Wednesday 16 January 2013

First Record

In the wake of HMV's not exactly unexpected collapse, the BBC News website is asking 'What was the first record you bought?' Most of us, I'm sure, would like to answer with something impeccably cool. Some of us might even have blocked the memory of our actual first buy in favour of something more representative of our taste and discernment. For myself, I have to confess that the first pop record I bought was the 7-inch vinyl single of (gulp, blush) Frank Ifield's I Remember You. This was the first of the Anglo-Australian yodeller's four (count them) UK number ones, all clocked up in 1962/63, years we prefer to associate with the outbreak of Beatlemania. Can anyone top my first record buy for sheer uncoolness?

16 comments:

  1. My first record was Poetry in Motion by (I think) Johnny Tillotson. On my battered second hand dansette it sounded like Oh, a tree in motion.

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  2. I can't remember my first bought record, but I remember the oldest record I ever owned--acquired, I can't remember how, sometime around 1960 at around age eleven or twelve. It was even then an old 78 rpm and very uncool. I loved it.

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  3. Peter and The Wolf was the fist ever bought for me! I remember my father arriving home with it, thinking i would learn all about The Orchestra from then on. But I didn't like the patronising story teller, nor the story. Adults often have odd ideas about what will appeal to children - it seems to me.

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  4. Revealing indeed Nige, and along with Jim Reeves, my mother's favourite. I would like to say Bill Haley's Rock around the Clock but it may have been Emile Ford and the Checkmate's 'What do you want to make those eyes at me for' said to be the longest question in pop music.
    Rock around the Clock, embedded in the movie Blackboard Jungle was a cultural quantum leap in the fifties and it's theme is as relevant today as it was then, the city as an urban jungle.

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  5. Not sure whether it was cool or uncool as I was so far up myself as a teenager that nobody could tell - but the 7" EP (which I still have) I had to save-up for was The Train and the River by the Jimmy Giuffre Three - the clarinetist + Jim Hall's guitar and the valve trombone of Bob Brookmeyer. Just played it on Spotify, and it still sounds...er....cool.

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  6. My parents bought me a variety of sing-along nursery rhyme LPs for use on the family radiogram. My parents were never big on music and the most the radio ever 'blared' was World Wide Family Favourites at Sunday lunchtime.

    But my own first official purchase was Alladin Sane by David Bowie on cassette. It was released April 13th 1973 and so when I got an exciting Phillips portable cassette player and some 14th birthday money on April 15th... the rest is history.

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  7. tommy steele, "get happy with tommy", ok?

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  8. You guys are way too cool - except perhaps you, Anonymous. No Chipmunks, no Pinky and Perky, no Russ Conway...

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  9. At the age of 11, I bought the Marvin the Paranoid Android single which was a a spinoff from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series. Strangely enough, depression and alienation have been quite prominent in my record collection - and cultural life - ever since.

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  11. "In the Year 2525" by Zager and Evans. I was 13. My Uncle Walt listened for a verse and a half before asking 'Who, pray tell, is responsible for THAT Stench in the Nostrils of God?' I tried for a long time afterwards to popularize the acronym S.I.T.N.O.G. among my friends, but I had no success with it. [typo corrected]

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  12. mine was one of those very cheap floppy clear plastic 7" records - and it was the theme tune to the spiderman cartoon.

    this one - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUtziaZlDeE

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  13. That's more like it - and it's a shame SITNOG never caught on. Maybe I'll start using it on the blog... I remember that Zager and Evans song - SITNOG seems a bit of an excessive reaction!

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  14. It was 'Guitar Boogie Shuffle' by Bert Weedon in 1959, but if my pal Vernon hadn't beaten me to it, it would have been 'Move It' by Cliff Richard and the Drifters - 1958. We wore it out; it was that lead guitar. What a sound! I'd never heard anything like it. I thought it was a 17 year old Hank Marvin, but have always wondered if it was a session man, maybe Vic Flick. I still think it's a great record.

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  15. The first records I ever owned were a couple of LPs by Adge Cutler and the Wurzels – sort of unavoidable for boys growing up in Somerset in the early 70s.

    The first I ever bought with my own pocket money was, however, a world away from Adge: Roy Wood parping away on his Krummhorn and plucking at his lute in this plangent not to say whiney attempt to win back his Dear Elaine. Hard to say what could have appealed to a 12-year-old in the autumn of 1973: I suppose I just liked the olde worlde feel of the thing and the fact that it was 25p in the bargain box at Radio House in Yeovil. I'm not even sure that I put two and two together and worked out that this was the same beardy Brummie bloke from Wizzard. It’s hardly rock ’n’ roll,l but I still sort of like it.

    After that it was the big Rak Records hits – the ones with the pretty blue label with the yacht: Mud, Sweet, Suzi Quatro. And the first long-player? Mungo Jerry’s Greatest Hits!

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  16. Adge Cutler! Mungo Jerry! Superb...

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