I can't even think of her name....

Before I attained record buying age (11 if we're counting, and kicking off with the single Take Me Bak 'Ome by Slade, in 1972, if we're elaborating) I was the possessor of just one record, The Monkees single I'm A Believer b/w (I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone, gifted to me on my 6th birthday. It was at that point by far my most prized possession and, if I knew where it was today, would remain my most prized possession.

We had, as I recall, few records in my house. My parents weren't record buyers, never mind record collectors. Which didn't then strike me as odd, since nothing strikes you as odd at an age at which you take everything as it comes. An age at which whatever you experience, no matter how remarkable or unremarkable, is taken as normal. Nothing to see here. It's the age of unquestioning.

Thus, my parents' apparent lack of interest in buying records was just an unquestioned feature in the topography of my day to day reality. Who cared about their apparent indifference to popular music? Not me, that's for sure. It's only later that it all strikes me as at least a bit odd, the few records there were in our collection in retrospect seeming to shed a certain sub-visual light on my parents' otherwise opaque psyches.

I remember an LP of Gerard Hoffnung's comedic monologues, which included the iconic Bricklayer sketch, at which we as a family laughed immoderately, no matter how many times we heard it. There was also a record of Bob Newhart routines, including the wryly amusing Introducing Tobacco to Civilization, which elicited not so much gales of communal laughter as ripples of understated amusement. Other than these, I recall the Sacha Distel single recording of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, which must have been down to my mother, and the Music For Pleasure-released soundtrack to the film The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews forever after standing as my mother's definitive behavioural avatar. And Acker Bilk's strangely evocative Stranger On The Shore, Bilk being of the west country and thus of proprietorial interest to us. And several Jeff Love and His Orchestra Great War Movie Themes and Great Western Movie Themes records. Along with a selection of classical records, which included Beethoven and Mozart symphonies, Chopin piano sonatas, etc etc. I don't recall Mahler or Wagner being represented, and certainly not Shostakovich. Although Ravel and Debussy definitely did find favour. As did Dvorak and his New World Symphony.

The presence of the above records, middle of the road as they essentially were, was entirely consistent with my parents' personalities as I understood them. Straight down the line, lower middle class aspirants, with no pretensions whatsoever to anything resembling an appreciation of the avant garde, or experimental art, which has defined my own generation's approach to the inner life. There was however one record in our sub-eclectic collection which, while ostensibly also categorisable as MOR defied, and still defies, any attempt on my part to easily fit into a recognisable psychological parental template or pattern.

That record is My Old Flame, a 1966 single recorded by brother and sister act Nino Tempo and April Stevens, the presence of which among the above discs to this day strikes me as slightly bizarre. A slight bizarreness which prevents me even imagining how it came to be purchased by either one of my parents. Perhaps it wasn't. Perhaps it was a gift from a well meaning relation, or friend. My uncle, brother of my mother (also called David, but known to us as Uncle Dave), possibly. Dave was something of a (trad) jazz nut, and would if asked, or even if unasked, expound enthusiastically on, for example, the drumming skills of Buddy Rich or the piano stylings of Count Basie, or Oscar Peterson. The smoky club, vaguely sleazy ambience of My Old Flame, as performed by NT and AS, seemed then, and still seems to me today, to belong to a different universe entirely to that containing Julie Andrews or Sacha Distel. Or even Acker Bilk. Maybe it's the resemblance to the Steptoe theme, in timbre if not exactly in tone, that in some incalculable way speaks to me. Maybe it's the divine vocal harmonizing. Maybe it's the old EMI Parlophone label the memory of which transports me to another place.

Only much (much) later did I accidentally (thanks for nothing, Spotify!) hear the Spike Jones comic version of the song, which includes a comic impression of Peter Lorre intoning the main lines. I'm not saying that version has forever ruined for me what remains an almost spiritual relationship with the version I have come to feel has defined my own ability to configure a meaningful relationship with my past. But it's a close thing.