… Not that much, just a couple of things hanging over from my recent blog about summer jobs, hot dogs, broad expanses of sand and distant seas.
First off, there’s the music. I’ve already mentioned the local Shadows-sound-and-look-alikes, Trek Faron and the Unknowns [whatever became of … ] but not the sounds of that summer in general, in particular. There seemed to be music everywhere: not through headphones, as it would be now, but from the dodgems, the amusement park, booming out from the juke box in the restaurant below the dormitory where we slept. It was – the summer of 1962 – a pretty good year for music; pop music; the charts; music on the edge of changing, tilting [see the Beatles sneaking in there] from a mixture of fairly basic rock ‘n’ roll, novelty numbers and sentimental ballads, towards something potentially more interesting.
A Top 30 [or so] assembled from the Mablethorpe juke box might have looked, alphabetically, like this …
- A Picture of You : Joe Brown
- Bobby’s Girl : Susan Maughan
- Break It To Me Gently : Brenda Lee
- Breaking Up Is Hard To Do : Neil Sedaka
- Can’t Help Falling in Love : Elvis Presley
- Crying in the Rain : The Everly Brothers
- Desafinado : Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd
- Do You Wanna Dance : Cliff Richard
- Don’t Ever Change : The Crickets
- Dream Baby : Roy Orbison
- Duke of Earl : Gene Chandler
- Hey Baby : Bruce Channel
- I Can’t Stop Loving You : Ray Charles
- It Might As Well Rain Until September : Carole King
- Let There Be Love : Nat King Cole
- Love Me Do : The Beatles
- Love Letters : Ketty Lester
- Return to Sender : Elvis Presley
- Sealed With a Kiss : Brian Hyland
- Sherry : The Four Seasons
- She’s Got You : Patsy Cline
- Softly As I Leave You : Matt Monro
- Speak To Me Pretty : Brenda Lee
- Speedy Gonzales : Pat Boone
- Sweet Little Sixteen : Jerry Lee Lewis
- Teenage Idol : Ricky Nelson
- The Locomotion : Little Eva
- The Wanderer : Dion
- Twistin’ the Night Away : Sam Cooke
- Walk on By : Leroy Van Dyke
- What a Crazy World We’re Living In : Joe Brown & the Bruvvers
- Ya Ya Twist : Petula Clark
- Your Cheating Heart : Ray Charles
As I say, not a bad list at all, but there are three songs that I remember most from that summer and which seemed to be playing on the juke box more than most: one, the Nat King Cole, was pleasant if little more, but lifted by a deft arrangement featuring George Shearing’s piano; the other, a true monstrosity, was Pat Boone’s Speedy Gonzales, with its high-pitched intrusions in cod-Mexican falsetto. An abomination.
The third was Brian Hyland’s Sealed With a Kiss. Well, it was summer and even in Mablethorpe the evenings could feel romantic, the sun sinking slowly down over the wide horizon. I remembered it, some of it, some twenty five years later, when writing Last Summer, First Love, the second of my books in the Pan Heartlines series of teenage romances. [Look, a guy has to eat!]
Set, yes, in Mablethorpe, it’s the touching story of true love between Lauri, whose last summer it is, helping out in her mum’s café before heading off to be a nurse, and Mike, a student working on the hot dog stall. The names [and a whole lot more] were changed to protect the innocent.