Download: Oxygene (Part IV) – Jean-Michel Jarre (mp3)

(Nice to see animated gifs coming back into fashion, they’re like the crackly vinyl of the internet.)

After the previous rather gloomy post I needed something a bit bonkers.

Some days I’m really, really bothered by the fact that these two aren’t around to see their grandchildren. Most days actually.

Download: Motherless Child – O.V. Wright (mp3)

You wouldn’t think something as ordinary as this Lard wrapper would have any deep meaning whatsoever but one look at that and I’m in our kitchen in the 1970s and mum is cooking Sunday dinner, putting big lumps of it in the roasting tin to cook the meat and potatoes in. The product itself is nostalgic enough, from back when people happily cooked things in pig fat (and apparently are starting to again) but it’s the Sainsbury’s wrapper that adds the extra Proustian layer to it.

The image comes from a book called Own Label which is all about the (at the time) radically modern packaging design of Sainsbury’s supermarkets own products from 1962-1977. Not, on the face of it, the most riveting subject for non-designers (or a lot of designers either for that matter) but if you are a certain age, seeing this stuff all collected together stirs not just admiration for the design but a whole flood of memories of going to the supermarket when you were a kid — and with their shelves stocked with this bold packaging Sainsbury’s left a more vivid impression than Tesco’s or The Co-Op.

Sainsbury’s were quite the forward-thinking company in the 60s, not only with these designs but they pioneered the whole concept of the own-brand product and their new, convenient “super” markets were where modern mums shopped. These days this graphic and minimalist style might seem more appropriate for pharmaceuticals than food but back then “modernism” hadn’t yet become a dirty word synonymous with ugly tower blocks and desolate shopping precincts and still meant optimistic progress toward a bright, shiny future when the world would be all efficient clean lines designed by clever men in suits. In this brave new world food would be convenient and modern too which even extended to feeding babies, like a lot of people my age I was bottle fed because artificial milk was seen as being better and more “advanced” than the natural kind.

Though they have a certain amount of retro cool I doubt if these would sell today, “progress” failed and the future went out of style sometime in the early 1970s, at least when it comes to things you eat. Not surprisingly people now prefer their food to look like it was grown by farmers and not men in white coats.

Speaking of mod-ernism…

Download: Shopping – The Jam (mp3)

It’s the 1980s again, the decade that has kept on giving musically for most of the 21st century so far. This time it’s Brooklyn beat combo Friends who resurrect the supple pop-funk of Tom Tom Club and Neneh Cherry with wonderful results.

Paging Simon Reynolds…

1977: A fight at every gig and the lead singer always getting covered in fluids of one kind or another. I believe that’s beer in this instance, I don’t think a human being is capable of producing that much spit in one go.

How dare he spray beer at the lovely Pauline!

Did anyone ever know Jimmy Savile (apart from his mother)? Behind the hair, the cigar, the tracksuits, the jewelry, the charity work, and the colourful, now then now then public personality he was a peculiar old bird with perhaps some dark and dodgy corners and a lot of whispers about his private life. But I don’t want to go there because I have no idea and neither does anyone else either, for someone who was famous for so long he remains a bit of an enigma. But his place in British pop history is secure at least because he was there from the beginning on our televisions and radios and, like him or not, was the face presenting many of our happiest pop memories.

All the old TOTP presenters liked to have pretty young girls standing next to them but none more than Jimmy (who sometimes veered into dirty old man territory) and this must have taken some determined organizing.

PS: Don’t Frida and Agnetha look terrific in this?

I’ve had and liked this record for years but was listening to it in the car the other day and was suddenly struck by how really, utterly lovely it is. Funny how that happens sometimes.

Download: Eighties Fan – Camera Obscura (mp3)