[Closed] What were YOU doing 40 years ago today

at the grand age of 13 months? shitting, eating or sleeping I would hazard a guess.

Not an awful lot as I hadn't been born yet

I wasn't impressed by Elvis at the age of 18 months. Not much has changed on that front.

Standing on a blue plastic chair in the kitchen whilst my Mum pinned up the legs of my first ever pair of school trousers which she was altering to fit

In France with mum+dad, I think in Vichy. Dad walked past a man lying on a bench with a newspaper over his face and it said "Elvis dead" in French obvs. It may have been tomorrow 40years ago though.

Taught the band to play.

Or was that twenty years ago......? I forget.

It was a Tuesday, I was probably at playschool so I don't recall Elvis leaving the building via the shitter.

I do however vividly remember listening to a bloke on the radio at home talking about John Lennon when he died three years later.

In the car park at Boscastle. It was chunking it down. We were on a family holiday in Bude and the weather had been appalling all week.

I remember my Auntie Janet being very upset, about Elvis that is, not the weather.

We went to the witchcraft museum in the afternoon and I saw lots of photos of nekid ladies jumping over fires, so all in all the day was pretty good as far as my 8 year old self was concerned.

[edit]

I don't recall Elvis leaving the building via the shitter

You made me laugh until I coughed.

Tuesday? Really?

I remember being in the car with my Dad (I was 6), and he saw the newspaper headline and told me my Mum would be sad when she found out. I assumed it was a Sunday as we'd been to the tip, but I guess he was on summer holiday....

My Dad had Elvis records, my older brother had Never Mind the Bollocks. So I was torn really. Don't remember the event, but remember thinking punks would be pleased.

swimming about in my mammy's belly! 😆 i don't think i'd a fully formed opinion on the matter.

On holiday at Conwy, North Wales. I was 11, my 8 yr old brother cried at the news 🙂

I was 16 and working in the school holidays at a factory in Plymouth, the ladies on the production lines were in tears & everyone was talking about it 😥

I was too young at the time to understand what Elvis meant to people & the influence his music had on them. They also played Elvis records on the radio all day long 🙁

Elvis dead!?! I need to let Joe Cocker know

being only six i wasn't a fan but i do remember the tv showing the coffin being moved and my mum saying it was a shame.

Buying pie and chips off him in our local chippy.

It was a Tuesday

Could have sworn it was a Thursday, anyhow's I was 13 delivering the morning papers, it was pissing down again and it was on the front page of the Daily Express.

Didn't really bother me that much tbh.

staying in a caravan in Chichester with my parents and younger brother and sister.

My mum and sister were both big Elvis fans and were inconsolable.

It was also the first time I was aware of cynicism as my best friend who was a year older than me described it as a 'career move'.

Probably eating mud in the back garden and getting washed in the kitchen sink, or whatever is what we did in the 70's, i was 22 months old....

MTB-Idle - Member
described it as a 'career move'.

Can't remember. Might've been on hols with my family, last year I did this.

I do remember though thinking he was pretty old and had had a good innings.

I was doing whatever it is that happens 6 weeks before being born...

We were living in South Africa and had been for a year - the news didn't reach us for some time!

I always remember the date. It was my 9th birthday!

Happy birthday mr Grim!

I was waiting for my A-level results but can't remember precisely what I was doing that day, possibly helping out on the farm. Will have heard the news on the 6 o'clock news - no interweb back then of course.

Lying in hospital in a coma having fallen 20 feet onto concrete. At 4 years old and in that state I wasn't really bothered about Elvis.

Sat in a bedsit with my mum..
She cried all day

stood in front of the headmasters office, waiting to get the cane.

**** knows I was 2 and didn't know some fat American died in a shitting accident

I was probably doing something lego related

Happy birthday grim!

My mum was crying I remember that clearly as the news was on TV, loads of people queuing around gracelands

My mum told me when I woke up. I wasn't bothered. Later that day I did my Cycling Proficiency training and the young lady training us was very upset.

Too young to care or remember. I did remember having a discussion about him a few years later and learning that he was dead.

I do just about remember John Lennon being shot though and my mum being quite reasonably upset.

