As long as I can remember, there's been something special about English blondes.

Petula Clark was very popular when I lived in England in the mid-to-late 1960s. I had a bunch of here 45s.



I tried to turn some folks on to her when we moved back to the states in 1970, but they were unimpressed. I couldn't believe it. Their little minds were already closed. They were into the Jackson Five, or the Osmonds, or the Monkeys, and they didn't have a clue. I kept her records in the box, stacked neatly, as a special memory of those days of living in an exotic foreign place.

OK, she was great, but here's the Queen, and I don't mean Lizzie.



How can ya not love Dusty Springfield?



And while were here, enjoy.



That look, the big hair and heavy eyeliner, is so synonymous with the times, and that voice was just dripping sex, even to an eight or nine year old kid. Denise is doubting as I write this how much I knew about sex back at that age, but I wanna tell ya, the best thing about that house we lived in in England was the set of stairs in the sidewalk leading from the road to our house. I used to watch my mom's boobs jump up and down as she skipped down those stairs, thinking "Damn, mom's stacked".

Yer thinkin' I was a freak, but my generation grew up with Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, not to mention all those cool Christopher Lee Dracula movies with all the buxom frauleins gettin' bitten all over the place. We used to look for naked mannequins in the store windows as the blue bus drove us through the little country towns on the way to school at the air base at Ruislip, and the whole bus would erupt when someone saw one.

We had a young cool bus driver at one time, and then suddenly he was transferred and we didn't see him for a while. Then, a few months later, we were passed by another bus from a private British girls school and guess who was driving it. We died laughin', and assumed that he'd gotten himself transferred on purpose. We knew about sex. We didn't have details, but we knew. We had to wait for details till someone found a stash of their dad's playboys somewhere and let us leaf through them.

The music from back then is some of the best music ever made. Can't imagine what the kids now are gonna be nostalgic about in thirty years. I shudder at the thought.