LIFE NOTES: 1968

 

I started primary school on Tuesday 6 February 1968. From then my memory becomes rather more formed, since my days are now structured, and I can remember things and people more readily. Specifically I remember my nice, middle-aged headmistress who took me in hand and started giving me piano lessons, using the Ministeps to Music series of book tutorials. She lived well into her nineties and to the end always remembered me with fondness.

 

Dissociated images of popular culture; Thunderbirds on television, Tintin’s Destination Moon. Apollo 8 just after Christmas. I remember the deaths of Martin Luther King (but not that of Robert F Kennedy) and Yuri Gagarin being reported on ITN as they happened but the celebrity death which probably saddened me the most was the Scots motor racing driver Jim Clark, killed in an accident on the track in what was then known as West Germany that spring, aged just thirty-two. One of the other kids in my class was called Jim Clark – and I don’t know what happened to him* – so it hit a wee bit deeper with me. So people die? Who knew? Oh, all of you did…

 

(*if I’m going to proceed with this impromptu memoir, I’m afraid I’m generally going to have to avoid naming names, since there is a high likelihood that many of those who attended school/university/work with me are still alive and are almost certainly now the parents of grown-up children, and very likely also grandparents. I don’t think they need reminding of these times, or that weirdo classmate/fellow student/work colleague they barely tolerated)

 

I remember my mother taking me to Maryville Park, our transistor radio playing loudly (in those days nobody objected and everyone welcomed it, even on the bus, because it represented a common vocabulary), ice cream lollies (FAB, perhaps?), spinning on the roundabout in the park to the strains of Everlasting Love, the first pop record I remember being something called “number one” in a thing called the “charts” with Love Affair’s slightly resentful-looking lead singer on Top Of The Pops. The future felt good at such times, even if the DJ playing the Love Affair song was, more often than not, Jimmy Young. Playing mini-golf on the range just behind Tunnock’s biscuit factory.

 

A scorchingly hot July spent on holiday in Blackpool. It was so hot on the beach my mother had to visit the local branch of C&A and buy me a whole new outfit. I rode right up to the top of the Tower and stared in moderate wonder at the Irish Sea. We saw Ken Dodd at the Opera House. Can’t remember who else was on the bill, but his closing act went on for quite some while. Got taken to the cinema one afternoon to watch a film called Custer of the West. I don’t remember anything about it or even who was in it. In our self-catering boarding house, run by an extremely nice old Welsh fellow and his family, I watched a programme called Danger Man. The title sequence was all linoleum diagonals. I remember jumping at the closing motif of the lead actor's face suddenly zooming towards the camera and a set of bars clanging shut on it. Maybe that was another show the actor was in; I didn't know the difference at the time.

 

I also remember a very angry, bearded man bursting into our house that year who wasn’t my father and shouting furiously at my mother. He was wearing a suit. Was this a bitter ex? He lived down Spindlehowe Road, near my school. My mother advised me to go nowhere near his place. She got rid of him and we didn’t see him again. Unless he returned fourteen years later but that’s another story.

 

I remember the weird and frightening old man in the flat cap with a walking stick who would always laughingly hit me with said stick as we passed him in the Main Street. I quickly learned to avoid him as well.

 

I remember my father doing the football pools. I was fascinated by all the “X”s he put in on his form and by the design they created. One idle weekday afternoon I looked at the form and without thinking filled up the entire form, every box, with an X. When Saturday afternoon and the results came, my father was furious as to what had happened with his forecast. He hurled me onto the carpeted floor and whacked me repeatedly and viciously with his belt, with my shorts pulled down. Hence my curiosity about the world was snuffed out almost at the point of its conception.

 

I learned over the years that my father was pathologically unable to control his temper with either my mother or myself, and expressed his rages in gestures of violence. Perhaps he blamed us for “stealing” the life he felt he might once have deserved. Hence I have great difficulty with songs of masculine domination popular at the time, such as Delilah or She Wears My Ring, because they remind me directly of those things I have described above.