Lennon > Elvis in our house.

My eyes and ears would have just about started functioning in the womb, so I suppose my cortex would have been too preoccupied with processing all those new nerve impulses to be bothered much about Elvis.

This thread is very heartening, I might be nearly 40, but I'm not so ancient that I can actually recall any of the 70s, you guys are [i]old[/i]... 😉

70s news items I remember :

Thatcher being elected

This thread is very heartening, I might be nearly 40, but I'm not so ancient that I can actually recall any of the 70s, you guys are old...

Yeah - I was always getting my bell bottom jeans caught in the chain of my Raleigh Tomahawk 😀

I'm not sure my parents had even met.

my step dad had sent off to the shop to buy his newspaper as he always did so I saw it in the headlines that morning. I was only 8 so didn't really care too much - I expect I probably spent the rest of the day either riding my bike, kicking a football around or playing Top Trumps with friends 🙂

As an 11 year old, it registered but no vivid recollection of what I was doing when I heard, Boycott's 100th 100, which happened a few days earlier, was far more important to me.

Camping with friends 3 miles from the road beside Loch Lomond. Three girls we had met the day before walked up from Rowerdennan and told us the news. No big deal really. Past it American singer dies.

I was more shocked on October 20th that year when Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane crashed. I listened to their music, not Elvis.

You lot are old.

I'm not sure i can think of any musicians deaths that affected me.

Johnny Cash? And by then was at college!

Wait until Joe Cocker dies we'll all remember that day.

My mum was crying I remember that clearly as the news was on TV, loads of people queuing around gracelands

I was doing pretty much what I'm doing now - I'm by the beach.
The only differences are that today I'm working and we have a different house to back then - I'm now 400m away but can almost see the old house from where I'm sat.

Happy birthday Grim..!

I'd have been 11 months old. Probably gargling my first word. Which was "bobby", not Elvis....

(I've been to Gracelands - amazingly non-tacky given all its associations.)

I was holiday driving for a plant hire firm in Newcastle, mainly delivering to Tyneside Metro construction sites so I'd have heard it on the radio of my MK1 Transit.

Werent even an itch in my old mans nutsack

Seeing as i was 5yrs old i guess i was doing whatever my parents told me to do, apart from staying in school all day - i often used to jump on my bike and take myself home or if my dad was landing (fishing boats) i would wander down to the harbour and hang about on the boat till he went home.

Thanks to my gran i could read, write and spell quite well by the time i went to school so i was often bored shiteless which was a good enough reason to wander off and amuse myself.

I was 8, and my mum and auntie were sat on the patio with the first fag and coffee of the day. I got the newspaper from the front door, read the headline without understanding. and carried it through to them. I asked them who Elvis was and they asked why so i told them.

The memory of the response is still pretty vivid now.

Ask me again in a year. Probably crying, sleeping or feeding then.

Getting pissed in Walton Street Oxford, having a curry and my mates wife walked down to find us and tell him that Elvis was dead. He was a massive fan and was holding back tears for an hour.

It was the week before my 10th birthday (so yes I am 50 next week) and my mum & dad had taken us away camping as a birthday treat for me.

In the early hours me and my big brother were listening to a little transistor radio and heard on a news flash that Elvis had died. Knowing that our dad was a big fan, we ran screaming to our mum & dad shouting 'He's dead! He's dead!' and when they found out who they just told us to be quiet and went back to sleep.

Later that morning we went foraging for wild mushrooms to eat with our camp breakfast.

Tomorrow we take our eight year olds camping 🙂

In my Great Uncle Alfs Austin Maxi. The news came on the radio and everyone in the car was stunned at the news - except me. I was 3 and had no real understanding...

I wasn't impressed by Elvis at the age of 18 months.

Me neither. He'd sold out by then.

August 1977? I was kung fu fighting.

On another Elvis related topic - I recall my dad selling a rare Elvis LP back in the 70s for £50. I can't begin to imagine how much it is worth now.

You lot are old.

I can remember being woken up to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon, Aberfan, my dad watching the '66 world cup final and I know where I was and what I was doing when it was announced that Kennedy had been assassinated.

