You Really Got A Hold On Me – Synopsis
Writer, university lecturer, family man and aspiring composer and songwriter Dan has a serious problem; a problem that he’s been trying to shake off for the last few decades – a lifelong addiction to pop music. He is only too aware that, by now, he should have cultivated more highbrow tastes and maybe taken up a leisure pursuit more appropriate to his age group; golf, gardening or gadding about on a 12-speed road racer. However, as he approaches the age of 60, he finds himself still persevering with the electric guitar, writing three-minute pop songs in his home recording studio, tracking down hot new artists and attending gigs in dodgy East London dives with whoever can be persuaded to join him. Perhaps rather tragically, he is as excited by the new Wet Leg single as he was when Joy Division released Love Will Tear Us Apart back when he was a teenager. On top of this, there has never been such a (mostly free) selection of music, films and video via Spotify, YouTube and other digital platforms. And why can’t Dan stop looking at ‘guitar player wanted’ ads on Gumtree? He has the sneaking suspicion that his missspent youth has come back to haunt him. So in an attempt to free himself from the pop spell and to understand more fully the roots of this lifelong affliction, Dan travels backwards in time to examine the defining moments of his rock and roll journey so far. From mothballed souvenirs to old TV shows, vinyl records, live concerts and inky magazine articles, he pieces together what it was exactly that first reeled him. He reflects also on the increasingly widespread social condition of being both a middleaged fan an ageing music maker – yes, like that sad slacker fantasist Dewey Finn played by Jack Black in School of Rock, he’s still in a band after all these years! Part manifesto, part memoir, he argues the case for listeners to turn off the old and embrace the new. From being a child in the 70’s glam rock era, to starting his own schoolboy new wave group and dipping into the hedonistic 1980’s club scene and beyond, Dan has an eye for both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the cool and the uncool, weaving seemingly disconnected memories into one clear and redemptive whole.
Prologue: Shake It Off I confess. I’m a man in my fifties with a habit I just cannot seem to shake off. It started innocently enough, around the time I swapped thick, flannelled shorts for itchy full length Terylene trousers, manifesting itself in a number of strange and exotic ways: the poster of leather-clad rock queen Suzi Quatro torn from my sister’s copy of Jackie magazine; the smattering of 45 rpm discs including T Rex’s Jeepster and their budget Music For Pleasure LP Ride A White Swan stacked up against my new Japanese-made portable record player; gawping at ABBA singing Waterloo in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest on the family television set; pretending to be members of Slade with my schoolfriend Simon; cutting out and painting a Beatles Hofner violin bass fashioned from old wine boxes with my mate from two doors down and, later, stealing his sister’s dinner money in order to help finance the purchase of a Beatles compilation album from our local record shop. Okay, so the cringeworthy Suzi Quatro posters and crappy cardboard guitars are but a sepia-tinted memory but casting my eyes around my home office on any given day I spy at least two six string solid-bodied electric guitars hanging from the wall, as if at the entrance of a Denmark Street music shop. A new bass rests against the bookshelf. Above the coat rack by the door is a portable Korg analogue synth in its box plus several electric keyboards and drum machines that would have once been at the cutting edge of music technology. Rows of vinyl albums still occupy a dusty corner below and there’s at least one shelf of rock lit and music biogs plus some unused tickets for forthcoming shows on the mantlepiece – Franz Ferdinand, The Divine Comedy and Spiritualized, as you ask. Next to this very computer I’m writing this on is a very random collection of CD’s (yes CD’s, popularly in use in the 1980’s!) and below at floor level are a decent enough pair of audio speakers through which I can hear my favourite new artists on Spotify and YouTube. Strangely, I’ve been as excited about new releases by The Surfing Magazines and Wet Leg as I was when I first heard Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division as a teenager. The late Radio One DJ John Peel, who helped listeners from my generation to discover so many previously under-valued artists, is no longer with us, but his freespirited music taste lives on at BBC Radio 6 Music, which, in the absence of any alternative, we listen to religiously in the car. And if I was to check my Twitter feed right now, I would be almost guaranteed to be treated to a photo of Debbie Harry taken by Mick Rock or Jill Furmanovsky around 1978. I might also be reminded of the fact that Dexy’s Midnight Runners released the single Geno on this very day back in 1980. Well, that’s digital algorithms for you. YouTube, meanwhile, invites me to watch re-touched and re-colourised videos of longforgotten TV performances, and in a couple of clicks, I can catch up on rare TV studio performances by Badfinger or Big Star (I always like to see what guitars they’re playing) or watch David Bowie in a black boilersuit and exquisitely held cigarette performing Boys Keep Singing on The Kenny Everett TV Show. Otherwise, there’s a guy with a nice-looking Fender Jaguar to show me how to play the riff from Spellbound by Siouxsie and The Banshees. It’s not exactly the zeitgeist, is it?
