Entertainment For Lively Minds
And your favourite 7" single was...........
The talk of record store day and records that define your life got me thinking about singles, good old fashioned 7 inch singles. The things you looked out for in the review page of your music mag of choice, you waited for Peter Powell to play first on Radio 1, the excitement as you bought it on the day of release and desperately hoped would be faithfully reproduced on TOTP on a Thursday night. I don't think your favourite single would be your favourite song ever but I think they define a time and place in your life. I've thought about this and I've avoided the obvious "Going Underground" by The Jam despite it getting to number one being so exciting and a landmark day in my musical life. My favourite 7 inch single was "Stand and Deliver" by Adam and The Ants. Because it was the first single after "Kings of the Wild Frontier" the anticipation was incredible then when it arrived the look, the sound, the drums, the video, the free poster of Adam in all his highwayman glory was almost too much. For me this was the peak of the single as an event, everything about it was perect for me at that time. And your favourite 7" single was......
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how odd
I just logged in to post this clip, purely cos it's brilliant.
it's also the b side of the above if I recall correctly.
(Have you seen the Youtube footage of AA 'doing' Cars with Gary Numan earlier this month? Eeek alors.)
I seemed to skip
directly to ellpees, singles kinda disappointed me - no sleeve notes, rarely a picture sleeve, only 2-3 tunes... wasn't enough for a young Blast!
Back to the 60's
I tried to pounce on one before my brain went into overdrive. This is what came out. I loved this song as a 13 year old. It gave me the urge to dance - an urge I would fight till I discovered Guinness a few years later. Then I was quite good at it. The Hollies also came to mind with King Midas in Reverse from the same epoch.
'Show Me'
It's got to be on the 'net' somewhere.....
A US TV duet of 'Show Me' by Janis Joplin and Tom Jones.
It is sensational and any sense that Tom was somehow an MOR guy to be ignored was completely torn apart when I first saw that.
Tom Jones
was (and is) a fine singer and his roots are in soul and blues. I think he went with the money in the 60's and got smoothed out for a while. I have a distant memory of the version with Janis Joplin from the time. Here's another song possibly from the same show. Joe's version is still the best.
Shipbuilding
I'd pick Robert Wyatt's version of Shipbuilding for a number of reasons:
1. It felt like a 'grown-up' song, very important to the 14 year old me.
2. It had a political standpoint that I liked. Once again, very important to me at the time.
3. It was popular but not wildly so (no. 36 in the charts, according to Wikipedia) which meant I didn't get sick of hearing it on Radio One and it felt like 'my' song, rather than one I shared with 1000s of other people.
4. It had a cool fold-out sleeve, that was available in four different versions and I managed to blag two of the covers from Selectadisc in Nottingham even though I only bought one copy of the single.
I still love the song to this day.
Great choice
Wasn't the cover a detail from a Stanley Spencer painting? I loved that.
Not sure
According to this French discography the single was released with five different covers, one on the 12" and four on the 7".
The discography says "Il y a 4 versions différentes de pochette d'après une illustration de Stanley Spencer pour ce Single."
Doesn't "d'après" mean "in the style of" rather than "by"?
Here's one of the five anyway:
I'm afraid we can't trust the French in this case...
They're proper Stanley Spencers all right, from the "Shipbuilding on the Clyde" series.
• Each sleeve has a different cover image, taken from a Stanley Spencer series of shipyard illustrations, credited accordingly on the back of each sleeve.
• Cover images are: 1) Men with ropes. 2) Man & Woman with tarpaulins. 3) Men hammering rivets. 4) Man at a brazier.
Thank you
Thank you. Well they're great covers, painted by Stanley Spencer, and it was a great single. My favourite 7" in fact, hence the post!
d'après...
I think in this context it means 'made from' or 'created using...'. J'espère que ce commentaire me rendre utile.
à bientôt
Merci
beaucoup.
I wasn't a singles buyer.
I can count the total number of singles I purchased on vinyl on the thumbs of one hand.
Come Back My Love by Darts.
And that was only once it was remaindered.
I lost my virginity to.......
My single buying cherry was mislaid to this lovely....
Calalog Number V1, with the mighty Vertigo swirling vortex:
Juicy Lucy's great version of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love? It is a shame that their Top Of The Pops appearance has not surfaced. I remember how threatening Glenn Ross Campbell's rocking of the electric table seemed at the time.
There would be two for me
I too was tempted to say Going Underground (great B-side) - especially as I saw The Jam in Bristol Colston Hall the week it was released. However I go for two that I bought on the same day as they Changed My World at the time. The first is by a group that were massive but have been slightly written out the history of the era:
To me listening to it now it still sounds brilliant actually.
The other one set the agenda for the events of the next few years:
Also still sounding good to these ears - first time I've heard either of them in Yearsssss. Thanks for inspiring me to dig them out Dave.
My Seven inches..
..was Life begins at the Hop by XTC
Saw it in one of those adverts in NME/Sounds/MMaker. Sent off my postal order on a Monday and it arrived in the post BEFORE school on the next Wednesday!
Lovely packaging and clear vinyl too.
Don`t really get that excited in the same way anymore.
The first one
Complete Control
by the Clash. Great song, great cover, great b side. Still gives me a large jolt of adrenalin to this day, never seems to date. 7 inches of dynamite.
Ahh
>
With no axe to grind against the Icicle Works, I reckon that £4.50 would have bought you two 'Premiership' games in 1983 and probably three down Brentford or Orient.
How much would two Chelsea games cost in 2010?
I really don't know.
£3.00
To stand on The Loft in 83. 50p a programme. See where the inflation has hit hardest there. 10 times the price for ground entry but "only" 6 times the price for a programme.
I'm with Dave
Stand and Deliver bust my pop music cherry. I had the 7" single in the poster bag sleeve. Loved everything about it. Traded it in at the Goldhawk Road branch of the Music and Video Exchange. Think I got a Woodentops album and forked out a shedload for the Terence Stamp sleeve of "What Difference Does It Make" on 12". What a sad 15 year old I was!
3 stand out
led zeppelin -whole lotta love a side
livin lovin maid b side
creedence - up around the bend a side
run through the jungle b side
fleetwood mac oh well part a side
oh well part 2 b side
Manfred Mann
Semi-Deatched Suburban Mr James
Bought the single but this is a live version (Klaus Voorman on bass)
Buzzcocks
Love You More backed by Noise Annoys.
Was Revolver always more crowd than band?