Clack, Crackle & Pop: The Vinyl Days

If you belong to a certain generation, you will be familiar with the old music consoles featuring a radio tuner (in Germany with bands indicating exotic places such as Hilversum, Dubrovnik and Königsberg) and a record player with a spindle on which you’d stack up to ten records which would drop on to the turntable [...]

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Time travel: 1979

As summer approached in 1979, we moved out of the house where I had spent all of my life into a new one, in the same suburb. It was a great house. It’s top two floors had been bombed off in World Way 2. My brother and I were given a spacious room each in [...]

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Time travel: 1978

By 1978 I was one messed-up kid. The only thing that kept me happy was music and football. I spent prodigious amounts of money on records, financed largely by the largesse of my dear grandmother and chance discoveries of cash in places I had no reason to explore (theft is such an ugly word). Needless [...]

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Time travel: 1977 – Part 2

When we parked Any Major Time Machine yesterday, my father had died and the beastly Roland had been shoved out of the way so that I could hold close the lovely Antje to the romantic strains of Mr Rod Stewart. As we resume our journey through 1977, we find Any Major 11-year-old becoming obsessed with [...]

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Time travel: 1977 – Part 1

1977 was a seminal year. In June my father died suddenly, a significant event in anyone’s life. In mine, it turned things upside down (and, boy, it turned me). 1977 was also the year when I began taking pop music more seriously, beginning roughly as of September that year. Rather than music arbitrarily scoring the [...]

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Time travel: 1976

After a major service, Any Major De Lorean is ready to time travel again, continuing my series of 1970s nostalgia as we wing over to 1976. As ever, the songs here are selected purely on strength of their ability to evoke my experiences of that year, much like a smell can transport one back to [...]

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Time travel: 1975

When Nat “King” Cole sang about those hazy, lazy days of summer, he might have had in mind my nostalgic memories of the summer of 1975 (or perhaps not, as Nat didn’t know me, having died before I was born). I wonder whether I’m alone in remembering the weather of my childhood only in extremes: [...]

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Time travel: 1973

By 1973 I could read, thanks to my Grade 1 teacher, Frau Thailer. When we returned to school for Grade 2, Frau Thailer was gone. A bit of a free thinker who probably was well into the Spirit of ‘68, Frau Thailer had given us sex-ed lessons, telling us that the male organ was not [...]

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Time travel: 1972

1972 was the year I became conscious. By that I mean that from age six onwards I have more of a narrative memory than from the time before. 1972 was the year I started school (getting one of those huge cylindrical things filled with sweets), became interested in the news (I remember following the Munich [...]

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Time travel: 1971

I have mentioned that I was a music fan even as a toddler. In 1971 I progressed from being a turntable (see here) to DJ. On my fifth birthday (around the time the photo here of my brother, left, and me was taken), I received a portable turntable, one similar to that pictured, where the [...]

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