Last Christmas, I got through the eight-hour Beatles-a-thon Get Back on Disney Plus and enjoyed every single second of watching Paul McCartney attempt to re-energise the frankly ailing Fab Four at Apple HQ; wives, girlfriends and gurus in tow and dressed in all their groovy Kings Road finery. The recent three-part docu series on French rock and roll legend Jonny Hallyday was compulsive viewing too and this rock wild man’s life story went down like a carafe of Pernod in one late-night sitting. I’m currently in the middle of Gimme Danger, a warts-and-all telling of the rise and fall of Iggy Pop and The Stooges. Tell me that’s going to be just another boring rock doc! I’ve also been inviting as many friends as possible to one of my own band’s gigs at a tiny West London venue. My band? Yes, we’re a guitar synth pop outfit that has being going on/off since 1987. I am certain however that most of these invitees won’t attend. They have better things to do with their lives: gardening, shopping, watching football, helping their kids with their GSCE’s or maybe they’re just clocking up a few extra miles on their Peloton. Soon, like sad slacker fantasist Dewey Finn from the film School of Rock, I’ll be lugging my Gibson SG guitar and 60-Watt combo amplifier along to the airless, subterranean venue to unravel its many leads and pedal effects – I’d much rather be sitting on the garden terrace with a chilled glass of Viognier. I consider sometimes, the sort of things I could have achieved in my life so far and can’t help noticing that many of my peers have had long and successful careers in management. Others hold senior positions in publishing and academia or can boast leading consumer brands as clients. I meanwhile am sending my latest song, which I’m convinced will be an international hit, to a twentysomething influencer in Argentina in the hope of getting it onto a big-hitting Spotify playlist. If I’m lucky I will be paid £5 for this in around two years from now. Such is life for the middle-aged music fan and part-time musician, and to be honest, I wish I had moved on earnestly to other things by now; opera, golf, bird watching or perhaps even steam train fancying, just like that old rock lothario Rod Stewart. Anything to stop my miss-spent past from repeating itself like a stuck groove on an old 12-inch single. The puzzling thing about all this is the seemingly everlasting appeal of this damned music. Why doesn’t it just go away? When rock and roll first exploded into the consciousness back in the 1950’s it was an exclusively teenage obsession; a silly, visceral fad that the adults or the ‘squares’ believed would quickly go the way of HulaHoops or the conical bra. Now it’s been fully absorbed into the mainstream and is less a show of rebellion and youthfulness, more a of a lazy cultural comfort blanket for a generation of late baby boomers and early Generation X’ers born roughly between 1960 and 1985. Just don’t confuse us with the eponymous London punk band fronted by Billy Idol!
Pop music may have been replaced by online gaming and social media in the affections of the young, but you wouldn’t know if you were to find yourself in a 200,000-capacity field in Somerset one late June afternoon. Placed roughly between The Chelsea Flower Show and Wimbledon during the English summer season, Glastonbury began in 1970 for a few hippies who paid £1 to pitch up in a meadow to watch Tyrannosaurus Rex and Steamhammer. Today it’s an almost compulsory rites of passage for the young and their parents with multi-platinum artists such as Adele, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift now getting in on the act. And if you think rock audiences are getting younger, have you seen the number of grey-haired or bald-headed punters who congregate regularly at our favourite music temples The Roundhouse, Brixton Academy and the 100 Club? Terrible rock cliches – and not just in terms of boring guitar solos – are also a bit of a problem nowadays. Think of the tired, absurd theatricals of Kiss and Marilyn Manson or Guns N’ Roses in their heyday with all that ridiculous cartoon posturing. When I was an impressionable ten-year-old watching Top of The Pops in the 1970s, the gleaming Stratocasters, towering Marshall stacks and androgynous long hair were all part of the appeal but over time the look and sound of rock has become no more than a well-worn trope for the purposes of advertising, fashion and marketing. As Johnny Rotten famously said at the end of the Sex Pistols’s disastrous 1978 tour of the US: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Having myself been born in the early 1960s – shortly after the release of the Beatles first LP as it happens – my younger self didn’t fully appreciate the seismic cultural changes of decade in which I arrived. This has led me and people of my age or background to assume there has always been some missed cultural moment which had to be recompensed somehow, whether that was Swinging London, Woodstock or the Sex Pistols concert at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, Manchester. And wasn’t everybody at that seminal 1976 gig? Without it there would be no Buzzcocks, Joy Division, Factory Records, The Smiths, ‘Madchester’ or even what we know today as ‘indie music’, right? To the die-hard fan (and I admit I’m not one of those), such times, places or events take on an almost religious ‘where were you when…’ quality to them. So instead of the feeding of the five thousand, we have a puppyish Elvis Presley improvising That’s Alright Mama in the Sun Records Memphis studio or Nirvana let loose on The Word forty years later. And, as if to rival Moses’s parting of the red sea, might I suggest Radiohead’s 1997 set at the Main Stage, Glastonbury or Bowie in full clown make-up putting his arm camply around guitarist Mick Ronson during that game-changing Top of The Pops rendition of Starman? Well, Bowie certainly knew a thing or two about the power of the image. So, let’s assume that we’ve all had some neo-religious conversion to pop music in our recent or distant lives. So what? Isn’t it about time we broke out of the spell and rid ourselves finally of this obsession? Having myself suffered decades of being trapped in its merciless clutches, I think it’s going to be worth a try.
