Share your Musical Life Story

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Giselle
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Postby Giselle » 08 May 2007, 16:21

I love hearing people's stories -- sometimes feel just a little tired of my own!!
They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!'

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catboy
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Postby catboy » 08 May 2007, 16:24

I was born at exactly the same time as Good Vibrations.

(for the fact checkers out there, go and find out what date the last mixing session for GV was, and the time, and you'll have the precise moment i entered the world. )

as a bonus the Beatles were tracking Rain as well...!
“I was in Hollywood a long, long time. I was on the verge of making it too, but some cocksucker stole my shopping cart and I was back to square one.”

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Postby Moleskin » 08 May 2007, 20:20

I was born in 1965. both my parents are of the dance band generation – they met at a dance in Gidea Park in 195?. They were kind enough to buy my older sister, born 1958, some early Beatles singles, and one of my earliest memories is of playing these on the family’s old Dansette record player in Vernon Road. I can still be wafted back there with the right combination of leatherette and other smells. The singles in question being ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Can’t Buy me Love’ and ‘Get Back’. I still have these singles – so please don’t tell Sue. Of course at that time I didn’t know which side was the A or the B (although perhaps the Apple logo should have been a clue).

Anyhow, I didn’t really pay much attention to music for a few years, doing boy-type things I guess, riding bikes and reading Spider-Man comics. We always listened to the top 40 on Sunday afternoons, though. Sometimes we’d have Sunday tea from Gran’s old wheely table in the living room, huddled round the old transistor. And my brother and I would sing the songs of the Beatles at bedtime in our shared bedroom (1962-66 only as that was the album Sue owned). Music next really impinged in the last year or so of primary school when the Bay City Rollers were big and every girl wore a tartan scarf round her wrist for the year.

I guess we can jump now to 1978/9. Sue had moved on from glam into disco and I picked up the baton, using the money from my paper round to buy the Beatles albums. I bought these on Romford Market – I could get 2 a week there from a stall which sold Portuguese pressings (£3.49). Or in Downtown they were £3.99 – or UK pressings were £5.25!! And I started buying singles in earnest. Among the first I can remember (and choose to reveal) were ‘Games Without Frontiers’ and ‘The Logical Song’. One time I can remember coming home with Help! and Rubber Soul and disxcovering I hadn;'t got a key and the house was empty. Our neighbour Eric (who was in the Normandy invasion) kindly invited me in to have a cup of tea while I waited for someone to return. I studied the photos of George in his cowboy outfit in their living room. Then along came John Foxx, Gary Numan and all their friends and inducted me properly into the post-punk world. I’ve bought a lot of these records on CD and still listen to them a bit, because although I was pretty miserable at the time they were the soundtrack to my life, I associate them more with comfort – I could lose myself in the music and forget my daily woes. So from this period we have Ultravox (with and sans ‘!’), Numan, OMD, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, ABC, Yazoo, Soft Cell, Human League, Japan). Plus by this time I’d got a heft chuck of solo Beatles albums, and Out of the Blue and Discovery by ELO.

In 1980 a friend at school showed off some song lyrics. They were pretty good for a 15 year old and spurred me to start writing. We decided to call ourselves Schizophrenia! but never got as far as recording anything (apart from a musique concrete/collage thing). The band split up and I subsequently discovered that Phil’s songs were actually all taken from Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare album. I joined forces with Ray, first as Trident – a crap keyboard-led punk outfit; then briefly as Random Gender, before becoming Jehannum. Ray played synth and I sang and played bass. No drums. Pop songs. We listened to Tears For Fears, Culture Club and Altered Images. I also loved Pink Floyd including The Final Cut, so there. We saw Pigbag at the Hammersmith Palais with Belle Stars and Clare G’s band. Tony got punched on the tube ride home for eyeing up somebody’s girlfriend. The thug in question hit Tony as he (the thug) was getting off the train at Dagenham.

Then I got Debbie pregnant, and man that was all she wrote… so Jehannum split.

After the divorce (in which I lost most of my vinyl from the Futurist years but retained the first two Marillion albums – hoorah!), I was a bit lost musically. What was going on didn’t suit me so I started to delve backward, picking up the first 2 Stooges albums, Astral Weeks and Moondance, Marquee Moon and Adventure, the complete works of Bowie, oh and the small matter of the VU. Fuckedy-doo-dah, that was a revelation. I met Dave at a D&D session through a mutual friend and he and I started to write songs, what with both being fans of Bowie and Reed. Dave introduced me to Berlin, which is of course much better than Transformer. Dave was 4 years older than me and also had an older clued-in sister who had introduced him to music. We formed a band called the Burn with Paul Leather-Trousers and Paul the Depressive and rehearsed. Paul the D turned up late for the first rehearsal, which had been going so well up to then, and so I sacked him on the Tuesday afterward. (He was going to quit anyway, he said).

