Now: 12th November, 2023
This is a bit of an interlude of a chapter, not to move the story on from the last one but to colour in what’s happened so far. Now the book writing has reached the stage of being thought about while I walk around doing entirely other things my memory cells are making suggestions like:
"Tell them about what 1969 sounded like. The music you were hearing then that wasn't The Beatles. And get some housekeeping done, those beginning and end bits added so it starts to feel like and look like an actual book. You know “Contents, References, About the author and all that.” Like real books have. Go on, write that thing you only ever see in books about how you divide your time, I dare you."
So this chapter is all that, with links.
Then: 1969
As the decade ends
The sound of 1969 then? Well, a lot of the music I was listening to that wasn't The Beatles was moving away from the giant Beach Boys, Dusty Springfield and Phil Spector pop that had been my biggest joy so far along with the Beatles, to all sorts, and a lot of it American, like:
• The Blues, listening to Mike Raven's new Radio One programme and finding where the Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac were getting their songs from.
• Folk, as I was then thinking of the songs Judy Collins was finding from Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and others who'd eventually get called singer-songwriters. And got me wondering whether I could be one too?
• The Band, my mental heading for the rougher and readier direction being established by them, soon to be followed by George from The Beatles and many another pop musician. Celebrated loudly every Saturday on the wireless by Emperor Rosko.
• Who was also my own route into the soul of Atlantic and Stax records. To Aretha, Wilson Picket, the Staple Singers and Otis Redding.
• And I'd just bought one of my own first LPs. A budget priced sampler from Island Records called "You Can All Join In" full of what was then called underground music like John Peel would play on Saturday afternoons from Free, Fairport Convention, John Martyn and Traffic.
So a shift to the serious and new was going on. Away from the familiar Top of the Poppermost Chartbusting Hits of up to then in the sixties. But none of that, none of the serious Blues Rock'n'Soul I've listed is on my own sampler of “What 1969 Sounded Like." Because it doesn't, particularly. Much of the Blues Rock'n'Soul being what I'd go on and listen to timelessly ever after.
Meaning it's the pop music of the very late sixties I've decided to go with to define what 1969 sounded like. Music I didn't even rate much at the time, but which clearly seeped into me regardless. Because now it seems to carry a pure sense of then. The hormonal thrill of being fifteen, of going out with my friends to anywhere that would let us in, and which would probably just be the Church youth club. But that would be ok because that’s where the girls were. The girls we’d be hoping to pluck up the courage to dance with, and who’d maybe even talk to us.
My sampler is the music of that growing up and getting ready for life. Beautifully written, produced and performed pop music it is too. Doing its joyous job in the background colouring of my 1969 life.
So here it all is, on a sampler playlist I’ve called "1969: The Other Songs On The Wireless.” The year expressed entirely in British chart hits as played on the wireless at the time. A collection of Top of the Poppermost Chartbusting Hits three, by the likes of Lulu, Love Affair, Amen Corner, the Foundations and loads of others. It's even got a sleeve note
"A coming of age playlist of the British pop music I would hear on BBC & pirate radio during the late 1960s. Songs not by the Beatles, Kinks, Who, Stones, Small Faces & all the Americans I was really listening out for. These are the others that were just there. And aren’t they wonderful."
Hear it here and now on Spotify. Or on Apple Music @ronniewriting. And yes, if you’ve just scrolled through the tracks, Val Doonican is on there. And sounding every bit the equal of the perfect pop of Eddy Grant’s Equals and what-a-voice Lulu. Listen, as would later be said, without prejudice. Or maybe just in the background.
So that’s the music. As for the country, with 1969 coming to its end we’re in the fifth year of Harold Wilson’s Labour governments. Race Equality and Equal Opportunities Acts of Parliament have been passed, homosexuality’s not a crime anymore and the birth control pill has been invented. Also “Lady Chatterley’s Lover“ has been in the bookshops for the best part of a decade now (I’ve read it and didn’t learn as much as I hoped I might). But life and society are definitely opening up after their clenched in end of war and empire years.
