Nightboat to Northants

I’ve just been granted exclusive permission to publish a photo of someone whose name has appeared here several times over the years...

...Mr SDS. 

Here he is in 1981.  A bloke in creepers and a 'We Are All Prostitutes' T-shirt sitting on a folding chair by a river may not be as extreme as teenage goths grimacing on the beach in those ‘Embarrassing Family Photos’ websites, but still I love the way it looks a little out of place. I snapped him squinting in the Summer sun as the morning light bounced off his fluorescent pink socks, androgynous post-punk hair blowing in the breeze against a pastoral backdrop in the middle of nowhere.  (The middle of Northamptonshire, as it happens.)

That’s how it was, though, wasn’t it?  Holidays, weddings, funerals, etc. were difficult when it came to dressing ‘appropriately’.  We wanted to wear what we always wore and (of course) what we wanted to be seen in.  Which was at least appropriate to who we were and what we were into, as deck shoes and shorts had never been in our wardrobes.

A slightly better view of that T-shirt

The Pop Group: We Are All Prostitutes

I took that photo the first time we went away together.  We didn’t have much money, still lived at home with respective parents, but for a nominal donation we were able to borrow a little narrowboat for a couple of days from my mum's friend.  It was moored at a campsite in a place we’d never heard of called Thrapston.

The saffron yellow, bone-rattling, ex-Post Office Viva van got us there somehow.  Mr SDS had only just passed his driving test and I couldn't drive at all; I tried to read the map the right way up while he did his best not to show his inner panic.  We made it unscathed through Bedford anyway, which was quite a triumph.

Smells make memories, don’t they?  And if I ever smell that disctinctive whiff of paraffin now I find myself right back on that boat, sitting on the foam-cushioned bench seats (which disappointingly only converted into single beds with several feet between them) eating Heinz Sandwich Spread on Crackerbreads.   Weird, but I really remember that detail.  Sandwich Spread may have the colour, taste and consistency of sick, yet in 1981 eating food not bought by our parents in unfamiliar waterborne surroundings with my boyfriend was so exciting that I managed to keep it down.

More exciting, though, was just listening to the radio there. We heard a lot of chart singles such as  Kim Wilde 'Water On Glass', The Specials 'Ghost Town' and Tenpole Tudor 'Wunderbar'... they are the sound of that place to me still, the sonic equivalent to the smell of paraffin.

Let me take you back to a 1981 Top Of The Pops for a moment as a reminder:

I really liked Kim's boyish image

Then we listened to Richard Skinner’s evening show which usually featured a band in session.  That night will forever be associated with Soft Cell:

Soft Cell in session, Summer 1981

I remember thinking the last song 'Youth' was really something.

'Don't hide the photos

Or turn off the lights

I'm quite sure we've both seen

Funnier sights'

(People used to think Mr SDS looked a bit like Marc Almond; he was once offered a freebie jar of Dippity-Do hair gel by an older stall holder at Camden Market on the strength of it.)

It was when we wanted to go to bed that the spiders appeared.  Dozens of them. Every corner, every crevice, the low lamplight casting monstrous 8-legged shadows against the wooden panels.  Big fat juicy ones and long-legged spindly ones, stripey ones, ones with bodies that looked like baked beans and hairy varieties too.   It seemed to take forever to carefully flick each one out the window with a Queen's Silver Jubilee themed tea towel.  Thanks to that I conquered my fear of spiders, so much so that long-time readers will know I now actively love them.  But that doesn’t mean I ever want to sleep with them.

You must've heard the apocryphal tale that goes round schools about the couple who get lost on a nighttime drive in the wilderness?  – where the boyfriend gets out to seek help and later the lone girlfriend hears banging on the car roof, which to her horror turns out to be his decapitated head in the hands of an axe murderer.   It came to mind when I was awoken in the early hours that first morning by the mysterious, repetitive knocking on the narrowboat roof.  It sounded very close, very persistent.  Luckily Mr SDS’ head was still intact on the starboard bunk.

What was that noise? 

We’ll never know.

Probably ducks.

Later we wandered out of the campsite and into a time-warp: a grocery store in town, where a plump, rosy-cheeked lady sold us a bottle of Dandelion & Burdock. She was so friendly; I like to think she approved of Siouxsie’s lifesize face staring out from Mr SDS’ chest and my sleeveless Lurex top sparkling in the dusty rays of sunlight.

Strolling back to our moorings, every wooden gate we passed – and there were quite a few - came with a bony old man in a tweed cap attached to it.  Maybe it was the same man, skipping ahead unseen behind the hedges while we dawdled, just to mess with our townie minds.

It's funny how I remember all these odd snippets.  I can never see a man leaning on a gate now without thinking of everything I've described above. 

Did we untie the mooring lines when we got back, fire up the boat's engine and go chugging up the Grand Union Canal with our new-found freedom?  Course not!  There'd have been no turning back.

Anniversary snapshots: 3rd July 1981

Blimey, I'm finally managing to write again! Thanks for your encouragement and understanding. But hope you'll forgive some retrospective indulgence...   It could even turn into an occasional series, tho' that might be over-ambitious.  Anyway, this started because I was thinking about a gig I was at on this exact day many years ago - hence 'anniversary' - and it dawned on me just how much has changed, although the band in question are still performing (albeit not the complete original line-up).  More on them in a mo.

First, time to forget everything we now take for granted about modern technology.  Rewind to an era when we weren’t all connected, forget having a home computer and transmitting words and pictures like I'm doing now.  I'm back to a time when we still had £1 notes and had to get photos developed at Boots and wait two weeks.  I won’t go on, you were probably there too.