The encouraging news is that after a pretty good run of 60 years or more, rock and pop music is now witnessing its very own endgame. The slow death of live music, declining income streams for artists, the decline of the band unit and the increasing attraction of other forms of art and entertainment among younger audiences are just a few reasons why it simply cannot last much longer. I see a bright future where I can sell the guitar collection, ditch my half-written pop masterpieces and finally get on with living the rest of my life. This book therefore is a personal, cathartic and sometimes humorous examination of the continuing hold that popular music has had on myself and on people of my generation. This is not simply a nostalgic foray into my 1970’s childhood. I want to fully explore and understand, by revisiting pivotal moments in my life, why pop music, and all the ephemeral but highly compelling stuff that goes along with it, still has me gripped all these years later. Perhaps also it will go some way to answer the question why I still get goosebumps whenever I hear the opening riff to Ride A White Swan.
1 How Did We Get Here? It’s the evening of Saturday 6th April, 1974. Mum and dad have gone out for the evening leaving me alone with the babysitter, a retired post mistress from down the road called Mrs Reeves. She wears Dame Edna-style glasses and is partial to box of a Terry’s All Gold chocolates and, in this case, a sophisticated soirée hosted by tonight’s MC, Katie Boyle. I’ve had my bath and changed into my pyjamas and a dressing gown and am being allowed to stay up for the 19th edition of Eurovision Song Contest, the competition launched in 1956 to promote peace and harmony through music and culture among the post war nations of Europe. Boyle, the Camay soap ambassador the undisputed queen of received pronunciation (née Caterina Irene Elena Maria Boyle she was the daughter of an Italian nobleman) is tonight’s compere in front of a live studio audience at Brighton’s Dome. Row upon row of smart middled-aged VIP’s sit in the stalls wating for the show to begin. Dressed in their dinner jackets and evening gowns they look like an audience at Glyndebourne, as opposed to some punters looking for a solid helping of light entertainment. Meanwhile, millions like us, based in the 17 competing European nations, sit excitedly at home. But before we get to see what the acts are like there is a short film about the host town. Brighton turns out to be a last-minute replacement for little old Luxembourg who turned down the opportunity to host for financial reasons; this was 1974 after all, a year in which the world suffered an almighty recession in the wake of the global oil crisis which drove the price of crude oil up by 300%. In Britain, the outgoing prime minister Edward Heath had brought in the emergency three day working week to counter the striking unions and to conserve our stock of coal, which in those days was the fuel behind the nation’s electric power stations. Operating restrictions were even imposed on our three television channels which meant that, until only recently, broadcasts had to cease by 10.30pm each night. Remember also that in British homes during this dark and uncertain period for the population, naked candle lights were used in place of electric ones and cohabitees were even encouraged to share the bath water. Judging by the footage very early on in the show, it is abundantly clear that this south coast resort, first made fashionable by George IV when he was Prince Regent in the early 1800’s, was hardly immune to the economic gloom visible elsewhere. There are shots of the famous Laines and a fancy-looking Regency building or two, but the beach is windswept and un-inviting, and the town’s famous pier looks almost derelict, a draw only for a few small boys and their fishing rods. Outside the event venue there is some very basic conference style signage and a line of drab Austin and Morris saloon cars parked up outside. Whatever glamourous entertainment that is about to start inside this 18th century Mughal style palace, has certainly been well-hidden from view, like exotic jazz and cabaret singers sheltering in a Montparnasse club in Nazi occupied Paris. The United Kingdom’s entry this year will be sung by the 26-year-old Olivia Newton-John, then a good five years away from being cast as high school sweetheart Sandy in Grease. Hers will be the second performance of the night and of course we’re gunning for her, even though she is an Australian by birth. As a mere 10-year-old, however, I’m looking forward more to the appearance of children’s TV stars The Wombles during the bit when
the international judges count up all the votes and the behind-the-scenes sound technicians start getting a little tetchy. The Wombles are a five-piece band of environmentally aware mammals who in the book by Elisabeth Beresford reside on Wimbledon Common, south-west London. A stop-motion animated version appeared on our television sets shortly after and Mike Batt, the ambitious young composer of its opening theme The Wombling Song, waived his £200 fee for the rights to the programme’s characters. A smart move as it turned out. Donning a Womble suit himself, Batt and his furry, eco-conscious band mates, who included among their number the rock guitarists Chris Spedding and Robin Le Mesurier (son of Dad’s Army actor John and Hattie Jacques from the Carry On films), amassed at least eight Top 40 singles in the UK. Wombling Summer Party, whose melody bore an uncanny resemblance to California Girls by The Beach Boys, even reached number 55 