Bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl.
Tom Clay – What The World Needs Now Is Love/Abraham, Martin & John b/w The Victors (Mowest, 1971)
The fact that I have this single reminds me of the time when I was an avid late-night listener to the pirate radio station Radio Caroline in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As well as playing album based rock, the station also promoted Loving Awareness (LA), a hippy-ish concept inspired by a philosophy of love, peace and understanding.
LA was the brainchild of Caroline’s founder Ronan O’Rahilly and disc jockey Tony Allan was an enthusiastic supporter of the concept. Allan explained that : “The whole point about Loving Awareness is that if you have a love for somebody but it doesn’t necessarily have to be sexual. It can be a loving thing which goes on and on and on; it can be a truthful thing; and those things work both ways”.
The direct opposite of LA was ‘DA’ which stood for ‘Defensive Awareness’.
Caroline produced a number of jingles to promote LA (‘Let the loving awareness sound gently kiss your ears’) including one, posted on You Tube (see below), which features extracts from The Moody Blues’ track ‘In The Beginning’ from their 1969 album ‘On The Threshold of a Dream’. The combination of mysticism and hipster speak dates the jingle incredibly as for example when a follower of DA is chided : “Thou art surely the all time sucker!”
Tom Clay’s single was played regularly to epitomise the well-meant , but cheesy, concept of Loving Awareness.
