Saturday 23rd January

It was a Ford Zodiac, a shiny chrome-gilded beast with sharp wings, a car-wide front seat and plenty of room in the back – and best of all, a fitted radio.  We used to go for runs in the car on a Sunday afternoon, especially in the summer and we always had the radio on.  Frank Ifield and Connie Francis and the occasional Elvis number, or as we drifted into the sixties “Speedy Gonzalez” and “We’re All having Fun, Sitting in the Back Seat, Kissing and a-huggin’ with Fred.” This was way before Radio 1 and we listened to The Light Programme, but it did have a few ‘pop songs’ on it.  And life might have continued in this way for years, me, mucking about in the back, trying to ignore my nuisance of a younger sister, not really listening to the music on the radio at all and dreaming of….well, just dreaming my life away really.

Then I heard them.  The Beatles.  It must have been ‘Please Please Me’ or ‘Love Me Do’ – one of the first ones anyway, they were unheard of at the time.  And suddenly music made sense.  It was that immediate for me, before The Beatles boring old rock’n’roll and then Clarity and “Music”.   Well, as it transpired it took ages until I heard the song again. How do you even begin to explain to young people what Music was like in the early sixties.  Or to be precise how little of it there was around.  No shops played music, and hardly anyone had record players.  The BBC radio played the occasional ‘pop’ record and absolutely nothing on TV.  So it was maybe a week until I heard them again on the back seat of Dad’s car.  Everyone at school was talking about them.  You had to get a transistor radio and listen to Radio Luxembourg they all said.   I had a paper round and saved enough money for a ‘tranny’ and would listen secretly under the covers as Luxemburg drifted in and out of signal.

And slowly the BBC begun to play more ‘young people’s music’ and the radio at home was always on, so I heard “Saturday Club’  and ‘Pop Go The Beatles’ at home.  Then in the mid-sixties we had ‘Ready Steady Go’ and ‘Juke Box Jury’ and eventually ‘Top of the Pops’ on the telly and you could actually see your musical heroes.

It was probably Christmas 1965 or 1966 when Dad bought me a second-hand reel to reel tape recorder and I would tape ‘Top of the Pops’ every week and listen to the tapes over and over again.  And still every Sunday we would go out in the car and we would now listen to the Chart show and I learnt every song off by heart even though it would be a few years before I got my very own record player.