Music, Sweet Music...

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Pictured bottom right amongst the clutter on my desk is a record I bought from the indoor market at Oswestry of a similar vintage to me, on our brief sojourn into Mid Wales last week. A copy of "Double Barrel" by Dave & Ansel Collins from 1970. This, along with many great ska and rocksteady of the late sixties - I featured Dandy's "The Operation" in a post in 2020 - was the musical underpinning of my early adolescence and the soundtrack to my approaching adulthood. These glorious emanations from the recording studios of Jamaica were part of the very fabric of life in my part of Birmingham at the time. This particular track, along with the likes of "The Liquidator", "The Israelites", "Red, Red Wine [the original Tony Tribe reggae version of the Neil Diamond song]" and so many others, featured frequently in the weekly youth disco that we went to at the time, which was held in the prison warders' club in Winson Green [blog posts passim] every Tuesday night. I guess it was there that I and my contemporaries - later to become 'The Lads' really took to ethanol-fuelled beverages for the first time: a habit that I still cleave to, despite the dire warnings of the medical establishment. But aside from that particular lifestyle choice, my biggest takeaway from that brief but influential period in my life is music, pure and simple...

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