Remembering your youth with fondness

stufisher

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!

Philly_Q

I'm 58 but didn't really start getting into music until I was about 12 or 13, which was 1976/77.  The glam rock programme you posted was a little before my time, but I was certainly aware of some of that stuff, and I like it now. 

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.

Tannin

For me, Tull, Skyhooks, Neil Young ... ahh too many to list. 

CoolCat

Philly_Q said:

I'm 58 but didn't really start getting into music until I was about 12 or 13, which was 1976/77.  The glam rock programme you posted was a little before my time, but I was certainly aware of some of that stuff, and I like it now. 

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.

Ditto to what Philly said.

BillDL

For me a lot of teenage memories from around 1975 are interwoven by the music I heard around me, for example Bad Company and (chosen at random) Steve Miller - Keep On Rockin' Me Baby.  I spent a lot of time in shady amusement arcades during school holidays and weekends playing table football (twist handles with wee men on the sliding rods) and pinball, and the juke box was constantly playing that kind of music along with others like Rose Royce - Carwash.

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   

EricTheWeary

CoolCat said:

Philly_Q said:

I'm 58 but didn't really start getting into music until I was about 12 or 13, which was 1976/77.  The glam rock programme you posted was a little before my time, but I was certainly aware of some of that stuff, and I like it now. 

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.

Ditto to what Philly said.

Very similar here. I was the youngest of four so TOTP was like an event in our household, parents relegated to tutting away up the corner. So my first memories of music on TV were bands like Mud and Gary Glitter. By the time I was 15 I was reading Sounds and marvelled at all those bands I rarely got to hear. 

DrCornelius

BillDL said:

For me a lot of teenage memories from around 1975 are interwoven by the music I heard around me, for example Bad Company and (chosen at random) Steve Miller - Keep On Rockin' Me Baby.  I spent a lot of time in shady amusement arcades during school holidays and weekends playing table football (twist handles with wee men on the sliding rods) and pinball, and the juke box was constantly playing that kind of music along with others like Rose Royce - Carwash.

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   

Blimey , where was this heaven on earth ?  I'd love to have grown up in that environment - sounds awesome.

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 ?  :-(

BillDL

DrCornelius said:

Blimey , where was this heaven on earth ?  I'd love to have grown up in that environment - sounds awesome.

Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe.  We had a very free lifestyle as kids in a very comfortable climate.  Even adults that had to face the drudgery of work still had what I think of as a better lifestyle than in many parts of the UK, and a large part of that was due to the reasonably predictable weather that only went below zero at night for a few nights over a month or so, and rarely went above 30 degrees.  If it rained you got wet, but dried out again pretty quickly when the sun came out again a few hours later.  For me the better lifestyle was being fortunate enough to live in suburbia rather than in a city or a large housing scheme.  I would imagine that our childhood will have been very similar to Australian kids growing up in suburbs in the 60s and 70s.  I hadn't meant to babble on as much, but when I started to recall those years it made me very nostalgic.

stufisher

Great tales @BillDL ; ... my uncle moved from Dumfries to Rhodesia in the 50s. He was a train driver ... lived in Gwelo. I recall his stories about life out there and I still have some of his memorabilia and photos. Sadly, I never got the chance to go and my uncle and auntie returned to the UK in the early 80s after the Iain Smith implosion.

Still ... you have ignited some good memories in me too  ... ta muchly  

BillDL

@stufisher ; Yep, I was 9 months old on one of the Union Castle cruise liners heading South having just left one of the worst Winters here ever, and came "back" here in 1979/80.  My Dad had taken the chance of a 3 year contract there that turned into 17.  We didn't have much money as a family for quite a number of years but they were very happy years despite that.  Things had begun to improve for my folks about 5 years before we had to leave.  There were a lot of Scottish people there.  I'll bet they were still using those 50s trains right into the 2000s.

DrCornelius

BillDL said:

DrCornelius said:

Blimey , where was this heaven on earth ?  I'd love to have grown up in that environment - sounds awesome.

Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe.  We had a very free lifestyle as kids in a very comfortable climate.  Even adults that had to face the drudgery of work still had what I think of as a better lifestyle than in many parts of the UK, and a large part of that was due to the reasonably predictable weather that only went below zero at night for a few nights over a month or so, and rarely went above 30 degrees.  If it rained you got wet, but dried out again pretty quickly when the sun came out again a few hours later.  For me the better lifestyle was being fortunate enough to live in suburbia rather than in a city or a large housing scheme.  I would imagine that our childhood will have been very similar to Australian kids growing up in suburbs in the 60s and 70s.  I hadn't meant to babble on as much, but when I started to recall those years it made me very nostalgic.

Thanks for coming back , it sounds incredible and for some reason I was expecting you to say somewhere like St Tropez 

axisus

I'm the same as @Philly_Q 59 years old but I didn't get into music until 77. I think that the glam thing was mostly done but I had a massive love affair with the singles charts for the rest of the 70s, and still do. I love disco! The 70s charts were a million times better than all decades that have come after, well, the 80s was quite interesting but 90s on pretty boring. I've been having a big binge on 70s chart songs recently, so much great stuff!

scrumhalf

Being the youngest of three brothers my introduction to pop/rick music came very early in life. Music was the backdrop to so many things, I can strongly associate so many times and places with whatever I may have been listening to at the time.

