The Music Collection

Everyone I meet seems to have very definite musical taste and I don’t think I do. I was listening to some of a friend’s music collection today as the computer randomly chose the tracks and they all seemed very different and yet all interesting.

Dating from the days before cds, my record collection is, frankly, an embarrassment and it doesn’t help that all you have to do with a record collection is shove it in a spare room for a couple of years and it grows, like yeast. Strange things appear in it. The Pope’s Visit to Ireland. Nat King Cole’s Greatest Hits. The Original Cast Recording of the Sound of Music. The Choir of King's College Cambridge Sings Erotic Songs of the Eighteenth Century. (Oh, all right, I made that one up). I swear to you I never bought these things. Where do they come from?

My cd collection is also an embarrassment, consisting mainly of compilations that I have impulse-bought at the supermarket when fed up of buying shampoo and carrots. (No, I’m not telling you what they are). The rest, the ones I’m not ashamed of, have been given to me for birthdays and Christmases.

How did I get from being the Second Most Musical Child In The School (coughs modestly, see previous post) to this sorry state?

The first record I ever bought was Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and I bought it in a petrol station and I still have it and I still like it. But after that - - well, not much. I never went into town to buy singles on a Saturday like many of my friends because, ironically, I played in an orchestra on Saturday morning. (See previous post for self-pitying whinging about this).

Anyway, what would I play records on? We had one Dansette record player in the house and the Communist’s taste is classical and very little else, and so is my mother’s - though, apart from classical music, she likes anything she can dance to, basically. We had one comedy record: we had Val Doonican: we had Rolf Harris’s Sun Arise and we one record by the superb Flanders and Swann. Elvis, rock music, the Beatles and everything since all passed the Communist by (they still have). He knows hundreds of songs and has an excellent baritone voice – but they are mostly Revolutionary Songs of the 1930s.

Avanti, o popolo, alla riscossa
Bandiera rossa, bandiera rossa
Avanti, o popolo, alla riscossa
Bandiera rossa la trionfera.

Bandiera rossa la trionfera
Bandiera rossa la trionfera
Bandiera rossa la trionfera
Evviva il comunismo e la liberta!

I ask you, how many red flags can you get into one song?

In our house, the radio played the Home Service and we had Sing Something Simple with our Sunday tea – the Black and White Minstrel Show on the radio, succeeding triumphantly in making every song sound the same (I enjoyed singing along, mind).

If I had come home with any of the music of the day I couldn’t have faced the barrage of,

“What’s that rubbish you’re listening to? I can’t hear a single word.”

So I learned to bluff. I read the teenage magazines and could talk knowledgeably about Marc Bolan, David Bowie and even Slade and David Cassidy and the Osmonds. Only rarely did I hear any of their music. Everyone else seemed to know all about it and I don’t know how they managed it – perhaps they had their own radios.

And perhaps I could have had my own radio too, if I had thought to ask for one – but it simply didn’t enter my head and I’m not sure why. It would have seemed like a big thing to buy in those days, but my family weren’t particularly short of money and if I’d asked for a radio for Christmas I think I would have got one. I think it was more that they would have been a bit disappointed if I had taken myself off to my room to listen to music by myself: music was a communal thing in our house, even though the choices were a bit limited.

So, I did my homework, and when I’d finished my homework and fed the rabbits, I read or watched television until it was time for bed. Music never got a look in.