My Top One Hundred

A few weeks ago my brother suggested that Dave and I send my nephew Rory some music for his birthday, on the basis that it would broaden Rory’s musical horizons at a time when he’s getting quite into playing instruments as well as listening to music. It was his 10th birthday, and he’d also requested the Wii music game which he’d enjoyed playing while visiting us a few weeks earlier. My brother’s tastes revolve around his love for the guitar and, as observed from a big sister’s perspective, seemed to move from Black Sabbath, Motorhead and loud heavy metal, through Rush to the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughn, Eric Clapton, Richard Thompson and the blues. My tastes suffice to say, don’t.

As for Dave and I, we decided to make a compilation CD each, as our tastes are very different and for mine, I thought I’d compile an A to Z of some of my favourite performers. This blog isn’t really concerned with what I included, but more the fact that it gave me a rare excuse to delve into my ‘record’ collection which is all neatly filed away in iTunes. It struck me that, although most of what I like is the music I was listening to in my late teens and early twenties, I have music that represents many of the periods of my life, and indeed defines some of them in my memory. So I thought I’d commemorate my life in music so far with a playlist, and this - a nice rambling blog about what the songs all meant to me, and when.

My top 100





Let’s start at the very beginning, as they say in The Sound of Music, a very good place to start. When I was born, the number one songs in the charts were House of the Rising Sun by The Animals in the US, and You Really Got me by The Kinks in the UK. I was born in Wales, as everyone knows, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have their own Top of the Pops, even in 1964! Early years aren’t generally renowned for shaping musical tastes, although I guess most people are influenced to some degree by what their parents and older siblings play. When I was between 4 and 6 years old my father was posted to Malta and 2 songs sum up that period for me. Apparently part of my early schooling was being taught to sing the Hallelujah chorus, something my mother discovered when hearing me sing it in the bath one day – it’s something I revisited at school when I joined the choir at age about 12, and it’s my favourite piece of choral music to this day. The other great feature about Malta, apart from its quirky education system, is the proximity of almost everywhere to the sea. We had a small motorboat which we used to go out in occasionally, my mother, younger brother and I sitting engulfed in life-jackets on the boat bottom I seem to recall, while my dad steered. And my over-riding impression is of spray and the sound of us singing the Peter, Paul and Mary song Daddy’s taking us to the zoo tomorrow! I’m not certain to this day whether Malta even has a zoo, let alone whether we went.







We returned to England in 1970 with my youngest brother having just been born (he was 6 weeks old when we flew home) but it’s not for another 4 years or so that any music makes an impression on my memories.






The songs that retain affection from my earliest viewings of Top of the Pops are King Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas – such a classic, and Sugar Baby Love by the Rubettes with their ridiculous white berets.

It wasn’t until a couple of years after this that I began to acquire records. My first single, purchased as I recall on a trip to Worthing to visit my grandmother in 1976, was Don’t Give Up On Us Baby by David Soul. Mum bought Leo Sayer’s You Make Me Feel Like Dancing and dad (the only time I ever recall him buying a single) bought Julie Covington's Don't Cry For Me Argentina at the same time. I know my brother's first single was Turning Japanese by The Vapors which is terribly cool but I can't do much about that now! I must confess, here, that I’ve just wiki’d Leo Sayer, and did you know he isn’t really called Leo? His name is Gerard. And since he was born in May, it isn’t even his star sign! Astonishing. Maybe it had something to do with his great mane of hair, hm! My first 2 albums were Darts by Darts, and Showaddywaddy Greatest Hits. One was the first LP I was bought, I think it was the Showaddywaddy one. The other I bought myself.

Apart from these, the music that filtered through from what my parents were playing included a number of things that have stuck with me, notably Joan Armatrading whose stuff I have always loved since listening to her eponymous album with the fantastic Love and Affection single on it. I remember month after month of sitting at our dining room table doing homework with this playing in the background. The other music I remember hearing at home, and which Dave downloaded for me fairly recently is Prokofiev’s Peter and The Wolf. The new version has one minor bonus over the version we used to listen to (it is narrated by David Bowie) but it is an altogether magical musical experience with it’s twittering bird, stealthy wolf and the booming bravado of the hunters.

Around this time I joined the Girl Guides and was lucky enough to be going to my first camp. In line with what I assume the older Guides had requested as a theme for the camp, each tent of girls was named for one of the members of the big group of the time – the Bay City Rollers! I was in Woody tent, although I only lasted a night before being taken ill with mumps and having to go home. To this day I don’t know how the tartan rockers theme was planning to emerge during the week, although I had packed a pair of jeans with tartan turn-ups to wear.

By the mid-70s, of course, I was at secondary school, a time when you begin to find that there are other types of music than those your parents like, know or even approve of. Unfortunately for me, with hindsight, I was in Norfolk at this time and I was in my early rather than late teens as the punk scene emerged and music became bright and vibrant for the first time. Obviously I was never going to be able to pop to London to catch The Clash, or nip into Malcolm McLaren’s shop to buy a Sex Pistols T-shirt. In fact my first actual gig-going experience had taken place when I was about 11 or 12, at the invitation of my then best friend Wendy. The King’s Lynn area newspaper girls and boys (of which she was one) were invited to see the phenomenal talent that is Desmond Dekker perform. I seem to recall this was in the West Runcton town hall, but that can’t be right can it? I also recall he was a titchy little fella who performed on a small podium and in an all-in-one leather jumpsuit affair in bright scarlet red. Lucky I hadn’t yet reached an impressionable age, or who knows what dreadful effects this might have had. One thing it did engender was a deep abiding love for the song The Israelites. Thanks again to wikipedia I have just discovered that Mr Dekker is the Desmond referred to in The Beatles song Ob-la-di ob-la-da which begins ‘Desmond had a barrow in the market-place’. Astonishing!

This leads me, coincidentally to another major influence on my musical history. I can’t narrow down exactly how old I was when I got my piano, but I do know that my dad bought me The Beatles complete songbook for Christmas 1976 – and in it anticipated the ‘recovery of your left hand’. This was not, as you might think, a reference to some terrible accident, but in view of the fact that for several months I had been bashing about on the piano, purely using my right hand to play tunes. I did begin to take lessons after this, with a friend of my mum but mostly learned to play by taking out my Beatles book evening after evening and every Sunday morning for months and playing the songs I knew, and eventually even several I hadn’t heard The Beatles versions of. Of course Hey Jude was a favourite, although it was by no means one of the tunes I could play the best. During my teens I also played the guitar (although ridiculously my favourite thing to play on it was The Entertainer by Scott Joplin, a piano piece) and, thanks to inheriting one from my maternal grandfather, the violin.

Taking lessons with the violin came about due to a couple of years singing in the school choir standing behind rows of girls scratching and squeaking their instruments through the murdering of several school concert classics and thinking that surely I could do better. This brief flirtation with a career as a competent violinist was, either fortunately or not depending on your view of the likelihood of my succeeding, curtailed due coming at a period in my life late enough in my teens to be cut short by the discovery of boys as an alternative after-school pursuit.I rarely went to discos, although there were some, as I already felt that they were somehow deeply uncool. Our local town had a few outdoor ones which were a mass of gipsy skirts and lots of dodgy disco music. I have fairly fond memories of such things as Kool and the Gang’s Ladies Night, and Tavares but never really got the point of places were all you could do was look an idiot because dancing wasn’t your thing, but then neither was standing in a dark corner snogging!