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Broooce covered and Annie's summermix...

Bryan Burnett | 19:02 UK time, Monday, 4 August 2008

Lulu.jpg

Thanks for all your Springsteen covers tonight. A great theme suggested by a very nervous Norrie. " I needn't have worried," he said in an e-mail at the end of the hour. "This is brilliant. And of course I am Scotland's most enthusiastic Springsteen fan!"

Another terrific summermix tape again tonight courtesy of Annie on the e-mail. I loved Annie's insight into what it was like growing up in Scotland in the 60s. This series of mixtapes has been a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Get It On listeners and confirmation of just how much music means to us all. Here's a list of her songs complete with her sleevenotes and those great memories...

Chubby Checker - Come on Lets Twist again - My mother hated music. In our house nobody dare listen to music. I was five and starting school when I met Rhetta. She lived in the hotel just around the corner. Rhetta and her two sisters had all the things we didn't have at home hoola hoops, dirndl skirts and a dansette. I spent the whole summer of 1960 learning to twist and now just as I think I've cracked it, nobody seems to be doing the twist anymore.

Ray Charles - I can't stop Loving you - In the early sixties there weren't nearly as many cars on the road, you were lucky if you knew somebody who would take you for a run. My family did know somebody not only with a car but an with a shiny black Bentley. As we cruised in style through Aberdour on a sunny Sunday with the windows open and the radio playing in the background more often than not it would be Ray Charles keeping us company. 'I can't Stop Loving you' has become a lifelong favourite and it was on the first L.P I bought. It cost two pounds and two shillings scraped together from working Saturdays on the haberdashery counter at Woolworths.

Peter Paul and Mary - Puff the Magic Dragon - With cars being expensive, bus trips were all the rage. A long queue for the great mystery tour formed on Sunday afternoons outside Harrison's travel agency, specialising in a fortnight in Portobello or for the more affluent a sail down the Clyde to Dunoon. One Sunday the mystery tour bus would crawl to Helensburgh and the next Sunday Burntisland. Buses then didn't have onboard toilets and never a half hour went past without somebody shouting 'stop the bus'. In between though everybody would be singing at the top of their lungs. 'Ye cannae shove yer granny off a bus was a great favourite but so was Puff. I think anybody who is listening and doesn't find they're singing along to this should see about getting their prescription changed.

Lulu - To Sir with Love - Dragons live forever but not so little girls. Lulu's poignant song describing the transformation from child to young woman is a reminder of the year I left childhood behind and the whole world changed. Far from moving from crayons to perfume, it changed from childish scribbles to words penned by some of the greatest songwriters in modern times, lyricists who brought about a political rebellion never to be forgotten.

Joan Baez - With God on our SideÌý - To celebrate the summer of love, although we didn't know it as such then, our school went to Abington camp in the Leadhills. The June of 1967 was long and hot and by days followed the midgies and ran wild and barefoot over the hills. The evenings were cooler and we huddled around the campfire as the two art teachers running the folk club strummed music by Baez and Dylan and explained why the world needed protest songs.

Love Affair -Rainbow Valley- In the summer months of 1968 we really did have something to protest against in Scotland. The minister for education was hatching a plot against all the little Harry Potters who passed their eleven- plus. In the September schools were to sneakily change over to comprehensive education. Those of us who had passed the exam congregated in Red Spiders valley up in the Ochil hills, conspiring and hatching a plot of our own. At the start of the September term we led a protest march, which could have wiped Vietnam off the map - well at least in Tillicoultry.

Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbits With the founding of Stirling University came the sort of parties where you wouldn't be seen dead dancing around your handbag. Held in the Student's Union, they were sophisticated affairs where everyone sat around putting an end to wars, freeing political prisoners and moaning about the time of the last bus. Maybe it was the new sophisticated em...lager but I always remember this song as being longer than it actually is.

Pentangle -Light Flight - The school holidays of 1969 was the time my best friend Gillian and I discovered the night life in Edinburgh and the risqué reputation of Rose Street. Of course at fourteen we would have been excluded from anything risqué but we did make a couple of really good finds there - Bruces' Record Shop and Pentangle.

Melanie - Candles in the Rain Stirling University also brought with it a new kind of people to the area and to earn a little extra cash I babysat for a couple of English lecturers. They introduced me to The Bronte Sisters, Jane Austen and Melanie.

Grateful Dead -One More Saturday night. Saturdays circa 1972 were all about long balmy nights whirling round on the waltzer at the Links in Kirkaldy and feeling sick. Spending hours at the Raith Dance Hall mesmerized by the glitter ball and feeling sick while you waited for the hall to fill up. Or Gillian and I hitching a lift to Dumfermline looking for a lumber and always ending up with the wrong boy. It was that summer of 1972 though when I would have given anything for just one more Saturday night this side of Hadrians wall. Things weren't working out at home and in 1972, Scotland didn't have as many opportunities as it does now for interesting jobs especially for women. I decided it was time to go south but it was a decision made with the head, not the heart.

Gene Pitney - If I Only Had Time - My snazzy bronze mark one Ford Escort had a new fangled cassette player and all the way from Edinburgh over the border and into Sunderland I played this song over and over again, the tears streaming down my face. I knew even then what I was giving up. I'm back home now but I can't hear this song without thinking of the long Scottish summers I lost and of the years yearning for the greatest music of all- the rhythm of the Forth lapping against the shores at Kirkcaldy, the wind whistling over the Ochils and lilting melody of my ain tongue.


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