So, it was not only the soundtrack albums to Saturday Night Fever and Grease along with ELO and The Commodores we listened to that summer, oh no, it was also punk ( Blondie, Sham 69), reggae ( Bob Marley), pop and soft rock ( Marshall Hain, Jackson Browne) and of course the obligatory novelty song ( Father Abraham and the Smurfs!). BBC Radio 1 woke us up and entertained us during the day but we also loved playing our records, and roped in friends and relatives to bring us new releases from record shops in the city when they came to visit. It was the predecessor to the massive Toshiba Music Centre that had replaced it only 6 months previously, but I was never going to be allowed to take that with me, so the mono player it had to be.Īlthough our social life revolved around going dancing, we were both massive music fans and played anything and everything during our time off that summer. The vinyl itself must have been simply kept in the inner sleeve but was played constantly on the little mono record player I had brought from my parents’ house. Looking at my album collection now, I can still tell which ones they were as they have those telltale blu tack, or even worse, sellotape marks on the covers.
But back to the album cover for “Out of the Blue”, my friend Catriona definitely had that one up on her side of our bedroom wall, and I had some of my favourites over on mine. Phew, I’m exhausted just writing about that so am amazed that my younger self managed to actually live life at that pace – The energy of youth. The Summer of ’78 summed up for an 18-year-old girl! The flashing dance floor from Saturday Night Fever Have a bit of a smooch with the aforementioned T-Bird (who for one summer only had decided that girls of the Sandy persuasion were perhaps preferable to those of the Rizzo persuasion) whilst waiting for Doug to come and drive us home again, just in time to grab around 3 hours of sleep before getting up and doing it all over again!.Bop until 1am (hoping that the last dance of the night, to the refrains of The Commodores mega-ballad Three Times A Lady, would be with one of our local T-Bird equivalents, that name taken from the summer’s other film phenomenon, Grease).Get picked up by Doug who would take us to our destination of choice by 11pm.That summer for us was still the summer of peasant skirts and broderie anglais tops as worn by Linda Ronstadt et al.)
(This being 1978 the previously under-used function suites of our local hotels had suddenly become kitted out with flashing dance floors and glitter balls as per the film Saturday Night Fever, but the clothes to match came later. Rush back to the cottage to change into our “going-out” clothes.That summer, over the course of a weekend, it was not unusual to:
#BEST SHAM 69 ALBUM PLUS#
It was basic indeed, but we had our first taste of independence, with no parents hovering over us querying our movements – Needless to say that summer we worked hard (being a breakfast waitress plus hotel jack-of-all-trades is a tough gig) but also played hard – Living off the beaten track, we built up a good working relationship with Diamond Doug, our local taxi-driver who seemed to favour wearing a certain style of patterned jumper. We had headed off to work in a very posh country house hotel and luckily for us accommodation came with the job. The cover for that particular album was very memorable for me, because it was one of the pieces of artwork that graced the walls of the very basic cottage I shared with my best friend the summer after leaving school. Blue Sky, from their 1977 album “Out of the Blue”. Since then, I have been feeling a bit nostalgic about the band ELO – That of course would be because the music I chose to accompany the film was Mr. Last time I shared a little film of my hometown, which highlighted just how blue the skies were on the first day of Spring.
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