So I'm in the early '80s, and 1981 in particular.  How was it for you?

The music I think of first is that post-punk / embryonic goth thing because I was really into those bands I’d heard through John Peel, like Modern English, Psychedelic Furs, Positive Noise, the Cure...

There were other new sounds too  - I loved the first New Age Steppers album with its dub rhythms...

...and still had allegiance to the anarcho-punk of Crass who released 'Penis Envy' that year.  I don't recall ever enjoying that in the way I did others, but it had its place.

These were varied times musically; I could play New Order’s ‘Ceremony’ alongside Dead Kennedys ‘Too Drunk To Fuck’ and Radio 1 could play Bucks Fizz next to the Jam. So much was going on.  Then, thrown into the mix, was something altogether different: electro ‘machine music' from a German band who’d already been around for over half my life.  Kraftwerk.

Kraftwerk seemed pretty old in '81 (in their 30s!).  I knew this because my sister already had Radioactivity in the dark ages of 1975, a record she'd been given by a German boy during a Town Twinning week.  I was 12 in '75, I liked Showaddywaddy and guinea pigs.  So, yes, they were ancient but, at the same time, so ultra-modern.

On Friday 3^rd July 1981, I saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon.  It was the first time I’d been to a gig venue with seats.  I was used to black-painted halls with sticky floors and being close enough to a band to look up the nostrils of the guitarist and count the hairs.  Down there on stage – a long way away, no up-nosing for me - were four figures who looked more like androids than people, each producing synthetic sounds from a personal console, behind them a huge screen projecting the kind of digital graphics I’d only really seen on Tomorrow’s World.  

Honestly, this is what I mean about forgetting what we know today because back then it seemed so futuristic.  Like when we were little and tried to picture what life might be like in the year 2000 (all jet-packs and holidays on the moon), the computer world that Kraftwerk envisioned wasn’t one I could imagine living in.

Now, as I type this using familiar technology, their version seems retro, like Gameboys and Space Invaders do too. But in 1981 we were still gawping at magic flashing signs on the motorway telling us we were too close to the car in front as we travelled down to Hammersmith in P's Vauxhall Viva.

I’m not sure quite how Kraftwerk fitted in to my musical taste, they just did.  Seeing them felt like witnessing something special.  The sophistication of sound and imagery took us to an other-worldly place, where our hosts didn't seem fully human.  How different from the gigs I'd been to before.  At the same time it was highly accessible, especially in songs like the wistful electro-pop of 'Computer Love'.

We were enthralled for two hours by four automatons, but just occasionally they let slip their robotic façades and smiled, and we loved them for it.   They filled our senses.  It was such a memorable and awe-inspiring night.

And unlike gigs I’d been to before, the ones with sticky floors, there was no real fashion style dominating the audience - there were all sorts there, with no aggro.  P wore a black cape! I don't know why - or perhaps I do - I mean, this was an era when many of us aspired to be vampires, at least part-time.  K was wearing brand new purple creepers from Shelley’s.  I donned my moth-eaten black lace dress (my mum’s from the 1940s), my hair deliberately tangled.

In the foyer on the way out we spotted Toyah! ‘I Want To Be Free’ was in the charts - she was going to turn this world inside out and turn suburbia upside down.  I'm not sure how she got so far with that voice, but she did have the look.

 As we queued to leave the car park, we were amazed to hear a tape of what we’d just listened to being played back – someone must’ve recorded the set on a portable cassette machine. Maybe smuggled in under a cape.

Possibly still dazed from the Kraftwerk experience, P took a wrong turn as we headed home and started driving West instead of East.  We didn’t know as we drove towards Southall that something serious was happening there that night.   The first we heard was in the papers the next day - there was nothing then to tell us what was going on in real time, no tweets, no rolling news.  

Luckily we turned around in time, oblivious to what was unfolding further down the road.  Petrol bombs were being thrown and a pub set on fire when a violent conflict erupted after a number of Oi bands  booked to play the Hambrough Tavern brought many of their racist supporters to an area with a high Asian population.  That was another side to the hot Summer of 1981: riots.

It's weird to think of Oi bands, riots and Kraftwerk in the same breath.  I’m so glad I’d been in the company of the latter that night.  I don’t think Oi fans would’ve taken kindly to seeing us dressed in cape, creepers and lace, singing 'It's More Fun To Compute' out the car windows, and laughing at the ridiculous idea of that ever becoming a reality.

Hmm.

As for Kraftwerk, they're touring again with 70-year old Ralf Hütter as the only original member, and by all accounts their performances are not that dissimilar to the one I enjoyed 36 years ago today.  Whereas so many other things have changed...

Developed at Boots, July 1981

In the digital age, July 2017

Thought it was about time I said hello properly!

Dance, dance, dance

Last night I was dancing around the living room, noticing the sunset sky outside the window. It was so easy to imagine I was somewhere else, that I could smell the crushed grass, the sun-cream and the weed, that I was exchanging coy looks with the smiley barman in a drinks tent, that I was in a place I've never been but want to. I was high on just the music... dance music. This was surely not meant to happen!

