“Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)” is one of those oddities in my mother’s record collection, maybe not quite as off-the-wall a choice for her as the Status Quo single or Rugby Songs album she had but trippy jazz-fusion instrumentals weren’t usually her bag either. I can see why she liked it though, it’s cool and elegant and groovily cosmic without being too far out there — if they had the expression back then it would have been called “chill out” music.

This was a big hit for Brazilian ivory-tinkler (and future Kool & The Gang producer) Eumir Deodato in 1972 and, of course, is a cover of the Richard Strauss tune used in 2001: A Space Odyssey which had blown everyone’s minds a couple of years before. Oddly enough, even though my mother usually hated science fiction films (she thought they were “unrealistic” which, I know, is kind of the point of them) she actually liked 2001 which is about the most difficult and hardcore mainstream SF film there is, even more light years away from being her usual cup of tea than this record is. But we watched it on television together once and though I imagined she’d think it was like watching paint dry when it was over she said to me “that was good, wasn’t it?” Maybe she was secretly doing drugs and had been tripping out on the couch during the “Beyond The Infinite” sequence without me noticing.

Download: Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001) – Deodato (mp3)

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)

There was a time when a person could look at a picture of some hunky, naked men having a bath together and think it was nothing more than sporty boys having good, clean, healthy, heterosexual fun, and that after the communal bath they’d all head down the pub for a skinful and a fight, then end the evening shagging some bird in a very manly way. Now, of course, it looks like the gayest record sleeve ever, queerer than a nine-bob note, camper than a row of tents, and a masterpiece of homo kitsch. We’re all so damn “knowing” these days, aren’t we?

I really have no idea why my mother owned this record and how it ended up sitting in our sideboard throughout my childhood. Like most Brits she liked bawdy humour and there was a whole series of Rugby Songs albums released in the 60s so they must have been fairly popular, but I can only assume — and hope — that someone bought it for her as a joke. I certainly hope she didn’t buy it herself because she liked the picture on the cover, I’d rather not think about that too much.

Despite the saucy sleeve the record itself isn’t actually that rude (by modern standards anyway) because all the naughty words are bleeped out so it’s more nudge nudge wink wink than truly filthy. While I don’t remember my mother ever playing it I used to play it a lot trying to work out what words those bleeps were hiding. I imagine they had to be very bad to be censored like that and figuring them out was like unlocking another door into the world of grown-ups. Some tracks were rendered almost unlistenable by the constant bleeps but my favourite song “Balls To Your Partner” was easier to work out:

Singing balls to your partner, bleep against the wall,
If you’ve never been bleep on a Saturday night, you’ll never get bleep at all.

Though I was still of an age when I was learning swear words from the older kids in the playground I knew enough to reckon that the first bleep was “arse” (I had no idea what “arse against the wall” meant though), and the second had to be “shagged”. Thanks to the magic of the internets I now know that “Balls To Your Partner” is based on an Irish folk song called “The Ball of Kerrymuir” but I can’t say for sure what those bleeps are as there appear to be several different versions of it. Oh well, guess I can just use my imagination the way I did back then, or maybe in these more liberal times someone will release an un-bleeped version of the album.

Download: Balls To Your Partner- The Jock Strapp Ensemble (mp3)
Download: It Was On The Good Ship Venus – The Jock Strapp Ensemble (mp3)
Download: John Peel- The Jock Strapp Ensemble (mp3)

(Yes, there’s a song called “John Peel” and they’re all performed by a group called The Jock Strapp Ensemble)

I should probably call this post Everybody’s Mother’s Records because I think Simon & Garfunkel’s final album was bought by every single one of them when it came out, in the UK it spent 41 weeks at number one and was the best-selling album of both 1970 and 1971. It was part of the furniture when I was growing up, not just in our house but there must have been a copy of it sitting on a shelf in every other one we visited too, that sleeve as ubiquitous in early 70s homes as a spider plant and a G-Plan sofa.

Though Paul and Art rode to success on the back of the 1960s folk boom and the younger-generation angst of The Graduate they were never angry or confrontational and came across more as nice, quiet boys sitting in a coffee shop reading The New Yorker instead of throwing rocks at riot police on the streets of Paris. Maybe I’m just looking at them through the lens of my own memories but I never thought of them as being part of the great Youthquake of that decade like The Beatles and Dylan because, well, my mum liked them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, especially when the songs are as good as Paul Simon’s.

It’s always good to go out with a bang and Bridge Over Troubled Water is easily their best album in my ‘umble opinion, it’s also their slickest and prettiest so no wonder it sold by the lorry-load. The epic title track is so well-known and played that it has become sort of aural wallpaper that I don’t listen to much anymore and when I was a kid I preferred perky numbers like this anyway, and still do today.