As a 16 year old I wasn't that bothered. As far as I was concerned at that time music started in the late 60s. Everything before that was in black and white.

70s news items I remember :

Thatcher being elected

I voted in that election; she still got in.

I can remember being woken up to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon,

Ditto

Aberfan,

Ditto

my dad watching the '66 world cup final

Scottish. No way we were watching that.

and I know where I was and what I was doing when it was announced that Kennedy had been assassinated.

You've got me there. I was only 2.

Elvis is dead??? 😯

I was all shook up. 😉 😆

But seriously, you expect me remember what I was doing on a specific day when I was 3? I'd struggle to tell you what I was doing last year on this day in any meaningful detail! 😳

@donald - I didn't say I [i]remembered[/i] it, only that I knew where I was. 😉

@noddy - can you remember what you were doing on 11th Sept 2001 roughly 2pm BST?

I havent a clue what I was doing ..........**** all has changed there then 😉

Elvis is dead???

No, he’s not dead; he just went home...

Rachel

Scout camp in a field in Coledale in The Lake District

@wibble 😉 - I woke up to the breaking news of the Twin Towers tragedy, back then my sleeping pattern was often really screwed up.

Discovering The Sex Pistols on John Peel's "Top Gear"...

working in a kitchen in the basement of a Boston Bar in Faneuil Hall (in Quincy Market), making salads and hamburger patties. A Cheers type bar but 5 years before that show was made. Didn't mean much to me as Elvis was err uncool (then) and I was into hippysh*t music... But now I realise he did sone great songs and had an amazing voice..

I would have been playing on a beach somewhere along the coast of Cape Canaveral, dressed in a pair of 70's terry toweling shorts as a very young kid.

Probably in the kitchen watching my dad pull bits of the pressure cooker out of the ceiling while rubarb dripped of every surface.

I was out riding my bike (5 sp Dawes Chevron racer) with my mate Melvyn Evans who told me as if war had broken out. I'd never been an Elvis fan and at 14 wasn't about to start.

Melvyn was a little scandalised and as he was one of the cooler* kids I wondered if I had missed something.

* all relative; this was Shropshire.

I picked up the paper (Daily Express?) at my Grandads in Tottenham and showed the front page to my mum. I remember her being shocked.

Came home from an evening shift, webt to bed and put Radio Luxembourg on. I couldn't understand why they were playing back-to-back Elvis tracks until the presenter mentioned his death.

Didn't bother me in the slightest at the time, nor did the death of Buddy Holly. Perversely, I like them both now (apart from In the Ghetto and American Trilogy, which sucked then and still do).
I did cry the first time I heard "Imagine" after Lennon's death.

At 14 I doubt I even knew. Watching the news wasn't high on my list of priorities. I suspect I my have cheered though not being a fan and fed up of those who were. Didn't really go with my tastes at the time.

All I remember of the summer of 77 was my complete fascination of Star Wars and when I could manage to see it again at the cinema.

And Elvis ain't dead. Last anyone heard he was working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines gently humming Love Me Tender.

All I remember of the summer of 77 was my complete fascination of Star Wars and when I could manage to see it again at the cinema.

Again? Didn't come out in U.K. Cinemas till Christmas of 77

We'd stopped somewhere in Derbyshire en route to the Lakes to escape the foretold Jubilee street parties - some village green with a parade of shops in which my dad procured some Creme Eggs for the first time, not doing so before because he reckoned my younger brother wouldn't eat it.

I remember reading the headline on the paper whilst simultaneously (and rather successfully) convincing my baby bro that he wouldn't like the Egg because it was, in fact, a real egg encapsulated inside the chocolate coating.

Gullible sod. More for me and big bro.

🙂

Edit : Actually, I think we were on a second holiday as I seem to remember going south in the Jubilee year, too.

I was caught in a trap and I couldn't walk out. Either that or I was a poor little boy with a runny nose, out in the street where the cold wind blows.

Cub camp at Mepal somewhere in the depths of East Anglia. Our sailing instructor told us about an hour before me and James Greetham got banned fron the lake for repeately capsizing toppers at speed and on purpose to see if we could snap the masts..