Sony TC377 Reel-To-Reel
Music At Alleyn’s In Spring/Summer 1974
Although my 1974 diary fell silent for a few months in April 1974, I recall some aspects of my musical education from that period rather well. Alleyn’s School played a major part in that, but not the only part.
I started learning the violin in that first year at Alleyn’s, Mostly I learnt that the violin was not the instrument for me, to my mother’s chagrin, as that type of bowed instrument (including, I later discovered, the hand saw) was purportedly in my blood:
Pop Kennard, our Alleyn’s music teacher, did not do a great deal for my singing voice that year either. I recall him getting us to listen to and then try to sing Schubert’s Das Wandern in an English translation “To wander is the miller’s joy…”, which did not sound like the following in our unbroken and untrained voices:
My contribution to such singing in those days would have provided enthusiastic volume but would have lacked desirable sound, I am pretty sure.
I have subsequently been taking singing lessons by Zoom with “Miss Honey” since early in the pandemic and have improved beyond measure – my early efforts at improvement blogged about here:
Spring/Summer 1974 – Music At Home
I noted in my diaries early in 1974 that my dad invested in a high quality hi-fi at that time. He plumped for that ahead of a colour television set, which we did without for another couple of years while he saved up for one of those as well.
A fair chunk of dad’s enthusiasm for a hi-fi will have been to do with my musical education and the sense my parents will have had that my most impressive musical skill would be listening to music rather than performing it.
I’ll write separately about the small but neat collection of classical gramophone recordings my parents acquired for me and helped me to acquire. Mostly middle-brow stuff, getting me familiar with the conventional classical canon.
But one evening, dad spotted a concert being broadcast on BBC Radio and decided to get busy properly rigging up the hi-fi so that the concert might be recorded to a (then) high quality on the reel-to-reel for future listening.
Monteverdi’s eighth book of madrigals – The Madrigals Of Love And War – performed by the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra under John Elliot Gardiner.
It transpires that this vague memory of mine must relate to the evening of 4 June 1974. Here’s a link to the BBC genome record for this broadcast.
The concert concerned took place on 6 October 1973. It was well received, by this Telegraph account at least:
Madrigals of Love & War 6 October 1973 08 Oct 1973, Mon The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Why dad was so keen to record this particular broadcast I don’t really know. I think he liked the sound of Renaissance music but found it hard to relate to sacred music from that period. High quality secular music of that period was not to be heard on the radio every day.
Dad made this recording on a 5 3/4 inch spool which I still have in a dungeon somewhere and have digitised along with all of the other spools from the Harris collection.
If you want to hear what those madrigals sound like, the following recording by the Consort of Musicke is a very decent quality version – frankly more to my taste now than the Eliot Gardiner style.
Anyway, fact is that this stuff became my ear worms at the end of my first year at Alleyn’s.
What Were Supposed To Be My Ear Worms In Early June 1974? The Top Five In the Charts, That’s What.
To close this piece, here are the top 5 UK chart hits from that week in 1974.
5: There’s A Ghost In My House by R Dean Taylor became an ear worm of mine many years later, when I got into Motown and Northern Soul, but I doubt if it even entered my consciousness in 1974:
4: The Streak by Ray Stevens went on to be number one for a while and was certainly the subject of our schoolboy chatter back then. “There seems to have been some disturbance here” was a catch phrase that did the rounds then, along with the Monty Python ones. I wonder what Pop Kennard would have had to say about the music therein:
3: Hey Rock ‘n’ Roll by Showaddywaddy was most certainly an ear worm back then. This number had entirely escaped my consciousness until I reheard it just now. Now it is stuck in my ear again. It was a seriously retro number even in 1974, although not as retro as Monteverdi madrigals, obviously:
2: This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us by Sparks. In truth, I don’t remember this track from that 1974 period. A few years later I had a copy of this track on a compilation album and then sought out a copy of Kimono My House (the album from whence it came) which was and remains an all-time favourite of mine. Kimono My House was very much my earworm in March 1981, when the story described in the following ThreadMash performance piece was live:
In short, I think this Sparks track is wonderful:
1: Sugar Baby Love by The Rubettes. Another ridiculously retro sound topped the charts that week.
How did that get to number one in the charts in 1974? Yet – listen closely. Do I detect a variant of the folia progression in there? Is Sugar Baby Love, in a sense, a setting for six voices based on a tradition pioneered in 17th century madrigals? Might Paul de Vinci of the Rubettes possibly have been related to Leonardo?
Monteverdi and Pop Kennard might be turning in their respective graves.