THE PROLOGUE

 

For my tenth birthday, which occurred on Friday 25 January 1974, my parents gave me a special present - that week's top thirty singles, plus a standing order with the Hamilton branch of Woolworths for every single that entered the top thirty in subsequent weeks. I immediately began a notebook in which I wrote reviews of each single. In fact it was a large ledger book with a grey cover which my father had "borrowed" from his work.

I was newly besotted with the pop charts. Every week I would scan the pages of Record Mirror and write out elaborate Top 50 lists in the style of the old "BRITAIN'S TOP 50" posters which you used to find in the middle of Record Retailer (later Music Week):

- complete with bubbllng under sections and mock ads. In 1974 the chart which Radio 1 and Top Of The Pops broadcast was the Top 30 (or, as Tony Blackburn and nobody else constantly referred to it, the "Fun Thirty"). I didn't get a subscription to the whole Top 50 because, guess what, my parents weren't made of money; in fact, my mother returned to full-time work at Tunnock's the very next week and stayed there for the next 22½ years. Everyone else at school lived in nice fully-detached houses in places like Douglas Gardens and Kylepark. We lived in a flat on Uddingston Main Street:

Ours was the flat on the bottom right, just above what is now Ladbrokes but was then the noisy Bay Horse Inn pub. The solicitors' office was then a launderette, and the house to the left was our local GP surgery. I was in my penultimate year at what was then Muiredge Primary School, under the tutelage of the very nice Mrs Howarth. Life generally was not sweet and in a lot of cases extremely painful. But I got comics and eventually also records. Not that I didn't already have a quantity of either - you will note from the following writing that my family already had some of these singles on their parent albums. However, the view was of a nascent archive of sorts; a purpose of historical completeness. It was pleasing to be able to ensconce myself in literature and music as a means of concealing myself from the rest of the world, beginning from outside the bedroom door (there was only one bedroom and I had to share it with my parents - they had the big double, I got the smaller single at the foot. How we managed to get any books, comics and records into there I don't know, but somehow we managed. There was also a living room/kitchen, a hallway with kitchen cabinet, and what had originally been my bedroom as an infant but which, for reasons of dampness - which left me with lifelong lung problems - got converted into an attic or storage room). This is where I "started" as a music obsessive.

 

The purpose of this blog is to reproduce what I wrote in that large ledger book, week by week, about the songs which came into the Top 30. May I attest right now that I have not altered one word of that writing. Postmodernist smart-aleckness is absent. What you read is what I thought at the time. The writing contains plenty of what Margaret McManus of the Hamilton Advertiser termed "peculiar, grown-up vocabulary" when she interviewed me in May 1974, with specific reference to the charts which I was writing out. This is down to my being a misdiagnosed child prodigy who was able to read and write at a ridiculously early age.

 

The writing is influenced by my readings of the weekly music papers, particularly Record Mirror, but what it does not contain is hindsight. What I felt is exactly what you read. When Lulu released her version of "The Man Who Sold The World," I had no idea that the follow-up was going to be "The Man With The Golden Gun." But she made Bowie's song sound like a Bond theme to my ten-year-old ears (or, more likely, it was my father's observation). I speak about "cancelled" performers decades before they were cancelled, and again spoke as I found. There is, for example, an awful lot of G@ry Gl1tter here because those were the times and nobody knew about the other stuff, except of course the poor bastards to whom it happened. I can't pretend this music didn't happen and wasn't popular.

What follows, therefore, is a set of succinct juveline observations about the hit singles of each week, which I'll probably publish on a month-by-month weekly basis. The experiment didn't last that long - I kept up the records until May 1978, when the main chart expanded to a Top 40 and I lost interest (although I kept up my subscription with Hamilton Woolworths until I finally left for St Andrews, and then Oxford/London, in the eighties). I have posted singles covers as I received them (there were few, if any, picture sleeves during that period) plus YouTube links to songs as I can find them. Thank you for your indulgence.