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Monday 28 June 2010

I Feel Love in MacArthur Park...


That last post was my 400th...

I can scarcely believe it! Thank you for being here. You mean a lot to me. Mwah! This time with ruby-red lipstick - Mwah!

We seem to have segued from country into another land altogether... Hey, it's my blog, tant pis!

I don't do Disco... Not Fhina, no Siree! And yet there are some Disco-era records that I do enjoy - And, again from Jimmy Webb, here we have Donna Summer, la Diva herself, (and let's face it, even the Great Engleesh Actorrrr, Richard Harris. covered this amazing song in the very same millennium (1968)).

Here's the wonderful Donna singing of Los Angeles' MacArthur Park in Holland later in her golden career.

This was a hit for Donna in 1977, again when I was a fair and slender, innocent and naive, Teen:



I know it's not a Country song, like the rest of my travels this week in pictures... But I do love a bit of Donna, and I Feel Love was a favourite of my mother's too, and she jumped off her bus one summer's day in the Haymarket, Newcastle in 1978.

She was a public service bus driver. She transported pensioners and pupils, drunks and ne'er do wells, and she was very good at it.

For some reason, there in the Seventies, she ran into a little indie record store that's since been pulled down (I checked on Friday!) and gave me the UK's Top 3 singles (45s) as a present. It wasn't my birthday, it wasn't Christmas. It was an unsolicited present from her, and I was made up. ...I must have been behaving myself at school, because my mother, early in our lives together, wasn't prone to random acts of affection, particularly with me, although I know she loved me very dearly... I had a particularly closeted working class upbringing...

I remember that I loved Boney M's Brown Girl In The Ring, (and hated Rivers of Babylon, but my grandad who lived with us enjoyed it instead), and I listened endlessly to Donna's A and B sides, ('Can't we just sit down and talk it over?').

...It's annoying me that I can't remember what the third single was but I mustn't have loved it as much.

It was the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee and we had a war-time style tea party in the street, and I was one of the oldest kids to go! I still have the commemorative Fifty Pence piece, a coin and a notebook I was given by the street's residents. I'm sure they're not worth anything.


I'd been to see Star Wars at our local flea-pit, and complained to the usherette because you couldn't see the desert scenes that well because of the layer of ingrained smoke and grime on the screen that had been there since the Thirties! How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!

I had probably outgrown wearing my burgundy nylon Oxford bags and a cheesecloth blouse with angel sleeves. I had two, one white and pink, one blue. I wore impossibly high platforms then.

...My cankles have never been the same since. I actually tripped up in the street this week and have been hobbling like a Hobbit ever since, with a blister the size of a saucer to match! I blamed the dodgy wonky pavements in the city, but I know that my cankles are to blame.

Back to the past - I had a skateboard then that my dad had made using a plank of two by four with a cast-off roller skate. I recall falling off it a lot and it was not flexible in the slightest.

...My ankles have always been weak. Maybe I need to blame the skateboard?

Anyhoo, Donna was black, beautiful and effortlessly cool, never mind her voice that could melt frozen butter, and I so wanted to be her, glowing, in her golden pleated skirt, her hair all fanned out in a V shape...

When I wasn't playing with my Klackers!


5 comments:

libby said...

What a fab thing for your mom to have done. Revisiting the past through music is just a wonderful feeling is'nt it? and cankles? made me laugh as I think they are the regulation setting for women of a certain age!

Reasons said...

Noooooooooo!!!!!!! I love the post, I love the memories, I love you....but please dear Fhina don't mention Brown Girl in the Ring again, it'll be an ear worm in my head all day. Agh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:-) xxx

Sueann said...

What wonderful memories!! A tea party in the street!?! How fabulous! Weak cankles huh? Me too dear one...me too!
But oh how I did love to roller skate...four wheels...all day long!! And stayed in the upright position as well!! Woohoo!!
Have a great day
Hugs
SueAnn

Saz said...

clackers YOU ARE!!!!

luv ya!

saz x

Unknown said...

MacArthur Park is a great song, which I never discovered until 1978 when a friend asked me to transfer it to tape for them but the track was so scratched it wouldn't! Your musical memory lane is good, Fhina!

Something I wrote earlier...

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