KATHY KIRBY "SECRET LOVE" To Conceal Or Reveal

Home-made record sleeves.

This example comes from the early 60's. The teenage market is expanding; pop star life story mags are cheap and plentiful, encouraging identification with performers who increasingly share a background with their audiences. Pop ( we call it Pop by now ) is part of a rite; the big labels form a megalith within which we dance, fight and grope. Record packaging lags behind other commodities; Lps and Eps come in attractive sleeves, but 45's are plainly packaged; grey text on monochrome labels, the  green of the Columbia label had echoed the livery of corporation buses. Company sleeves are standardised and come in single colours, some have adverts on the back for the company catalogue, or for gramophones and hairdryers. 

The Machineshop Overall Blue of the Decca label always looks capable of nullifying any colour in the recorded performance within, and the orange stripey sleeves have the utilitarian feel of a bag for woodscrews or rawl plugs, or a packet of sandpaper.

In inspired defiance of this, the owner of this copy of Kathy Kirby's "Secret Love" has collaged a fanmag clipping of Kathy and a tinted seacape from an ad and stuck it on the inside of the sleeve, positioning it perfectly within the hole in the bag. Over the years the cut out figure has lost a bit of face and a hand, as might a piece of statuary, or a neglected memorial.

Originally sung by Doris Day, "Secret Love" is a sweet tale of inhibitions overcome. It was Kathy's biggest hit and her best record. In her hands the song is helpless. From her launch at 00.02 it's fate is sealed, like that of a butterfly straddling a Luna space rocket.  At 00.20 Kathy lands the rocket, plants a flag in the saturday night telly schedules and as the arrangement subsides into a twist beat that is half Northern Dance Orchestra and half Clip-joint sleaze ,she sees the future; she will sing this song forever and her audience will always come to stand in her slipstream.

The back of the collage shows an ad for Phensic, a popular headache cure.

As people's lives move on, or stop, their record collections return to a kind of circulation. Some from this era change hands immediately, snapped up by friends or bought online and in the hipper shops by a new generation. Others join a glacial procession around the record fairs; some fragments of the megalith rise bare and battered in the charity shops, their grooves full of Mother's Pride toastcrumbs and the dust of ashtrays and bedsit carpets. The rest form a vast scaur of shellac and vinyl, accessible at low tide, relics of the pre-Beatle period.

It's a tough world, as Kathy Kirby was to find. But here at least the private devotion of a fan has emerged, sending a signal from that blasted, flattened jurassic coast of British Light Programme Pop, that herein is something that mattered, enabling it to matter again.