P1LEY

I is for Elvis

Ian Pile - Piley to his mates - needs no introduction on this blog. Suffice it to say he is one half of the excellent Mondo & Piley monthly PODROPHEN1A podcast which you can find here . I was thrilled to receive this email in my inbox last week:

Hi John,

Hope you are well. Please find attached a pic of me with the first album bought with my own money.

Had numerous albums before this (Bugs Bunny, Sooty, Pinky and Perky, few 'Top of the Pops' albums), but all purchased as presents or nagged a parent into buying! Mum was a 'middle period' Elvis fan. The films and soundtracks mostly. I was an avid Top 40 listener on Sundays, and was diggin' the mid/late 70s Elvis singles (Moody Blue, Way Down). So much in fact that I recorded them off the radio (is there any higher praise than that?!). Anyway this rockier style didn't feature on anything my mum had, so i trooped up to Woolworths in Hadleigh to see what i could find. The recent RCA albums were all out of my league pricewise (I did get them all in the following few years), so was drawn to the cheapy MFP/Pickwick/Camden spinner rack. There were a number of Elvis albums less than half the price of the RCA ones so decided to get one of those instead. In my innocence i picked US Male purely because it had the most recent picture of him on the cover. So obviously this would be more recent tunes!!

I had no idea these were all just rehash after rehash of old tunes. Turned out most of 'em were on my mum's albums anyway! Still, the great news was it had Burning Love on it. Still to this day one of my all time favourite Elvis songs. 

Cheers mate!

Ian

ELV1S: BURN1NG LOVE