Welcome to an experimental 'fanzine format' blog post!
Inspired by some comments on the previous post, and also influenced by my much younger fanzine creating self, I took to paper, pen, Pritt Stick and scissors to make this one. I can honestly say, I've really enjoyed working like this, away from the computer screen. I can also honestly say, it took bloody ages. Still, it was fun and the only other downside is that there's no chance to edit it now, but I'm a long-time fan of the DIY ethos and the charm of imperfection. As for the silly amount of time it took, well, sometimes don't you just wish that everything did anyway, and then we could all slow down a bit?
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’tall 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 theJam. 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 3rd 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!
We both woke up this morning with hunger pangs. Don't know why,
we'd eaten well last night, but maybe that was the reason and our
stomachs were primed for more.
“I'm so hungry...” said Mr SDS.
“So hungry so angry...” I replied, without even thinking what
I was saying, “so hungry, so angry, so hungry, so angry” and it
started to take on a tune,“oh god - who did that?”
(Weird, last time I heard those lyrics must've been over 30 years
ago.)
“I can't remember... was it someone like Blurt...? “
“It begins with M... I'm sure it begins with M for some reason”
I suggested, “a word like Material?”
“I think it's two words”
“Oh I can't remember. Let's Google it...”
And we had to find out before we could even eat breakfast (we
weren't really so angry).
Medium Medium (of course!?): Hungry, So Angry (1981)
I can't stand Jeremy Clarkson but this seems kinda apt.
It's June already, I can't believe my 18th birthday is only a month away!
I've spent some time this week rearranging my bedroom and it
feels more like a little pad, I pretend it's my flat. Now I just have my mattress on the floor and I saved up and bought a stereo (turntable, tuner and cassette deck). New albums I've been playing
to death lately are the Au Pairs 'Playing With A Different Sex',
Psychedelic Furs 'Talk Talk Talk', Kraftwerk 'Computer World' and
Positive Noise 'Heart Of Darkness'. I've put this great Nosferatu
film poster above the bed. Scared the life out of me when it fell
down in the middle of the night and I awoke suddenly
to find a vampire on my head (although Klaus Kinski does look rather cute in a bald, pointy-eared, fang-toothed kind of way). So now it's stuck back with an entire
packet of Blutac.
He looks a bit rough in the mornings
College is ok - Jill came in to visit the other day, I miss her
from the Foundation Year but she's fine, she's gone very London now
and has been hanging out at Le Beat Route - I feel very provincial
now by comparison!
Been a strange year without Dad in the house but Mum is a lot
better after her breakdown. It was the worst she's had, we're used
to her depression when she stays in bed all day but we knew that
things had got bad when she started saying/doing really odd things
again as well. She obsessed about painting her bedroom orange and
wanted us to do it for her. Orange! Then she suddenly started
reading the bible - we have a really old one in the house inherited from Dad's side of the family but nobody ever looks at it. We're all so non-religious and this just wasn't like Mum
at all, the way she was talking about stuff too. It was a few months ago now but anyway A called Dr
Lewis, he came over and arranged an ambulance - they took her to
hospital that same afternoon. It was horrible seeing her wrapped in
a blanket and wheeled out to it, like she was physically ill even
though she wasn't. I actually think she was relieved, though. It was
as if she was feeling, “I don't have to try any more. I can
just give in to it” - like she'd reached rock bottom but at the
same time a turning point, a time to let the doctors step in I s'pose. A and
I both cried after she'd gone but we were relieved too, and then
we were fine on our own, in fact it was really nice having the house
to ourselves for several weeks. We worked out our menus (macaroni
cheese every Saturday) and we kept the place clean, it was like being
a true grown-up with a house of my own (but sharing with my big
sister). Hospital visits were
hard, I hated going. But anyway she got better, came back home and things have returned
to some kind of normality. I haven't seen Dad in ages, don't know what he's going to do about my 18th (maybe he'll
visit, that might be a bit strange).
Great news today! P has bought tickets to see Kraftwerk at
Hammersmith Odeon so K and I are going with him and L. It's on the day
after my birthday and I can't wait!
Now I'm just wondering what to wear.
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 CertainRatio..." 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:
I’m not a shoes and handbags kinda woman at all, in spite of having a bit of a fetish for nice boots (as posted earlier), but I was going through my old portfolio again and came across these pictures I’d drawn in 1981 which reminded me of just what kind of shoes and handbags I possessed at the time.So I’m just going to indulge that memory for a moment.
The shoes were unearthed in a charity shop (naturally) and were possibly ‘60s.Very uncomfortable of course (probably the wrong size to be honest but how we suffer for our art…) And the handbag I remember well for being fabulously tacky with its silky leopard-print panel and the rest in shiny black patent (clearly something of a penchant for shiny black patent has stayed with me since.)Note the cigarette box poking out – Silk Cut by the look of it – I didn’t smoke for long but it was one of those things that so many students in my year seemed to do.We even had a pet name for them:-‘oolies’ (not ‘oilies’ as in ‘oily rags: fags’ but definitely ‘oolies’ for some reason).The college stairwells and lobbies used to stink of our Silk Cut and Rothmans, and occasionally something stronger too. (In the studios themselves, the smell of fixative spray and cow gum was enough to give you more than any nicotine or herbal high.)
Fashion-wise this was a great era for an impoverished student (though I was fortunate to be undertaking further education at a time when grants were the norm. Yes, we were actually given money to study and we didn't have to pay it back...)I’d moved on from being predominantly punk by that time (and the patience it takes to put egg-white in your hair every day runs out eventually) - enjoying a wider range of music and clothes, the latter mostly being hunted out from charity shops which at that time were a fantastic and exceptionally cheap source of unusual old items, because so few people were interested in anything vaguely vintage or anti-fashion, it seemed.And they didn’t have that overpowering smell of industrial-strength washing powder then, either… I remember finding a black and pink dress with a scenes of Paris print on it (oh, how I’d love that now) and with hair up in a Pebbles-type top-knot, (minus the bone – although chicken bones did feature a short while later during the tribal/goth/Southern Death Cult years, to be expanded on another time perhaps), lacy tights, the snakeskin slingbacks, plenty of black eye make-up, a plastic ring from a Christmas cracker and an old man’s cardigan to top it all off, the overall look must have been not unlike one of Diane Arbus’ photographic subjects or an extra from 'Summer Holiday' who'd got dressed in the dark. Great escapism in a year remembered for (amongst many other unsavoury things) Peter Sutcliffe, the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, and Bucks Fizz winning the Eurovision Song Contest…