I mean – it used to be so simple; you could tell straight away what someone was like by their musical taste and, for me back then, dance music came with a stigma. My early '80s experiences of working in a small town record shop gave me this education, exposing me to many different genres and consequently to their typical fans. I could so easily have written a 'Bluffer's Guide' to musical stereotypes based just on our customers. For example: heavy metal enthusiasts were nerdy and more intelligent than they wanted you to think, indie kids were sweet and shy, goths were introvert, Gary Numan fans all looked like Gary Numan and crusties were... unwashed. But it was the dance fans you really had to watch. Anyone who looked at the dance charts for their inspiration, who bought the Street Sounds Electro albums and who preferred Chaka Khan to the Cocteau Twins, was quite likely to be rude, aggressive, glue-sniffing or moronic, or all of these things. It was the dance fans who brought back their recently scratched albums and tried to pass them off as faulty. They were the ones who changed their screaming babies' nappies on the counter and stubbed their fags out on the shop's carpet. I grew to hate dance in its broadest sense just on principle. It was almost impossible to disassociate it from the arseholes who made our lives a misery with their demands for refunds on the Break Machine albums they'd spilt their cans of Tennent's over.

It's only in the relatively recent past that I've managed to shake off this irrational prejudice. Now, with the interim years bringing closure to my record shop dance fan paranoia, I can hear the music differently.  Saint Etienne and Apollo 440 first made it more palatable, then others followed and now so much also sounds better retrospectively.  What would I rather listen to at this moment – Theme from S'Express, or Song To The Siren? It's a closer call than it's ever been.  EDM is getting under my skin and, more to the point, under my feet. Dubstep, uplifting trance, progressive house... oh god, my '80s self would have shuddered. Possibly the creators of some of the albums now gracing our CD racks are shuddering too at the thought that their music is appealing to 50-somethings. Does that mean they've failed? Or is it all different now anyway because it really was our musical roots which inspired them in the first place?

I don't know. But here's a track from the forthcoming Nero album. Now tell me this isn't good!

All the records I've ever owned

Thanks to a post over at the excellent Bagging Area, I was recently reminded of a couple of records I owned in 1981: in this instance it was the New Age Steppers' first album and the Slits' second. Sometimes I miss them... and those they rubbed up against... I look back on them fondly like old friends. But if I still had every record I've ever owned I would have to give them a room of their own for there's no space to spare here; there have been so many.  It got me thinking... remembering.  A quick flick through my brain's RAM reveals a mixed selection: long-since-gone albums by Buzzcocks, Punishment of Luxury, Wire, Generation X, Afghan Whigs, Au Pairs, Bauhaus, Mighty Baby, the Lyres, Rain Parade, PiL, Steel Pulse.... not to mention dozens of compilations (or 'combinations' as someone I once knew described them).  And I can still picture the labels on my singles and EPs by the Ruts, Comsat Angels, Neon Hearts, Crispy Ambulance, Television, Voice of the Beehive, New Model Army, New Order, Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction... I'll stop there. I'm probably omitting vast swathes of my varying musical taste with a selective memory that has conveniently glossed over certain purchases, best forgotten anyway.  Maybe you think that about Zodiac Mindwarp?! - no, I loved my Wild Child 12” at the time, perhaps helped by the fact that I rather fancied the leather-clad Mark Manning too.

What happened to them all?  In the '80s many would have ended up at the Record & Tape Exchange, usually the branch in Notting Hill Gate, where they may have been openly sneered at or secretly salivated over by the usually rather snotty staff before being, well, exchanged of course.  Mr SDS and I used to make the trip down to London with one big bag of records... and come back with another big bag of different records. Others found new homes via charity shops.  Loyalty to my vinyl, CD and tape purchases has always been fairly transient. Loved truly, madly and deeply for a while, but ultimately replaced by younger, or just as likely older, models: an ever-changing music library. Today's joint collection includes a few hardy perennials (Aladdin Sane, Clash first etc) but a good many which (don't tell them) possibly won't be here this time next year. We've even bought albums, sold them, bought them again, sold them again... Every so often we pull one out and say, “Are we ever actually going to want to listen to this these days?” and then their fate is sealed. We make the trip down to the charity shop with another big bag of CDs.

Don't mention downloads... we're not there yet.... still sticking with things we can touch. Even if we don't always stick with them for very long.

Talk Talk

A quick musical diversion - last night we randomly dug out the 1977 'Streets' punk compilation and I had completely forgotten just how excellent this song by Mark Hollis' band The Reaction is....

I love it!  I love the rhythmic guitar and the song in general makes me think of the mod revival sound that was to follow soon after, before Mark's new band revisited it in 1982...

But before that we had the Music Machine and a totally different, but still brilliant, song with the same name:

And now it's just a telecoms company...

Outsiders of the world unite

He had pale blond hair which hung limply around his ears and down to his shoulders, with an ill-advised straight-across fringe that did little to draw attention away from his huge, hooked nose.  Skinny to the point of bony, I recall that his limbs looked too long for his body and that his fingers looked too long for his hands.  Large feet, too.  Always inside Clarks Wayfarers shoes (we used to call them ‘Cornish Pasties’.  If you know the footwear I mean you'll know why).  They were just visible beneath the hem of his light brown and highly unfashionable flared cords. 

Then there was his voice.  I first met him when we were 16 but, even at 30 (the age he was when I last saw him briefly) it was as if it hadn’t quite broken yet.  It oscillated unpredictably between high and low notes, and it took a while to get used to realising that the variation in octave didn’t actually indicate surprise or fright or any other emotion.  There was just something not quite right with his voicebox which gave him a strange kind of involuntary yodel.

