FAT BALLS OF FIRE Th e Fr o m e Fo s s i l
In the market, all was quiet. The fish man was bagging me up a slab of ling and a slithery mass of squid. Then a nasal Cockney voice split the air. “Come outside!” it begged, “Come outside! There’s a luvverly moon out there.” The fish man and I looked at each other conspiratorially. We both knew who the singer was, and that made us feel hopelessly ancient. “Takes me back,” he said. Yeah: to about 1962, I thought. The bloke on the music stall clearly had a job lot of early sixties hits CDs he wanted to shift. Which was why the little-missed tones of Mike Sarne were floating across the car park like the smell of rancid chips. So, as I moved on round the market, my twelve-year-old self hovered beside me, along with the varied musical talents of Karl Denver, The Tokens, Adam Faith and much, much worse. By the time I reached the birdfood stall, Helen Shapiro was belting out “Walking Back to Happiness”. There was a grizzled guy in front of me, and we too swapped nostalgic eye rolls at the song. It was as if we were members of a secret society with exclusive access to arcane and embarrassing musical knowledge. After all, no-one else was going to recognise these rather terrible old tunes, were they? Six decades old, at that. A goose waddled across my grave. I shuddered, bought a big bag of fat balls and turned away, humming “whoopa oh yay yay” to myself. At that moment, I heard the same refrain being bawled out beside me. A knot of cheery herberts, average age fifteen, was strolling past, singing along with the CD. And they knew the words! How the hell did that happen? Mike Sarne, Helen Shapiro – even Russ Conway – were tiny fragments of my long-ago childhood, but they don’t mean much to me now. What could they possibly mean to kids whose soundtrack consists of Dababy, J.P.Saxe, Powfu and Jawsh685?
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THE LIST FROME
T h e F r o m e Fo s s i l
But then, musical tastes are often baffling. My 84-year-old neighbour told me that, when he and his wife were courting, they used to spend Saturday nights in the local pub. “After about ten pints I did used to get on the table and sing Elvis Presley songs. My wife did hate it. She’d tell me to sit down and not make a fool of myself. Funny thing was, though – she did really love Elvis after that.”