Growing Up With Elvis (In Britain)

I wasn't quite a teenager when I went to see Elvis in Kid Galahad at the Essoldo Cinema in Tunbridge Wells. I was just a month short of my thirteenth birthday. The idea of going to see an Elvis Presley movie made a relatively small impact on me at the time. It was my sister, Sue, three years older than me, and her friend Ann Church, who persuaded me to join them one Saturday afternoon in late January 1963.

 

Although I barely knew who Elvis was, I had heard of him, of course, who hadn't, but that was some years earlier at secondary school when the older, senior boys stood round in groups in the playground discussing Elvis as if he was God himself, swapping bubblegum cards with his picture on. Even so, I still didn't have a clear picture of who he was. I can't even remember if, back then, I had even heard one of his hit singles being played on the radio. And at that tender age, I was still a little time off buying records and no, I wasn't even listening to the popular radio station of the day, Radio Luxembourg, usually listened to under a blanket at night by those of my sister's age. Nor had I purchased a record myself. When I did, I remember, it was the other hitmakers of the day like Frankie Vaughn and Garry Mills, not Elvis. In fact, I soon became the proud owner of Vaughn's Tower of Strength and Garry's Treasure Island.

My sister was already into records. She had recently become the proud owner of a brand new ‘Elizabethan’ 4-speed, auto changer in a blue and white cabinet. It was the latest mono record player that made her friend’s very basic red and white ‘Dansette’ turntable look like an antique. Going by the records she was buying at the time, it seemed that she was going for all the big pop hits of the day by such names as Eden Kane, Cliff Richard, the Shadows, Neil Sedaka, Bobby Darin and Russ Conway.

In the wake of seeing Kid Galahad, I obviously wanted to go home after the movie with the soundtrack EP, but the record shop in Monson Road, was out of stock of it, so the first Elvis record I ended up with was an EP containing four of the songs from his King Creole movie, which l chose simply because I liked the look of the sleeve. 

Not soon after, l was the proud owner of my first Elvis album, Elvis' Golden Records Volume 2, which was given to me by a classmate at school who no longer wanted his copy of the the album, with its original 1960 silver spot RCA black label. It included seven A sides and their respective B sides. One of the things that did strike me as odd though was how the tracks listed on the front cover were not in the same order as they appeared on the record, and as they weren't listed on the back cover at all, the only way to find out the running order of each side was to refer to the label. Of course, back in 1963, when I was just 13 years old, none of it mattered. The important thing to me was that it was Elvis, it was the first album I owned, and every track was a winner, most of which, like the King Creole EP, I was hearing for the first time! To me it was the perfect feel good tonic after a bad day at school!