Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you realize that you will never ever quite fit in.
It’s never more apparent than when the subject of “the music of our youth” crops up. I guess I had a different sort of youth. I didn’t go through the stoned “Yeah Man” phase, I don’t really remember the Beatles, Woodstock or Vietnam, and didn’t go through a country rock/protest song/singer-songwriter/blues/jazz phase. You see I grew up on the other side of the Atlantic, where the music of my youth was “pop” music, and where my teenage life revolved around the holy music trinity of Top of the Pops, Radio One and the Tuesday Top 40 Chart Countdown.
Imagine if you will, a country where there are only a handful of radio stations, all geared towards a mature audience, a country where there are only 3 TV channels, a country where records cost an arm and a leg. Imagine an era of major unemployment, strikes and power cuts. This is the country and the era I grew up in, 1970's Britain.
Imagine then, the dawn of a radio station for young people, one that played “pop”, (ie popular), music of all genres that young people, rather than their parents wanted to listen to. They called it Radio One and the kids loved it, I loved it and my teenage life revolved around it.
On Tuesday lunchtimes Radio One would reveal the new chart. I would dash home from school for lunch, dying to find out if Slade were higher than Sweet, if Mud had gone up or down, or if, horror upon horror, as all was revealed at 1pm, if Donny Osmond had come straight in at number 1. Then I would race back to school and tell everyone the good or bad news.
Thursday nights, (and for a while Fridays), was Top of the Pops night on TV. Everyone watched TOTP, kids to see their favourite bands, dads to see a scantily dressed Pans People strutting their stuff, and grandparents to tut tut about long-haired shirtless men wearing make-up.
The theme music was a rock guitar riff and only many years later did I naively discover it was a Led Zeppelin song. Radio 1 DJ’s would introduce the new entries and climbers of the week and of course the number 1. Sometimes they would play promos, later to be called music videos in the MTV era, or sometimes the bands would perform “live”, except they didn’t, they lip-synched very badly and played unplugged electric guitars.
It was 45 minutes of pure escapism where glam acts were followed by soul acts, and disco was followed by punk, where Chinichap ruled, where Mud performed their tightly choreographed Mud- dance, where the Quo played their 3 chords in scruffy denims, where Freddie postured in his leotard, Johnny snarled and John walked in his white suit through the white house and played the white baby grand. This was the music of my youth.
My music week would be rounded out by the Sunday evening chart countdown from 6 till 7, an hour which I blissfully spent listening to my favourite songs, on my tranny, in the meagre 3 inches of water that constituted the British weekly bath.
