Life must be filled up

As is well known, I was in love with Adam when I was twelve and I still like his early records. Today, Liberal England posted this video. By 1974, when the record was made, I had long since moved on and thought of Adam as an actor rather than a singer. Here he is, though, pretty as ever. Not a great song but a curiosity which I’d never heard before.

This time, he really has died. I’ve been listening to him since the Saturday Club days in the sixties. Liberal England has a nice little tribute today. Adam Faith in the photograph!

Steve McQueen and The Beatles made an unlikely connection between two BBC4 programmes I’ve watched this week: Knitting’s Golden Age and Neil Brand’s series Sound of Cinema.

I was disappointed by the knitting programme. The films were good, especially the old black and white shots of women knitting Fair Isle patterns at astonishing speed while herding sheep at the same time. It was the voice over which was the problem; I felt it had a slightly mocking tone throughout which was at odds with the seriousness of the knitters. As for the old patterns, I seem to have most of them! The Beatles appeared because they popularized black polo neck (roll neck, according to the prog.) sweaters which everyone then wanted.



Polo necks were cool, as shown by the fact that cool people wore them, like Steve McQueen in Bullit.



I confess I still think black polo necks are pretty cool, also Cuban heels. Blue, not so much. I couldn’t agree with the programme makers that knitwear went out completely in the 1980s and 90s.



This oversized sweater by Nicole Farhi is from that era, as is this BikBok cardigan.



The Beatles turned up again in Sound of Cinema, illustrating the innovative use of pop music in films; in their case, using their own songs in A Hard Day’s Night (still one of my favourite films) instead of employing a composer. We also had a brief glimpse of Adam Faith in Beat Girl, Yay! I’ve yet to see that film. Then there was Steve McQueen, in his blue polo neck, epitomizing cool to the soundtrack of Bullit. I’m enjoying this film series very much but there should have been a health warning before yesterday’s episode. Viewers of New Tricks this week were warned that it contained ‘upsetting’ scenes. What? It was nothing at all, you see worse things on the news every day of the week. No warning, though, that Sound of Cinema would include scenes from films by Quentin Tarentino. I had to look away; I could never watch anything of his.

Was spent watching the 1960 film What a Whopper. I didn’t want to use that as a title and mislead people who do strange searches. Many thanks to follygolightly for the heads-up that the film was available on DVD. I’d searched in vain in the past; when it arrived I found it was put out by a company specialising in B Movies. I last saw it when it came out, hopping off the bus on the way home from school to get an Adam fix.

No one would say it was a great film but the screenplay was by Terry Nation, the music by John Barry and it featured Sid James and many other comedy stalwarts. Adam was a pretty good actor for a singer (better, later, as David Essex’s manager in Stardust); even so, What a Whopper is usually omitted from accounts of his life.

My favourite scene in the film is a completely gratuitous one, put in to please the fans. Adam (Tony Blake) is with girl-interest Marie when a song called The Time Has Come starts up on the transistor radio. ‘He’s all I need,’ says Adam, looking disgusted, ‘…voice like that and he’s making a fortune.’ ‘I think he’s good!’ says Marie. Big joke because of course it’s Adam and he then harmonises with his own voice from the radio. It’s lovely! If you look at that scene, you get a good view of the fab sweater he wears throughout the film. For this and two other John Barry film songs by Adam see here. The wonders of the net. Unfortunately Beat Girl with Shirley Anne Field is still not available at a reasonable price.

That took care of most of Saturday evening and I still think he was utterly cute. Those cheekbones!


From Adam’s 1961 autobiography, Poor Me

The writer of 60goingon16 has been to see the exhibition of Bob Dylan’s paintings; lucky her. It’s nice to meet another admirer because I get the feeling my Flist is pretty cool on the great man. The thing about my love of Bob Dylan is that it has absolutely nothing to do with nostalgia. When I hear Poor Me, I smile fondly at the memory of how much I was in love with Adam Faith when I was twelve. Waterloo Sunset takes me so much back to London in the late 1960s that I can almost smell the smoky old city. With Bob Dylan, there are no associations and memories; he is perennially here and now.

In Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs (good book), he wonders wistfully what it would have been like to have heard the great classics of pop when they came out. I can tell him; they were just the latest songs, y’know? Every week, blasting out of our little radio via Kenny and Cash – on London! were songs we would be listening to for the rest of our lives, but how were we to tell that? I wouldn’t have called myself a Dylan fan then. I knew all the songs of course, just as I knew all the Beatles’ songs backwards. When Like A Rolling Stone came out I, like everyone else, thought, What? But that song gets better every single time I hear it. I remember a review of a Dylan concert whose author said that you go to see Mick Jagger to find out if he can still do what he’s always done but you go to see Dylan to find out what he’s doing next. Constantly evolving and still writing good songs now. He’s my man.

I need space and money so I have made a start by going through our record collection. Listening to some of this old music I find that my top musical era is about 1964 – 65. The Animals, The Yardbirds, The Small Faces: good old R & B before the druggy stuff started and all that dreary underground music. No wonder I got so excited about Punk when it came along. Luckily for moi, the current market seems to favour all the progressive bands whose records I never want to hear again, so no regrets.

When it comes to Should It Stay or Should It Go I’m finding that the records I really can’t bear to part with are the ones from my pre-teen years: Adam Faith of course, and Helen Shapiro, even Cliff, although I never liked him at the time because you were either for Cliff or for Adam and many hot arguments raged on the subject over the school dinner table.

I’m also concluding that for this old music you absolutely can’t beat vinyl. I’ve been testing out the records which are worth selling on an Achiphon record player. I remember cybersofa staggering up the hill from the market with this one day. He paid £25.00 for it: bargain! Playing old records on this is like having a first edition book in a dustwrapper rather than a later paperback reprint: you get the period feel and are closer to the performer/author.