Sunday Music – I Want To Hold Your Hand and Theme For Young Lovers

Posted on Sun 08/17/2014 by TonyfromOz

Today’s music videos are I Want To Hold Your Hand, sung here in this clip by the English super group The Beatles, and Theme For Young Lovers, played here by the English super group The Shadows.

Link to Video at You Tube

This video was posted to You Tube by SOADShaunxp

Link to Video at You Tube

This video was posted to You Tube by Welcome!

These last few weeks for these regular Posts, I’ve been mentioning how we come to an appreciation of music at around a certain age, usually around the time you start at High School. I have also mentioned that there are songs prior to this time which you remember from your youth, and they are probably songs your parents liked at those times when your own appreciation was yet to begin.

There’s not really one song you can pin down that started your own personal appreciation, and it basically comes down to the music that is popular at that time in your life, so it changes with every generation, and even on an inter generational basis.

For me, that time was indeed as I started at High School.

That year was 1964, but the germ had started a little earlier.

Here, where I lived in Queensland Australia, that year of 1963 was the last year when they had 8 years of primary School education and 4 years at High School, and I was in Grade 7 at the time. So, years 7 and 8 both started at High School the following year 1964, and we were the first of the Grade 8’s at High School.

At the Primary School I attended, there were around 30 children to a class, and, at our School, there were two grade 7’s, so that meant there were around 60 children around the same age as I was, and mainly, you just hung around with the children in your own class, and even down into smaller groups of closer friends. However, now at High School, students came from three Primary schools in our area, so now there were literally hundreds of children around the same age as I was, and there were ten Grade 8 Classes of around that same class size of 30 students. Only some of the children in My Grade 7 were in the same class as I was at High School, so there was the beginnings of a whole new circle of friends, and hey, now, there were even girls we were actively looking out for as well, as boys started to, umm, notice girls.

Just before starting at High School in that January of 1964, our family went along to a New Years Eve Party at a close friend of our parents. They had just moved into a new house, a huge place, bigger than I had ever seen, set out on 2 levels on a hilly area close to where we lived. I was from a large family, with 5 children, and they had four children, and with a few other families there as well, the number of children was up around almost 20, in varying ages from very young up to mid teens. The house where the party was being held had the advantage of a downstairs ‘rumpus’ room, which their four children virtually had to themselves, and a very large double garage as well. So, all the adults had their party upstairs, while the crowd of children had their party downstairs, a huge area as the cars were removed from the garage and parked out on the street.

I was 12 at the time, and there would have been only three children older than I was, so the older children were tasked with keeping an eye on the younger ones. The oldest one there was a girl of 15, and she had brought along some of her records to play, but hey, partying kids at that young age hardly noticed music. The older children among us, five or six of us stayed in the Rumpus room, occasionally looking out into the garage where our younger siblings were playing well into a very late night, and it was rare for children to be allowed to stay up that late, even to see in the New Year.

The 15 year girl, being the eldest was in charge of the record player, virtually an open invitation for her to play whatever she wanted, and most of us were not all that into music, so she had free reign.

During that year of 1963, The Beatles had already started to become huge here in Australia, and they had already had a series of smash hits here, with 3 Number One hits spread throughout the year. However, my real appreciation of music had not yet begun, so while I liked this new modern music, it was, for me still as basically a child, just background. (Here in Australia, The Beatles songs were released in a different sequence to how they were originally released in the UK.)

During December of 1963, this new Beatles song, I Want To Hold Your Hand soared up the charts, in virtually two weeks, if that, and it was incredibly popular, and because of that, the young girl at the party played this single regularly, probably every third or fourth song really, and that’s how I came to notice it, because it was being played so regularly. So, by the end of the night, well not even that late really, nearly every one of us was singing along with it every time it came on, drawing the attention of some of the parents who heard this wild singing downstairs, and came down to see that all was OK.

While I had now noticed the song and begun to like it , I really noticed when she flipped over the Single and played the B Side, and that song was This Boy. Oddly, I liked the harmonies and the almost purer sound of the guitars as opposed to the somewhat harder rocking sound of the smash hit itself. I actually got game enough later in the night to ask her is she would play that B Side again, and that was the song I liked from that night, and kept humming to myself for days after.

Later that January, I started High School, now with a complete new circle of friends, and now music was a bigger part of not only my own life, but of all my new friends around me, as this new sound from England just came out with a bewildering list of so many wonderful new songs. Australian groups caught on and also started out with their own sound, mimicking what was coming out of the UK. In fact, the two groups that hived off in that class of 30 were divided into those who liked the two biggest bands at the time, The Beatles, and that other monster band from the UK at that time, The Shadows. One group strongly supported one band, and the second the other band, although it was all good natured really, as we all liked virtually everything. I had heard some of the monster hits from The Shadows, with that beautiful lead guitar work from Hank Marvin, but had never really noticed all that much. Now there were these two groups, I took notice of The Shadows, and not long after that, this band released the second song I have featured today, Theme For Young Lovers. It wasn’t even a hit, well, nothing like The Beatles, where every song went straight to Number One, and this Shadows song was hardly played at all. It did however, become one of my favourite songs from this early era when I started to come to my own appreciation of music. To this day, I still have the Single of that song, an old 45 vinyl disk, a record I actually went out ans spent mu own money on, something not easy in those days when, as children, we had pretty much no money at all of our own.

I suppose this one Shadows song is where my appreciation of the pure sound of good guitar playing stemmed from.

So, as I said above, there’s no ONE song I can nail down as the one that ‘hooked’ me onto music, but these early ones from an epic time in all our lives would probably go close to being the ones that did start it for me. Either way, there was such a bewildering number of songs that came out during the early years of what was later referred to as The British Invasion. It just all blended together after a while, and all of it was just so good.

I have most of The Beatles albums, and while I like nearly everything they did, this one song that was only a simple old B Side still remains one of my favourites to this day, and while The Beatles may have been renowned for their innovations in music, their use of harmony as shown here in one of their earlier songs showed just how gifted this wonderful mix of four young men really were.