We snarled and swaggered and posed our way through our chosen song and
won third prize in the Miming Competition. Maybe there were only three acts. I think we got away with it; we
must have been pretty... convincing?
Despite being a bit drunk.
And fourteen.
And, you know...
...female!
Thank god there was no YouTube in '78. No camera-phones. It must have been horrendous. But perhaps that's why we were so uninhibited too? It was a moment in time, spontaneous, never to be recorded or viewed again. A moment, that's all. Here today, gone tomorrow. Whatever happened to that?!
So, how it was is this: my friend and I had tipsily convinced ourselves we could enter a competition (part of a free live music event in a local park) just as it was happening, with no real forethought and certainly no preparation. Oh, the bravado! I would never do something like that in all the years since. I suppose it was like a forerunner to Karaoke (we're talking 40+ years ago, after all) although without the live vocals, just the posturing. I do remember standing there and not really being able to see the crowd, just looking out in a cider-induced daze, imagining myself as Johnny - a silly, inebriated, normally shy schoolgirl doing her best to mimic a fully-grown man. There are two key things about that which I was just never going to pull off: fully-grown and man (ifyou'll please excuse the double entendre). And glancing across at my dear mate, who was doing the same. I think we 'won' some record tokens.
When we came off the stage we were both immediately chatted up by a pair of young lads who perhaps saw our bluster as a sign that we were a couple of goers. I don't remember a lot about what happened next but suffice it to say I became vaguely acquainted with a skinhead boy who told me he was on holiday (?!) from Borstal. Class! Actually I seem to recall he was quite nice but I only got to see him in the dark so who can say?
Pretty vacant sums it all up....
Aren't you glad sometimes that, like me, you're all grown-up and sensible now?!
You know how in my last post I mentioned that many years ago
I was working with rufty tufty seadogs and middle-aged mariners, who’d
travelled the ocean waves on massive cargo carrying vessels? I have
them to thank for introducing me to many different things.
Different things like... being shown around the hot, noisy depths of a ship’s
engine room by a very polite (and not rufty tufty at all) boiler-suited Panamanian
engineer. Like how to make Cheese
Beano*. Like speaking to Eamonn Holmes doing role play for an emergency exercise (whoop-de-do!) (and that's the first and only time you'll hear me say 'Eamonn Holmes' and 'role play' in the same sentence.) And being teased about something called the Golden
Rivet. I was told that male sailors like to
show female visitors on board their ships the famed Golden Rivet – in naval
folklore the story goes that every vessel built contains one single
commemorative one - but, oh, you have to find it! (It wasn't in the hot, noisy depths of that aforementioned ship's engine room, as far as I could tell.) It was through this job that I took my first ever flight, and it was to New York! Plus I heard a lot of tales, about a lot of people and a lot of places. One of the places was Singapore, a major port
on the shipping trade route.
I’d never really thought about going to Singapore until then,
but in the mid-‘90s I’d hit a bit of a
strange time in my life, a kind of personal, emotional crossroads, and something I
decided I needed to do was to go away for a while. Nothing extreme, you know - just an eleven
and a half thousand mile trip on my own to the other side of the world. On the way to Australia and NZ I planned a short stay in Singapore and, thanks to contacts I’d made through my
job, there were people there who’d be happy
to show me around this city I’d heard so much about.
I’d never done any teenage travelling, hadn’t gone to uni, couldn't afford a 'gap' year, never had the urge to backpack, and had married someone with no
desire to venture further than Cornwall.
I was in my early 30s and now I had that itch. So I worked really hard, saved up like mad, and
asked my boss if I could carry some leave over into next year and then take it
all in one go – five weeks' holiday. Being a
globetrotting ex sea Captain (and now a great lifelong friend) he understood my
urge to see more of the world and agreed.
Anyway, this is the background to why every time I hear
a certain song, I think of Singapore. I
just can’t separate the memory. More
specifically, I think of a huge shopping mall (‘Ngee Ann City’), at that time only
a couple of years old, and of standing in this vast modern complex with a ‘Japanese
fair’ pitched up at one end (selling exotic-sounding dried fruits and meat
dishes) and a branch of ‘Boy’ of all things at another, being shown round by a
man called Ong and his wife Theresa, who later took me to a Pizza Hut where
we had something called ‘golden corn soup’ for starters.
