Buying music in Hull

I was born and spent my first seventeen years in Hull. I was back there briefly in when my son was  filming in a local Police Station and staying on Newland Avenue where I was brought up. Newland Avenue was where my father  took me to the bike shop to buy a Dansette multi-change record player for my 16th birthday, justifying the extravagance to the shop keeper on the grounds that it would keep me off the streets. It may have had the opposite effect. I’d heard 78’s at my aunts but now I began buying 45’s from the record shop in the town centre Sydney Scarborough’s. It wasn’t a regular occurrence so  I had to choose very carefully. Buddy Holly was never a disappointment and I always liked Duane Eddy EP’s like ‘Rebel Rouser’ and ‘Peter Gunn’. They had 4 songs and wonderful sleeves and that made them to my mind great value. I think that’s why the first first album I bought was ‘Duane Eddy plays Songs of our Heritage’. I suppose if not the title then the photo on the sleeve of him with an accoustic guitar sitting in front of a covered wagon should have told me that this wasn’t an album of twangy guitar. I got over my initial disappointment. I’d made my choice and lived with it. I played the record a lot and came to love it dearly. Many of the songs ‘John Henry’ ‘In the Pines’  “Streets of Laredo’ have kept recurring since, have a listen to Kurt Cobain’s version of ‘In the Pines’ called ‘Where did you sleep last night’ it is truly desolate, and if you can be bothered look at the history of ‘Streets of Laredo’ in my piece on Frankie Miller ‘A Long Way Home’.
About the same time I met my first band. A friend took me round the corner to a house on Springbank Ave where ‘The Watersons’ were living. I didn’t know who they were or how important they would become but I loved the atmosphere they lived in. Someone arrived with a fox on a lead whilst I was there, but I was transfixed by the Sonny Boy Williamson’ autograph on a scrap of paper stuck above the mantelpiece with all the power a holy relic. It had never occurred to me that I could be that close to a legend. I didn’t know it then but this bohemian, artistic, musical world would quickly become the life I wanted.