I spent three years in  his company at art college when we were in our teens;  he became one of my best mates there.  I liked him, I felt safe with him, felt like I understood him.  Plus, being shy too, I was comfortable enough with him to really be myself and to not feel inferior or intimidated.   Our friendship was liberating.  We’d frequently go to the town’s record shop at lunchtime and browse through the album racks, I’d take the piss out of the heavy metal LPs he pored over while he laughed at the names of some lesser known bands I searched for.  I won him over to the B52s for a while, though - I remember that.  Like many really shy people who find themselves treated as outsiders, he had a great sense of humour - nicely dry and often wickedly caustic.  And he was the most wonderful artist, the best in the class by a long stretch.  He had an incredible imagination and an amazing talent for difficult perspectives and angles that the rest of us would never even begin to attempt  (in fact I still won’t).  But, the last I heard of him, he was long-term unemployed, long-term single and living alone in a town centre tower block bedsit.  I just don't think he had what it takes to fit.

There’s no punchline to this post, no twist, nor revelation – I don’t even know quite why I started thinking about my old college mate in the first place!  I suppose I was just wondering why it is that some of us feel like ‘outsiders’ (even if in disguise…) and others don’t.   Who decides what the ‘inside’ is?  And who decides what fits in it? 

This is the song I turned him on to.  Funny how you remember these things.

And it still sounds great to me!

I'm with the band

A slight smell of stale cigarette smoke lingers in the stingingly cold night air. The floor of the back of the transit van where I sit feels icy, even through my trousers. My back hurts, leaning against something hard and unyielding, its corner poking into my shoulder.

There are six of us – no, hang on, actually there are seven of us, trying to ‘snuggle’ down between amps, drums, guitar cases, backdrops and bags of leads and pedals, behind the cab, hoping to catch a little bit of sleep as the vehicle we’re travelling in rumbles down the motorway in the bleak early hours of a winter morning.

The guitarist, drummer and bassist, and their three girlfriends, one of whom is me, make up six. The vocalist and his girlfriend are sitting in the front with her brother, the informally appointed roadie. The seventh person in the back with us is a ‘fan’ who is cadging a lift back home after the gig. When everyone was packing up at the end of the night - always a long-winded and frustrating business - he’d asked, “Any chance of dropping me off in Hull?”  (or wherever it was).  With the band’s badges on his lapel glinting in the streetlights as he’d made his request, the bass player and self-appointed spokesman for the group could not have refused. However, the detour for this additional passenger takes us an hour out of our way back home and it feels like an eternity when we’ve got another 150 miles to go. But this often seems to happen at gigs; there is always someone in the van travelling back with us who hasn’t travelled out with us, and usually it’s someone who smells strongly of sweat and dope and farts, with long limbs and a bulky rucksack, taking up precious space and time. And space and time mean more than anything on the home-bound stretch, because everyone is knackered, hungry, dehydrated, cold, squashed up, uncomfortable and grumpy. Everyone just wants to get home as soon as possible, longing for deep sleep in a warm, soft, bed. But at least nobody can accuse the band of being ungenerous in that respect.

It was the early 1980s and this became quite a frequent event for a while as I travelled with my boyfriend’s anarcho punk band to an assortment of venues up and down the country. We usually tried to get back the same night, which in reality meant arriving home just as the sun was coming up.  A few times we stayed over, like once in a damp squat – a condemned terraced house with no plumbing (ironically it was in Bath) - and another time on the floor of tiny council flat in a high rise in St. Helens. That one had plumbing but, by strange coincidence, the toilet was broken. We had to use the bath.

My memories of those days are a melange of odd moments and images. From being stopped and searched by the Mets as we travelled home through South London, to seeing a cow giving birth as we ventured through the Cumbrian hills on the way to a gig near the Windscale (as it was then called) nuclear plant. From hearing rumours that British Movement skinheads were going to storm in and give everyone a kicking at Grimsby (they didn’t), to paddling in the sea before a gig in Fareham. There were the unkempt crusty/hippie children climbing on top of the van at Stonehenge, where tales of Hells Angels with knives made the place feel distinctly unwelcoming and the schedule got so far behind that in the end the band didn’t play anyway. And there was the punk in Burnley who was ‘wearing’ a condom, attached to his face between safety pins (one in his lip, one in his nose. It was quite a look.) It turned out he was the singer in one of the support bands, whose only memorable number was a re-worded demolition of Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon Everybody’ endearingly entitled ‘Fuck Off Everybody’.

I remember the inter-band arguments, the waiting around at soundchecks, the sharing of bags of chips with chilli sauce at The George Robey, the listening in on fanzine interviews, and the way only Northern punks sported moustaches… Strangely enough, perhaps, the thing I probably remember the least about is the performances. They were good, though.  Of course.

So where are they now? The bassist founded a record company, the vocalist and drummer are fine and I met them again a few years ago, and the guitarist… well, he’s in the kitchen right now, making me a cup of tea.

Jeepers creepers

There’s been a bit of a rock’n’roll theme in some of my fellow bloggers’ posts lately and it chimed in neatly with a strange and sudden yearning to get myself a pair of… you may think I’m mad, but… a pair of creepers. 

Well, I was looking through one of my sketchbooks from the early 1980s and found these small drawings…

…and, I dunno why, but I got hooked on the idea of slipping my feet into a pair of crepe-soled shoes, at least before I get too much older.  Can a woman of my age get away with wearing such things, with narrow jeans and a leopard print coat?  Do I care?  Hmm...I don’t want to end up like one of those old ladies who should have given up the lipstick and leather decades beforehand  - there are always one or two in every town, aren’t there? -  and who turn heads for completely the wrong reasons.  But I think  - ok: hope - there’s still time for me to make a few last stands against middle-aged convention.

