“Gonna use my, my, my imagination” – Lessons from the first record I ever bought

Ahead of Record Store Day 2025, I have a question for you.

What was the first single you ever bought?

I want to tell you about what I learned from mine. It was Brass in Pocket by The Pretenders. (Get ready for a twist though…)

The year was 1979. I was nearly eight years old, and I went to Our Price Records with my big brother and bought it with the pocket money I’d saved up.

How cool is that? It’s still one of my all-time favourite songs several decades later. What excellent taste I had as a small boy! I certainly remember telling university friends about this very mature purchasing decision, to nods of recognition.

And if you’re unaware how good a song it is, here it is in all its glory.

As I said though, there’s a twist. As you’d expect, the reality is a little different from the story I told my teenage friends. It’s certainly not the whole truth

While it was indeed the first record I ever bought, it wasn’t actually the record I wanted to buy! As it happened, I Wanna Hold Your Hand by Dollar (distinctly less cool) was sold out, so my brother persuaded me to buy the Pretenders record instead.

But why am I telling you this in my charity blog? Well, I think there are a few lessons for charities buried in there somewhere.

The best things often happen by chance

I didn’t intend to buy Brass in Pocket that day, though I’m glad I did. But my point is this: doesn’t this happen all the time to us in our organisations? Was the Ice Bucket Challenge planned, for example? No, but it’s how we react to happenstance that is crucial. We need to be ready to move quickly, to accept that the unexpected can be brilliant, even if it didn’t feature in our strategic plan.

The journey is just as important

I think honesty is crucial when we’re telling our stories as organisations. What is our organisational personality? I may have impressed my fellow students with tales of my musical taste, but I wasn’t being fully truthful, and the whole story is more interesting. How did you come to be the organisation you are today? What makes you unique?

Gonna make you, make you, make you notice

And finally, some communication pointers from the lyrics of the song itself. How do we make ourselves noticed? I worry that we copy each other too much, and lose what makes our organisations distinctive. Take the Ice Bucket Challenge as an example, again. How many copycat ideas were conceived by charities in the aftermath, only to vanish into the ether?

What’s the way to make our supporters notice us? Let’s be more innovative, and react quickly to good ideas as they come our way. Or, in the words of the song:

Gonna use my, my, my imagination

So that’s what the story of my first record purchase has taught me.

But maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that the seven year old boy who bought Brass in Pocket grew up to be a fundraiser.

This blog was first published in 2015, and revised and updated in April 2025