I’m breaking from tradition with this post, to share a totally different (and honestly my most favourite) side to Dad’s songwriting. Way before The Jarrow Marchers, my earliest memories of Dad are him singing songs from The Beatles and Lindisfarne, as well as his own pop style compositions. Quite often on Sundays he’d grab his guitar and you could tell his mood from the choice of song – if it was R.O.C.K. then it was a great mood, but if it was Fool for You then he was probably feeling blue.

Although the recordings were just rough demos, they’re too good not to share! One day if I ever learn a Rock n Roll riff on guitar or uke I’ll do a version myself!

Before I share the recordings here’s a little bit of audio of me interviewing Dad about how he started with pop songs and what led him to a more folk style song. You can check out ‘That’s Northumbria‘ here on the blog too.

OK now for the tracks – the only disappointment is not being able to find Dad’s infamous ‘Bottle of Tomato Sauce’ song… one day… My absolute favourites are Number One, Turn Back the Clock, ROCK, Why should a woman, and Bending over backwards. He used to do a heavier more up beat rock n roll version of Sitting here drinking which I loved but sadly don’t have a recording of.

Dad was pretty eclectic in his musical tastes. A major inspiration was of course The Beatles but he loved all pop and disco too. Any excuse to get up and have a dance. Here are some photos from some of Dad’s ‘pop’ eras from the 1960s to the 1980s. The street parties on Southfield Lea are stuff of legend!

ALl songs are written by Wilf Mitford and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://mitfordmusic.wordpress.com/.