 

The year became darker for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, and so did the music. My mother and I were sitting in the Vale Café on Tollcross Road one Wednesday lunchtime, probably around October. The place had a jukebox. When we went in it was playing Mony Mony. I conflated Tommy James with Tommy Cooper and assumed this was a group who wore comedy fez hats and did rubbish magic tricks. Then Hey Jude, which I saw on Top Of The Pops, and at the end it was as if the whole audience had invaded the stage. Someone dressed up as Napoleon was waltzing with someone else. I was immensely impressed, although the song and performance struck me as something of a celebration in defiance of I didn’t yet know what.

 

Then someone else in the café accidentally dropped some money into the slot at the wrong time and Hey Jude abruptly gave way to Fire, by Arthur Brown. Now, that thing scared the bejesus out of me. I had also seen this on Top Of The Pops – both Hey Jude and Fire were, as I found out a long time later, promotional films rather than TOTP performances as such – and at the end of the song it looked as though the stage was on fire and all the musicians were burning to death.

 

(although I also recall a miserable episode of the measles around March when I was confined to bed, watching the little auxiliary television set in my bedroom and Dave Dee cracking his whip to The Legend of Xanadu. What was THAT all about, I weakly asked myself)

 

But the songs were becoming longer, and darker. MacArthur Park. Those Were The Days. Eloise by Barry Ryan, which I saw on a Saturday teatime ITV pop show called Time For Blackburn, with the great Tony sitting in a mocked-up radio studio pretending to play records, before the camera suddenly cut to the actual artists miming (I think?) to them (they had tried the same format earlier in the year with Alan Freeman, on a show then called All Systems Freeman). That Eloise was a particularly dramatic moment. The singer ended up kneeling on and pounding the studio floor, and screaming over and over about this woman Eloise. HUH?

 

My father hated it, just as he hated the Beatles (though I do recall being very reluctantly given a toy Yellow Submarine – Dinky or Corgi? Can’t remember now), and Mary Hopkin, and Richard Harris and Hugo Montenegro and All Along The Watchtower – This Wheel’s on Fire, THAT was also scary – and especially Lily The Sodding Pink, which I saw imperiously vaulting up the charts, week after brisk week. towards number one with some dread, as it incurred my father’s mounting fury. Mind you, he liked the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – he’d get very impatient at people dropping the “Doo-Dah” tag – because they were always on a wacky kids’ television show called Do Not Adjust Your Set and reminded him of the Goons. He liked Urban Spaceman and I don’t think cottoned on who produced it.

 

I watched a bit of DNAYS on YouTube a couple of years back. Leave some memories where they can remain untarnished.

I WAS OLDER THEN, BUT YOUNGER NOW

 

Like David Stubbs, I read English Language and Literature at Oxford in the eighties. I went to a different college from David’s but he had to put up with B*r*s J*hns*n two years below him, whereas I made every effort to avoid having to put up with M*ch**l G*ve in mine. I suspect David was as frustrated as me by the Eng Lit syllabus stolidly refusing to progress beyond Tennyson. Strange how we were all “up” there at more or less the same time, albeit with some temporal overlaps; Mark Sinker, Nigella Lawson, Simon Reynolds, Paul Oldfield, Roger Lewis and me. Even Lucy Ellmann was around to some extent, at her father’s big house down Jericho way.

 

I did knuckle down and do my degree, and since I had Another Person to support at the time (none of your business) I had to get a Proper Career as a fallback, since I figured particularly early (and rightly) that, as much as I loved the music papers and magazines of the period, any attempt on my part to maintain a career as a music critic would lead inexorably to spending most of my professional life out of work and skint (to paraphrase the great Bob Sinfield – “Two things I got right”).

 

Nevertheless I did have a fallback job while still a student, namely working in the Music Market record store on Cornmarket Street (hence the name; clever or what? What? Oh, I see…) where I did my best to convert and persuade customers to explore slightly unexpected musical avenues. Not once did I encounter future prime ministers David C or Alexander de P J strolling in to purchase a Smiths or Housemartins record. I think they probably just bought Invisible Touch out of the Virgin Megastore in the Westgate.

 

But music was the thing with me, and it melded expertly with the general colourfulness and exploding newness of the eighties. Also in common with David, I had a penchant for suits in bright primary colours and there were places in Kensington Church Street and certain parts of Chelsea where you could buy them relatively cheaply.  But work (with the NHS, who at the time of writing have gainfully employed me for almost thirty-seven years) was fun – including its social aspect – and life in London (and Oxford) in general was what I’d call affordable fun. Could buy tons of books and records, go and see lots of films and plays, go to clubs and still have plenty left over for food, rent and so forth.

