Back when I was a teenager, oh so many years ago, there was this great show on the radio. It was called the Friday Rock Show and it was presented by the rather unique Tommy Vance. The show was on from 10pm to midnight, and as a teenager, I was always out then, but I didn’t want to miss it, so I set it up to be taped. (This was pre-streaming, and pre-anything that would be recognisable as the internet these days as well. Hell, back then even most computers came with cassette players rather than incredibly modern and swish floppy discs.)

Anyway, this was a proper music show, and that meant that Vance would play four tracks back-to-back. That meant I didn’t always catch the name of the band or the track when listening to it on tape the next day. But some of the songs stuck in my head anyway.

Anyhow, fast forward to this year (yep, you could fast forward tapes; if you pressed play at the same time, you got a much improved rendition of certain tracks…) and I finally bought myself a turntable to play my old vinyl. I even had a couple of records that I’d never actually listened to, because I’d bought them on sale when I didn’t have a turntable.

One of them was a LP by White Lion, called Fight to Survive. It’s a mixed album. Some of the tracks are good, some a rather by-numbers rock. But only when I listened to it did I realize that one of the tracks that had stuck in my head since those Friday Rock Show days was on this album, and it was called All the Fallen Men. The way I see it, if a track can stick in your head for well over twenty years, it’s got to have something going for it. So, here it is for those of you missed the 80s the first time around.

And if you enjoyed that one, here’s another, this time Lady of the Valley, from their album Pride (in my opinion a better album than Fight to Survive):

Hey, but one good thing about today over the 1980s is that back then you couldn’t find every song ever recorded on YouTube and stick it up on your blog.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a turntable. I’ve been wanting one for ages because, well, they’re cool, but also because although I like the convenience of having everything digitised and on my computer, there’s something lacking in the sound quality. It just doesn’t seem to have the same body to the sound.

Anyway, for the first time in well over 20 years I now have access to a turntable, so I went digging around the garage (oh, yes, I do keep everything) until I found my box of old vinyl, and in that, in completely the wrong sleeve (which it was in when I bought it second hand all those years ago) I came across an album that I’d totally forgotten I owned: Technical Ecstasy, by Black Sabbath. And one of the best songs on that album is a song called “Gypsy”.

It made me realise that I seem to have quite a few songs that are some variation on “Gypsy” and that they’re all pretty good songs. So, in the interests of random blog posting, here are the songs I own that are called “Gypsy” (or similar):

The songs in this playlist are:

1. Gypsy, by Black Sabbath
2. Gypsy, by Uriah Heep
3. Restless Gypsy, by W.A.S.P.
4. Gypsy, by Dio
5. Roll Gypsy Roll, by Lynyrd Skynyrd