In that quite
overwhelming shrine to the Western art of shopping in a humid city state in
South East Asia, 6800 miles away from home, there was an enormous video screen
and beaming out of it, with the volume up full, was the eyecatching film for The Cranberries' single Zombie.
I would include that official video here, but Blogger won't let me, so instead here are a couple of images as a reminder,
and also a really fantastic performance of the song from Saturday Night Live 1995:
I love it.
Well, it just seemed really bizarre to hear
this rousing, alternately fragile and powerful, angry, sad, beautifully brooding, spine-tingling
song at that moment, in that alien place. I was on the other side of the world,
in an unfamiliar city with a different culture, and there was a 20ft - 30ft? - high Dolores
O’Riordan sprayed in gold** – plus the
cross, Belfast, the soldiers - a song written about the Troubles, in memory of two young boys killed by the IRA. It seemed entirely at odds, and that’s
perhaps why that weird juxtaposition has stayed with me ever since. ‘Zombie’ will forever conjure up that unlikely place and time, an early evening
in a brightly lit Singaporean shopping centre - and it will always sound great and moving to me, too. It's one of those songs.
*one of the shipping world’s favourite dishes: beans on toast
with cheese on the top then grilled (sometimes also with ham or corned beef)
** I've just realised that, quite by coincidence, this post contains golden rivets, golden corn soup and a golden Dolores O'Riordan.
The Summer of 1978 seemed a strange, transitional time, musically as well as personally. I’d just turned 15 and punk was rapidly becoming my main thing, but there was so much still at odds with it. For instance, I was never going to hear it down the little fortnightly disco at
the cricket pavilion (unless you counted the Boomtown Rats), yet I still went that Summer, and I still danced. My friends and I went to see 'Grease'; we wore our Jam badges, we giggled at John Travolta. It shouldn’t have been our kind of film but
there’s no denying, we enjoyed it. The
boys we fancied rode Yamaha FS1Es and only the most daring of them had an ear
pierced. I’d ventured into what seemed
like the dark, adult realm of Sex Pistols and safety pins, but the residue of the pre-punk, blue
eye-shadow, strawberry lipgloss, Starsky
& Hutch fan still lingered in me and my world. I owned a plastic belt with the Coca-Cola
logo all over it and a razorblade necklace.
Anyway, there was this song.
I really liked it, but the thing was - it wasn’t punk, it was disco.
Disco seemed to be at the opposite end of the spectrum to punk then. Discos - proper big discos in town, I mean, not our cut price cricket pavilion ones - were full of cliques of mean girls and the sort of blokes who'd beat up anyone in straight trousers. But still I liked this song - it had a relentless bass-line and
a nagging chorus with a lyric that was so not
my thing; we’re gonnaboogie oogie oogie ‘til we just can’t boogie
no more.
Haha, do you remember it too?!
Well I’d forgotten all about it until I came across a UK
singles chart list from July 1978 the other day and then got mildly obsessed
with it and the memories it evoked: Boogie Oogie Oogie (the clue was in the lyric) by A Taste Of Honey. That week in the charts, You’re the One That I Want was No 1, and the Smurf
Song was No. 2. A few places down there was quite a diverse mix of artists, in fact it seems weird to think of it now as I wouldn't have remembered them being in the same timeframe: James Galway, Showaddywaddy, Lindisfarne, Boney M, Renaissance, ELO. Then further down – in the 30s - it got really quite cool and definitely up my
street with Buzzcocks, Sham 69, Xray Spex and Steel Pulse. With all that going on, Boogie Oogie Oogie was not a song I “should” have favoured at all.
But memories of it, like so many things, are inextricably
linked to the personal landscapes they inhabit, and I can’t separate this song
from a week in July 1978 spent in Sussex on a Geography field trip with my school year. Like
something from the (wonderful) Please Sir! film, it was that peculiar marriage of
school life and away-from-home freedom. It was a week of giggling fits (those truly painful ones, when your lungs feel as if they're going to burst through your ribcage), of bags of Chipsticks smuggled in satchels for midnight feasting, of sneaking out of places we should
have been and sneaking into places we shouldn’t, the covert smoking of Rothmans in
the woods, ghost stories and glow-worms, packed lunches and sunburn, and seeing teachers drinking beer.
