Familiar tunes…

…when we were at Port Aventura, I heard a familiar tune during the Fort Frenzee stunt show and after some churning of mental gears, announced “Green Acres”. Karen looked at me blankly, as she is 6 or 7 years younger than me, depending on the time of year.

I recall it as standard 60′s American import TV fare, along with Beverly Hillbillies, I love Lucy, Bonanza, Car 54 where are you?, Get Smart, Lost in Space, The Munsters, Bewitched and Rowan & Martin’s laugh in.

Checking this YouTube clip, I now realise that I never ever saw it in colour as we didn’t get our first colour TV until 1970 and it was a hand-me down from my Dad’s Boss. (It had preset buttons for mono and a tuning dial for colour). Only BBC2 was in colour at the time on 625 line UHF- ITV and BBC were still on 405 lines VHF. We did enjoy watching UFO though, with the purple haired girls.

THE KING AND I

Welshcakes from Sicily here, with a post that has nothing to do with Sicily whatsoever:

I used to be able to recite Elvis Presley’s army number. I don’t know what good I thought this feat would do me, but my Dad thought I might have made a passable spy because I could commit this kind of information to memory. [To this day, I don’t have to write telephone numbers down.] Knowing and regurgitating useless facts about our pop idols was just something we did in those days of the Romeo and Bliss girls’ comics.

Elvis Presley entered my life after Tommy Steele and by this time we had 45 rpm records that you could stack on the spindle of your record player. I would watch entranced as the stylus arm automatically made its way across, used its side to knock a record onto the turntable then lowered itself onto the edge of the record to play it. Our record players didn’t need to be wound up any more [yes, I remember the gramophone!] and they were portable – not in the sense that an MP3 player is today, of course – but portable enough to put them on the floor in our bedrooms and stretch out beside them listening to and dreaming about Elvis or whoever else was in the “top ten”. It’s hard to explain to younger generations the freedom we felt that this gave us: it made the music “ours”, you see; we could listen to it in private or just with our friends; we didn’t have to share it with our parents [who knew nothing about anything, did they?]

Elvis, of course, outlasted them all: Every time I received a record token as a present or saved up 7/6d [pre-decimal British currency] I was off down to the record shop in Stapleton Road and time and time again I came back with an Elvis recording because they always made it to number one in those days.

And in some ways, I think Elvis was my generation’s first anti-hero [although the world had been assured by no less a personnage than Ed Sullivan that Elvis was a "fine, home-lovin' boy"]: he wasn’t baby-faced like Cliff Richard , ill-looking like Billy Fury or seemingly undernourished, as Adam Faith appeared in those days [though the latter became a thoroughly fanciable actor in a later incarnation]. The older “square” generation [though not my parents] were scandalised by Elvis’s pelvis twisting and you only had to look at those shadows under his eyes to swoon! [My Dad roared with laughter at Elvis’s pelvis antics in the film Love Me Tender, which was supposed to be set in the nineteenth century!] We needed anti-heroes, perhaps, because we had been brought up on so many tales of the unmatchable heroes of WW2.

I saw all the Elvis films and couldn’t have told you even five minutes after they finished what had happened in any of them, for I spent their running time snogging in the back row with my boyfriend Clive. All these films were fairly plotless vehicles for Elvis’s voice, anyway. Blue Hawaii was the first Elvis LP my Dad bought me and I still have it, along with the 45s.

How I cried over that version of Are You Lonesome Tonight?, absurd though the spoken part is: “Someone said ‘the world’s a stage’”; would it have sounded much less romantic to have said ‘Shakespeare’? Or was that too “square”? And that diction! “I wonder if… you’re lonesome tonight…” I played it over and over again after the break-up of my two-year romance with Clive and even now, when I hear it, I think of a “bright summer’s day when he kissed me and called me sweetheart” .

