Anniversary snapshots: 28th May 1978

On May 28^th 1978 Adam & the Ants were booked to play at my local venue.  I was barely able to contain my excitement when I heard.  It was only five months since I’d been to my first gig, when Siouxsie & the Banshees had played at the same place.  Five months is a long time when you’re 14 and in that interim the venue had become my regular haunt, usually twice a week (depending on the demands of homework).  My three friends and I always went together to watch bands, drink cider and mingle with fellow punk fans.

We felt at home there in a way we rarely did anywhere else; we were all outsiders together.  Mostly punks, a few rock types, a couple of hippies and one or two general oddballs.  The club occasionally played host to artists who were not too well-known to overcrowd its intimate small-town setting, but were established or culty enough to have made it into the music papers or perhaps recorded sessions for John Peel.  Bands like Adam & the Ants who, in spite of not even having recorded their first single yet, had gained an underground following I’d read about.

And they were coming to my town!  Presumably with Jordan – the embodiment of London art punk outrageousness, the most outstanding looking woman I’d seen in the whole of this brave new underworld  - I was in awe.

But my friends couldn’t come that night.  At fourteen, and female, was I brave enough to go on my own and spend the whole evening there without them? 

“Well we’re going down to the Jazz Club later, so you can come home with us,” my mum said – meaning that she and my dad would be in the adjacent bar for the latter part of the night and my lift home was assured.  It was a deal.  (I was deprived of any excuse to rebel against them - they were too liberal!)

It was a warm, light evening as  I walked across town on my own, then waited nervously outside the door to get in, along with some unfamiliar faces who’d clearly come down from London - but the queue wasn’t as big as I’d expected.  And then I noticed the hand-written sign and overheard the conversation filtering through the line:  Adam & the Ants had cancelled.

So on this date 40 years ago I didn't actually see Adam & the Ants, or Jordan.  I saw The Automatics on my own instead.  Regulars at the Marquee and with a vocalist who'd briefly been a member of the Boys beforehand,  they were pretty good (listening to them again now, they sound quite power pop too).  And being on my own had its advantages;  I got chatted up by the guitarist from a local band who was also there on his own, a bloke a fair bit older than me, about 20.

 “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked. 

“Oh yes, a pint please”.   

“A pint of what…?” 

“Beer”, I replied helpfully, thinking myself very grown up.

And then we stood together with our drinks, hardly able to talk above the noise.  I think the ‘beer’ went to my head a bit, because it wasn’t long before I turned round and kissed him full on the lips. Well, he looked like Mick Jones.  I think I took him a little by surprise.

When the evening ended, it was a little awkward, as I had to wait for my parents, which didn’t seem very cool.  But ‘Mick Jones’ and me said lovely if slightly clumsy goodbyes and, even without Adam & The Ants, I’d had a great evening.  Then I waited there in the foyer alone, as the last few people filed out of the hall.  A great big older punk bloke whom I’d never seen before – a Londoner, I think, maybe he'd been part of the Automatics' entourage – stopped and looked at me. 

“Do you wanna fuck?”  he asked, just like that.  Straight to the point.

I don’t think he was too chuffed when I said a polite “No thank you”, trying not to show my disbelief.

With that, he called me a “boiler” and marched out the door – just before my mum and dad appeared and drove me home - I didn't tell them.

It felt like I’d grown up pretty fast that night.

Adam & The Ants did come to my town in the end – in March the following year, six months before the release of  Dirk Wears White Sox.; they were great.  And I stood and watched them with the bloke who’d bought me that pint, as we'd been going out together for 2 weeks.

The Automatics: When The Tanks Roll Over Poland Again b/w Watch Her

1978

Adam & The Ants: Zerox Machine 

1979

Look through any window

A very quick visual post today as the result of an afternoon out with friends yesterday.  Our outing included, but was not limited to, some of my favourite things: sunshine, spotty pigs, peacocks (elegantly named Dave and Steve), gargoyles, olde stuffe, a maze, beehives and macaroni cheese.  All in the same place too, just five minutes' walk from my home, but where I've never before ventured beyond the gates.  I've just looked through the bars longingly, many times, like a child pressing her nose against the toy shop window. Sometimes, ironically, places of interest are so nearby that you simply don't take advantage of them. "Oh, but I can go there any time," you think, and as a result you don't.

Anyway, yesterday I did, and took quite a few pics, including some of the spotty pigs and Dave, or was it Steve?  I merely ate the macaroni cheese.  We saw bees chasing a gardener (they didn't like the vibrations of the lawnmower, apparently) and fed the carp in the moat.  Of all the many beautiful, ancient and quirky sights we enjoyed, though, there was another favourite thing - or perhaps theme -  that kept catching my eye, all within this one location. What is is it about old and often tatty doors and windows that I find so appealing?  Something mysterious perhaps - and the idea that they are portals, that so many people have passed through or peered through them, over decades - or centuries.   I'm glad that now includes me.

