That’s Oldies

(Scheduled post - still struggling with understanding) 

I have been watching UK TV Freeview Channel 840, “That’s Oldies”, which I came across by chance, and had a 1960s music fix. It shows old TV rock and pop music from the 1950, 1960s, and 1970s, non-stop, end-to-end all day. These are not the tired old “Top Of The Pops” BBC programmed, endlessly repeated. 

Watching again now, there are groups I enjoyed enormously, such as Cream and the Animals, and others, at least for me, completely forgotten, such as Thunderclap Newman. 

They seem to play chunks of 1960s British groups, 1970s, and 1950s with American music. Most except for the 1970s are in black and white. Much  of the 1950s music is from American television shows, but not the original hits. 

Needless to say, I enjoyed the 1960s groups most. Many you might expect to see do not feature. There is nothing of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, or The Who. I guess it is a rights issue. So, what you get are rarely-played groups with their lesser-known hits that did not reach the top 3. That’s all right. I have not seen most of them for 60 or 70 years, and found them fascinating. 

What strikes me now is how good they were, and how many new things I missed in them at the time, such as harmonies, counter melodies, and clever solos. There were so many groups I dismissed as not worthy of attention, probably because I have much more musical knowledge and appreciation now, and, hopefully, am a better guitarist. 

It is also surprising how well groomed they all were. They were thought scruffy, but most are wearing suits. 

Family Photographs

My vision issues make reading and participating in comment quite challenging just now, but I continue to enjoy your blog posts which the computer reads for me. 

A similar sequence in families throught the Western world, labelled in albums if they are lucky.

Early in mine, among the various family lines, are my great-grandparents around 1908. My great-grandfather is resplendant in is uniform, a newly qualified Master Mariner.

Later there are lots of weddings. Don't they all look well!

Now a very faded picture of his son, my grandfather, with his new wife, on holiday with friends and cousins at Mablethorpe Lincolnshire after the Great War. Along comes a son, my father, then a daughter, my aunty. They begin to look more prosperous and go on days out to the Yorkshire coast. My grandfather sits on the beach in his hat and suit looking uncomfortable.

The children grow older and get married. My father and mother help tend the family allotment. Then I appear as a baby and begin to grow. Dad plays and entertains me for hours, carrying me around town on his bicycle crossbar seat, and then does it all over again six years later with my brother. Wasn't he fantastic! Again we take holidays on the Yorkshire coast, and further afield too.

We even have audio recordings and bits of digitised cine film from the nineteen-sixties.

I look at it all over and over again obsessively, and digitise it, and add pictures of my own family. I leave everything well-organised for the future.

And in that future, my children have little more than passing interest in the earlies pictures of people they never knew. And their children even less.

"So who was he? Is that some kind of seaman's uniform?"  

I suppose I might be the same if there were photographs of relatives I never knew from 1800, who lived such unimaginably different lives through unimaginably different times. It is too difficult to connect with them.

The whole lot might survive another century at best before being deleted, becoming inaccessible or simply thrown out.