In reality, I couldn't have afforded even one-half of one of those records, let alone eight. It’s only recently that I’ve finally got hold of every song on the list, helped along by the coming of the Net, file-sharing, and emailing mp3s, as well as CD reissues of every other song ever recorded.
I've heard of kids back then keeping their own charts, their personal Top 20 of current favourites, complete with hit picks, new entries, and drop-outs, as they got hooked on a song then got sick of it. A guy from Delta, British Columbia, who uses the name Taliesyn, had his personal charts published in the local paper: nowadays he regularly posts them on Usenet. I wasn't so organised. I just wrote a bunch of songs in Pentel Sign pen on the cardboard at the back of a writing pad. I didn't even manage to find the same coloured pen each time. Years later, I threw out the pad, but tore off the list for nostalgia's sake.
The list doesn’t include any huge international hits, and some of the artists are barely known, but they were being played on the radio, probably on small-town stations such as 3SH Swan Hill, 3BO Bendigo, 2QN Deniliquin and 2WG Wagga. Regional radio stations back then usually had their own eager young disc jockeys on their way to the big city, and they would have had some say in the music they played. Some of the songs might not even have been heard on big city stations like 3UZ in Melbourne.
The Righteous Brothers - On This Side Of Goodbye (Carole King – Gerry Goffin)
Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra - Summer Wine (Lee Hazlewood)
#2 Melbourne, #7 Brisbane #4 Adelaide
The Small Faces - My Mind's Eye (Ronnie Lane - Steve Marriott)
The Cyrkle - Please Don't Ever Leave Me (Susan Haber) #43 Adelaide American band, associates of The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel. Their best-known song was Red Rubber Ball (1966), written by Paul Simon with Bruce Woodley of The Seekers, a hit in the US and in Australia.
The Innocence - There's Got To Be A Word! (Don Ciccone)
The Cryan’ Shames - I Want To Meet You (Jim Fairs)
Twice As Much - True Story (Andrew Rose – David Skinner)
The Settlers - Till Winter Follows Spring (Kent, Jones, Fyffe) Pop-folk song, pretty much in the vein of The Seekers, by group from Birmingham. This is on the anthology Autumn Almanac, one of the Ripples series of compilations of 60s British pop obscurities (The Settlers' Major To Minor is on Dreamtime, another in the series).
What does the list say about either my musical tastes at the time, or the playlists of the stations I was listening to? Let's face it, these songs are mainstream pop: no garage rockers or frantic r&b here, and the Righteous Brothers' nod to soul stands out amongst all that jaunty, sunshiney jingle-jangle and folk-pop harmonies. (Ah well, it was Summer, after all.)
One more thing I noticed: there are five American records, three British, and none from Australia. Sorry, mate.
1 comment:
lyn,
re the cryan' shames - that should be Jim Fairs, not Fair.
cheers
Jeff Smith
ps somewhere I have a dozen or so or these, 1970-1973, painstakingly recording time/date/artist/song/station - I wonder where they are?
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