Then suddenly along came a group called The Beatles and the sound was unlike anything any of us had ever heard before . They looked different too – those strange suits and all that fuss over what were quite innocent haircuts. We transferred our loyalties to the sound of Liverpool and the Elvis releases stopped becoming automatic number ones. I’m ashamed to say that some of us forgot him, for a while. But he was still there, in the background and, older, fatter and often drugged up, he started to stage come-back concerts. I didn’t go for the religious songs he recorded in those later years but I loved the newer versions of the ballads – and strangely enough, my generation discovered, so did most of our mothers! I am listening to the “Love Songs” CD now, as I write.

My favourite Elvis songs? Always on my Mind – the line about “little things I should have said and done” always makes me cry and I think of my Mum; Anything that’s Part of You because I’m such a sentimental hoarder! And Return to Sender because it still makes me want to get up and jive!

When, thirty years ago today, I heard that Elvis had died I couldn’t believe it. It seemed that part of the “punctuation” of my youth had gone and of course it was so sad: all that money; a still fine voice; women who adored him all over the world; yet the king of rock ‘n’ roll had been so unhappy, walled up in Graceland finding solace in goodness knows what. So much has been written about that final decline that I am not going to go into it here, except to say that the death of his twin at birth may have had much more effect on him than we realise and certainly affected his relationship with his mother, whose death I don’t believe he recovered from.

I miss Elvis, who most inconsiderately did not show up in a Carson City supermarket during my one visit to the USA . I imagine him as a stunningly handsome older man, portly perhaps, but with a shock of white hair and still those haunting eyes, wowing the ladies as ever. But it was not to be. Perhaps he would never have been content. Who knows? And like another icon who died twenty years later during August, I don’t think Elvis ever knew how much he was loved.

“No reason left for me to live
What can I take, what can I give?
When I’d give all of someone new
For anything that’s part of you.”

BLAME IT ON TOMMY STEELE

“Shades” often posts about music and I have nothing like his knowledge of bands or stage experience. I am, as this post shows, of an earlier era but he asked me to guest-blog and this is my first idea for subject matter that is vaguely in keeping with his own:

One dull, grey day in the late 1950s I was sitting in the living room behind our shop in Stapleton Road, Bristol and I was sulking over something. Probably I had had an argument with Auntie Mabel [Dad’s aunt who lived with us]; she was always telling me to be quiet while she had her nap and I just wouldn’t!

It was about 6pm on a Saturday and Dad came in. He was trying to cheer me up [he was always on my side] and it wasn’t working: “Come and see what’s in the shop”. “Don’t wanna come in the shop!” “Come for a walk with daddy.” “Don’t wanna come for a walk!” “Let’s play with your dolls”. “Don’t wanna play!” Finally, in a last-ditch attempt to establish peace, he said, “Well, let’s watch teley then”. “Don’t wanna watch teley!” “Yes, you do; Tommy Steele will be on in a moment.” [You guessed it]: “Don’t wanna watch Tommy Steele!” [though I had no idea who he was.]

But Dad had had enough and he switched the TV on anyway: It was the first time I watched Six-Five Special , presented by Pete Murray and Josephine Douglas and something about the music and the banter got me interested. Then all of a sudden, this young man with a shock of blond hair and a guitar bounded onto the stage and I was really excited! He exuded energy and, I suppose, an innocent kind of sex-appeal. I had got over my mood all right – I was hooked on Tommy and rock ‘n’ roll!

At around the same time, the streets started to look brighter; girls a few years older than me began to wear pretty, very full skirts, people were talking about “teenagers” and a new colour, called “shocking pink” was everywhere. I loved it!

The living room was redecorated in a style that was called “contemporary”: I remember we had plain, light wallpaper on three walls and the other had paper with a bamboo pattern. This was thought to be very daring. Pictures and knick-knacks were banished [I think Dad’s generation had at last started to rebel against the clutter and heavy furniture left over from their own parents' era]; the dark banisters [which we would now die for!] were boarded over and all the woodwork was painted white.

The drab old draper’s shop down the road closed and reopened as a department store in the centre of Bristol; a jeweller’s where you could buy cheap costume jewellery opened a few doors down, and then two record shops appeared in Stapleton Road.

The sixties had not yet arrived, but the war was finally over!

You know, I blame all my troubles with men on Tommy Steele!

I should say it’s Welshcakes posting as I can’t get the “posted by” thing on at the end.