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart. It is the eighth act, however, which ends up stealing the headlines that night. “We’re looking at Sweden, a country full of mountains, lakes and forests…and of course it’s full of blonde Vikings,” begins the David Vine voiceover in the pre-recorded segment designed to introduce us to the exotic smorgasbord hopeful artists. “These are the ABBA group,” he continues “…Björn, Frida (sic), Anna (sic) just beside her with the long blonde hair and …Benny.” Then suddenly, as the introductory montage cuts to the live broadcast in Brighton, we see conductor Sven-Olof Walldoff enter the orchestra pit to rousing cheers. “Oh, and it’s Napoleon!” exclaims Vine, otherwise a Ski Sunday and Superstars presenter, remarking on the startling choice of costume. Now the cameras have panned to the stage, where the as-yet-still-unknown band of Vikings are ready to go. Bearded Benny at the grand piano and Björn on the far side wearing silver boots and hunched Troll-like over a matching custom electric guitar shaped like a star. The opening riff to song kick into life then the two girls race to front of the stage in a riot of velvet, sequins and glitter to begin their alternative history lesson and possibly change the course of late-20th century popular music: “My, my – boom! – at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender…” From my position on the burgundy carpet next to Mrs Reeves’s armchair, my immediate impression was that for a pop group they all looked a little on the mature side and indeed not far off the age of my own parents, who were in fact in their early forties then. The two women of course seemed staggeringly beautiful, utterly unattainable and had amazing hair and great teeth, which we now know was a genuine feat for the 1970’s. With its catchy saxophone-driven rock and roll beat, the music was both assured and original and quickly had this ten-year-old child and his retired postmistress companion rooting for the Swedes. And from this moment on, the following procession of ballads, neo-folk offerings and attempts to catch the latest prog rock wave from Luxembourg, Monaco, Belgium and The Netherlands seemed inconsequential. Of course, Sweden ran way with La Grand Prix de
la Chanson with a whopping 24 points and an excitable but blue-bloodedly cool Katie Boyle calling the Swedes back on stage for a final rendition of the song. ABBA’s closing performance is an altogether different beast to their more restrained version earlier on in the show. Firstly, Frida nearly garrots herself with a stray microphone lead as she attempts to climb through the tiny hatch that opens to the modest concert stage. There are barely restrained tears of joy on Agnetha’s face as she swings her velvety blue hips to this preposterous but irresistible pop ditty and we see the first of a few soon-to-be trademark faceoffs between the girls. And, as the polite English applause rings out again, the newly crowned blonde bombshell Agnetha plants an affectionate kiss on husband Björn’s cheek. What a night! The very next day, I had both drawn and coloured in a poster sized fan homage to the group detailing both their stunning platform boots and Benny’s iconic star guitar. Previously I had only dedicated this much detail to a piece of foolscap for a panoramic depiction of Custer’s Last Stand and a mid-air dogfight between a group of Spitfires and German Messerschmitt fighter planes. ABBA were up and running and nothing was going to stop them. Myself, on the other hand, would shortly be returning for the start of the summer term to my prep school in Sussex which occupied an imposing neo-Elizabethan house just 20 miles inland from Brighton along the newly built M23. From my already hard-won experience as an eight-year-old boarder, this was an unlikely position indeed from where to capture the zeitgeist of mid-1970s popular culture. Apart from the fact that there was no access whatsoever to a phone, a television, records and definitely no pop weeklies or annuals lying around the communal areas (Look and Learn was the only approved publication), we were all sent to bed by 8pm with, if we were lucky, Sparky’s Magic Piano or Ravel’s Bolero playing softly on the intercom until lights out. What was I missing out on by being subjugated to this Colditz-style regime? At the same time my friends back home would no doubt be reciting the latest comedy sketches by Monty Python or The Goodies, sipping home-made Cola from their mum’s SodaStream drinks maker or packing away their Scalextric sets. Major world events such as Bloody Sunday, the end of the Vietnam War or the release of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane simply didn’t have a chance against hardy perennials such as sports day, the Christmas carol concert and my regular Saturday afternoon Airfix model workshops supervised by, it must be applauded, a genuine World War Two Wing Commander complete with handlebar moustache. In essence, the everyday lives of the 130 or more boys boarding here were no different to those experiencing it fifty years earlier or possibly even fifty years before that. The sickly smell of floor wax and ghostly fading black and white school photos lining the hallway that led to the wood-panelled dining room were chilling proof of that. John Lennon famously sang ‘imagine no possessions’ in his 1971 hit Imagine. This was a relatively easy notion for me to relate to; not because I didn’t have any worldly goods, but because any records, toys, magazines, gadgets or item of personal clothing we might have brought in was unceremoniously confiscated from us, often never to be seen again.
