The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 23/03/11
The Association - "Windy" (1967)
Just like The Lovin' Spoonful's Daydream from a few posts ago, this is another evocation of my childhood.
In this case, rather than anything involving tabby cats and wheelbarrows, this has more to do with my early radio experiences.
In about 1967, our elderly valve radio on the living-room table finally packed up and my mother was forced to buy one of them new-fangled transistor radios. Although transistor sets were supposed to be lightweight and compact, this was only by comparison with the old mains-powered ones. The Marconiphone Model 4128 which we bought from Curry's had the light weight and compactness of a rather large brick, not helped by the fact that it needed a sizeable PP9 battery which effectively doubled the unit's weight.
The build quality left a lot to be desired in some respects as well, with the volume switch suffering from poor contacts from the off, and the vertical markers on the tuning wire snapping off, leaving just little red stumps.
It was portable, though, and my customary wheedling and stranking had led to me getting the concession of using the set when I'd gone to bed of an evening. This would have been about eight o'clock if not earlier (I would have been five years old).
It was a four-band set, although that just meant that it had Long Wave, Medium Wave and two Short Wave bands - VHF was out of our range (both financially and electromagnetically) at that time. It wouldn't pick much up on Short Wave either, which just left LW and MW.
I don't know quite how I alighted on Radio Luxembourg as my station of choice at that time. I wasn't really that interested in pop music anyway (I think we were still - literally - at the wind-up gramphone stage in our house at that time), but there must have been something about the ambience of '208' which I found attractive.
So there I would sit, in bed, thumbing through an extremely foxed (not to say badgered) old book about railways around the world (aged five, I could tell you a lot about the Pike's Peak Railroad, or about how they put fog-warning detonators on the main west coast line at Tebay), or running my collection of Matchbox™ cars up and down the folds I'd carefully made in my tartan bedspread, listening to old Luxy until it was time for lights out.
I'm positive it was on Luxembourg that I first heard this wonderful record. For years, I didn't know who it was by; all I know is that - as another example of music being the nearest thing we have to a time machine - hearing this song now still brings back those memories as if they were last week rather than nearly half a century ago.