(Inside the high, creepy attic - which easily fitted the
criteria for this)

Def leopard

Yesterday in a small market town in Hertfordshire, two women were spotted looking at their reflections in the windows of a Toni & Guy.  “Let’s check ourselves out!” one had suggested, laughing -  and looking back at them, posing stupidly in the rain-spattered reflection, were two 55-year olds, smiling broadly under their umbrellas, both dressed in leopard-spot coats, dark jeans and black boots.  A bemused customer inside having her roots retouched grinned in the mirror.

We did turn a few heads.  I mean, I knew she had a leopard spot coat too – a bit different from mine in that it’s fluffy and a tad more golden in shade, but what were the chances of us both wearing them today?  We only get together a few times a year, reuniting here in our old hometown, the place we rarely visit now, but where we first met at school.   If it had been sunnier, I would've worn my green coat.  If it had been warmer, she would have worn her black jacket.  But it was cold and wet and we'd both dressed as big cats.

“Hey, but we’re cool!  We’re rock’n’roll!  We used to be in a band!” I assured my dear friend playfully  – we were never in a band, at least not a real one, but somehow we might as well have been, as that’s how it felt to be part of our little punk scene here, forty years ago.  You sort of felt like a someone; it was like a rural equivalent of the Bromley Contingent.  And some of its regular characters who weren’t known then did go on to be bigger someones.  It was as if there was something special about this town and its thriving underground music scene that nurtured its rebellious youth a particular way.  

As well as catching up on news and views over lunch, we luxuriated in a little reminiscing, about a time when we might both have killed for the leopard spot coats we were now wearing, but wouldn’t have been able to get one anywhere.  I'd been lucky enough to get a pair of tailor-made leopard print trousers (with a drawstring waist!) through a small ad in the back pages of the NME when I was 15.  The young fashion student making them up to order on her electric sewing machine knew she was onto something.  I loved those trousers like a pet - a rare, exotic pet.  You just couldn’t buy these things off the peg in the late seventies – in fact the only women you’d see in this fabric pattern (a scarf, or a skirt, perhaps) were also likely to be in their late seventies.  Okay, they probably weren’t, they were most likely only 55 too – but anyone over the age of 30 just got boxed into a category we thought of as ‘old’, didn't they?

Maybe that’s what the 15-year-old schoolgirls coming down the street thought when they caught sight of us as we wandered back from our reunion lunch with wine and garlic on our breath....  Oh - look at those two daft old ladies, both in leopard print coats!

(No! We're rock'n'roll! We used to be in a band!  Almost!)

Troubled mind

Ooh,  I had a troubled mind at the weekend. You know when everything feels a bit dark and well, yes,  troubling is definitely the word - because of things in your life which, at that moment, aren’t quite right.   They gang up in your mind and heckle you.  They don't let you rest. Some of them even slip slyly down to the pit of your stomach and bang on its walls.

The family problem, the letter from the council, the hot water playing up, the plumber not getting back to us about it, the work I couldn’t get right, then the blocked toilet, the bill for unblocking said toilet, more of the family problem (a constant backdrop to life at the moment), the worrying about someone thinking I might have done something I didn’t, the worrying about how to say something difficult to someone that makes a point I need to make (oh, the psychological knots we tie ourselves up in!), the work I still couldn’t get right, dammit – all niggling and nagging at the same time this weekend (funnily enough Monday morning wasn't so bad.)

But there was a saving grace!  I was reminded of a truly excellent song….

It's fucking great, isn't it?

The haunted bathroom

If I were ever to try writing a ghost story, I’d want to base it on experience.  I don’t have much, but I’ll tell you this…

It’s about our bathroom, and some odd little things that are hard to explain.  It’s downstairs, next to the kitchen.  That’s odd, for a start.  But no, I mean the noises.   A little while back I went in there to wash before bed and heard funny sounds above me in the single-storey roof.   Maybe it was a cat or a rat or a bat - a fat bat - but whatever it was I was so unnerved I nearly did something that rhymed with it.  At least I would’ve been in the right place.   Still, I put the thoughts of a headless monk knocking on the pantiles above me to one side and carried on brushing my teeth.

Nothing happened for a few weeks.  And then the other evening there was another strange occurrence.  The toilet flushed on its own.  That’s weird, I thought - I hadn’t pressed the little button thing on the cistern by accident, had I?  No - but it was definitely flushing.  “I think we’ve got a ghost in the bathroom,” I said to Mr SDS, “and they’ve just used the loo!” 