At least I can buy them off the internet now too.  Back at the time of my little drawings, purchasing such exotic items meant taking the train down to London and heading for the rather cramped and gloomy branch of Shelly’s at Foubert’s Place in Carnaby Street.  Inside, boxes of weird and wonderful footwear for all of us who wanted to make fashion statements with our tootsies were stacked precariously and in no obviously logical arrangement from floor to ceiling.   In Shelly’s I indulged my love of some black patent lace-up boots with impossibly pointy toes, not the sort of thing you could buy in a small town Stead & Simpsons at the time.  It was my boyfriend who bought the creepers then – purple ones, red ones, some with pointy toes too - to be accessorised with dayglo green or pink socks, which we could also only find in the city shops (far too outrageous for the provinces).

You didn’t have to be into traditional rock’n’roll to wear creepers.  Early ‘80s fashion seemed, to me anyway, to be mostly about hybrids.  It was natural to mix and match various influences: a bit of punk here, a bit of glam there, a mélange of several different decades' styles, combining kitsch with chic and old with new.  I had no qualms about wearing a yellow polka dot 1950s dress under a leather motorbike jacket, along with black woolly tights and monkey boots, for instance. And, when I think about it, there were a lot of hybrid inspirations in the musical backdrop of the time too.   Rockabilly earned new credibility with bands like the Polecats and the Stray Cats...

(Who couldn't fall in love with Brian Setzer's hair too?)

  

Anyway, the creepers are on order and I just hope I’ll like them when they get here.  At least if I find I'm not brave enough to wear them out I can Stray Cat Strut round the living room in them and pretend I'm seventeen again...

Dancing through dark times

At an age when my friends and I should have been enjoying the most hedonistic time of our lives, there was something dark and ominous looming over us like a monstrous headmaster ready to dish out discipline at the merest hint of any mischief: the threat of nuclear war. 

For me - and maybe for you too?  - the early '80s were schizophrenic in the extreme.  On the one hand there were 'Protect and Survive' pamphlets dropping through our letterboxes and, a little later, visions of a post nuclear apocalypse would be beamed into our living rooms via programmes like 'Threads'.

Even the children’s author and illustrator Raymond Briggs, best known for his wonderful books ‘The Snowman’ and ‘Fungus the Bogeyman’, stepped into this terrifying territory and haunted us with ‘When The Wind Blows’.   And ‘Only Fools And Horses’ parodied our deepest fears of imminent nuclear conflict with an episode entitled ‘The Russians Are Coming’ in which the hapless Trotters build a fallout shelter at the top of a tower block.  This was not so far from reality – anyone could buy DIY shelter kits through the Sunday supplements, which carried adverts for them as if getting one was on a par with purchasing a new shed.   With one of these safe havens in your back garden you could relax in the knowledge that when World War III kicked off (which it was definitely going to at any moment) you’d be protected against radiation by a few layers of lead, dirt and concrete and some strategically placed cushions.

On the other hand - perhaps as a direct response to the above - there were a lot of bright  and creative things going on behind the scenes.  However, the mainstream took colourful frivolity to an extreme, and seemed dominated by a culture (if you can call it that) of bubble perms and padded shoulders.   Frothy bands like Bucks Fizz (pun intended) topped the charts – their name, their look and their songs all summed up this strange, frilly party atmosphere.  They may as well have been singing, “Let’s all fiddle while Rome burns!”  On the surface it was all primary colourrs and lipgloss, and I can’t blame anyone for wanting that escapism.  If I’d been into plastic pop and not into punk – or at least the ‘anarcho’ element which one area of it had evolved into -  maybe I could have remained ostrich-like too, and emerged from the sand a few years later, blinking incredulously while asking, “Did I miss anything important?” 

It wasn’t just about nuclear war.  There were dozens of other political issues to worry about and to rail against.  (Life was ever thus.)   For a short time I was right in the thick of it, immersed in a scene in which fanzine writers interviewed bands less about their musical influences and more about their stance on fascism and veganism.  Record sleeve artwork no longer exposed us merely to horrific fashion crimes, but instead to the horrors of crimes against animals and the inhabitants of third world countries.  Although… speaking of fashion, the faded black shapeless uniform of protagonists and followers did suggest an almost criminal lack of imagination. (With the exception of Rubella Ballet, who brought a much needed splash of dayglo to those murky days.)  

Around ’81/’82, when I was most involved with this particular musical movement, I was at art college and, not surprisingly, many of my illustrations reflected the burning issues.  My portfolio at the time included collages of mushroom clouds, strange drawings of women bound by bandages and barbed wire, and a lot of black and red.  I was even commissioned to do a picture of balaclava-wearing activists carrying puppies and guinea pigs for an Animal Liberation Front flyer.  One of my favourite artists of the time was Sue Coe, whose uncompromising and often brutal, bloody imagery made my spine tingle.

Of course, I still had some fun; skiving off college and travelling halfway round the country in the back of a hired Sherpa Van with my boyfriend’s anarcho punk band was not without its lighter moments.  There were nice people around and good gigs and sometimes a very genuine sense of connection, especially in the face of this cold-hearted world we were kicking against.  And the causes were very real; I cared deeply about both human and animal rights, the divisive effects of the Thatcher government, the miners’ strike, police oppression, poverty, sexism, racism, etc.   It’s easy to feel downhearted about the notion that we didn’t make any difference – but in a small way I think we did, and maybe I’ll write more about that another day.