 

I am aware that this all conjures up the spectre of Thatcherism, and perhaps we enjoyed the inadvertent fruits of that too readily. The point was that, in the mid-eighties in particular, it seemed to offer such a blaring diversion from the grey dourness of the towns and villages from which we had mostly come. Coming into Oxford Street was like every day being Christmas. You’d go into the old WH Smiths near Marble Arch and they’d have records by Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel in their racks. You didn’t get that in Hamilton!

 

So I was attracted by the unapologetic Futurism offered by the Monitor people who went almost en masse to Melody Maker (having first been turned down by the NME). Ages of the aerial and fascination-over-meaning seemed so much more exciting and, dammit, sexy than the NME’s Rare Groove bores who said that Mantronix wasn’t proper music and everyone should be made to listen to Aretha for half an hour each morning to teach themselves dignity.

 

But I never fell into the either-or binary trap, which always ends up with its arbiters painting themselves into a corner. Most music in 1986-9 sounded bloody glorious to me. Yes, the Young Gods, a double yes to AR Kane and a Pi to the power of infinity to MBV Mk II, but I also loved the Pet Shop Boys, Wedding Present, Housemartins and Pogues. I eagerly devoured the work of Saqqara Dogs, Gore and Band of Holy Joy, as well as the “big” names (Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, R.E.M.) and “newer” names (Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Muses, Pixies), not forgetting the Antipodean camp, which stretched from INXS to Nick Cave via the Triffids, Chills and Go-Betweens, and jazz of all stripes (except the dreary and counter-productive soulboy-engineered “Jazz Revival”), folk, World Music, WTF-isms like Culturcide, oh and that thing called House music and that other thing called hip-hop which seemed to evolve on a weekly basis…

 

…but also pop. Definitely also pop.  Prince, obviously (and Madonna once Prince got involved), and New Order, equally obviously. But Stock Aitken & Waterman were at their best as unapologetically Futurist as Wilson’s Factory. Something like Mel & Kim’s Showing Out was as symbolic and representative a passage into eighties THIS IS DIFFERENT AND BETTER London; the clanging sounds you heard once you got past the M25 and the Brent Cross interchange, as evocative of that elemental feeling as anything by Janet Jackson, Diamanda Galas, Sigue Sigue Sputnik/Big Audio Dynamite (literally two sides of the same coin; listen to the latter’s Sightsee M.C.! and tell me I’m wrong), Test Dept or Tackhead.

 

So it was with a mixture of excitement and apprehension that I tuned into Pick Of The Pops this Saturday past. Gambaccini was away on holiday for a week, so Scott Mills was brought in as understudy. This is not as unlikely or desperate a gesture as it might superficially sound; Mills came with many years’ experience of hosting a peak-time chart show (Friday afternoons on Radio 1 with the new Top 40) so this prospect wouldn’t have fazed him at all.

 

And indeed it did not. Some online listeners were astonished by how well and enthusiastically Mills handled the proceedings, complete with audience interaction. Compare that to the airless cod-liver-oil sterility of Gambaccini’s recent presentations. The two years were apparently of his own choosing – 1988 and 1996.

 

1988 was at the time hailed as The Best Year For Music Ever and how could 24-year-old me have possibly disagreed with that? And the Top 20 picked by Mills – or as much of it as could be fitted into an hour of radio time - was exciting and thrilling. Noticeably female-dominant, was that chart; Hazell Dean, Taylor Dayne, Adele Bertei, Natalie Cole, Patsy Kensit, Tiffany, Bananarama – and it all sounded as fresh as the blooms then still allowed in Hyde Park. Bananarama’s I Want You Back IS Perfect Pop, you doughnuts, and so is I’m Not Scared. Even songs I wasn’t too keen on then – for instance Love Changes Everything (Climie-Fisher, not Michael Ball) – sounded astute and reasonably compelling (tip: most pop sounds better coming through a decent stereo system on headphones). The only one I couldn’t quite get down with was Drop The Boy by Bros – Caroline Sullivan’s favourite single of that year if I remember correctly – mostly due to Matt Goss’ ceaseless growling as though Michael Jackson had just sat on a wasps’ nest. But Heart, a song the Pet Shop Boys never anticipated as being a hit (fourth single off the album, doesn’t everyone have it already?), sat with polite majesty at number one (always get a remix).

