John McKenna
speaker
61 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
John McKenna’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The record player arrived one Christmas Eve with a handful of borrowed LPs.
Mario Lanza's The Student Prince, The Sound of Music, two collections of Christmas carols.
As far as I remember, it came with my brother from Dublin arriving on the late train.
And, as far as I remember, the LPs were borrowed from Frank MacDonald, our singing butcher, who went on to be a fine actor in the Focus Theatre and in film and on TV.
But in the mid-60s, he was still our butcher, appearing in local opera productions by night, parceling chops and liver by day.
The record player was a run-of-the-mill mono box with three speeds, 78, 45 and 33 and a third.
And that's important, because the story I'm about to tell you has very little to do with Christmas or late trains or borrowed LPs.
The story I'm about to tell you comes from a warm summer afternoon, about four years after the arrival of the record player.
By then someone, and it may have been me, but I'm not prepared even at this remove to admit it, had damaged the arm of the record player so that it skipped and bounced like a stone across water.
But necessity being the mother of most things, I had sellotaped a half-knee to the top of the arm, and the weight kept the needle from jumping.
Didn't do the needle much good, and it wasn't the best thing for the records, but it worked.
And when you're 15, tomorrow is a long time.
In October 1968, I asked my mother if I could have a guitar for my birthday.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
By then, I'd spent five years taking piano lessons and could play simple tunes very slowly.
Adagissimo was the term I liked to use.
It means very, very slowly.
Oh, and I could play right hand only.
And ideally, in fact, essentially, the pieces needed to be in the key of C and I needed to have the music in front of me.
But the guitar looked a lot more manageable.
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