10th August, 2017 in Entertainment

Radio Caroline: Teenage music memories

By Ray Clark

A tenement, a dirty street
Walked and worn by shoeless feet,
Inside it’s long and so complete
Watched by a shivering sun.
Old eyes in a small child’s face,
Watching as the shadows race
Through walls and cracks that leave no trace
And daylight’s brightness shuns

(The Days of Pearly Spencer – David McWilliams)

I was 13 years old when the summer of love unfolded. Everyone it seemed was either a ‘hippy’ or a ‘child of love’, whatever that was. Too young to really be a hippy, I did manage to grow my hair a little bit longer before being promptly sent to the barbers shop, and I loved the orange shirt that I got for my 13th birthday … but I don’t think my dad would have let me become a flower child, even if I’d wanted to.

At 13 I couldn’t attend a ‘love-in’. I don’t think I understood all the implications of such an event at the time even if I had been allowed to go; besides, riding the dodgem cars at the travelling fair that visited each summer was far more fun and of far greater interest to me during that summer.

It was 1967, I was just about to start in the third year at ‘big school’ and, at last, I was a teenager. No longer was I one of the new kids at school; we were getting ‘cooler’ by the day … and, although my school chums and I were starting to take a bit of notice in the opposite sex, it was the music that we really got into.

While the huge hits of the day included Waterloo Sunset, A Whiter Shade of Pale, All You Need is Love, Let’s Go to San Francisco it was a record that failed to make the charts that takes me back to those magical days. The Days of Pearly Spencer by David McWilliams was the landmark record of that era for me.

So, why does this song take me back, more than any other, to those magical days?