Authors Electric

60 Years Ago Today   Memory is notoriously selective. In 1963 in the UK it was the coldest winter anyone could remember and my father had died the previous year. Talking this over with my brother recently, he remembers fondly how we made a fabulous slide from frozen snow in the side passage of our house - and of course1963 was also the year that The Beatles released  Please, Please Me  and began to take over the musical world. As Annie Ernaux says in her memoir, The Years (2017) – ‘Just listening to them you wanted to be happy’.   The Beatles: I have this idea about the circular nature of time and how we are able to revisit ourselves as we get older. This happened again when I caught sight of an article in my Sunday paper, ‘Why lost Beatles school gig tape could be saved for the nation’. It was an article about how The Beatles had played a gig at Stowe School in April 1963 and it featured the story of how 15 year old John Bloomfield had made a tape recording of the s...

          Happy December, folks. As I told my partner in the early hours of last New Years Day when we were driving home from a gig, it'll be Christmas again before you know it - and I was right! And doesn't it seem to come around fast these days? Or is that because I'm getting older? Anyway, for people my age, who were hanging around music stores in their teens, one Christmas Album will surely stick in their minds above all others. Commonly know as The Phil Spector Christmas Album - the actual title is - "A Christmas Gift For You." Now I know Phil's reputation is not squeaky clean, rumours of gun-toting in the recording studio with The Ramones and John Lennon are rife, although Yoko Ono says they are untrue. He's now serving life in prison for murder. However this doesn't detract from the fact that he was one hell of a record producer. Probably the best there was at that time and still hard to beat nowadays. No one has come up with a...