45rpm

To quote Bruce Springsteen " we learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school" (No Surrender 1985). Well yesterday afternoon I was watching the DVD of the making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Bruce explained hoe Steve Van Zandt had a great feel for the three minute pop song, that had the power to lift you .

I started to think about that and it sent my mind swirling back to my early teenage days when buying a 45rpm single meant so much. The song that you played again and again, that you just had to listen to. I remember walking the streets of Tooting during the winter of 1966 looking for a record shop that was open where I could exchange my record token I'd been given for a copy of Reach Out I'll be there by the Four Tops.

Well records have given way to CDs and buying the CD single has given way to downloading, and I'm not sure whether young people still get that feeling of excitement at hearing a song. They certainly don't get the tangible feel of buying the record, or standing in a booth at the shop listening to it. That experience is frozen in time.

Perhaps I'm wrong and its a period of your life, before you are absorbed by albums. In 1966 I was really only familiar with "Best of" LPs. However the three minute single, soon gave way to listening to longer pieces and bands that produced singles were often derided by the time I reached university.

For years I've pondered the fact that popular does not equal quality, but throwing myself back to 1966 and picturing myself walking along Tooting High Street clutching my Four Tops single

has helped me think about the experience of music buying that started for me back in 1964 when I walked into Hurleys of Balham and bought "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks. Perhaps buying your first record, was like other first time experiences of adolescence , part of the move to adulthood, to be savoured in hindsight.