Almost all my earliest memories are connected to music, which must tell you something. Being about five and listening to ‘We Can Work It Out by the Beatles and Michelle by the Overlanders. A hit in 1966.
My parents bought Do Wah Diddy by Manfred Mann apparently because I used to wriggle around to it but I don’t remember that. I do vividly remember a hot early evening in bed listening to Is Do You Know The Way to San Jose? by Dionne Warwick.
There’s loads of them but by the time I was about 11, my whole recollection of my life at the time revolves around music. It’s as if nothing happened without an accompanying soundtrack. I recall being obsessed for some reason by the white Asylum label of my Jo Jo Gunne single. It fascinated me as did its sky blue sleeve.
The last holiday I had with the family was in 1978 and I was 17 and in the grip of Live And Dangerous. Of course you couldn’t listen to music easily on the move unless you had a portable cassette player but even that was a bit rubbish and the batteries soon ran out. So I committed the entire album to memory and sang it to myself in my head instead. Sounds mad now but seemed a good solution at the time.
My memory for anything outside of music isn’t that good but fortunately most things happened while music was playing so that’s not so much of a problem. People have doubtless long forgotten these incidents but not me. I remember listening to 461 Ocean Boulevard on Russell’s cassette player, taped off a radio broadcast of the whole album, lying in Ropner Park in Stockton.
An early girlfriend has no doubt forgotten grappling on the living room floor while Songs From The Wood, Be Bop Deluxe Live In The Air Age! and Black Sabbath Greatest Hits played but for some reason I haven’t. There are myriad such incidents that anyone who knew me would be amazed I’ve remembered. It. to the extent that I look back on all these years as a kind of musical tapestry.
This must have happened until I was in my late 40s, but not so much since then for some reason. I wonder how people who don’t share such musical bookmarks, look back on their lives. It must be odd. Of course, hand-in-hand with that all the knowledge about records has stayed with me too. For some reason, music knowledge stays with me when much else just evaporates and that has always been what has driven DJTees.