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. 

octatonic

I got into 70's Bowie & Queen in the late 80's.
I was born in '72, so I guess I heard it as a nipper, but wouldn't have registered much of it.

pigface

BillDL said:

DrCornelius said:

Blimey , where was this heaven on earth ?  I'd love to have grown up in that environment - sounds awesome.

Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe.  We had a very free lifestyle as kids in a very comfortable climate.  Even adults that had to face the drudgery of work still had what I think of as a better lifestyle than in many parts of the UK, and a large part of that was due to the reasonably predictable weather that only went below zero at night for a few nights over a month or so, and rarely went above 30 degrees.  If it rained you got wet, but dried out again pretty quickly when the sun came out again a few hours later.  For me the better lifestyle was being fortunate enough to live in suburbia rather than in a city or a large housing scheme.  I would imagine that our childhood will have been very similar to Australian kids growing up in suburbs in the 60s and 70s.  I hadn't meant to babble on as much, but when I started to recall those years it made me very nostalgic.

I was there at the same time, and about the same age as you, I guess. My teenage experiences were similar to yours (ouzo and cream soda!). The climate is unbeatable, IMO, and it was indeed a free and easy place in which to grow up. I was also into Steve Miller and Bad Company as a teenager, and other bands like Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull and Grand Funk Railroad, whose were the first records I ever selected myself, in the general store in Triangle when I was about 13. I spent most of my money on LPs through my teens, and I especially liked Santana, the Stones and anything with Clapton. Later got into reggae when I was picked up while hitchhiking near Lake Mac by a mixed group of young foreigners in a Kombi in about 76. They had huge speakers in the back and that's the first time I'd heard Marley. Happy days ...

AK99

BillDL said:

For me a lot of teenage memories from around 1975 are interwoven by the music I heard around me, for example Bad Company and (chosen at random) Steve Miller - Keep On Rockin' Me Baby.  I spent a lot of time in shady amusement arcades during school holidays and weekends playing table football (twist handles with wee men on the sliding rods) and pinball, and the juke box was constantly playing that kind of music along with others like Rose Royce - Carwash.

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 know it's already been said - but dear blessus, that sounds like an idyllic teenage upbringing

(And definitely nothing like the sh1thole Norn-Iron was for ordinary common or garden teens back in the 70s .. )
 

rlw

I grew up in south east London in the late sixties, leaving school in 1969 at age 16, nearly 17.

Apart from the aforementioned dog turd infested football pitches, I have very fond memories of going to the various pubs we frequented around Deptford/Greenwich/Lee/Downham etc where there was always good live music to be found.  Getting beaten up a couple of times because I had long hair.  Going to the Den to see my team play.  And discovering the Marquee, the Roundhouse, the Temple for all nighters.  And discovering South Kensington which was (and is) another world and all the great pubs and the Chelsea Drugstore.  And being amazed by the women...

Good times and hard to imagine now.

equalsql

I was fortunate to witness that TOTP episode when Bowie sang Starman whilst draping his arm over Rono's shoulder.  Also Alice Cooper's first outing on the show with School's Out. What an amazing time it was being a young teenager back then.
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 

DrCornelius

rlw said:

I grew up in south east London in the late sixties, leaving school in 1969 at age 16, nearly 17.

Apart from the aforementioned dog turd infested football pitches, I have very fond memories of going to the various pubs we frequented around Deptford/Greenwich/Lee/Downham etc where there was always good live music to be found.  Getting beaten up a couple of times because I had long hair.  Going to the Den to see my team play.  And discovering the Marquee, the Roundhouse, the Temple for all nighters.  And discovering South Kensington which was (and is) another world and all the great pubs and the Chelsea Drugstore.  And being amazed by the women...

Good times and hard to imagine now.

The Downham Tavern ?   What a dump that was !

stufisher

I remember in the Summer holiday between P5 & P6 I was in my neighbour's house and my mate put his big brother's copy of the just released Made In Japan on the Radiogram turntable. I still recall the astonishment of that sound ... I'd never heard anything like it.

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

rlw

DrCornelius said:

rlw said:

I grew up in south east London in the late sixties, leaving school in 1969 at age 16, nearly 17.

Apart from the aforementioned dog turd infested football pitches, I have very fond memories of going to the various pubs we frequented around Deptford/Greenwich/Lee/Downham etc where there was always good live music to be found.  Getting beaten up a couple of times because I had long hair.  Going to the Den to see my team play.  And discovering the Marquee, the Roundhouse, the Temple for all nighters.  And discovering South Kensington which was (and is) another world and all the great pubs and the Chelsea Drugstore.  And being amazed by the women...

Good times and hard to imagine now.

The Downham Tavern ?   What a dump that was !

It might have been a dump but it was good enough for Procul Harum and Cream to play in 1967.  And many more too.

And the Tigers Head had some good bands too.