It hasn’t happened since.  But, oh, something else has.  Two nights ago, shortly before midnight,  I was just trying to put some moisturiser on my face without my glasses on (always a bit hit and miss) when, well, how can I put this politely?  I heard a very long drawn-out, squeaky bottom burp.  A real ripping raspberry of rectal turbulence.  A proper classic blow-off.  Right beside me.  I mean, so close to me that I froze right there in the middle of its duration to check that it wasn’t actually me.  It definitely wasn’t.  Perhaps it was the soles of my slippers on the floor?  I slid them about a bit and tried really hard to make them mimic the anal acoustics I’d just heard but nothing, my slippers were silent.

“Now it’s farting!” I said to Mr SDS when I went upstairs.  He was already looking at me strangely due to the blobs of white cream in my hairline and nostrils.  Once I’d heard that spectral trouser trumpet right next to me I'd decided not stay in the bathroom any longer than I had to, and I definitely wasn’t going to look in the mirror for fear of what might look back at me.  Sod the moisturiser.  Even without glasses, a hazy headless monk was too much to apprehend.

It’s not exactly M R James but that’s my ghost story and it's true.  Have you ever heard of such a thing?  A farting phantom flusher?!  Whatever next - will I find the end of the toilet paper folded into one of those pleats like they do in hotels?   Who knows?  I’ll keep you posted if it returns...

In the meantime, here's some stonking '60s garage from an appropriately named band to blow the ghostly cobwebs away:

The Haunted: 1 2 5

Abstract moment of the week #8

It took a moment or two to register - had I heard it correctly? - then I realised that, yes, I had.  The writers of Coronation Street, once again, dropped in a cheeky little name reference that could so easily pass by all but the most attentive of us.  I've noticed they do this from time to time, you could play 'Mancunian Characters From Popular Culture' Bingo with it - for example, in an episode a few years ago, someone casually mentioned the 'Mark E Smith Suite' in a conversation about some venue or other.  Last night, we found out - but only through hearing the briefest of mentions by a hospital radio DJ in one scene - that Audrey Roberts was in the 'Tony Wilson Ward' at Weatherfield Hospital.

It prompted me to have a little rummage around the 'So It Goes' archives.  Here's Tony interviewing Johnny Thunders and Walter Lure in 1978 -  unfortunately I couldn't embed it, so may not be available outside the UK - but a great clip if you can watch it.

And while I'm on the subject, there haven't been any music series like 'So It Goes' for ages, have there?  Much like the music papers, I relied on programmes like this in my teens to enlighten me about bands and artists, it was the only access.  Watching them always felt a bit edgy - they ventured into the margins.  Also, looking back you realise just how chaotic and unpredictable interviews tended to be - when did things become so slick and palatable?!

Saint Etienne Therapy

Last night a woman who looked like a young Joan Jett threw me a Parma Violet and I caught it deftly in my hands, even with orange woolly gloves on.   “Not bad for an elderly woman!” she exclaimed as I did so.  I choked out a polite laugh, but inside I was recoiling in abject horror.  The word “elderly” was like a stab wound to my heart. 

Fortunately, it was just a very bizarre dream. The young Joan Jett lookalike was the girlfriend of a man who resembled a young Jon Bon Jovi and they’d come to my house to collect a massive box of records – about as tall as me - which I’d taken in for them.  I don’t know why she was throwing me a Parma Violet.  The writing on the record box said it contained Durutti Column albums and that it weighed 10 stone.   All so random and peculiar in the way that dreams frequently are (why Durutti Column?  Not as if I’d been playing any lately!)  But it was that ‘E’ word which stuck with me most when I awoke this morning.  Elderly.   It reminded me that one day, at least if I make it that far, I will fit that word.  I might be the elderly neighbour, the elderly customer.  The elderly patient.  Ugh.

I must admit, lately, I’d been thinking about how there comes a point in life, a while before the 'elderly' description, when we start to use the caveat “for your/my/one’s age”, e.g. “She’s not in bad shape for her age”, “Can I still get away with it at my age?”, “You’re still pretty healthy for your age”, etc.

Maybe that was what triggered the dream.

Anyway, where am I going with this?  Well yesterday, reading a post on Saint Etienne over at the ever excellent Charity Chic Music I remarked that Saint Etienne are the band who make me feel alright about getting old.  (Ah, that's probably what triggered the dream too).  

That really is exactly how I feel about them and I love them for it.  

Any time I get that unpleasant pang about the inevitability of ageing, I bring Sarah, Bob and Pete to mind.  We share some of that '70s past and attitude and the facial lines for which we traded our life experiences.  They've been around a long time and they're still innovative and cool, sorted and individual, real and unaffected and still doing what they do. Everything you could aspire to as far as I'm concerned. 

