Rolling Back the Years

It was while we were having our recent spring clean that I came across a relic from the Ark – my old vinyl records. They had been tucked away out of sight, and out of mind, for a long while and so it was quite a surprise when we uncovered them the other day.

I’m not exactly sure when the last one was bought, but I guess it was sometime in the late ‘80s, and flicking through the collection was like taking a step back in time to that decade. The ‘80s were when I was at my vinyl buying peek, as before then I was a kid with not much cash to spend on such things, and after that time it was CDs that came to the fore, before the digital revolution of music downloads. So looking through my record collection I came across names such as Queen, Wham, Eurythmics, Altered Images, Kate Bush, The Bangles, Belinda Carlisle, Dire Straits, Billy Joel, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, ... and the list just goes on and on. Many happy memories, of spending hours in my room playing whichever was my latest fave record over and over again, flooded back.

It is interesting that despite growing up on different sides of the Atlantic, Dori and I have a shared musical memory of the ‘80s. Many of the biggest bands of that time were British, and there was a lot of crossover from one side of the pond to the other. There were though, a few bands/artists that, naturally enough, Dori hadn’t come across before. One of those was the band who made the very first single I ever bought. Or actually, to be precise, the joint first single I ever bought as I actually purchased 2 at the same time.

The band in question was Bad Manners, who were a ska band from North London led by the unique Buster Bloodvessel, and the song was “Walking In The Sunshine”. Here it is...



Wow, that was a long time ago. Ironically, with the title of the song being about sunshine and all, the video was shot on a very grey day. It must have sounded like a good idea at the time when they were thinking about how to shoot the video – “I know; we’ll go down to the coast and have lots of shots of the band messing about on the beach” - only to be scuppered by the traditional English weather!! :-)

If you are at all interested, my other first single was “Shut Up” by Madness, which contains one of my favourite lines of lyric – “I’m as honest as the day is long - the longer the daylight the less I do wrong!”. I guess I was a bit of a ska boy back then. :-)



Aah, memories! I would love to know what your first singles all were. Drop me a comment and let me know!