Ruth and Martin's Album Club by Martin Fitzgerald (Unbound 2017)

So, over to you Peter. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????

What’s wrong with me is a puritanical desire to be serious, and an actual inability to take popular music seriously. I pretty much gave up listening to pop music round about the time Radio London (Big L, 266 on the medium wave band, not the BBC one) went off the air in 1967, and absolutely gave up soon after I crashed my motorbike in the late summer of 1969, an event that strengthened my wish to be serious.

I’d been listening to Tin Pan Alley, I can now work out, since about 1963 (Pick of the Pops on Sunday afternoons was eventually permitted by my boarding school headmaster who until then had insisted nobody could listen to the radio unless he could make his own set, which a couple of my schoolfellows did, so subverting the ban). So I was in on the beginning of it, and it was all catchy, memorable singles which quickly came and quickly went, and the waters closed over them. I don’t think anyone ever expected to hear them again once they’d dropped off the charts, and it was amazing how quickly singles vanished from the shops once they had stopped selling.

As a result, they’re great memory-joggers, instantly taking me back to certain long-ago moments. But most of them are pretty artless. I never thought it was anything more than an ephemeral pleasure, and I still don’t, though one or two singles, e.g. ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place’ and ‘Meet on the Ledge’, appealed to my gloomy instincts more than the rest.