Music Lover

There was a point in my teens when I often used to wonder what I would choose if faced with the choice of being deaf or blind. Both horrific options. But every time I decided that I could live without sight but being deaf would be impossible to cope with because listening to music was my life.
In the 1960s we had a radiogram. I loved that radiogram. It was big, wooden and shiny with sliding doors, large chunky knobs and a big speaker. Behind one sliding door was the record player and behind the other a place to keep all your records. In the centre was the radio with its dial and buttons. This whole thing took up half the living room, much like today’s flat screen TVs, but unlike the flat screens the radiogram were seductive. 

Once, when left at home alone, I varnished that radiogram and everything else in the room that looked vaguely as if it was made from wood. Including the clock on the mantelpiece which had been a wedding present to my parents. My mum arrived home just as I was making a start on the wood panel effect wallpaper that lined one wall of the room and she, not surprisingly, wasn’t best pleased. It was a replay of the time me and my cousins had shampooed my aunts carpets with Crazy Foam. Sometimes adults are just so ungrateful.

Someone I knew once used to collect radiograms, which at the time I thought was rather odd, because as a collectable it not easily accommodated. A collection of three would be take up a lot of room and any more than that would need a room of their own. En masse it would be difficult to appreciate their purpose and attractiveness. Looking at the various images of radiograms on the ‘net reminds me just how beautiful some of them are. Some had televisions and drink cabinets incorporated. So practical. Flat screen TVs are so boring in comparison.
Ours was beautiful to me and I loved to twiddle the radio dial, turn the knob from mono to phono and sort through the various LPs stacked in the side compartment, all of which belonged to my mum. I have never known my dad to listen to music.

LPs of Matt Monroe, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield, The Bachelors, and her all time favourite – Joe Dolan, lived in that compartment. Whenever 'Make Me an Island' came on the radio my mum would stop what she was doing and sing along and when she had a few drinks and got maudlin this was one of her favourites. The Stones, The Beatles, The Who, they all passed my mum by and, until Tina Turner went solo, her tastes were firmly of the crooner type (with the exception of Bassey and Springfield as my mum liked to belt out songs of lost love after a few drinks).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61J8b8NwSDI
Before I discovered David Bowie and added ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ to the LP collection the only LP that belonged to me was ‘Half a Sixpence’. I was not a fan of Tommy Steele, or indeed musicals in particular, but this was a gift from my dad and I played it non stop and loved to sing along. Fortunately I was left home alone a lot from an early age and could indulge in a melody of Distant Drums, I Who Have Nothing, Delilah and Crash, Bang, Wallop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Sixpence
Before the Bowie moment I dallied with others. For some strange reason I was obsessed with Kenny Roger's ‘Ruby’, Middle of the Road's ‘Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep Cheep and The Archie's ‘Sugar Sugar’. In my defence I was only about 9. Fortunately as I entered my teens I had an epiphany moment when I saw Bowie sing ‘Starman’ on Top of The Pops and was thus saved from a lifetime in a music wilderness.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muMcWMKPEWQ
Even though my love for Bowie was deep and pure I was still seduced by other types of music and embraced wholeheartedly Glam Rock, Punk, Soul, The Sound of Philadelphia, Motown and Soul music. The highlight of my week was Sunday evening listening to the Top Twenty on the radio. By this time the radiogram had gone to radiogram heaven and I listened to it on my little ITT transistor radio. This and a ITT radio cassette were another present from my dad and each week I would hover over the radio, trying to maintain absolute silence as I held the microphone to the radios speaker and try to anticipate when the DJ would start to speak so that I could press the ‘off’ switch. Both these ITT devices had a wooden effect but I resisted the urge to varnish them. They were my pride and joy.

I also had a portable record player and would spend hours in my room listening to cracking 45s or bad recordings of my favourite songs. For the rest of my teenage years listening to music replaced reading of books but both offered an escape from my world, at least for a few hours.

My husband-to-be smashed the radio, cassette player and record player during an argument, along with many of my records. In reality, one one level at least, I was both deaf and blind.