1983 and all that

Some years remain strong memories with you, others while you are aware of them tend to be much less so and for some of us they are a mish-mash fairly young things and rather more grown up things that you had to deal with the best you could.

In 1983 beyond the more formal presentations to adults you couldn't avoid, feeling tired from masking and generally repressing the authentic you talking around and deal with conversations you had scant interest with such as careers, being expected to have adult "small talk", I cultivated a much younger me building on from the previous years and the issues back then that had brought it all to a head.

See, by 1978 just entering my teenage years I realized I felt nothing like my peers and that brought no satisfaction and it wasn't just a  delay of a year or so, it just wasn't there.

So by 1983 we had the strange situation of wanting to run through parks kicking a ball about, playing with toys, cuddling a teddy with taking your A levels and seeing a Careers Master and suffice to say the way that got handled was messed up as the careers service "lost me" being very late in the day to offer ANY guidance.

it was that which really pushed down a way of thinking of just doing stuff on my own as clearly I couldn't rely on a grown up to so I made all my own arrangements to claim social security to get my N.I. contributions started and get a job which took a while in the Transport Industry.

Socially little changed, I read a mixture of comics and magazines, I watched mainly children's tv shows and even dabbled in a bit of flower decorating as I found great for resetting after a struggle dealing with grown ups.

Breakfast tv started January 17th  which I caught and discussed with schoolfriends as prior to that I just put the radio one for a bit while Top of the Pops and Tomorrow's World remained a must see shows.

The Compact Disc launched in Europe to a big fanfare although it was to be three more years before I bought a player but we did have our very first Now That's What I Call Music compilation lp.

Catalogues and brochures from newly arriving supermarkets came that inspired my outside of work look too.

There was much music I liked back then, Kajagoogoo, Rush, Duran Duran, the Flashdance soundtrack but one towered over all and actually that's a recent specialist edition in even high quality sound than my 1983 original.

I had always liked the Commodores and their lead singer Lionel Richie's voice and this, his second solo album had a great mixture of uptempo funk, slow soul ballads and the most amazing arrangements that still stand up even today.

Songs like All Night Long, Hello, Running With The Night and Penny Lover were events when released as singles with memorible, moving even videos that connected with many people because they were about universal feelings and emotions.

Some like Stuck On You were covered to great effect too.

It's great to own a fantastic sounding version of now to go with my memories of that era.

What matters more - the sound or the music?

In a week where the planet has seemed rather messed up as a space mission went around the whole of the moon today I'm looking the relationship between recorded music and the means of reproducing it

Originally records were made directly from an artist(s) performing in front of a horn with their exact  position altered to get the best possible balence and often replayed by a gramophone via a horn although by the 1930's electronics came in both directions.

The big breakthoughs were in recording on tape after WW2 that made it possible to redo sections and the use of vinyl rather than shallac that allowed for both much lower noise and higher fidelity.

Around the same time slower speeds 45 and 33 1/3 rpm were used that gave longer playtime which helped with longer works and enable an album to be on just a single disc rather than several heled in a stiched heavy duty album.

That really kicked off what today's hifi industry was all about - getting better sound from your recordings  - from the 1950's where it soon joined by stereo discs and tapes adding more realism.

Tape systems improved to allow multiple tracks to be recorded independently and by the end of the 1970's digital recording came in.

What some do say today is the attention is too centred around the equipment to the point a person doesn't play a cd or record listening to the performance so much as they are listening to their system so much so that the quality of recording matters for them more than the performance.

Alan Parsons is a recording engineer and musician who gave us Dark Side of the Moon and The Air That I Breathe.

For me there's a lot of truth in that as performances generally move us more than absolute recorded quality that certainly makes it sound more realistic but that feel is what artists work on in terms of lyrics and muscial composition.

Even if we heard that on portable radio or your smartphone, it would hold your attention. You may have memories of listening to songs on AM Radio which never sounded great but those songs and memories clearly count for something.

Sometimes audio fans would be better adviced to put that record on with drink in a hand and just enjoy the performance.

The look of the past II

After last weeks post well one thing that does come into play is the length and styling of modern day boys or mens shorts specifically sports shorts.

Virtually from the 1970's right though to 1990's the lengths of football shorts, athletic shorts usually of the high cut sort and cotton tennis shorts tended to be short.

For reason's best known to themselves, some suggest as a "prank", a London football club adopted long just on the knee shorts at the start of one season and this became a craze within the Football Association and this filted into shorts for boxing, gym wear and so on.

This has implications when it comes to remaking that look I talked about last week as these almost as long as great great grannies bloomers shorts are everywhere!

