Birthday No. 1 Blues #9 - The Pretenders - Brass In Pocket

 

I am nine years old and the Pretenders are number one.

Both these things will never happen again.

Moving into the eighties, the main thing I remember was this glut of new fonts everywhere. Everything seemed to have a futuristic look or at least look like a load of letters that had just been in the freezer too long.

 The most important thing that happened to me at the age of 9 was seeing Llanddewi Brefi for the first time. We went on a holiday and my dad became convinced that we must escape the terrible concrete jungle and become self sufficient rural home owners. It took a few years but he got his way. But all that’s for later.

Back to 1980. Thursday nights were a ritual in our house. Top of the Pops was a must but you had to get Tomorrow’s World out of the way first. I put much of my disliking and not understanding science down to wanting Judith Hann to stop fucking about with talking bins or whatever so I could settle down with some nice escapist pop music. My dad got paid on a Thursday and so, sometimes, if things weren’t especially bleak we’d have chips with ToTP and life was magnificent, providing Racey weren’t on.

I’ve been watching Shifty, the new Adam Curtis series about the transformations Britain underwent in the eighties and early nineties. I remember when Thatcher was elected because I saw my dad staring with despair at the radio in the kitchen as he treated himself to a cuppa following his night shift at the frozen food factory. That’s kind of a formative memory I suppose. Maybe it didn’t happen, maybe it’s like something from a Curtis doc, a set of random images my mind is using to tell a story to myself. Either way, I took to the keyboard this evening to try and forget the distressing images of an elephant being taken away against it’s will in a cost cutting exercise by London Zoo. And I only typed that so I could forget about the Racey clip I linked to earlier.

Perhaps that’s all Adam Curtis is really doing, just adding fresh images, trying to forget. I can remember thinking that Chrissie Hynde looked dangerous in some way. I was nine, I didn’t have much of a grasp on cool or androgyny or rock and roll, but she seemed dangerous to me and so I didn’t like this record as much as I should have. It just reminds me now of childhood. My Mum really liked this song. I remember that much.

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 – 3

Final Ranking of Birthday no. 1 –  N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week – My Girl by Madness.

 

 

 

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