Hi everyone – I’ve brought along some of my old record
collection for Show & Tell today; pretty cool, huh?

I kept most of my old 45’s from the ’70s as well as a few of my brother’s singles from the late ’60s: an eclectic hoard including everything from ‘In the Year 2525’ by Zager and Evans to ‘Wide Eyed and Legless’ by Andy Fairweather Low.

 For my ninth birthday in 1969, my parents bought me a white clock radio, which I covered in ‘Peace’ and ‘Love’ stickers; well, America was in the grip of Flower Power!  I put it on my bedside table, where I drifted off to sleep to some of the best music ever written – Motown!

It was the moment of my musical awakening. This is where I first heard ‘Love Child’ by The Supremes. I went around the house glibly singing it – not understanding the lyrics, of course – causing my mother to shoot me one of her looks and say, “Honey, I don’t think you outta be listenin’ to that.”

It was here that I heard Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold’, Bobbi Gentry‘s version of ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’, ‘Aquarius’ by The 5^th Dimension, ”I heard it Through the Grapevine’ by Marvin Gaye and the first single I ever bought – ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ by B.J. Thomas for the giddy price of 50 cents.

My big brother David came home one Saturday afternoon with ‘Sugar, Sugar’, by The Archies tucked under his arm, but he soon tired of it and decided to sell it. My middle brother Dale and I both wanted it but David refused, saying he would “still have to listen to it!” He sold it to a friend. I bought an equally annoying single called ‘Dizzy’ by Tommy Roe and would jump up and down on the sofa until I felt sick while listening to it: life imitating art.

My parents had a 1950s stereogram in the living room on which we could drop stack 45’s.  As my brother’s record collection grew, we could listen to four or five singles at a time. A typical selection might include ‘The Snake’ by Al Wilson, ‘Hawaii Five-O’ by The Ventures, Simon and Garfunkel‘s ‘Cecilia’, ‘Classical Gas’ by Mason Williams and the comic record ‘Gitarzan’ by Ray Stevens – which still makes me howl with laughter! Mom and Dad played their own small selection of LPs which favoured Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra and The Sound Of Music soundtrack.

Mom got so carried away with this ‘hip’ new music, she made Dale a blue corduroy shirt with a gold braid Nehru collar and paid a dance instructor to come to the house and teach us all to do the Twist, the Hitch-hiker and the Watusi.

As we moved to the UK and throughout the 1970s, my musical tastes grew and changed – as any teenager’s do. I ran the gamut of chart singles, getting ‘lost in music’  with  my friend Denise; spending countless weekends sprawled across the dining room floor swooning to David Cassidy, Marc Bolan and The Carpenters – even Morris Albert! But Motown, Philly and disco stole my heart and still have it.

So please take a moment to enjoy my little collection of 45s – I hope they make you want to get dancin’!

(Copyright: Andrea Burn 13^th May, 2021)