the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

It’s the Sprint of 1967. I am a schoolboy in class 3A at St Andrews County Secondary Modern school in the village of Cobham, Surrey in the UK. I live in a white world, my parents are servants at a country estate just outside of the village and, aged 14, I know only two non-white people, one of whom is one of our maths teachers at school, and the other from, what was then, East Pakistan, a man to whom I deliver his evening paper.

This was rural England in the mid-sixties. Any non-white person was unusual in our community, but, through music, we knew loads of black people. Except that, when you first heard a record by someone new, you didn’t know what colour they were, it was only later, through the printed media or seeing them on TV, that you would find out. If you liked the music then the colour of the artist’s skin was irrelevant.

Back at school in Cobham, one of my classmates is telling me all about having been to see the Stax review, Stax, and sister label Volt, being one of the prominent soul record sources, and I had no idea that they had bought a number of their acts over for a European tour. Too late then for me to see them, but I was enthralled as my classmate, I can’t be sure now, but think her name was Caroline, told me all about the acts that she had seen.

Music was music. Like so many things it is all about personal taste, you like a song or you don’t. I have never been too faithful to any artist, in that I might like some of what they do, but don’t always like everything. I don’t, especially, like any specific genre either, and generally feel that there has been little that I like recorded since about the mid-eighties. That is just the generation gap.

For us in the UK back in the mid-sixties we still had a thriving pirate radio scene. For us down South Caroline and London were the primary stations that we could get loud and clear. They played the sort of music that we liked, and we thought that we were sticking it the The Man by listening to the pirates rather than having to put up with the crumbs being offered by the government backed BBC radio. We were, of course, just lining the pockets of a different Man, but we were naive, as we all are at that age. We just liked the music better.

It didn’t make any difference whether it was black music or white music. I certainly wasn’t too bothered about who was making it, it only mattered whether I liked it or not. I, sort of, knew that Motown and Stax were black, but even there some of the musicians were white: Steve Cropper, Lewis Steinberg, Duck Dunne at Stax, and even in the black walls of Motown one of the Funk Brothers was white, guitarist Joe Messina. None of that mattered, for the were all people making music that spoke to me.

Music had a uniting power. The Blues musicians of the Sixties brought us black music. Now there is a generation that calls such things cultural misappropriation, but to us it was just music that we liked being made accessible by our home grown groups. Now we can see the irony of white British bands taking black music back to the USA, but we were innocent of such things back then.

The innocence of youth left us free to listen and enjoy. Yes, we all had certain favourites, but the music we chose was an important part of our lives. At that age you are learning fast, but there is still more to come. You rebel against your parents in various ways as part of growing up, but you don’t know enough about the real world. Life isn’t fair and you are about to find that out.

Music has been a comfort to me, and I still love to listen. Sometimes it transports me back to when I first heard it, sometimes not, but, when it does take me back, it is to a more innocent time, one where I thought that I knew it all, but really knew little. It was a different world back then, and I am very glad that I grew up in my little corner of it.

The Spring of 1967 was time of awakening for me. Through the power of music I began to understand some of the injustice around the world. I already had a voracious curiosity, and music fuelled that to a great degree. I have never lost that hunger for knowledge, although now I am a lot more selective about what I want to know about.

The power of music and the naivety of youth was a heady cocktail. It gave me the life that I subsequently have lived, and I am very grateful to it for that.