Daylight robbery

I don’t know whether we look more like ageing beatnik chicks or Mafia wives, all of us dressed in black and with chic boots and dark glasses.  One friend wearing a smartly tailored coat, the other with her nails immaculately polished, me with crimson painted lips.  We make our way to an old building at the end of town - coincidentally the same place we’d convened many times long ago - in fact, over forty years back.  It was once the venue where, with wide-eyed adolescent adulation, we'd watched Siouxsie & The Banshees perform before they’d even got a record deal and where we’d seen Adam & The Antz many months prior to the release of ‘Dirk Wears White Sox’ (oh, how to make yourself feel ancient!)  Also where the Newtown Neurotics and Crass became our local heroes.  I could go on.  But it's certainly a building full of ghosts from our past, and I half expect to see a gaggle of punks around each corner and to delve into my handbag for Polos to hide the smell of forbidden cigarettes from my parents.  Ah, there are parts of me which would go back to that time in a heartbeat; I’d skip the teenage angst and the school night curfews, but…yes, the gigs!

Anyway, here we are at our old stomping ground (no longer that music venue and arts centre), three women in our late fifties, about to embark on something completely new.  That’s one of the things about getting older, isn’t it?  That there are fewer and fewer ‘first times’.  But this experience is still uncharted territory; it’s definitely the first time any of us has robbed a bank…

An hour later, as orange lights flash and alarms sound around us, we are sitting in the back of a transit van, leaving behind us a trail of gold bars, magnetic keys, bank cards and a gun.  Oops, did I say gun?  I do of course mean a grabber stick.  We’ve ordered a pizza for a security guard and laced it with laxative so that he’s waylaid in the loo.  We’ve hidden in cupboards, hacked a computer and fiddled with frustrating padlocks.  There was that moment when each of us tried to turn one of those number locks by torchlight, on the underside of a table it was, too - but the glare was too much for our glasses…that’s the problem with varifocals, I find.   I must bear that in mind should I ever want to pull off another heist.  Still, in spite of that somehow we’re not quite yet too old for this malarkey, because it’s undoubtedly one of the daftest, silliest things I’ve done in a long while and the laughter along with our bank-robbing ineptitude will remain with me for some time.

Of course no security guard was harmed in the process and the gold bullion was made of wood, but as far as those ‘first times’ go, my first ‘Escape Room’ experience was a good one... 

Well, it had to be this!

What's my name?

A great post over at Kolley Kibber set me thinking about nicknames recently.  I had a friend whose slim limbs and bony joints earned her the soubriquet Beanpole, and no matter how many Curly Wurlys or Freddo bars she ate, to everyone else’s chagrin she stayed as skinny as one.  At the same time, a classmate of rather more generous proportions was affectionately referred to as Podge. She took to this quite happily as a term of endearment and the name endured - I could never actually think of her as Caroline.  It has to be said too that this being in the olden days meant she was one of very few chubby pupils in the entire school and the body type which merited such a ‘fattist’ term then might perhaps be considered quite average now. 

For a short while I was rather unkindly called Pasty Face which I understand was a reference to being an insipid looking twelve-year-old with a complexion the colour of wallpaper paste, rather than resembling a Cornish meat and potato dish.  And Goldilocks seems quite sweet now, but at the time I didn't take it well, maybe it sounded too babyish.  Before that, my first name was conveniently tweaked a little to turn it into an unfashionable and slightly comical-sounding boy’s one. I didn’t like it but just learned to take it on the chin.  At least it was better than my young German neighbour’s nickname, Spaz, which, for all its un-PC-ness, was simply a contraction of Sebastian.

Fast forward to my mid-teens and down at the local music venue, which became the centre of a thriving punk scene in the late seventies, there were very few people whose real full names I ever got to know, even though I’d see them there at least once a week.

The punk world was perfect for spawning some memorable monickers, especially useful for those who played in a band. So we had Anarchy and Chunky (no relation to Podge) in one, and Stringy, Snout and Bondage in another.   Less evocative-sounding and of unknown origin, but still inextricably linked to their owners, were the names Milky, Till and Dim.  And for anyone reading this who knows the poetic output of one Attila the Stockbroker I can reliably inform you that back then he was Basil Boghead. 

Then again musicians and singers have been using handy epithets for decades.  Iggy Pop has so much more of a ring to it than James Osterberg, Twinkle far more exotic than Lynn Ripley. 

I didn’t expect to be using anything other than my given name later on in life – it just seemed to be something you grew out of.   And then this internet business changed all that.  At least we get to choose our own.

The first T-shirt you ever wore...?

I don’t know about you but I find I just can’t wear band-name T-shirts any more.  I can wear other logos, art and random images across my chest when I’m in the right mood, but band names - no.   The funny thing is that I don’t wear them now for exactly the same reason that I did wear them once: because the name you’re displaying immediately puts you into a very specific box.