Lyrically, too, they know what to say to soothe my creeping unease at the ageing process, reminding me that it’s alright to be where we are now in the timeline of our existence because of all those great markers along the way which only those of us of a certain age can identify with.  I get that feeling: we’re all in it together.  You, me and Saint Etienne.

Take these two verses from Over The Border (Words And Music 2012)

In 1974, I bought my first single, from Woollies in Redhill

I started to memorise the charts, to memorise the leagues

Tuesday lunchtime at 12.45, Saturday afternoon at five o'clock

I didn't go to church, I didn't need to.

Green and yellow Harvests, pink Pyes, silver Bells

And the strange and important sound of the synthesiser

I was in love, and I knew he loved me because he made me a tape

I played it in my bedroom, I lived in my bedroom, all of us did

Reading Smash Hits and Record Mirror, Paul Morley and the NME

Dave McCulloch and Sounds, Modern Eon and Modern English

Mute, Why, Zoo, Factory

Cutting them up, sucking them in, managing the story on our own

And in the chorus, the straightforward acknowledgement of that creeping unease reminds me I'm not on my own either:

I'm growing older, heaven knows what's on its way

Then there's some simple philosophy which I think you can only really grasp fully when you get to a particular vintage, as in the words of Take It All In (Home Counties, 2017)

You've gotta stop and let yourself

Take it all in

Sometimes you gotta drop it all

And just take it all in

So smile and get it on

Just take it all in

Then you'll begin

To really see

No-one said it would be easy

No-one told you it would be fun

But you're gonna have to believe me

The party's just begun

Saint Etienne are not immune to a little wistful reminiscing either, for instance in 'When I Was Seventeen' (Words And Music, 2012)

When I was seventeen

My heart and head were full of brilliant dreams

Assembled in the light of a day

That seems so far away

Away

And now

When I was seventeen

When I was seventeen

I thought we knew everything

We knew everything

No responsibility

Endless possibility

What on earth could possibly hurt me?

I know that getting properly elderly is going to be pretty awful but - there's no doubt - I always feel a little bit better about it when I think of getting there with them.
I call it Saint Etienne Therapy.

Saint Etienne: Twenty Five Years

Gigging, ligging and leek pie - Part 2

I said I would explain about the leek pie.

Leek pie has become synonymous with my memories of travelling around the country to gigs with my boyfriend’s anarcho punk band in the early ‘80s.  Leek pie!

It really wasn’t very rock’n’roll, was it?  Where were the tour rider requests with their bizarre demands to remove all the brown M&Ms (except of course we called them Treets back then) from the sweet bowl?  I mean, what sweet bowl? 

After travelling for hours to anonymous towns, taking wrong turns and arriving just in time to use the loo and for the band to soundcheck and prepare before the doors opened to the black-clad masses, there was rarely time to check out the local Chinese or chippy.  So it became the norm to take your own food – crisps perhaps, you might think, or Mars Bars - the sort of thing you could stuff into a jacket pocket and get a quick sugar and salt fix from. 

But with anarcho punk being all about doing it yourself, rejecting capitalist values and, in particular, strong views on vegetarianism, maybe there was resistance to this level of conformity from some quarters?   So one of the girlfriends began - very sweetly, really - to bring her home cooking to gigs in a Tupperware dish. 

I remember it well, arriving at Birmingham Digbeth Civic Hall, with its grandiose interior, all decorative ceilings and high windows, and as the band finished unloading their gear, a voice rang out: 

“Would anyone like some leek pie?”

I mean, I do like leeks, and it would have been great at any other time, but they are notorious for repeating on you and, I don’t know, what with it being served cold and the insides being a bit gooey and the pastry being rather flaky, it just wasn’t obvious pre-gig food.   And, this is going to sound really mean, but the whole hippie-commune-knit-your-own-yoghurt aspect of it just… well, forgive me, but... it can just seem a little too earnest.   There’s a fine line between earnest and sanctimonious and the home-made leek pie was in danger of crossing it.

That gig went very well in all respects apart from some shitty little dickheads at the front who decided to gob at the band by way of showing their appreciation.  Some of this landed on my boyfriend’s guitar and shirt.  Ironically, I have to say it looked not unlike the contents of a leek pie.   If only it had been - it would have saved all that worry about Hepatitis B.

There’s more irony to come.  Many years later the band played a reunion gig at quite a large, well-known venue and, things being so different this time around, there was a proper dressing room (with comfy armchairs and a clean loo and everything!) and… guess what?.... a gig rider!

Some food and drink was laid out by the venue staff on a little table, plenty for everyone, band and entourage.  Several cans of lager, Mars Bars and lots of packets of crisps.  I had to laugh when I saw most of them were Smokey Bacon flavour.