Thursday 2nd March

How can we begin to explain to the ‘i-pod’ generation what music, our Music, was like back then in 1962.  There was no music anywhere for a start. Can you imagine that?  Nothing at all on the television and precious little on the radio, and the Wireless was another adult-operated machine anyway; Harriet and Jane were never allowed to switch on the Wireless, that was their Dad’s prerogative. Transistor radios were so new and expensive that most homes still had a large wooden family Wireless with incomprehensible dials and stations marked on them like Berlin or London or Hilversum; and a switch where you could have Long or Medium or Short wave.  AM and FM hadn’t been invented back then.  The BBC was the only broadcaster in England, and the Light Programme was the nearest thing to Pop anyone could hear at all, and that was a long way from real Music, believe me.

No-one had record players, though The Wilkinsons did have a hand-wound Gramophone, which was as big as a sideboard with a big horn speaker.  This was hardly ever played and again this was parent’s property.  They did have a few records, but these were mostly old Jazz 78’s from the forties; forty-five rpm discs were the new thing, but hardly anyone had these either, and anyway they wouldn’t play on their old Gramophone.   Phil even had a couple of Elvis records, still on 78, and worth a fortune now of course, but the girls didn’t really get Elvis, or didn’t back then – (and while yes, okay he had a great voice, and Heartbreak Hotel etc: had something,) but Elvis never grabbed them like The Beatles did; besides, he was their parents generation’s sound – beat music was their own.

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The girls used to go on and on about the Beatles.  It was Beatles this, and Beatles that, and Jane would cut every photo of them out of the papers and stick them in a scrap book.  Harriet went one stage further and started to stick photos all over the walls of her bedroom, and not just the Beatles.  Harriet was far more interested in everything that was around her and would bring home magazines to read all the time and not only the usual pop stuff but even such serious titles as ‘Life’ and ‘Paris Match’; she got her friends at school to give them to her when their parents had finished with them.  June never knew what she was up to, she wasn’t exactly forthcoming and she had learnt early on not to ask.