Whatever individuality we must have brought to this place when arriving as mere eightyear-olds, was systematically removed and although this was somewhat cruel and demeaning in hindsight, the tactic worked as a sort of safeguard against the incursions of modern popular culture, much as Soviet leaders managed to prohibit bubble gum, Levi’s blue jeans and Western beat records during the Cold War years. Rare incursions into our rarified, pared down world of shared muddy baths, Latin syntax and the occasional beating from the headmaster included an impromptu visit from a group of skinheads from nearby Crawley, back then one of the designated new towns designed to accommodate the London overspill of largely working-class families who required better housing in the aftermath of World War Two. I remember this group of boys in their Crombies and long sheepskin coats gathered in the mist at the edge of one of our junior rugby pitches and asking if any of us wanted any ‘bovver’. Word quickly went around for the biggest and quite possibly the toughest boy in the school so he could tell them where to go. I think by the time the poor fellow got there, the gang already slinked off. In fact, it took a major flu epidemic during the winter and spring of 1975, to release, albeit temporarily, the relentless stranglehold of this institutional life. It was one of those odd situations where, by day, the dormitories were more populated than the classrooms, and in order to isolate the truly sick boys from the ones who were on their way to recovery, we were put in temporary dorms until the school nurse had given us the allclear. The absence of the usual order and the staff members to enforce it (many were presumably stricken by the same virus) allowed time to stand still briefly. In this quiet unregulated utopia akin to a safer and less fractious version of Lord of The Flies, new relationships were forged and new ideas exchanged as the days dragged on inconsequentially. Someone had left a portable old Roberts radio in the shared room I was designated, from which blared out the latest chart hits on repeat; How Long by Ace, Sing Baby Sing by The Stylistics and the questionable talkie novelty record Whispering Grass sung by Don Estelle and Windsor Davies from of the popular comedy sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. A week-old copy of the Daily Mail that had been passed around included a report on London club land’s latest craze; the 1940’s, inspired by the popular re-release of the wartime swing classic In The Mood by Glenn Miller. We didn’t have an inkling of this at the time of course, but such a creative and idealistic lull in the entrainment world no doubt helped hasten in the arrival of punk and the spiky declaration of ‘year zero’ just a couple of years later. As temperatures were checked and we sipped condensed orange squash and attempted to finish plates of reconstituted pork slices and instant mashed potato to the sound of country and western and Philadelphia soul, at least the brash and vulgar outside world of 1975 with its long hair and horrid Trade Unions was finding a way into this last post of the British Empire with its defiantly unapologetic house names Clive, Drake, Haig and Raleigh.
Reading options in the school were limited. I had previously been publicly humiliated by the headmaster for bringing in “rubbish” comics such as Asterix, Mad magazine and Commando, the long-running series of illustrated war stories famous for their plucky Tommies and legions of vanquished Germans. Luckily, he had been unable to detect my well-thumbed paperback Liquidate Paris by Sven Hassel which had been circulating among some of the older boys and for a while had been placed under a copy of Civis Romanus. A favourite among impressionable pre-teen boys in the 1970s, Hassel’s oeuvre ranked in literary terms alongside the dubious hack writing of Richard Allen’s Hell’s Angels and Skinhead books published by New English Library. Hassel was the pen name of real-life Danish Nazi collaborator Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen so there was a bleak authenticity to his stories set in the most hard-fought of battle zones World War Two, among other works of his being Legion of The Damned, Monte Cassino and SS-General. Far more appropriate for boys my age, the headmaster would point out rather smugly, were The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien or the rollicking adventure stories by Alistair Maclean or CS Forester, author of the Hornblower series. It was some surprise therefore to find, in amongst a pile of ancient Famous Five and Billy Bunter hardbacks a book that I can honestly say, at the grand old age of eleven, was the first I had ever truly devoured from cover to cover. ‘Jim Maclaine is a product of the fifties, when boys were spotty and girls were out of reach and nobody could play rock music like the Americans…’ ran the blurb on the inside cover of That’ll Be The Day by Ray Connolly. I was hooked immediately by this coming-ofage tale of a troubled and rebellious grammar schoolboy (played by pop star David Essex in the 1973 movie) who eschews the academic life for all the fun of the fairground and other deadbeat jobs in a gritty post-war seaside town. Something about the book’s themes of escape, identity and early sexual awakenings must have chimed loudly inside my brain. And after four long years stuck in this petty Victorian-style fiefdom ruled by reactionary despots and opportunistic sadists (and no doubt a few paedophiles to boot), I began to wish I could be more like cruel, impulsive Jim. Okay, so he was hardly what you’d call an adequate role model for a future young gentleman like me and his unsporting behaviour towards the ladies left a lot to be desired, but through the tight, Hemingway-esque prose from Ray Connolly, himself a star Evening Standard columnist turned screenwriter, this glimpse into the seedy, degenerate world of fairgrounds and holiday camps set to a soundtrack of imported American rock ‘n’ roll was a real eye-opener. The book ends with Jim leaving his young family, like his errant father had done before, and buying a second-hand guitar, which sets up That’ll Be The Day’s film sequel Stardust, very nicely indeed. ‘Remember the 60’s?’, ran the promo poster’s tagline on its much-heralded release in 1974. Well, not exactly, but please do fill me in were my immediate thoughts.