Well, you know, I’m sure.
Boogie Oogie
Oogie always seemed to be playing on the little radio my schoolgirl friends and I took
into our accommodation block, a long wooden chalet with greasy windows. It was next door to one with German students,
both male and female, who reportedly wandered around in it with no clothes on and
weren’t embarrassed. Oh, those liberal
Europeans!
That month, I bought Buzzcocks Love You More. I’d never
have bought Boogie Oogie Oogie.
What I didn’t realise at the time, though, was just how cool the two
front women from A Taste Of Honey were.
The single peaked at No. 3 in the charts here, and while I remember
hearing it all the time I don’t recall ever seeing any footage of them -
I'm sure I’d have been so chuffed to see them
play their guitars. So, finding this performance below was quite a
treat, even if it is nearly 40 years too late.
That smiling confidence, the fast funky bass, the bendy guitar solos (there’s
a kind of Isley Brothers sound coming out of that Stratocaster). Even if you don’t like the song, I promise
you the way they play their instruments is a joy to watch.
The outer sleeve of the fourth (or was it fifth?) album I ever
bought was the thickest and stiffest I'd seen. The card was really
sort of heavy, and had a wider than normal spine. There was a
particular texture to it that made it feel different too; perhaps
because of its matt silver finish.
I bought it some time in 1978, can't recall exactly when, but I remember playing it a lot and for some reason I have a specific memory
of putting it on just before heading out to a party. I was kneeling
in front of our ancient portable electric heater, a cumbersome thing,
which fizzed and popped and clicked in a rather ominous way while
emitting an intense heat the smell of burnt dust, but it was the best
way to dry my hair. I simply knelt in front of it with my head bent
forward so that my hair hung upside down and then when I looked up
again, it had dried at right angles to my scalp. A light application
of egg-white then set it into spikes. I was doing all this while listening to the two-minute genius of LoveBattery and I Don't Mind, etc.
I loved every track on that silver-sleeved album, but Moving Away
From The Pulsebeat was probably the biggest surprise to me on first
hearing and seemed like a grand finale.
The party was at a village hall a few miles away, with 1960s
curtains at the windows and a little kitchenette area. Apart from a
few school-friends I didn't know many there - except for The
Postman. There was this cheery young postman who we used to see in
town all the time, he was sort of punky but not quite, I mean he knew
the music but didn't sport the look. Really smiley and always had a
quip or a cheeky greeting. I don't know if I ever even knew his
name... I probably did... but it's gone now. However, I can see his
face as if it was yesterday, a little bit rodent-like, with blonde
hair and a few too many teeth. Knowing him was really nice because
he was one of those people with whom you could flirt a little, even
though he was some years older - old enough to be a postman! - yet at the same time you knew
nothing would ever come of it. That made it comfortable and fun
without any of the stress of wondering what might happen next.
The Postman was a bad influence on my friends and me that night,
though. We were only 15 and drinking orange juice, but he took us aside and told us about the vodka –
he'd hidden it in the kitchenette. I'd never had vodka
before. I don't know how much of it I drank but of course it was too
much, because he kept topping up my paper cup and the more I had the
less I cared. Further memories are a bit sketchy, but I do know that
I ended the night by getting off with a young long-haired bloke. It
was so wrong. He was wearing a greatcoat too. So wrong. We
went into a back room and snogged in the dark amid the stacked up
wooden chairs, table tennis bats and god knows what else - things
with corners and edges. He didn't even take his coat off. It's
going to sound bad but I know that I got a peculiar kick out of our
complete incompatibility. I certainly never wanted to see him again;
I couldn't connect with him on any level but this brief physical
fling with 'the enemy' felt strangely defiant – rebellious, I
suppose. I was rebelling against my own rebellion. Weird. Well, I
was young and drunk... he must've been too.
I was back at that particular village hall for another party a
few years later. The friend whose birthday it was had booked the
Waxwork Dummies to play there. I don't remember a thing about them,
though. Instead, my abiding memory of that night is the attention
paid to my boyfriend, the young Mr SDS, who was sporting a fairly spectacular black eye. Just a few evenings beforehand he'd been
waiting alone for his bus home from my place when three blokes walked past
and, completely unprovoked, one of them punched him in the face.
