As I write, it is 50 years ago to the day since Sunday 5th November 1967.
On that day, my father and I recorded Hare and Guy Fawkes, Ogblogged here, on our family’s trusty Grundig TK-35.
Our machine was still playing (although not recording) when I let the scrap merchants take it to a better place in 2012.
The very end of the Hare and Guy Fawkes recording segues rather elegantly into the top three from Pick of the Pops:
- Zabadak by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich
…which is followed by…
- Massachusetts by The Bee Gees
…and then…
- Baby Now That I’ve Found You by The Foundations.
With the excitable tones of Alan “Fluff” Freeman between the tracks.
I have split the audio track into parts, but if you run the files contiguously they run entirely unbroken.
The segue works so well, I can only surmise that dad was experimenting with that recording after we had made the Hare and Guy Fawkes recording.
I am pretty sure I must have been watching him carefully and working out what it took to rig up the radio to the tape recorder and record from the radio.
The next 20+ seconds of tape is taken up with “gunk”, as I describe it in subsequent notes, which I think is my early attempts to work out to record, stop, pause etc. some done that evening, the rest the next day or just a few days later.
The following week I recorded the whole of the top nine from Pick of The Pops. I’ll up that material next week.
Don’t try to compare these charts with anything you see from the Official Charts; the BBC Pick Of the Pops charts didn’t work that way in 1967; they tried to second guess the chart standings by making a “chart of charts” from the NME, Melody Maker and several other chart sources which would all be published on different days and different ways. But the only logical dates for my recordings are 5 November 1967 top three, some gunk in between and then the 12 November 1967 top nine.
After that, I recorded a whole load of other pop music stuff to fill up that side of the tape.
It could only have been me making those recordings after the initial part of the 5th November recording; the cutting and hacking about is too amateurish to have been dad or mum. I also remember mum telling me in later years their mixture of horror and pleasure when they discovered me making my own clandestine recordings.
The reason this particular spool survived is because of the Hare and Guy Fawkes recording and also some other material which dad wanted to keep on the other side of the tape.
Most of the recordings I made as a child would have been wiped by subsequent recordings I made as a child. Tape wasn’t cheap.
There is one other tape of similar vintage that survived; with Pick Of The Pops from August 1968. Those recordings include Fluff Freeman’s fabulous chart rundowns, which the 1967 recordings sadly lack.
I’ll up the August 1968 ones when they reach their 50th birthday.
In the meantime, pop pickers, hit the above MP3 files for the Pick of The Pops top three.
Tara.