And though most of us probably don’t realise it, the people of Britain are almost as prosperous now as we might ever turn out to be. Everything’s not perfect of course but I remember having a confidence in the future back then that I’m not sure I’ve felt since.
As for Liverpool, I’ll get to here in the next chapter when the 1970s arrive, I move back into the city and start work. But before we leave the 1960s behind, there’s a bit of housekeeping needs doing, then one last story to tell.
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Now
Some housekeeping
As the story’s well under way now and beginning to feel like a proper book I’ve been doing some proper-book style catching up. With some extra contents to tell you about in already published chapters. That being an advantage of publishing the book in always editable digital instalments.
Here are the extras then, with chapter heading links to easily get to them. Then the story to follow.
A Beginning
The Contents list is now live and being added to, with links, as each new chapter is published.
A References section here or at the end was considered, but rejected in favour of putting links to my own archive and other external publication references within the chapters where they’re most relevant.
And yes an “About the Author” sub-section is there, for now. But with just the one sarky sentence about how I divide my time.
Chapter 1
Links to archived blog posts. About the recent clearing of stuff from my life and being taken on the Liverpool Overhead Railway when I was a baby. Also footnotes about a Simon & Garfunkel song and a memory of living in Diana Street, Walton.
Chapter 2
Links to an influential book, a footnote about how to spell an Everest mountaineeer’s name, some histories of Maghull and Norris Green and a calculator that told me the 2023 equivalent of a 1957 house price.
Chapter 3
A link to the Liverpool Catholic Cathedral opening.
To several archived blog posts, about my own spiritual searching including a stay at a monastery, and on first discovering that everything wasn’t always getting better through a late 60s Shelter poster.
And, very specially, to four blog posts written with my boyhood friend Barry about food, sweets, ice-cream and games in the 1960s. Essential social history, I’d say!
Also, a footnote about my other main boyhood friend Paul and his own writing life.
I said, as well, there’d be one more story to tell. And had considered adding it as a footnote to Chapter 2 where Norris Green is mentioned. But decided instead to put the footnote at the end of here, to se Maghull in its context before I leave there in the next chapter.
So below is the family story of Thomas Joseph Hughes, my grandfather, and how come the Hughes family never did move to Norris Green as he’d wanted, but ended up in a different new town, in Maghull.1
Next
Speaking Next Week
There’s a Liverpool Salon event called “Designs For Living” next Saturday, 18th November, that I’ve been asked to speak at, partly because of the chapters of “Seventy” so far. Tickets are available. So maybe see you there?
The story is this, as told to me by my dad. When the Great War was declared in 1914 Thomas Joseph, his own father, was already 38 and unlikely to have been conscripted. But he volunteered and spent the war at the Front in the, apparently, élite Coldstream Guards. Until, in the final push that would end the War, his lungs were seriously and permanently damaged by poisoned gas, and he was taken prisoner. Released some time later, on turning up at the Coldstream camp his Commanding Officer had said “I thought you were dead Hughes, are you alright?” To which an exhausted Thomas Joseph had answered “Yes, I just want to get home now.” That answer, that “Yes” in that one moment, later turning to be the Army’s excuse for denying him and his dependents any pension or compensation, ever, for what had been done to him. Even though he could only pick up very occasional work as a night watchman down by the docks, with his wrecked lungs, and he and his wife Mary and their seven children lived in dire poverty, they got no help. And not much from Liverpool Corporation either when, ten years later their application to move to the newly announced giant estate at Norris Green was turned down. The best they were offered being a walk-up flat in Owen House, on the corner of Stanley and Melrose Roads. Where young Joe sat on the roof watching the docks burn, during the next war. Shortly before Thomas Joseph died and 15 years before him and Rose, his wife, would move their own family to their own version of Norris Green, Maghull. Where we’ve all lived for the last two 1960s chapters.
Bloody great playlist that Ronnie. I was two. But it still feels somehow evocative of a time and a place for me too.