Before punk spewed forth its unique brand of nihilism and turned my teenage years upside down, I inhabited another world. An important musical world made up of pop hits and youth club bangers that had already upset my apple-cart, but in a much gentler way. This was my first education, the beginning of a journey that took me from the pop eyed wonder of St Christopher’s Sunday night disco head turner to this very moment as I write these words. This for me, is the age of discovery, the age of the golden years of Radio One and the otherworldly hiss and wheeze of Radio Luxembourg. All of this transcended fascinating and took me to a place I never seemed to find on the dark streets of Speke. And for the most part, what we experienced was pure pop gold. Being barely teenaged, the difficult entanglement of progressive rock was a little hard to take on board at that stage. Whereas the pop-soul of the top 40 was easily more palatable and much easier to digest. Brief and to the point, this pop made as much a statement as the more esoteric music I got into as i got older. All the music here was made before I’d ever even read the words ‘Sex Pistols’. I had just turned 15 when ‘Anarchy In The Uk’ came out, the music I’m currently staring at is the golden road to unlimited devotion.
What we have is a collection of tunes -some of them massive sellers- that you heard at the youth club disco, big sisters and brothers, K-Tel and Ronco compilations, Radio One, Radio Luxembourg. Some belters that in some quarters were deemed surplus to requirements, verboten for many years following Punk’s year zero Stalinism. A glorious period in life when the world began opening up and everything was the other side of unbelievable. x
bernie@happening-things.com 