ‘John Lennon’ on his last day of work so it is even possible that he identified so much with Lennon that the other Lennon, the fake ‘Lennon’ had to die. Chapman also claimed at other times that he shot Lennon to promote Catcher in the Rye.
Way back in the 1970’s when I was a shy gawky teenager, one of my very best friends was a big fan of the Moody Blues. Everything that ever happened to him, life, love, romance, anything and everything really, he related back to something on one of the Moody Blues’ many concept albums. I really wanted something like that, a band or musician I could relate to and follow as they created more music. Very quickly I discovered Elton John.
Stuart Sutcliffe.
Derek Taylor.
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.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 