Meanwhile, it seems strange now to think that I actually spent some time in my late teens giving serious consideration to what I’d do when the four minute warning was sounded (eat chocolate? - snog the first person I saw? - slash my wrists?) whilst at the same time Top Of The Pops gave us fluffy pink-clad dancers flashing vacuous grins to four minute pop songs.

And here’s a song which, to me, absolutely sums up the feeling of the time with both its dramatic arrangement and poignant lyrics:

The Passage: Dark Times



Record shop memoirs, part three (Roll up! Roll up! CDs are here!)

The arrival of  the first CDs in the record shop where I worked in the mid ‘80s was quite a momentous occasion.  The invention of those tiny shiny discs has been referred to by some as the ‘Big Bang’ event of the digital audio revolution but, at the time, many of us were still cynical.  In his excellent book, ‘Lost In Music’, Giles Smith (who happened to work for the same small regional chain of independent shops as I did) describes this perfectly:

‘That Christmas [1984] , a few rather serious-looking people came in to choose from the extremely limited range of items in the shop’s plastic tray of Compact Discs.  (Fools! We thought.  It’ll never catch on.)’

 Lost In Music by Giles Smith (Picador 1995)

I have a memory of a little frisson of excitement as we unpacked and examined the new format.  I think there were just a handful of titles and I can’t recall exactly which but I think the artists included Billy Joel and Jean Michel Jarre.  I’m sure I probably held one up and looked at it from all angles under the harsh fluorescent lights, mesmerised by its sparkle and eager for it to somehow prove itself.  Would it sound amazing, like nothing I had heard before, nor could even imagine?  And was it true that you could set them alight and gouge your initials into them and dunk them in vinegar and it wouldn’t make any difference?

I sold my first CD to a regular customer, Mr Sexton (he liked to keep our interactions formal).  Mr Sexton was one of those ‘rather serious-looking people’ as Giles Smith describes.  He was a technophile.  In fact I’m sure he’d probably told us about compact discs even before the record companies did.   He’d come into the shop and refer to the list of record requests that he’d previously typed into his little Psion Organiser (they’ll never catch on either, we thought).  Prior to the availability of these new-fangled CD things, he was very meticulous about his vinyl purchases.  He’d inspect them thoroughly before parting with his cash, pointing out any tiny marks and asking that we check them specifically on the in-store record deck for possible accompanying audible flaws.  In spite of his perfectionism, he did make small allowances: “Two clicks per side per album,” I seem to remember.  Two clicks but no hisses, no jumps and definitely no pitch-altering wobbly warps.

So I think it was probably the Jean Michel Jarre CD that Mr Sexton bought first.  Grinning like a simpleton I took the little disc out of its cardboard master bag. I deliberately held it between my thumb and forefinger in the way I would never do with vinyl (having trained myself to be quite an expert in the barely-touching, edges-only grasp that defines you as a true respecter of records).  Thinking I was being funny, I made some gauche remark about smearing honey on it.  I’d seen that BBC TV item where they’d done just that and the disc had still played perfectly.  (And you can watch it for yourself  here . Honey AND coffee!  I can see why conspiracy theorists maintain that these sample discs were far more resilient to maltreatment than the later production line output, because their indestructibility doesn’t make any economic sense…)  Mr Sexton was a nice man but I don’t think he was too amused at the honey quip.  He took several minutes to thoroughly examine the disc, holding it in the barely-touching edges-only grasp and I couldn’t help wishing we had a pot of Gale’s under the counter.  Anyway, he went away very happy, and came back for more, from his short electronic list that quickly lengthened over the ensuing months. 

Gradually the shelves of twelve inch cardboard album masterbags made way for more five-and-a-half inch replacements and the racks of LP sleeves dwindled.  The revolution had started. I left my job there before the transition from vinyl to CD was complete and of course I realise this all shows just how old I now am.  (But will downloading ever catch on…?)



Dress, shirt

I couldn’t help feeling an unlikely sense of excitement when my sister told me she'd volunteered to catalogue Victorian underwear at her local museum.   I had this vision of mountains of white lace, linen, ribbons, strange things made out of whalebone and lots of stockings.  Words I rarely use tumbled into my mind: bustle… petticoat… crinoline… bloomers…  I can’t wait to find out exactly what kind of drawers she’s going to be rummaging through – probably some made from calico.

I think it’s pretty amazing that any undergarments from a hundred years or so ago would survive at all.  Why were they ever kept?  I don’t know about you but, whilst I’ve been tempted to hang onto the occasional special garment, or at least pass it on to a new owner rather than throw it away, I’d never have considered my undies.  

I had one of those muslin ‘Destroy’ shirts which I bought from Seditionaries on the Kings Road in 1979, sold to me by (ooh!) Vivienne Westwood herself.  I loved it dearly, I loved its soft feel and the little metal spring clips on the sleeves.  At 16, I had no qualms about wearing a logo which combined a swastika with an upside-down crucifixion and our decapitated Queen on a postage stamp (I know…).  I have to remind myself of how all this imagery seemed in the context of that time.  It meant nothing more then than just being into punk; it was where all that shock-symbolism began and ended.  That shirt was one item of clothing I hung onto for many years; I’d stopped wearing it long ago of course but I was reluctant to throw it out. It had some kind of meaning, it was from a very specific era.  Eventually, about six years ago, I sold it for £100 to a collector who didn’t even mind the paint stains on the sleeves (I’d worn it to college); I think he was going to frame it and hang it on his wall.  The money was more essential to me than having it as a piece of memorabilia by then.  Maybe in another hundred years it will end up in a museum somewhere.

