I’m the youngest of six children. I’ve figured that because of this, in my early years, I always wanted to be a be more grown up, more like my brothers and sisters. And to like more grown up things. When the children in my class were going an almighty bundle on Donny (Osmond), David (Cassidy) and Gary Glitter, I had already nailed my colours to David Bowie’s mast and by the time I was 11, Mott The Hoople were my favourite band ever. Looking back, maybe I should have been practising my Subutteo technique, but “Silver Machine” by Hawkwind was always more inviting and sitting off playing your siblings records is somewhat greater than anything I could think of. Despite my self-styled pre-teenage sophistication, other than the soul, and club music my brothers and sisters played, all the music that I knew was on Top Of The Pops, in the top 20. There seems to be a discernible point where my discovery of the outside world became tangible. That realisation that all you know can be fitted onto the end of a drawing pin and that the world you inhabit is microscopic and barely visible to the outside world.
I listened to Radio Luxembourg all the time, every night – it was (an..?) essential part of the day. From seven in the evening till way past bedtime, it would weave its sonic magic in and out of the airwaves, playing you the wonders of the pop world from some godforsaken outpost of human understanding. And it worked, it drew me in, it became good company for my moments of solitude. Everything about Fab 208 – as it was called in the early seventies – oozed difference. While they would play exactly the same records as wonderful Radio One, they would also playlist records that would only get occasional plays on the BBC. They also playlisted records that were in the American top 40, records that would never get played elsewhere. This added to its uniqueness – the feeling that this radio station is being operated just for the benefit of my insatiable thirst for new pop.
The tune that tripped my wire, so to speak, was I Saw The Light by Todd
Rundgren. They played it relentlessly on Luxembourg – had they not, I would never have known it existed. It explains that initial rush of falling in love and being in love in a way I still don’t fully understand, with a gooey loveliness that’s kept me warm for over forty years. It’s fucking awesome, and it carried pop music to somewhere I never thought it could go in 1974, and that was just outside the top twenty. “I Saw The Light” was top 5 on the Fab 208 chart and as such warranted heavy rotation. Night after night, my new found outside world would speak to me in a language I understood – the language of classic, timeless pop music that would stay with me forever. I gathered coins from me mother and sisters and I set off into the wilds of
deepest Garston – to De Carle Records, on my own, for the first time. It was 1974 and the journey had begun. Even if I wanted to have backed out, I couldn’t have -the hook was in and the lure too great. A lifetime of slavish devotion to pop was just about to begin. I had no idea that it would consume my life and turn the inside of my head into a virtual jukebox of enormous proportions.
The actuality was greater than the expectation – a 7” single, on Bearsville
Records. And it belonged to me, just like tomorrow, apparently. I played both sides to death for weeks. This single transaction had elevated me – as far as I was concerned – into the same strata as those who liked Genesis and Yes. I could, if I saw fit, pontificate about music that wasn’t in this week’s top 20, set myself apart from everybody else of my age that I knew. And this, it seems, is exactly what I have done, tirelessly since early 1974. I became the teenage expert of music that wasn’t in the Top 20 that week. Of all my minor achievements, I consider that the greatest. For a few hours, it even made me popular at school.
Todd Rundgren- I Saw The Light. Bearsville K15502. April 1972.
bernie@happening-things.com 