Awful. But he got a lot of mileage out of that black eye that night
and - isn't it odd? - it did rather suit him.
I heard a song the other day - I can't even remember what or where and it was barely in my consciousness - but there was a staccato guitar in it and it prompted a thought. A fleeting one - one of those that drifts in vaguely and out again quickly, like a faint wisp of smoke. "That sounds a bit like Marquee Moon" went the thought, and promptly disappeared.
But it came back and this time it brought along a random memory - of late Summer 1977, the weather a bit like now, when I had just turned fourteen. I was venturing - half of me tentatively, and the other half of me very brazenly - into a lot of new experiences, most of which revolved around boys and punk. I'd only bought one proper grown-up album so far - the eponymous Clash first - and was saving my pocket money for more 12" vinyl. What were they, about £2.49, something like that? I couldn't just go out and buy one, it had to be planned. So the cheapo singles bin in Martins was always worth a look in case I could pick up something for 10p, something I didn't have to scrimp for nor plan, but something I could actually take home the same day and play.
A lot of band names were becoming familiar; I was latching on to what I thought 'fitted' the punk scene, but often without having first heard the music. I mean, bands like The Cortinas had the honour of getting their name carefully written on my school science overall in permanent black pen alongside the more obvious ones like Buzzcocks, Sex Pistols et al, even though I hadn't yet heard one track by them (the Cortinas, that is) . I got it wrong sometimes... like, I thought Dead Fingers Talk must be young, new and very raw just on the name alone... wrote that name on my school satchel too... they weren't, though, were they? And it was the same with Television. It was a name which was linked to all this new stuff I was exploring with limited means of doing so, and I imagined that they must be making songs at least as aggressive as White Riot or snarly as Pretty Vacant, whoever/whatever they were. So when I flicked through the cheapo singles bin in Martins and saw the 7" of 'Marquee Moon', I was quick to hand over my 10p and dead excited at the prospect of hearing it.
I remember walkng home with it feeling really chuffed. I had to go past the petrol station which was usually a bit nerve-wracking because there were always some young guys working there and I didn't know quite how to strike that balance between feeling horribly shy and yet also wanting their attention. Just having to walk past was a big deal. Funny how you remember these odd details but I recall very vividly that this time there was a new petrol attendant there, a tall bloke with acne. He smiled at me. Actually he stared. I think I got more of a look than I really wanted. I didn't fancy him at all... but I sort of wanted him to fancy me... I smiled back. Then I immediately regretted it, in case I was giving him the come-on, which I didn't really want to even though my heart was beating fast and oh now I'd never be able to walk past that garage again. It would make it really difficult going into town because that was the main route, I'd have to take that funny detour down the other side of the hill.... oh what was I thinking..... Ha, they were confusing times, those early teens.
Anyway, I got home, unwrapped my new purchase and put it on the turntable on the family stereogram. I was so excited.. hopeful for some thrashing chords, some fierce drumming, hadn't a clue what a song called Marquee Moon might be about, but I'd heard of The Marquee...
Erm, it wasn't what I expected at all. It was weird. And the B-side was more of the same!
So, I had to work really hard to convince myself that I could, perhaps, sort of, like it. Or I could at least grow to like it... one day... maybe. I played it again. My sister came downstairs and said she thought it sounded a bit like Yes. I didn't know what Yes were like but that didn't seem to me to be a good thing.
Well, I kept the single anyway, in my little cardboard box which I'd covered in an offcut of orange patterned wallpaper, and it stayed there amid what I deemed to be far more worthy 7"s by Buzzcocks, the Adverts, etc. I did grow to like it in the end, although I have to admit, it took time. And even now I can't be sure, I wonder if I like it really only because I just can't separate it from that time, that feeling, that age and stage in life, the mood it evokes... the memories. These things are so inextricably linked.
I also got brave and walked past the petrol station again, continuing my ambivalent flirtation with a boy I didn't fancy one bit. I never grew to like him, although even then there was this naive teenage thought process which went along similar lines to my feelings about the record... like, maybe I would if I really tried... should I just keep playing him again in case....?!
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.
