Download: God Gave Rock and Roll To You – Argent (mp3)

(I have no idea who this is)

My cockles need warming.

I believe today is something called “Halloween” which I couldn’t care less about but it does give me an excuse to post this.

This Playboy from December 1978 was the first girlie magazine I ever bought, a rite of passage for a young man only slightly less stressful and potentially humiliating than getting your hands on a real naked woman for the first time. I was 16 at the time which meant buying it was not only nerve-wracking but also illegal and I can still remember the superhuman effort it took to work up the courage to go in the shop (first making sure there were no other customers), quickly grab it from the top shelf and take it to the counter. “This please” I said, placing the magazine in front of the shopkeeper, trying to act as nonchalantly and cooly grown-up as I could while inside my heart was pounding like a hammer, thinking that any second now he’s going to ask me how old I am (or worse), or some woman is going to come into the shop and see what I was buying which would make me die of embarrassment. I swear I wouldn’t have been surprised if an alarm went off, a steel cage dropped down on me, and armed police stormed in to drag me out to the street for a public shaming.

Though Playboy was relatively tame and almost respectable compared to some other magazines it shared top shelf space with, that didn’t make me feel any less of a dirty little pervert (albeit an exhilarated and excited one — I did it! I bought one!) so when I got home I hid it in my bedroom cupboard under my comics, as you do. My mother had once told me she’d be more worried about me if I didn’t have any girlie magazines but I certainly didn’t want her to know I’d got it, all the therapy in the world wouldn’t have cured me of that particular mortification.

But while I vividly remember buying it I’m not sure now what made me want that particular issue so much, you’d think all that heart-pounding stress would have been for a woman I seriously fancied but Farrah Fawcett was my least favourite of Charlie’s Angels and I certainly didn’t care about NFL cheerleaders, only having the vaguest idea what those even were in the first place. Maybe it was the Gunter Grass short story. Yes, that must be it, I was buying it for the articles.

Oddly enough, I’ve never had any embarrassment problem buying condoms and never felt in the slightest bit nervous going into Boot’s, picking up a packet of Durex and handing over my money to even the most stern-headmistress type woman there. Maybe it was because one purchase proudly declares “Yes! I am a virile and desirable man who plans to have sex very soon!” while the other is a sad admission you have no chance of getting any for the foreseeable future — which was pretty much the story of my life when I was 16.

Download: Boys Will Be Boys – The Undertones (mp3)

A long time ago on this here blog I called Jenny Agutter the Manchester United of British totty, the champion of champions who made everyone else look a bit second-division (well, except Barcelona of course but you get my point). To extend the sporting metaphor I think Raquel Welch is the New York Yankees of the American kind (dolls? broads?): the imperious, all-time champ with the most glittering, um, trophy cabinet of them all. And to extend the metaphor even further I would gladly pay money to see the two of them have a fight to decide the world title.

Raquel was my very first celebrity crush, going all the way back to that innocent time in my life when I had no idea what you were supposed to do with girls but was just starting to notice the effect they had on me. My first encounter with her was in One Million Years B.C. which my dad took me to see at the ABC Cinema in Hammersmith (I can’t believe I still remember what cinema it was) but at the time I was too young to appreciate the girl running around in a fur bikini and just thought of it as a dinosaur movie — I’m sure my dad didn’t though. But a couple of years later I watched her 1970 TV extravaganza Raquel! (love that exclamation mark) and for the first time I remember, looked at a woman and thought Cor!!! which is an important moment in the life of a boy. I didn’t quite understand why, but I was so discombobulated by the sight of this fabulous creature I thought I was going to spontaneously combust into a little smoking pile of hormonal ash. Subsequent viewings of Fantastic Voyage and Bedazzled only cemented her legend in my impressionable mind and even now I can’t look at her without turning into that awkward, red-faced kid who hoped his mother hadn’t noticed how silently transfixed he was by the television.

While she might as well have been a goddess from another galaxy as far I was concerned, with her big hair, teeth, outrageous curves, and rocket-powered va-va-voom Raquel was definitively, quintessentially American. That might not seem very exotic now but very few of us had been to the States back in the 60s and 70s so she seemed as unreal and impossibly glamourous as the country itself, a far-away fantasy land that we only knew from television and the movies where everything was bigger, better and shinier. Gorgeous though they obviously were, British sex symbols like Jenny Agutter and Caroline Munro were girls you could almost imagine knowing or at least seeing in real life but they didn’t make them like Raquel ’round our way who looked as if she’d been designed by Boeing and custom-built by General Motors. She could only be a product of the country that gave us the Cadillac, the Big Mac, and the atom bomb.

So on this 4th of July I’d like so say thank you America, and happy birthday.

Download: State Of Independence – Donna Summer (mp3)

70s dolly bird overload!