There are a couple of items of clothing I’ve continued to keep, however, even though they weren’t mine originally, but just ended up in my possession. 

One is this fantastic Sixties shirt which I feel extremely privileged to have been kindly given over twenty years ago. 

It’s made by ‘Donis of Carnaby Street’ and it’s in lovely condition, with the most amazing collar and cuffs. 

I just love the idea that it would have been bought and worn by some trendy young thing, probably at the height of psychedelia… Maybe he wore it to the Speakeasy where he danced the night away to the Yardbirds..?   My reasons for keeping it are perhaps quite romantic, really.

Then there’s this now musty and literally moth-eaten dress.

The dress as it  looks on me today.  Amazingly, it still fits -

it’s just a shame that it smells like a stagnant pond…

It was my mum’s; she bought it in the late 1940s.  It's made of layered lace and has velvet straps and neckline.  Originally it had whalebone in it too but she took that out some years later and let my sister and I play dressing-up games in it, adorning ourselves in plastic beads and clip-on earrings from Christmas crackers, whilst hobbling about in mum’s five-sizes-too-big-shoes with fancy old curtains draped over our shoulders.

There was a spell during the Eighties when I discovered it was a good enough dress to actually go out in and it ended up as an essential item in my (mostly black, mostly second-hand) wardrobe.  Apart from being genuinely vintage it had all the credentials for that indie/post-punk/goth look.  Black.  Velvet.  Lace.  And it was nicely tatty and torn by then too.  It went perfectly with fishnet tights and crimped hair.  Now, nearly seventy years old, it’s stored away in a box.  I don’t know quite what to do with it but I just can’t bring myself to part with it. 

These are two items of clothing which aren’t going to be discarded anytime soon - unlike my old undies, which no museum in the future will be cataloguing, I can assure you.  And I’ll resist saying any more about volunteers rummaging through them, too.

Here’s a song…

Record shop memoirs, part two

As anyone who’s ever worked in a shop probably appreciates, regular customers tend to earn themselves handy nicknames.  Not that they have a clue what these monikers are themselves.  These useful identification and reference labels are an important secret, closely guarded by the knowing assistants on the other side of the counter.  So I was one of those knowing assistants in an independent record shop from '83 to '87; it was a long time ago and sadly I can’t recall many names now, but... let me think… well, there was Worzel Gummidge… and Bog Monster… and Tiger Man…and the Fraggles… and plenty of other less imaginative tags too - and we knew who we were talking about, even if they didn’t.

Other regulars, however, actively introduced themselves in the way they wanted to be addressed. For example, there was ‘Neil the Mod’.  The ‘Mod’ part of his name was emphatic.  I don’t think we ever knew his surname –  I mean, when we reserved, say, the latest 2 Tone release for him, it was just ‘Neil the Mod’ that we wrote as his name on the order slip.  As instructed by him.  He was never seen wearing anything but full (‘80s) mod regalia, such as his parka (with target), pork pie hat, sta-prest trousers, etc.   

I remember the first few times he came in - he must only have been in his early teens and he was just a little too exuberant.  If there had been such a thing as ‘The X Factor’ or ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ back then, you might have thought you’d accidentally walked into an audition on any occasion that he was in the shop.  Before you had time to say ‘Green Onions’ he’d be singing to you.  Mind you, that was nothing new when you worked in a record store.  People frequently came in and said, “There’s this single I want, and I can’t remember what it’s called, or who it’s by, but it goes a bit like this…” and then self-consciously proceeded to ‘da-de-da’ a few bars with maybe the odd memorable word thrown in (something really useful like 'love' or 'baby'- not much narrowing down to be done there, then).  But these were quietly sung by the enquirer at close range, and only after checking that the shop was devoid of other customers and possible eavesdroppers.  Conversely, Neil the Mod actually wanted everybody to hear him.  He sang at full volume and even threw in a few dance moves too.  It was as if he had no embarrassment filter; the more attention he could get, the better.  At first this was a little tiresome but, I suppose, at least we knew we were in for a bit of free entertainment when he was around. 

However, over time he calmed down as he grew from a rather over-enthusiastic teenager into a more focused young man.  It was then I realised that his career as some kind of performer had been inevitable; he started to get entertainment work at holiday camps and local events, and in a way he’d been practising his art on us in the shop.  Maybe it was really quite a privilege to witness his early forays into singing publicly.  A few years after I’d left my job there I bumped into him (and his guitar) in town where he’d apparently been doing a bit of busking between seasonal leisure resort bookings.  He'd ditched the full Quadrophenia gear in favour of a more subdued retro look.  We had a bit of a chat before he said “So what song is it gonna be – fancy a bit of Beatles?”  Then, right in the middle of a busy retail centre full of Saturday shoppers he launched boldly, and perfectly, into ‘Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby’, the Carl Perkins number, as performed by the early Fabs.  If you’re familiar with this you’ll know there is no handy guitar intro, no time to take breath nor get in tune with a few chords at the start….  It's just the vocal that kicks it off.

Then in came his vibrant, strumming guitar.  His performance was strong, captivating, pitch-perfect and LOUD.  The shoppers all stopped to watch, their worn-down faces lighting up with admiring smiles, feet tapping in time.   You just couldn’t fail to be both impressed and uplifted.

(Pork pie) hats off to Neil the Mod.  I hope he's doing well, wherever he is now, and I hope he's still singing.

