Number One Birthday Blues

Bohemian Rhapsody I am sat on the sofa in our front room. Our tinny record player is playing A Night at the Opera and I am reading along with the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody. It terrifies me. Why is this man singing about dying? Who is going to get him?   It upsets me and thrills me at once.... The sight of Queen miming in some cavernous pretend concert every week on Top of the Pops each week is equally hypnotic and horrific. I don’t know what dry ice is but it feels like part of the thing that Freddie is singing about, the terrifying thing that is coming to kill him. And then there’s that whole weird echoing face effect. Bismillah. Scaramouche. I don’t know what these words mean and neither do my parents. I am fascinated by my parents’ little record collection. Aladdin Sane is terrifying because the man on the inside cover is wearing makeup and has no genitals. I ask my mum what wanking means when reading the lyrics. My mum hides that record for the next few years.  Not...

On a Tuesday morning in January 1975, a 29 year old GP made a house call to widow named Lucy Crossley. She would be the first of three victims of Harold Shipman that day, and the first of several hundred overall. Meanwhile, in Maidstone, I was snuffing out some candles of my own. Four of the bastards sat on a cake filled no doubt with the kind of wondrous E-numbers you just don’t see anymore. I remember nothing of the occasion. I was four. And when I looked up what was number one on this occasion, I was none the wiser. No Proustian rush occurred. I wasn’t thrown back down the vista of years to some touching childhood memory. I genuinely had never heard of Ms. Grace or indeed The Tymes and, even now, whilst I play it, can recall nothing of it except it feels like the kind of song you’d hear playing in the background of a filler shot in some mid-90s Farrelly Brothers comedy. Perhaps Adam Sandler is driving a monkey to his grandmother’s cremation for reasons too stupid to go into ...

  I am three years old and Mud are number one with Tiger Feet . My memories of this time are hazy. I am living in Maidstone. So it’s probably for the best. Sixth tier football. Too far from London to be convenient, not near enough France to swim. We had a black Labrador called Lassie. I can picture seeing my Dad walk to work. A candle on the landing at bedtime. A red pedal car I had with a personalised reg. This was as close to success as I ever got. There were neighbours on the square where we lived. One was called Shirley. Another one was called Eddie. I remember watching an animated episode of Star Trek round a kid’s house called Danny. I think he was called Danny. But they had colour TV and we didn’t so that was how I discovered money. I went to a playgroup where I threw an orange at Santa. Weekends were often spent at my dad’s parents – Poppa and Nanny Cuckoo. Poppa wasn’t Italian, though he was from the Rhondda originally and had ended up in London after the war. Nanny C...

NOTE - I had made the mistake of presuming Wikipedia was correct and so this is about the song that was number 1 the day before my second birthday. I can't be arsed to write anything about the song that was the actual number 1 24 hours later because it's Blockbuster by The Sweet, a song that somehow pipped Bowie's Jean Genie to number 1 because instead of a sleazy transgressive pop song inspired by The Stooges, Burroughs and Genet, Joe Bastard Public preferred the same tune but with a fucking police siren and some bloke called Brian dressed like a twat. I am two years old and learning to hate America. Little Jimmy Osmond is number 1 with a song so twee, so fucking schmaltzy, that Nixon was immediately forced to suspend hostilities in North Vietnam to boost his country’s standing in the world. The Osmonds were Mormons, I think they’re the ones with the guy finding a magic golden book about a hundred years earlier, just as he had run out of money. The Osmonds were everywhe...