The first T-shirt of that ilk that I ever had was one I loved wearing ‘til it was almost threadbare.  I even remember getting it - I had just turned 15 and I’d gone to London on the train (with my mum!) with the sole purpose of coming home with something special for my birthday.  The Clash T-shirt that I found in a little shop in Carnaby Street fitted the bill - as well as me - perfectly. It was special – and, yes, it put me into a very specific box. 

It was a tone-reduced black and white photo of the band standing in a street looking seriously cool, all zippy jackets and skinny trousers, with The Clash above (same typeface as on the first album) in a screen printed rainbow of neon colours.  I can remember looking through the rack, and even though there were several of the same main design, the colours were all very slightly different, so I could pick my favourite.  I wore that T-shirt frequently (if only I could have worn it to school…)  and thought it went very well with both leopard-print and paint-splattered trousers or those early straight-legged jeans which I wore over black monkey boots.

So that was my first…. I wish I had a photo with me in (or out of) it, and maybe someone else does somewhere, but sadly I don’t.   No doubt if I had kept it I could sell it on ebay now as a vintage item for an extortionate sum, but instead it went the way of all my subsequent band-name T-shirts, i.e. to one of three places – the charity shop, the rubbish bin, or the cupboard under the sink to fulfil a new role as a cleaning rag…

I have hardly any decent photographic records of other T-shirts either but there have certainly been a few since that one bought in 1978.   Here we have the rather mixed bunch of Crass, Bauhaus and the Dread Broadcasting Corporation (so not strictly a band  but it shouted to the world that you liked a bit of dub…)

Later I sometimes designed my own one-offs too, using Dylon and a fine paintbrush, or the basic screen-printing kit bought from a craft shop.   But whether bought or studiously painted, they all meant something important for a while.  They told the world who you were into - really into.  I mean, back then, wearing a Ramones T-shirt meant you were into the Ramones. You know what I’m saying…

They say love can move a mountain

Quite by chance this week I discovered that Joe Strummer was born on this day in 1952.

As I love this song (even though, like many, I’d heard the Clash first), any excuse to put it on here is fine by me.  So today's date gives me a perfect one.

The 101'ers: Keys To Your Heart

Joe Strummer (John Mellor):  21^st August 1952 – 22^nd December 2002

The first album you ever bought...?

Or: 'How I lost my long playing virginity to a Clash 12 inch...'

It was thirty-four years ago today... Well, in fact it was thirty-four years and eleven days ago today: rewind to April 8th 1977 and the Clash’s eponymous first album arrived in our record shop racks.  A perfect platter.  Even the sleeve alone is iconic.

I’ve liked, been, drawn, worn, said and done lots of things in my life that are truly embarrassing - but buying my first album isn’t one of them!  I bought ‘The Clash’, and I’m proud!  I was still at school and had to save my pocket money for months before I could pool together the £2.99 (or thereabouts) required to enter the new and rather adult world of LP ownership.  Up to then I’d bought a few 7” singles (which could definitely be included in the ‘embarrassing things’ list - well, I was barely in my teens) but there was something about purchasing an album that was in a totally different league.  It meant you were serious. You liked a band enough to want to hear perhaps ten or more songs by them in succession, numbers that wouldn’t get played on the radio, tracks that you might not even like on the first listen, but you were prepared to make that commitment.  I went into the local record shop, Startime, and asked to listen to ‘The Clash’ on the headphones.  Within the first few seconds, as ‘Janie Jones’ burst into life and blasted into my ears, I knew I had to have it.  (Share that memory with me here.)  As my friends and I walked home from town, I took it out of the carrier bag and tucked it under my arm so that everybody could see what I had just done.  You know what it’s like when you’re young and daft and actually believe that the man/woman in the street might be impressed or (preferably) outraged by the music you're into, a bit like winding your car windows down at traffic lights and turning up the volume on your CD player so the world can share your sonic choices…  It was like a rite of passage.

At that time here in the UK punk was emerging from the underground and making controversial headlines, and when I started getting interested in it my parents may have been worrying that their shy little daughter might go off the rails.  “Don’t worry, mum, I just like the music, I don’t want to look like that…”  But secretly I was harbouring the desire to; and, not long after, I bought a red studded dog collar from the pet shop.  I didn’t realise I had the same neck measurements as a bull mastiff but there you go.  I hid it in a drawer and when I went out I used to wait ‘til I was around the corner from home to put it on.   As is the way in life, one thing often leads to another and by the following year I was customising clothes, had my long hair cut short and was open about my obsession with this new music and its many dimensions.  One day at school I was obviously showing my boredom with Pythagoras’ Theorem and was stirred from my daydreams of meeting Paul Simonon by my maths teacher shouting, “Would the punk rocker please pay attention?” It was the best compliment the old bat could have paid me.  But it all started with the Clash.

Since those early days I’ve been into so many songs, so many groups, so many albums, but there is something about this band, and their debut in particular, that stands that difficult test of time, and, oh, I love them for it.