The first time I bought a record with my own money was in 1974. When I say money, I mean the gift voucher I got at Dad’s work Christmas party, but the value was real. I knew immediately what I wanted because I’d seen it on TV.
That was the year Space Waltz had burst through the family-friendly fields of the TV talent quest to play . Alastair Riddell, blazingly androgynous, widened his eyes and mugged the camera so effectively that it was easy to ignore the fact that the rest of the band looked like ordinary chaps. The judges were bemused and every young person in the country was electrified. “This was a cultureshock moment in the extreme,” author Ian Chapman would write years later. “Truly, things would never be the same.”
