Tuesday, June 30, 2009

I remember my Sony Trinitron: Stylish cube design with the best picture quality ever.

I remember Kwai Chang Cane and not understanding why people thought he looked Chinese. Rest in peace, David Carradine.

I remember the TV Clinic in Worcester Park and the lost feeling I used to have when I left my television to be fixed – which it usually was.

I remember whirling round like a dervish at the Louise’s last gig in Gander Green Lane.

I remember Bazooka Joe bubble gum. It came wrapped in a little comic.

I remember taking our new kittens to the vet and not understanding how she could say Issey was a she without so much as a peek at her private parts. We had convinced ourselves that Issey was a boy because she bossed Padstow around so much. Anyway we asked how she could tell and she said, “All tortoiseshells are female”.

I remember reading, probably in the Melody Maker, a quote from Scott Walker about Neil Young, just after his first solo album had been released, saying how great Young’s “prose” was. It seemed to me that Walker had misunderstood the back of the album cover, which has part of the lyrics – “I was chopping down a palm tree etc” - of The Last Trip To Tulsa printed as prose on it, and that Walker therefore wasn’t as intelligent as he was cracked up to be.

I remember cycling past a dead badger lying in the road just outside Chapel Amble, and thinking it looked as if it was screaming.

I remember boys at school thinking ginger beer was a really cool idea – we were discussing it at the bus stop at Hampton Court on our way back from games - and I seem to remember Andy Mackie being involved so we are talking about age 12-13 here. I think they had a recipe/demonstration on Blue Peter.

I remember a friend of mine insisting her baby was conceived within wedlock even though the baby was born about seven months after she got married.

I remember interviewing a couple of musicians who asked me not to mention that they lived together, because that sort of thing was not allowed ‘back home’ in Ireland.

I remember asking for, and being given, The Jackson 5’s Greatest Hits, for Christmas the December I got married – I think it was from Val, my first wife’s step-sister. This might be a false memory because it was released a year earlier. But wanting, and getting, the record was real. I also remember being bowled over by the Thriller video. And finally I remember – last Friday – checking the front pages of all the newspapers at the local garage, and all of them referred to Michael Jackson as the King of Pop, none of them as Wacko Jacko. The Sun called him Jacko but that was only due to space constraints. I was very pleased that all the Fleet Street editors had resisted the temptation and treated him as a human being who’d just died at 50. By Sunday of course it was no holds barred.

I remember when JazzFM started playing more soul than jazz and eventually changed its name to SmoothFM. But at about that time theJazz appeared on DAB radio – heaven! Didn’t even bother with DJs rambling on between tracks. Then it got successful, started using DJs and adverts and then – it folded. Lo and behold if the other day, while autotuning our new DAB radio for the bathroom, I didn’t come across JazzFM, which is now broadcasting on digital only, and while there is a little bit of soul and r&b in there, plays jazz. I wonder how long it will last.

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