Seventies music part 1

One thing I remember truthfully from our childhood is the pleasure we had in pop music. We loved the charts; we took a great interest in what was going up and what coming down. When we got the technology, we recorded from the radio so that we could play our favourites over and over again.

Then when we became more sophisticated we looked back and said: "Oh - all that rubbish! Thinking of David Cassidy and Donny Osmond, the Sweet and the Bay City Rollers (none of them our scene) (but slightly forgetting how much we had loved Slade and David Bowie).

But even the bread and butter of the charts were pretty good. One staple was Elvis Presley, in the years when he was often in residence in Las Vegas. He would release a song, it would climb up the charts to the top ten, or even the top five, and then it would go down again, and no sooner had it disappeared than, regular as clockwork, the next one would appear. So we had Burning Love, Until it's time for you to go, I Just Can't Help Believin', Promised Land - and we particularly enjoyed it if he slurred his words - we all did impressions of slurring-words-Elvis - he was part of the furniture and  at the same time we enjoyed him. But recently I have re-evaluated all those songs and put them on the jolly old iPod. Elvis, and his musicians, and his song-arranger, were brilliant.

Another thing that was brilliant, and we didn't know it at the time, was the quality of the standards. The standards are songs like "Yesterday" - songs that every professional singer covered because they were popular. They were songs you get bored of because if Tony Bennett sang it so did Frank Sinatra and Matt Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald and Jack Jones and Perry Como and Harry Secombe. Honestly. They'd pop up on the telly and you'd recognise the song and go, "Oh, not that again!" and go out of the room. One of the very popular ones was "The Impossible Dream" from "Man of La Mancha" - great the first couple of times you hear it but then ridiculously grandiose and unbearably dramatic. Some singers absolutely killed it.

The funny thing is that yesterday I heard the Impossible Dream anew, a woman called Linda Eder singing it with real conviction - and I thought  - I'd like to hear a man sing that - no offence to Linda - a different kind of vibe - I looked it up on Wikipedia to see who had covered it. Well, dear old Elvis, of course, was amongst the many others - so I tried his version on iTunes. You can preview the same song by different singers - and then choose - I chose Elvis doing a workmanlike version for a Las Vegas audience - a version very disciplined by the tempo - as though he were doing it by numbers - but the tenderness in his voice was extraordinary - tears were springing into my eyes - even though this was a middle aged crooner churning out a standard in two minutes thirty - and this is the wonderful thing about the passing of time - old things become new again, and re-evaluation is possible.

I was going to put a link to it here but it's already lost its magic for me - it was so fleeting...

I read the other day: on the telly the seventies is all strikes and crappy décor - but most people who were young then will tell you - the seventies were great fun to live through! And power cuts were nothing to our parents - they had lived through a war - they just bought packets of candles and cursed the government.

In the most avant garde circles, the sixties were the time of liberation, but not until the sevenies did liberation come to the suburbs and the market towns. Which was confusing of course, because our parents threw all their old ideas and repressions out of the window and went quite crazy, but generally speaking it was a fun time.