There is an answer however and that there are PUMA Unisex Gestrickte Shorts Teamgoal Shorts WMNS which are available from the Puma store on Amazon which aren't branded for women but are worn more more by WSL players in their leagues.

These are quite a bit shorter but still "decent", have the tie to adjust drawstring we all know and go upto 3xl (38 inch) waist.

Worn with say a white or yellow t shirt or polo shirt and ankle socks they do work out well.

The look of the past

You could say the main feature of the week has been the return to winter with fairly cold temperatures, hailstones, drizzle and all of that having been caught out in it so the thicker layers were needed outdoors although I spotted the boys in one area going cross country in their tops and shorts on Wednesday at one school and another in with the gas fire one.

Actually this kind of almost but not quite sailor suit inspired look was very much the thing in the late 1970's as I rebelled against the longs I rather liked and dressed more like  as "going back" became more acccepted at home.

School was different and being in the Marches we did have bi-lingual staff from the Valleys of Glamorganshire who had this wierd fascination in keeping boys in longs, even being a boarding school we'd see their own children in the height of summer fully covered up top to bottom.

Whither it was connected with Methodist inspired notions of displaying working class respectability to the outside world or some other odd idea I don't know but it made little sense to me and I saw less of in England which can be as class conscious and inwardly conservative as anywhere.

I liked that look as much over time I was able to return more to the tailored approach of my junior years and still do.

Happy birthday, Dennis!

It's been a sunny week, a week when low flying bee permitting I've been been out in the park enjoying the sun playing apart from some post birthday things like a belated card coming  and some of the ordered stuff finally arriving evening needing a cancelation from one place and a reording elsewhere!

It was recently another famous boys birthday who also never seems to get older towhich was marked in style by his biggest fan, the comic, The Beano.

He appears to have had a number of famous guests from music and tv apart from everyone in Beanoland for his tenth birthday but actually he first appeared some seventy-five years ago so like some of us he goes around the sun never getting older.

I do wish my joints were what they were but I know the feeling.

Rolling Stones "On Air"

After last weeks birthday excitement we return this week to something connected with that but got put off for several years.

The Rolling Stones were a group I followed although in so far as building a collection of albums went that didn't really take off until my mid to late teens, starting with a couple of compilations and then delving into individual albums.

Their recorded catalogue is split into two halves that recorded and released up to 1969/70 issued on Decca in the UK and owned by Abkco and that after that to date which the group own but license out over fixed period to other companies to press and distribute, currently Polydor Records.

Over the years we've had a number of live albums issued, some live shows from the past but like a good number of British groups they did appear on radio as BBC radio while being notoriously short on "needle time" seldom playing pop records in the early to mid 1960's did favour shows where artists could perform live a few songs at a time such as "Saturday Club".

Some other artists of this era have had their radio recordings issued on cd and record not least the Beatles with two volumes from the 1990's but with the Rolling Stones it wasn't until 2017 that two variants for them came out.

Called On Air, it mixes a whole series of recordings from 1963 through to 1965 where increased demand for world-wide concerts and recording sessions from top BBC Light Programme shows

It's not just valuable for in session versions of studio recorded and issues songs but for a good number that were never recorded at all even if they may of been in their live shows so we get new songs 

Of great interest is a series of songs recorded for an experimental stereo transmission using BBC Radio and TV transmitters for the left and right channel before the introduction of stereo radio on VHF/FM in the late 1960's.

Viewers and listeners were give instruction on how to set their sets up to gain the most from it so while their first two UK lps were in mono only this gives us some early stones in true stereo sounding surprisingly well.

The Beatles covered Chuck Berry's Roll Over, Beethoven on Beatles Second Album (Capitol) and for the UK With The Beatles albums but while the stones did a good number of covers that was one they never recorded in the studio so we get to hear their take on it.

For a variety of reasons I didn't get around to getting this in its two cd deluxe version with a disc of extra tracks so I'm delighted to finally get this set this year.

Pasts in present

Many popular comic strip and film series having started with introducing the adult character after a while starts to give us flashbacks to when they were younger sometimes it must be said to pad out the whole history but othertimes giving us a a glancing to what made them the adults we see.

In real life this is a common concept, often a person may be at some kind of notable event such as at an award, or otherwise taking on a new role and someone involved will refer to his (or her) past linking that to the qualities now required or skills developed over the years.

People do develop. most of us will mature or at least get a bit wiser several trips around the sun.

The thing that often goes missing is the extent to which that younger person remains within the older one now being praised which can show in any number of ways such as continuation in interests, how they see others around the - were you the diplomat or the directly speaking one? - or that you find yourself at times back in that time.

What's so wrong with carrying the Boy around with you?