So Much For Mary

I've finally got it. "So Much For Mary" by Jon. Made Number 40 this week on the Radio London chart on 11 June 1967. And that's when I last heard it, a teenager in Kings Langley, dancing around the lawn to tunes from a transistor radio. This track just got me and I loved it but it was so seldom played that I doubt if I heard it more than three or four times. A simple, classic Sixties sound, nice young American vocal. Just great. I searched for it several years ago and that's what brought me to the Oldies Project as it was the one and only result that came up as an entry in their BigL Fab Forty charts they'd published.

Prior to that I might have been forgiven for thinking that I'd imagined the whole thing. I'd looked in record catalogues, listings, everywhere without any luck. But not only was it there but the Oldies Project actually play the whole Fab Forty show 40 years on. The original show, minus adverts. How on earth they do that I don't know - I think it's been a matter of collecting everyone's tapes from those days and rebuilding the programme. But that meant if I waited until June 2007 I'd get the actual song too. Amazing. It was a 'climber' a couple of weeks ago but it was one of those weekends when I was running this way and that and completely forgot to do the recording. This week I was much better organised to the point that, if necessary, I'd have bolted the doors and refused to move until I had it!

To record from an internet stream I used Total Recorder's device which works a dream. I had to buy the cost option for the laptop to get rid of the annoying bleep they now put in every 30 secs or so on the free version. I had the free version (with no bleeps) on my PC but as the internet connection to that isn't as strong as to my laptop I wasn't going to take any chances.

I've now extracted the track from the whole programme (which had some other great memories too) and will be putting it on my main site shortly so will make a link to it for anyone who wants to hear it. After next week, when it'll be in the chart show again at 23, that'll be it. It dropped out of the charts (possibly because it wasn't actually released over here and radio London just had an airtime publicity copy from the States) and that was that.

So I feel absolutely brilliant now. That was one of my life's ambitions - now fulfilled. Few readers will understand and most will think I'm just plain silly but there you go. I know what it feels like and that takes some doing these days.