2 Welcome to the Dive Much like anyone born in the 1960’s but whose formative childhood and teenage years happened to have occurred during the 1970’s, I was surrounded by vinyl records from practically the day I could crawl. My parents had their LP’s – mainly easy listening, classical and the odd stage musical such as Godspell or West Side Story – and for our own enjoyment there was an anarchic pile of coverless and often scratched and abused 45 rpm singles – black, blue and red ones, like Fruit Pastilles – that we listened to on the family record player. I would stack several of them at a time on the machine’s spindle, crank the lever to automatic mode and watch as each disc plonked down like a dinghy from a Sea King rescue helicopter after the previous one had ended. A typical handful of singles in our home around 1973/4 would include records bought in the 1960’s by my parents plus a few recent chart smashes: Matthew and Son by Cat Stevens, Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of The Road, David Bowie’s The Laughing Gnome, This Guy’s In Love With You sung by Herb Albert, Don Maclean’s American Pie and more than likely an old Beatles single or two, my favourites being Day Tripper and This Boy, the B-side to I Want To Hold Your Hand. We played these discs to death, literally. Far from being the hallowed collectable artefacts they would be today, these were mere disposable playthings, rather like my dis-embodied Action Men, one-legged Subbuteo players or scale model tin Dinky and Hot Wheels cars that were consigned to a scrap yard in an old biscuit tin below the stairs. Most of these records had long since lost their original picture covers, or if they hadn’t, I had managed to deface beyond repair with anarchic doodles using a thick crayon or some felt tip pens. A shame, really, as some of these items are fetching good prices at auction today, notably the Beatles double A-sided single Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields and the Magical Mystery Tour EP complete with illustrated 24-page booklet. Vinyl records had of course been around a long time before I got my mitts on them, the gramophone player and disc records having been invented by Emile Berliner back in 1889*. The iconic 7-inch discs we know of today are made from a chemical process involving polyvinyl chloride or PVC, used also on a number of consumer and industrial products ranging from kitchen flooring, road signs and the kind of risqué fashion items favoured by punks or sex fetishists**.
*Thomas Edison introduced his cylinder driven Phonograph a decade earlier. Music was just one of its suggested uses, others being dictating without the aid of a stenographer, books that spoke to blind people, an aid to elocution and recording the last words of dying persons. **Mail order ads for PVC ‘straights’ were a staple in the back pages of the NME, Sounds and other music weeklies the 1970’s and 1980’s. Phaze of Newcastle offered instant punk fashion at basement prices.
If you owned a bog-standard record player like my parents did, then the settings just below the needle would accommodate all the exiting formats on offer, or indeed those that had dominated the preceding years, such as 78rpm discs. These were made mostly from shellac, a shiny material derived from resin secreted by the female lac bug in southeast Asia. I requisitioned at least two of these 10-inch curios from my parents’ collection, a 1951 copy of Leonard Bernstein’s An American In Paris theme and a near mint copy of Blue Suede Shoes by Elvis Presley on the HMV label. Tragically, the latter item simply shattered into several pieces one day. Some homes no doubt clung onto their pre-war gramophone players and there may even have been something of a collectors’ scene in the wake of Swinging London’s brief revival of the pre-war jazz era, typified by the wide-lapelled Bonnie and Clyde*-inspired gangster suits in Carnaby Street, Barbara Hulanicki’s flapper-style Biba dresses and the revival of the Art Deco Rainbow Room on Kensington Hight Street, not forgetting the winsome 1966 hit Winchester Cathedral by the New Vaudeville Band, which my parents must have brought into the house when I was a toddler. My own attitude to these throwbacks to a bygone age had already been formed having visited a family friend, a kind old man who, as a way presumably of entertaining my much younger self, asked me and my older sister to dance on his old 78’s. “You have to really jump up and down on them!” I can remember him saying rather wickedly. We did, until there was nothing but a mountain of cracked shellac pieces lying on his front room carpet. But even late-ish adopters like my parents had wised up to the ephemerally fun possibilities of the 45rpm, a format first pioneered by RCA Victor and Colombia in the socalled “war of the speeds” back in the late 1940’s. The catchy, disposable and slightly more rebellious sounds of the 1950’s onwards was the perfect fit for single’s growing teenage audience who by the early 1960’s were buying these items in their millions. Number one hits such as She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand had both sold almost 2 million copies each, an incredible feat considering that in the early 1960’s many households still lacked basic consumer goods such as washing machines, refrigerators or a Dansette four-speed record player, which would have cost 13 guineas back in 1962 (around £275 today). The more cerebral 33 rpm full-length albums, which required you listen attentively all the way through as if at a live performance were starting to become big statements for artists who followed the example of the Beatles, who in 1967 released the Peter Blake designed gatefold concept Sergeant Pepper to worldwide critical acclaim. Carole King, Elton John, Pink Floyd and Simon and Garfunkel were just some of the artists who had made what would later be referred to as ‘classic albums’ by this stage of the 1970s.
*The 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway set during the Great Depression. A Hollywood production shot in the influential French New Wave style, it features ‘one of one of the bloodiest death scenes in cinematic history’.
