I can remember the green Philips portable turntable on the floor in front of me.
I can remember the worn-out paper sleeve of my mother's copy of the 7-inch vinyl single, and the wood and rubbered string record rack that I picked it out from whenever I wanted to play it.
I can remember trying to fit the record on the deck without fiddling to much with hitting the hole in the middle, which was hard.
I can remember the clicking sound when pulling back the the tone arm in order to start the turntable motor, and the repeated failure of carefully putting the stylus down at the beginning of the record, due to the underdeveloped motion control of the small child that I was at the time.
I cannot remember any other details of my surroundings.
I was three years old, and this was my favourite record.
Other favourites were "Sugar Baby Love" by The Rubettes and "Barbara Ann" by The Beach Boys, but "Snoopy versus the Red Baron" was on top of the list, and it is only in retrospect that I can begin to understand why.
You might think it had something to do with the fact that fun tales of Snoopy the cartoon dog appealed more to a three-year old than the hymns of sexual celebration that my other two favourite tunes were.
But it wasn't.
It was about the fact that, in addition to the music and vocals, there were sounds of airplanes, guns and crashes in there - real sound effects to spark my imagination.
This bubblegum pop record actually contained samples - in 1966! - noises that helped me create pictures inside my head and made some kind of story unfold inside me.
In addition, the music and the song was fine, too - as a soundtrack to my inner experience.
The production was resembling the sound that Joe Meek created for the Tornados, only with less backward noises and delay feedback, which couldn’t be a bad thing either
The funniest thing is that the rhythm of the track has had an immense impact on my later life as a music maker myself.
The drum beat of “Snoopy…”, with its four to the floor kick drum and marching style snare work is something that I would subconsciously apply on my first ever self-produced solo record "Drum", released under my "new beat" pseudonym Syamese in 1990.
To illustrate this more clearly, you can check out the links to the originals and to a short mash-up of the two tracks below.
Another thing that strikes me as important, is that it was all about this one song.
The album format was totally irrelevant to me back then. I couldn't care less about tracking down any LP with the band, and to this day never have heard another tune by The Royal Guardsmen.
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