 

The hour escorted me right back to those frankly fantastic days (it certainly helped that the afternoon was warm and sunny). And I’ll lay you down a Last Exit, Skinny Puppy, Napalm Death, Negativland or Neubauten as recourse to any indications of embryonic poptimism. The second hour was 1996, which was imperfect but overall really revelatory – as with 1988, most of this music appears to have fallen down the back of the metaphorical sofa in the living room of oldies radio, hence its relative freshness. I would have skipped the Take That and Oasis ones but some relevant reminiscences were conjoined with both (actually, the solution of the eternal why-don’t-POTP-play-the-whole-Top-20 riddle – apart from there simply isn’t enough time to play 40 songs in two radio hours – seems elementally logical to me; do a podcast version of the show where all twenty songs actually do get played?). Scott didn’t play Sick Of Drugs by the Wildhearts or Salvation by the Cranberries – great records both, which weave very well into each other, but lyrically perhaps not compatible with a sunny Saturday mid-afternoon Radio 2 – but a great range was covered, from California Luv to the X-Files theme.

 

How good it was to hear Walking Wounded by Everything But The Girl as opposed to Missing for the millionth time – and Scott even played Firestarter (reputedly the late Sir Des O’Connor’s all-time favourite single)! Gina G, Mark Morrison, Alanis Morisette, even the Presidents of the United States of America with their “peaches.” Great to hear them all. And I suppose this is how I have come through; I never drew a line in anyone’s sand but kept on going, listening and being eager and enthusiastic about what comes next. Oh, and the new SAULT album, bugger me, Simon Mayo should be playing it on Scala; it’s an epic.

LIFE NOTES (2)

 

My next set of memories stems from 1967 and they are scattered and not conjoined. Visiting the High Speed Gas showroom with my mother one weekday morning to pay the gas bill. The showroom was situated in front of a giant (and now long-demolished) gasometer, on the border between Uddingston and Bothwell, which one could see from Glasgow and, we used to joke, sometimes from southern Italy. There was a queue of anxious housewives.

 

A visit with my parents to the greenhouse at Tollcross Park, me dressed in a navy blue sailor’s suit. Photographs were taken which I didn’t really enjoy.

 

A new kitchen dresser being installed in the hallway of our narrow flat in Uddingston Main Street and filled with items of food and cutlery. I kept having to move out of its way.

 

The small conical dome presiding over the grocery – for a spell in the 1970s it was a branch of the Centra chain – at the junction of Uddingston Main Street and the extremely steep Gardenside Street. If you climbed up the steps heading towards Spindlehowe Road, behind what was then a church, you could still see it.

 

Riding on the dodgems at the local fair – if it were local; I cannot precisely recall – with my mother, wearing a rather fetching raincoat.

 

Mrs Marley and her version of expatriate Italian culture. The huge Bush radiogram with its teak-redolent, dark blue-labelled Decca singles deep within.

The visits from several newspapers because word had got out about my being something of a child prodigy. Reading and writing at two. A lengthy, detailed and finally apologetic letter from the National Association of Gifted Children was sent to our house. The photograph of me, reading that letter, made the front pages of the Scottish Daily Mail and Scottish Daily Express. The glum conclusion was that nothing special could be done for me in terms of formal education, which I almost certainly should not have come anywhere near. Not enough money, you see. We were living in a first-floor flat on Main Street in Uddingston, above what was then the Bay Horse Inn pub. Saturday nights were noisy. In my childhood that situation was deemed unique.

Music drifted unevenly through that year. The first record I remember hearing and remembering was I Feel Free by Cream right at year's beginning. My father liked Cream; they were really a jazz group masquerading as a pop one ("rock" didn't yet exist). I saw the promo film for Strawberry Fields Forever on Top of the Pops, and indeed that broadcast was recorded, in audio, by sellotaping a microphone to the television speaker. All other elements were random; San Francisco, Grocer Jack (the harpsichord tag to the latter immediately conjured up the abovementioned conical dome for me; it twirled as balletically as the dome seemed to do), light entertainment in general.