Children like me didn’t aspire whatsoever to the somewhat earnest long player. These after all were objects in the armoury of weary, uninspired schoolteachers who would use recordings of Prokofiev’s Peter and The Wolf or Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of The Animals in attempt to pacify their restless charges as the afternoon school bell approached. At home, the only album I possessed was a battered copy of Danny Kaye singing Hans Christian Andersen tales with its reverse side Tubby The Tuba composed by George Kleinsinger. For those to whom this portly member of the brass band means nothing, Tubby the Tuba is a kind of revenge tale featuring “fat, little tuba” Tubby, a musically stunted wind instrument cruelly derided by the orchestra including a snotty French horn for his uninspired ‘oom-pah’s’. Cast out of the band he is fortunate enough to meet a kindly frog who cheers Tubby up with a catchy melody which the pair then take to the orchestra’s conductor Signore Pizzicato. The maestro is so impressed that he builds an entire symphony around Tubby’s new tune and artistic redemption is complete. Even the piccolo, the xylophone and the dastardly trombones are won over! Kleinsinger, as I discovered many years later as I researched a story about the notorious Chelsea Hotel, New York where Sid killed Nancy and the city’s bohemian set continued to behave in a suitably bohemian manner*, lived in a top floor apartment in the 12-storey building during the last few years of his life. An eccentric but sociable man, he created a sort of mad scientist’s idea of a jungle for himself on West 23rd Street. And as he composed his zany childlike scores at the grand piano, wild parakeets flew overhead in his urban recreation of the Amazon rain forest complete with fish tanks, a waterfall feature, real-life monkeys, pythons and an ocelot. “Oh my god,” explained the young actor who had recently taken over the lease of the apartment, “when we got here the place was a tip, full of animal crap and bat droppings. The guy was a nut!” For us listeners in the early 1970’s, relatively new on the scene in terms of music formats was the audio cassette tape. This idea was pioneered by Dutch electronics manufacturer Philips in 1962, but as demonstrated by my older teenage sister’s copy of Tubular Bells** played repeatedly on her new Sony Solid State portable cassette player/recorder, cassettes were only just coming into popular use. My dad, meanwhile, continued to persevere with an old valve driven reel-to-reel on which we listened to old family recordings or made new ones of our own when it wasn’t broken. The sleek new Japanese cassette-loaded versions coming onto the market made these dinosaurs look and sound ridiculous.
*The hotel’s guest list down the years reads like a Who’s Who of New York’s resident artistic geniuses: Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Jasper Johns, Julian Schnabel and Bob Dylan to name but a few. **The mostly instrumental album Tubular Bells was written and performed almost entirely by a 19-year-old self-taught musician from Berkshire called Mike Oldfield. It has sold over 15 million copies worldwide.
The respected Canadian cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media (1964) must have had such technology in mind when he coined his legendary mantra ‘the medium is the message’, one that remains etched on the minds of Media Studies undergraduates even today. He conceived and then ran amok on US television chat shows with the idea that the nature of the medium (the channel through which the message is transmitted – television set, tape recorder etc) was more significant than the meaning or content of the message (the cartoon show, drama series or rock music consumed on it). His own pithy soundbites about the electronic age in which he lived through – ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media or the ‘the global village’ – are often misinterpreted today. Put simply, McLuhan’s ‘medium is the message’ marks the moment when audiences – whether in front of a television set, near a radio set or recording their favourite new tracks on their new Sony cassette player – begin to interact with the medium thereby creating their own meaning through the medium. Are you still with me? This behaviour contrasts with the habits of previous audiences. At cinemas for instance, the audience were mere receptors for the latest Hollywood epic, western or musical. But during an episode of Love Island or Gogglebox we, the viewer, might send Whatsapp messages and video clips to our friends commenting on the characters on screen which becomes a form of content itself. McLuhan said in the 1960’s that while the age of the printing press had made everybody a reader, the invention of the Xerox copier had made everybody a publisher. Such an effect is apparent also through later technologies way beyond his lifetime – the internet, social media, file sharing platforms, YouTube, Spotify etc. Armed with a portable cassette player in the early 1970’s I knew nothing of McLuhan’s theories but quicky proved the medium was indeed the message by recording my own personal chart run downs in phoney American DJ-ese (using mostly old Beatles records) or placing the recorder’s in-built microphone as close to the television set as possible whenever Top of The Pops was broadcast. Only a handful of songs from the show would make it onto my cassette version and the sound of the studio presenters such as Dave Lee Travis or Noel Edmonds had to be clumsily edited out, often mid-sentence. But at least it was my version. Another skill to this decidedly analogue version of a Spotify playlist was making sure an adult or sibling didn’t suddenly burst into the living room while you were doing it. Cries of ‘Have you seen my Spirograph pens?’ or ‘Can we turn over to ITV?’ would spell disaster for any carefully curated edit. Yet despite the allure of this new cassette technology – remember the ground-breaking Sony Walkman was still a good five years away from being invented – the 45rpm single remained a prized item in this rather late-to-adopt house at least. I recall that around 1973 my father got into the habit of taking me and my teenage sister to the local record shop on Saturday afternoons where, pasted onto the retailer’s window, was a list of the week’s Top 40 selling singles. If we were lucky, we’d be able to choose one and take it home with us. Often the artists and song titles listed made as much sense to me as Sanskrit, a Chinese menu or a list of starters at Haydock Park racecourse.