Download: Keep The Customer Satisfied – Simon & Garfunkel (mp3)
Buy: Bridge Over Troubled Water (40th Anniversary Edition) (album)

After my mother died my sister gave me a pile of old family photos to scan, among them this one of my mother (left) and her three younger sisters outside their Shepherd’s Bush council flat — the same flat my gran still lived in when I was a kid and didn’t leave until the early 70s when my grandfather died. I know exactly when the photo was taken because some helpful person (my grandmother I think judging by the handwriting) has written “Coronation Day” on the back which would make it Tuesday the 2nd of June, 1953 and my mother a mere 18 years old (though I think she looked younger when she was in her 30s). She’d already left school and was working at that point, despite getting several O-levels she didn’t stay on for A-levels because the family needed the extra wage, something I think she always regretted.

My mum told me that she watched the Coronation on television like 20 million other Brits but whether it was their own set or a neighbours I can’t remember. Coronation Day was a holiday (in typical English “holiday” fashion it rained all day) and with their pearl necklaces the eldest three all look a bit dressed up to go somewhere, it could have been a street party or maybe just because they were having their photo taken, though it wouldn’t surprise me if it was because they were going to “see” the Queen on television and thought they should put on their “best” for such an important occasion. As it was a Tuesday I assume my mother wouldn’t have gone out that evening but come the weekend you might have found her dancing at the Hammersmith Palais where, in those pre-rock and roll days, the music was provided by live big bands led by the likes of Billy Cotton and Joe Loss.

The Hammersmith Palais was also where she met my dad about 6 years later who, I imagine, at the time looked something like he does in this photo.

That’s my old man on the left with three of his mates (he also had three brothers) and I don’t know when this was taken but judging by the suits I’d place it sometime in the 1950s too. The thing I’ve always loved about this picture is how suave my dad looks, he seems so much more put-together and debonair than the others, his suit just that bit fancier and well-tailored and he’s even holding his drink rather rakishly. Back then he was known as a bit of a fancy-pants and was nicknamed “Duke” because he always wore suits with a red lining, an indication perhaps that after he married my mother he wouldn’t be satisfied being a cab driver and would eventually make for the sophisticated bright lights of the theatre.

It’s always strange seeing photos of your parents as teenagers (and yourself too) and old photos of people you know are unavoidably poignant and suffused with a sort of innocence because you can see their future and they can’t, and not just in the long-term. Like the characters in Mad Men they don’t know that the 1960s are coming to smash the conventions and assumptions they’ve been living by and in my parents case they happened just a little too late, being married with two kids by the time The Beatles’ first record came out. Who knows what would have happened if my mother didn’t have to leave school to get a job at 16 and share a little council flat bedroom with three sisters until she got married, or my dad discovered what he really wanted to do with his life before then?

But then I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this.

Download: Photograph – Ringo Starr (mp3)

What is it with the British and soul music? Why did we fall so truly, madly, deeply in love with it, worship even it’s most obscure artists and form so many cults and lifestyles around its every permutation? I doubt if there’s another country in world with such an obsession.

The most obvious expression of this love affair was the huge popularity of Tamla Motown which seemed to be adored by everyone in England from sharp-dressed Mods to mums and dad. Growing up, Motown songs always seemed to be coming out of a transistor radio somewhere — usually introduced by the chirpy voice of Tony Blackburn — and I don’t think I entered a house that didn’t have a copy of “Motown Chartbusters” on the shelf, Volume 6 with it’s bizarre Roger Dean cover was especially popular.

So it was only natural that next to her Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett albums my mother should have a copy of the 1968 compilation “The Motown Sound: A Collection Of 16 Original Big Hits Vol.6″. I’ve no idea what was on the other albums in this series (I can’t find any of them online and the American version has a completely different track listing) but the thing I love about it (especially now) is that only about three tracks on it were big hits while the rest is made up of more obscure numbers which gives it the feel of a from-the-vaults rarities collection rather than a package of chart smashes. Little did I know when I was a kid jumping around our living room to the fabulous, rousing “I Got A Feeling” by Barbara Randolph that I was enjoying a cult tune that was filling the floors of Northern Soul clubs. It wasn’t until the Mod revival in the late 70s when I “rediscovered” the album, dusty and half-forgotten in our sideboard, that I realized it was probably the hippest record my mother owned.

Download: I Got A Feeling – Barbara Randolph (mp3)

My other favourite track was the ballad “I Can’t Give Back The Love I Feel For You” by Rita Wright which even as a kid I thought was heartbreaking (I was a softy even then). Though I didn’t know then that “Rita Wright” was better known by her real name Syreeta (and for a while as Mrs. Stevie Wonder), how this was never a hit either is beyond me as it’s utterly gorgeous.

Download: I Can’t Give Back The Love I Feel For You – Rita Wright (mp3)