(Btw I dread to think what nicknames have been thought up for me over the years by smirking shop assistants.  Best not to go there…)

It's the Peel thing

There is a brief moment in my musical-tastes-timeline which deserves a special mention, perhaps particularly because it was so short-lived.  It was the very early eighties and a whole new crop of UK bands had released songs that just didn’t fit neatly into an existing genre.  Even with hindsight I can’t think of a perfect name for it – it wasn’t punk, nor goth, nor rock, nor pop.  Being generally referred to as ‘Post-punk’ is ok, but sounds a bit too broad.  And  I suppose ‘Indie’ would be an understandable tag,  but that rather blandly convenient term brings to mind a slightly later upsurge of bands.  So I’ll share with you a name which sums up my listening habits of the time:  ‘Peel bands’.  It was John Peel who brought these sounds into my bedroom through his late night radio show and for that reason they’ll always be inextricably linked.

Perhaps one of the first things to draw my attention to these Peel bands was their weird and wonderful names.  They gave no indication as to how they might sound, so when John announced at the beginning of his show, “Tonight we have a session from Crispy Ambulance and records by Ski Patrol and A Certain Ratio..." my curiosity was already stirred.

At the start of that decade I was an art student, feeling happily outside of the norm, with not too many cares in the world, dressing in clothes from charity shops and growing out my once-spiked hair to back-comb it instead.  I bought my singles from places like Small Wonder, who, as well as being a label for acts like Patrik Fitzgerald (and releasing the first Cure single), had a record shop in Walthamstow.  I never went there but it operated a great little mail order service.  You could phone up and speak to founder Pete Stennet  himself to place your order and send your stamped addressed envelope off for the latest list.  It’s funny how little random snippets linger in my memory for no apparent reason; I recall sitting on our brown-carpeted stairs with the curly cord of the big-dialled cream telephone stretching round the doorway from the kitchen when I rang up excitedly to reserve an obscure EP by the Tunes.  A Saturday lunchtime I think.  Rhubarb crumble in the oven.

Before selfies were selfies

I may sound like an old fart but really I’m quite glad I’m of a certain vintage when I think back to those days. I get such a warm feeling.  My world was so small in so many ways, my life’s limits bound by the cost of a train ticket or bus fare, late night curfews set by parents and only three TV channels, all of which turned into mute, black screens by bedtime.  But maybe all that just made me appreciate even more the exotic pleasures to be had from listening to the one and only John Peel. 

Here for your exotic listening pleasure too, I bring you a small, random selection:

The Tunes: Headlights

Young Marble Giants: Final Day

Comsat Angels: Eye Of The Lens

Second Layer: Courts Or Wars

The Durutti Column: Sketch For Summer

Clock DVA: 4 Hours

Modern English: Gathering Dust

Wah! Heat: Seven Minutes To Midnight

(links may have expired...)

Girl eyed brown

I looked through some old photos recently and was struck by just how much brown there is in them.  Brown carpets.  Brown sofas.  Brown curtains.  Brown cushions.  Brown wallpaper.  And it started me thinking about…. well, yes: brown.

I’ve a strange relationship with this colour.  So many things that I like in life come in different shades of it… lovely natural things including various birds, Autumn leaves and small mammals.  Some of my favourite foods too… really well-done toast, smooth dark chocolate and a nice oaty Hobnob with a cup of (brown) tea.   

I think the early seventies were probably brown’s heyday in interior design and, as these were my formative years, I have strong memories of those burnt sienna, raw umber and oatmeal designs that dominated most households. Rustic-looking coffee sets were all the rage, with strange extended knob things to hold onto instead of traditional curved handles, as if to replicate some kind of ethnic or peasant look – always in natural browns.  Plates and bowls frequently seemed to be decorated in brown squirly and geometric patterns or very stylised flower shapes.  And around this time I also joined the Brownies! So, for me, in spite of all the glitter and colour being worn by the glam brigade, the seventies were brown. 

Well, that was OK  until I started secondary school and was expected to wear this colour in its most drab form - day in, day out - for the next five years.  The insipidly beige blouse and conker-brown skirt were compulsory and (for some reason I’ll never understand) so were the dark brown knickers.  (I mean the colour, not just the wearing of them…)  Brown became the colour I associated with the science lessons I couldn’t comprehend and the games sessions I tried to skive off from.  Brown meant getting up early and having to go outside in sub-zero temperatures during winter breaktimes. It represented that feeling of being afraid to cough during morning assembly and the dread of those fuddy-duddy teachers with bad breath.  The day after I left school I threw away my uniform and vowed never to wear this colour again.

Home décor seemed to favour brown for some while after the seventies too.  So in every rented and furnished flat I lived in subsequently there was a predominance of it (all the photos below are from the 1980s, apart from the Brownie one..) and I don’t think I’ll want to see another piece of brown-patterned wallpaper as long as I live.  But I’ve gradually come back around to it for other things. Every so often they say “brown is the new black” and that it’s the more complimentary of the two to the, ahem, mature complexion, so I’ve reintroduced it to my wardrobe over time.  Apart from one thing, that is.  Never again will I be wearing brown knickers.

Every shade of brown imaginable in just one small room

Hmm... chocolate brownie to follow? At least it won't show if I drop crumbs

The unusual burst of colour in the poster was enough to make me need shades indoors

Trying to figure out the bass-line to 'Brown Sugar' I suppose

I should never have become a Brownie

And here's a song I loved at the time that mentions school uniform (still sounds good to me...)