It was agony making that choice. I simply didn’t have the knowledge or experience to fall back on. On the first occasion I eschewed offerings by David Essex, Bryan Ferry and The Simon Park Orchestra, which I had already heard on the Motorola radio in dad’s new Triumph 2000, for the Ringo Starr single Photograph. This decision was made largely on the basis that, being a Beatle, Ringo’s song would be reasonably good. It wasn’t. The next time around, however, my selection turned out to be a real belter, an eventual number one no less. When I got this item home, I immediately sampled the heady joy of removing its sleeve to reveal its shiny black surface. This is mine, all mine, I said to myself. I was dazzled by the vinyl which looked as black and as pure as an oil slick then, holding it up, stared at the tall clipper boat framed by a calm blue sky on the pasted label. Three bold capital letters in dark blue around the mast informed me this was a RAK Records production. RAK was the recently formed record label owned by producer Mickie Most aided by the song writing team of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. As ‘Chinnichap’ they went on to pen a sequence of number one hits for the groups Mud, The Sweet, Racey and Hot Chocolate. Chapman outlasted the glam years and is credited also with production duties on Blondie’s late 1970’s new wave disco anthem Heart of Glass. As the needle hit the record’s groove, a coarse, shouty female voice implored: “Hey, y’all wanna go down to Devil Gate Drive?” “Yeah!” came the immediate reply from what sounded like a gathering of the sort of teenagers my mother would have definitely disapproved of. Pounding reverberating glam rock drums then took over, which sent my pulse rate soaring, my head spinning wildly and I did start to wonder where this was taking me exactly. “Welcome to the dive”, came another voice, this time male with the tone and timbre of a fairground worker calling out the last ride at the dodgem cars. What was a dive, I wondered, and was this somewhere I really wanted to be? Too late. The shriller, more excitable female voice was now counting the song in: “er one, er two, er one two three…” The singer is Suzi Quatro a 24-year-old bassist from Detroit, USA who had been brought over to England by hotshot producer Mickie Most, who had previously recorded hits for The Animals and Herman’s Hermits. On a business trip to the Motown offices in Detroit, the impresario spotted her performing with her all-girl band Cradle at a local gig and offered her a deal on the spot.
Most, who on the popular TV talent show New Faces earned himself a reputation as a harsh critic of aspiring new acts*, was quick to transform Suzi’s image from happy-golucky hippie chick to ballin’ rock queen, dressed in zip-up leather jumpsuit and accessorised by various chains and chokers as she prowled the stage wielding an enormous white Fender Precision bass. At least it looked enormous in the photo from my sister’s Jackie magazine; Quatro is only 5 foot 2 inches tall. Anyhow, everything I had heard so far was manna from heaven to my pre-pubescent self and as all 3.57 minutes of this brand new 45rpm record kept playing, I found myself diving deeper into Suzi’s extraordinary universe. The first verse, for instance, was a resounding call to arms for us pre-teens who were already beginning to exercise our hard-wired sense of nostalgia and realisation of innocence lost: “Well at the age of five they can do their jive….and at the age of six they’re gonna get their kicks….” Suzi, who I’ve quickly decided is now my perfect pin up poster girl, reveals later in verse two she was “the jukebox queen” when only “sweet sixteen” accompanied by a very crude male wolf whistle; the kind heard on building sites or in ITV’s On The Buses starring Reg Varney. In Suzi’s raucous rock and roll boogie-woogie party I detected a distinctly sexually charged atmosphere, which to my eleven-year-old self was thrilling yet ever-soslightly embarrassing in the context of our nice family home. Put it this way, I wasn’t going to bop up and down to this in front of my granny. Other music sung by attractive mini-skirted female artists that could be found in the family record collection had no such ability to arouse, yet despite all the carefully stagemanaged vampish-ness, Suzi was doing her bit for female liberation also. Devil Gate Drive, it transpires, is a biographical account of young Quatro’s struggle against all the odds to become a star in the chauvinistic, male dominated rock music scene of mid-West America. The Quatros were a solid working-class family descended from Italian and Hungarian immigrants. Music ran in the blood; dad Art worked at General Motors and performed in his own jazz trio, while her older sister Patti invited Suzi to join her all-female garage rock band The Pleasure Seekers who resorted to wearing short mini skits and alluring 1960s wigs in order to attract booking agents and record company executives. “She goes down to the Drive, she’s the star of the show, let her move on up, let her come, let go, she can jive….” By now Suzi was busy getting her all-male band of Brit-born session rockers together for the crazy, climactic finale. She is the real boss now, albeit a slightly kinky-looking one in her thigh length boots and leathers: “Come on boys, let’s do it one more time for Suzi…” By the time the record ended, I had to sit back exhausted from this rush of adrenaline mixed a sudden onset of testosterone. I felt sweaty and slightly used but quickly decided to return to needle to the start. Fancy doing it all again Suzi?
*TV talent competition New Faces first aired in May 1973. Also on the panel of judges was Crossroads and Neighbours theme composer Tony Hatch, known as ‘the hatchet’ for his unsparing views on some of the acts. A precursor to The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent, the programme made stars of Lenny Henry, Marti Caine and Joe Pasquale.