Just been looking for stuff to watch and found this:
I've seen it before but tonight I feel particularly receptive to such and I'm totally loving these blasts from the past (possibly because of the amount of shit that's being broadcast on the airwaves at the moment).
When I was living it live, as a youth, the music was great ... energised, simple, rythmic, social, accessible, colourful ... all the things my parents didn't understand or like (Andy Scott's hair was 2ft too long) but OMG how I think back with such fondness to this era.
For anyone of my age (60-ish) what are your abiding memories of this era / why? What was your favourite band/song?
Mine was The Sweet, Blockbuster ... because I haven't got a clue ... ah ... ah ... ah ... oh!
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I remember pretty much everything that was in the Top 40 between 1977 and the early 1980s, maybe even a little beyond that... there were things I didn't like at the time, nowadays I like pretty much all of it.
My friends and I used to buy a bottle of cheap and very sweet Ouzo or Raki and a couple of bottles of greenish fizzy cream soda. (try it some time - yum) We opened the cream soda bottle, took a few glugs, and topped it up with ouzo. Every time it went down a bit more ouzo was added and it obviously got stronger as it was glugged and topped up but we had by then become accustomed to the strength of the almost neat spirit. If we couldn't afford ouzo, maybe because we had lost our bets on the table football, we had to make do with a demijohn of cheap strong mulberry wine or smaller bottles of orange "wine" (something like Thunderbird I suppose). We would polish off the booze then head to one of the many hotel and motel beer gardens in the avenues around the city centre that had live music, a barbecue or some other outdoor food, and strong draft beer for pennies (actually 10 cents a plastic pint cup). My friend's Father played bass in one of the bands that performed on a Saturday afternoon on the expansive pool deck of a motel and he would order us up steak rolls to soak up some of the strong cheap beer we were quaffing. Plenty of sunshine, fine-bodied ladies in wet T-shirts and bikinis, and great live bands playing covers of popular rock and dance music.
If we managed to survive the afternoon we sometimes went to a "disco" down in a basement area underneath a restaurant where the amazingly talented French waitress would often get up on the bar and dance to the live music or DJ music. It started in the early afternoon and closed around midnight and only cost about £1 to get in. It was like another world down there in the artificial light with fake rock formations, fake trees and plants, and a "river" with live fish running between the seats. If we had run out of money and couldn't pay to get into the disco we often hitch-hiked to the outskirts of town and sneaked into the stock car and speedway racing, or the drag racing at the other side of the town where we spent the late afternoon and evening breathing petrol and nitro-methane fumes.
Oh memories
I spent my youth in South London during the 70s gently kicking dog shit off football pitches, being chased by skinheads and riding abandoned mopeds in the woods near my parents house. Where were my French waitresses and steak rolls ? :-(
Still ... you have ignited some good memories in me too ... ta muchly
I don't know how common this is but it's wonderful getting the pleasure from the music and then getting it again from the associated memory.
I was born in '72, so I guess I heard it as a nipper, but wouldn't have registered much of it.
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(And definitely nothing like the sh1thole Norn-Iron was for ordinary common or garden teens back in the 70s .. )
Our next-door neighbour's lad was the real music educator for me though. His family were well off compared to us and thus he had a quality stereo record deck and amp and used to buy a new album pretty much every week. I spent so many hours in his room as he played us his latest vinyl. All the early Deep Purple and Black Sabbath albums, Uriah Heep Live, Grand Funk, Simon and Garfunkel, Zepplin, John Kongos, ELP, Hawkwind, Amon Duul II, Elton John. For a 14 year old lad he had an incredible taste in music. Lord we spent hours talking about those records as we digested the gatefold covers.
Truly a wonderful time.. Thanks Peter wherever you are now
My mate had a drum kit and decided to try to copy Paicey ... he was in the year above me at school so obviously it was no problem at all
I then remember being in another mate's house and his much older brothers were there ... long hair, flairs, Chelsea boots, smoking, swearing and talking about lassies ... with Rory Gallagher, Taste and Black Sabbath constantly being belted out. I loved it