Early December in the 1970s, a small town in Yorkshire sees a 9-year-old boy gazing with wonder at a toy in J.T. Smith’s shop window.
The object of my desire was a tabletop football game called Casdon Soccer: a 2-player game consisting of a plastic green dimpled tray on which rotated individual plastic players each with its own flipper for kicking the ball-bearing football. The picture on the box showed Kevin Keegan and a couple of other players from the England squad wearing their team shirts while enjoying a game with two children.
I’d first seen Casdon Soccer a year or two earlier when I’d been playing outside with a group of neighbourhood boys. The father of one arrived home with the game and we all went inside to watch it get unpacked and played. I wasn’t invited to have a go that day but I did experience a visceral delight at seeing the others play. I think it was the “remote-control” aspect of the game that excited me the most.
It’s hard to imagine, in these days of phones and drones, how much thrill a mechanically operated toy like this could inspire back then. Being able to control the players by turning the knobs from one end of the table was something I wanted so bad. I was sure this game would bring me a lifetime of happiness and, in a way, that’s exactly what happened, but not quite in the way I expected.
We weren’t a well-off family, and I’d never asked for much, but now I found myself giving mum regular updates about the game in the window. I wasn’t optimistic, since many of my toys in the early years had been handmade by my father, but I kept mum informed that the Casdon Soccer game as played by the England team was still in J.T. Smith’s. That is, until the day I cycled home to report to mum that the game was no longer there and the only present I would ever want, until the end of time, was now gone.
Well, you can guess the rest. On Christmas Day presents were unwrapped and I became the owner of a Casdon Soccer game. The joy was great. Stickers were stuck on the side of the game, as well as on the players themselves, and play began.
But there was a problem. Two or three players couldn’t kick the ball. They barely moved. Although they turned a little, the weight of the ball at their feet was enough to stop them dead and I had to use my fingers to flick the ball back into play. This was not my idea of remote-control and I was disappointed. I hoped it might be a glitch that would fix itself – but it didn’t.
The black plastic back on the bottom of the game was held on with screws. I decided to take a look. Finding a Philips screwdriver, I went to work and lifted the back off only to gasp with horror as a tangle of strings and plastic rings cascaded into the tray bottom. My new toy had gone from being slightly faulty to being utterly dismantled.
My dream toy was a sad jumble of rings and strings. With dread I wondered how I would explain this to my family. Looking at the collection of pieces I realised that the toy had been string-operated and that turning the knobs was what moved the strings which then moved the players. Further inspection revealed that the inside-back of the game displayed a map showing where the strings were supposed to go. I went to work.
And I did it. It felt like hours but was probably a lot less. I got the game restrung; I screwed the back on and re-inserted the players into their little sockets. It worked perfectly.
You are probably wondering what this story has to do with music, but I can tell you with hand-on-heart that this was one of the key moments of my life that helped me to become a musician. The gift that I received on that day was not the toy, it was the discovery that I could take on a seemingly impossible task and use my own resources to figure out a solution. No adult showed me what to do. No teacher “taught” me this. It was the inner feeling that comes from personal achievement.
The self-confidence that I acquired on that day has not always worked with such perfect results. I have taken on many jobs that did not end so happily, but also many that did. Once we learn we can figure things out for ourself we can use this self-knowledge throughout our life.
The ’Harold Teen’ ukulele made by the Harmony company in the 1920s & early ‘30’s carried the words: MUSIC SELF-PLAYED …IS HAPPINESS SELF-MADE written in speech bubbles. These words describe best what the creation of music is actually like. No-one can do it for you. Nobody can hand you the magic formula that makes you into a musician. You have to get in there and try – over and over again – all the while remembering to appreciate every success that comes your way, for these are indeed moments of profound happiness.
Wishing you a happy and musical 2025.
Keep Strumming and Smiling,
Ralph
