VA-THE CANDY SHOP IS CLOSED[PAUL MARTIN PRODUCTION]
LINK
http://www61.zippyshare.com/v/Sa9HXycz/file.html

The Candy Shop Is Closed:
60s reflections on childhood, innocence, place and change
01. Paul Jones - When I Was Six Years Old
02. Pinkerton’s Colours - Magic Rocking Horse
03. The Fragile Lime - Fairyland (When I Was A Little Man)
04. Eric Burden & The Animals - When I Was Young
05. The Act - Cobbled Streets
06. The Slender Plenty - Silver Treetop School For Boys
07. George Bean - The Candy Shop Is Closed
08. Schadel - Goodbye Thimble Mill Lane
09. Endalf Emlyn - Goodbye ‘Cherry Lil’
10. Jonathan Gill - Isandula Road
11. Dean Parish - Brick, Broken Bottles & Sticks
12. The Masters Apprentices - Living In A Child’s Dream
13. Schadel - Little Red Watering Can
14. Anita Harris - Playground
15. Dave Dee, Dozy, beaky Mick & Tich - Where From, Where To?
16. Yellow Bellow Room Boom - Easy Life
17. Idle Race - I Like My Toys
18. The Mindbenders - Schoolgirl (strings version)
19. The Untamed - Young Girl of 16
20. Keith West - The Kid Was A Killer
21. Graham Gouldman - The Impossible Years
22. Marcia Strassman - Self Analysis
23. Philamore Lincoln - Early Sherwood
24. Peter Lee Stirling - Goodbye Thimble Mill Lane
25. Ronnie Burns - When I Was Six Years Old
26. Pete Lincoln (aka Starstedt) - In My Days of Youth
27. Vaughan Thomas - Too Far Down
28. Mike Hugg - Blue Suede Shoes Again


For an older generation, the ‘permissive’ 1960s merely represented a threat to all that had been held morally dear since Victorian times. The young, it seemed to them, only threatened that moral consensus. They avowedly refused to respect war time sacrifice or even acknowledge how easy they had it by comparison in welfare state Britain. Witness the never ending complaints of Grenada TV’s Coronation Street’s WW1 veteran Albert Tatlock regarding his experiences with the Accrington Pals battalion in the first world war. When the young did acknowledge the past it seemed, it was only to ridicule it (a la Carnaby Street’s Victorian military uniform kitsch post-Sgt Pepper).

However, what the older generation did presumably not notice was the concerted introspection in popular song lyrics of the day. As this collection demonstrates, there was no shortage of wondering and soul searching going on. It is easy to forget in our post modern society in which all manor if reinventions of the past exist to which no-one bats an eyelid, that the 1960s, at least for the young, were all about the ‘now’. Never has a decade moved so fast. 1997 would not yield anything especially different to 2007 in terms of daily life in Britain beyond a change of government. 1967 compared to 1957 was a universe apart. And how did the young reference themselves in relation to how they had grown up to where they might be going as childhood and adolescence gave way to early adulthood? This is the question Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky Mick & Tich are addressing in ‘Where From, Where To? Or Pinkerton’s Colours decry in ‘Magic Rocking Horse’ as an idyllic and hermetically sealed past gives way to a problematic bigger world they are now a part of. The Masters Apprentices lament the loss of simplistic innocence in ‘Living In A Child’s Dream’, whilst Schadel (‘Little Red Watering Can’) and Anita Harris (‘Playground‘) wistfully note the progression from child to adult.

Most of these musicians will have had immediate post war childhoods which bridge the later 1940s through the 1950s. The remembered experience could change relatively quickly. The Act’s ‘Cobbled Streets’ dates from 1967 and the singer’s reference to having a bombsite for a playground, probably in the early 1950s in Britain was exactly that for many children. Yet by 1973 Mike Hugg is full of nostalgia for the rock’n’roll 50s of the second half of that decade. The 1970s of course was the age in which the 1950s were reinvented a la Stardust, American Graffiti, Rock Follies and Sha Na Na. Similarly, the young seem to struggle with the concept of age. Again, The Act’s singer has no problem recalling the greyness of his childhood recreational facilities, it’s his lived past. He has more of a problem conceptualising the future. As he notes, he met a girl ‘down Boston way’ (presumably Boston in Lincolnshire!) that he married and ‘her face did age with the years’, clearly projecting into a future yet to be lived, so perhaps using his perception of his mother’s aging as an example.

Another fault line are the references to the simplicity of childhood pleasure compared to the difficulty of maturity. Today’s play station obsessed tweenies and teens would be mortified to have to make do with a circus (Peter Lincoln), swimming at the local river (Mike Hugg) or playing pirates, dressing up in scarlet sashes (Paul Jones; Ronnie Burns). The sense of place is also of importance. The Beatles ’She’s Leaving Home’ was a touchstone of the decade in which young girls did, for the first time, go and flat share in rapidly expanding bedsit lands rather than living at home until they got married as their mother’s would have done. The rapid destruction of some urban areas to make room for high rise blocks and estates as of the late 1950s are perhaps the rationale for the lyrics in Peter Lee Stirling’s (earlier) version of ‘Goodbye Thimble Mill Lane’ (a completely different song to Schadel’s, bar the title) which is a bitter resentment of urban change or Jonathan Gill’s ‘Isandula Road’ which seems to be asking for it. Endalf Emlyn’s ‘Goodbye Cherry Lil’ on the other hand, has more in common with the Move’s ‘Blackberry Way’ in which the restless singer is leaving an unhappy domestic environment for who knows where. A rather more advanced aspect of the reflecting adult is in the adolescent loss of innocence, represented here by Graham Gouldman (‘The Impossible Years’), Mindbenders (‘School Girl’) and The Untamed (‘Young Girl of Sixteen’ , an unreleased recording from late 1965 of a Charles Aznevour co-penned song).

Overall, the songs gathered here, give an interesting overview of a theme long cherished by period pop lovers, but many of which typically get lumped in with the wider ‘toy town’ sub-genre. ‘Toy town’ in general, (see the marvellous pages on www.marmalade-skies.co.uk) is subtly, though importantly, different in that it celebrates childhood as if the child is singing the words, or is being invited to join in with the singing (Mirror’s ‘Gingerbread Man’ for instance) rather than reflecting on the distance travelled from childhood to adulthood by the individual themselves. I have collated the songs according to their lyrical content rather than their musical genre, but I have tried to keep everything more or less ‘pop’. Although quite a few will be familiar to you, and there are a few guests from the early 1970s (Vaughan Thomas, Mike Hugg and Emdalf Emlyn), I hope the way these 1960s recordings have been sequenced together will afford a somewhat different perspective in their listening experience. Can you remember when you were six years old?

Paul Martin, April, 2007

Thanks to everyone on RZ who contributed song suggestions and sent MP3s etc. This is as much your compilation as mine.