In this brave new post-divorce world I saw Springsteen on the Born in the USA, Tunnel of Love and Amnesty tours, the last Queen tour, Meat Loaf when he was out of contract, and listened to The Smiths, The Sisters of Mercy, The Mission, The Cult, The Woodentops, a bit of Iron Maiden (and saw them on the Seventh Son tour), and a lot more 60s and 70s material including my first forays into prog with King Crimson. Oh shit, and Prince! I found him (along with the rest of the UK) in time for Purple Rain and he’s still in my firmament. Do his 80s albums compare as a run with Stevie’s 70s? Agh, and the Waterboys! This Is The Sea and then the first two. Which led me to Patti Smith in time to be disappointed by Dream of Life. I must have got into Dylan and Cohen around this time too. They were already there for me before – but I get ahead of myself.

Dave, Paul and I took The Burn to Norfolk for a weekend of rehearsal. We taped two songs based on my lyrics, then Dave quit. We split the band and Dave and I continued to write and drink together. We recorded guitar/vocals versions of many of our songs on cassette, gave lyrics away to girls in pubs, didn’t get laid, offended the occasional boyfriend by talking to their girlfriends while they played pool/the fruit machine/with themselves. I took part in a couple of plays and that is where in 1988 I met Fiona. I saw her band The Deadly Bride-Shades play once and was the Yoko in their break-up. I discovered the Nick Drake albums and we went to see Paul McCartney’s comeback tour. Then we moved in together and both bought the first Black Crowes album (saw them at Hammersmith Odeon), listened to some Lenny Kravitz, holidayed separately (she in China, me in San Francisco) and split up due to irreconcilable differences. Which brings us to 1992. Wow, what a long job this is. Somewhere in these years Paul Leather-Trousers suggested we reunite as The Burn with his brother, David Leo Atriedes (he’d changed his name by deed poll to be named after the Dune character). This lasted long enough to work up a set based on my songs but not long enough to play them anywhere. I started to teach myself to play guitar.

I moved into a house share with Claire (drummer from the Bride Shades) and Angela, and Claire kindly dragged me out to see some gigs with her friend Neily-Wheely. I fell in lust with her due to having to follow her up the stairs to the sitting room with me dinner but she was having none of it so I went to see Radiohead at Camden Underworld on my own. Then we saw them again together, and added Belly, the Auteurs, Suede, Sugar, Sonic Youth (with Pavement as support), the Lemonheads, Tindersticks and many more and then Claire relented. These were peak years of gig-going, coinciding with the whole grunge/Britpop era. We went to three Glastonbury festivals. I caught Oasis’ debut there the first year while Claire watched Evan; we saw too many acts to remember really. We were married between numbers 2 and 3 – in fact our first was on the way when we went to our third festival. We also caught the first New Order farewell gig at Reading.

We saw Dylan at Portsmouth while expecting number two, and then Claire sort of lost interest in music for a while, becoming deeply maternal. This coincided in my opinion with a downturn in new music – I think there was less of interest being created over the next few years, in fact to some extent that is still true. We are currently liking the new Maximo Park and Kings of Leon, but let’s face it they’re nowt new really. I’ve spent the last few years filling in on odd corners that I hadn’t explored before – more folk, progressive and glam, psychedelia in depth… oh and the Airplane and the Dead and the other SF bands, although I suppose they should be described as psych really.

And in the last 5 years I’ve been writing and recording as Moleskin. Four albums so far, none commercially available (though I pressed 20 copies of the first, Into the Swim, for friends and relatives, none of whom have listened to it so far as I am aware), plus a few odd tracks under the guise of Henry Ford – tape treatments and sound collages including one that drizzles along for 61 minutes. I’ve made my solo debut playing acoustically as part of music sessions organised by the local morris side, singing my own songs.

I've missed out loads, I know, and some of the chronology is a bit skewiff, but that's what you get I suppose.
@hewsim
-the artist formerly known as comrade moleskin-
-the unforgettable waldo jeffers-

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the masked man
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Postby the masked man » 10 Jul 2007, 14:27

King Giraffe I wrote:*bump*

anyone else care to add their contribution to this wonderful thread?

(or is it time it was put in "classic threads"?)


Yes indeed - this surely belongs in Classic Threads. Though it's worth bumping again to see if we can get any more additions to it.

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Minnie the Minx
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Postby Minnie the Minx » 14 Jul 2007, 12:25

I cant believe I hadnt seen this. Ramblings to come!
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

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Postby RSL » 14 Jul 2007, 13:22

It's all about my music blog. Passionate about music!
Cheers.

my mp3 blog -->
http://rslblog.com

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Minnie the Minx
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Postby Minnie the Minx » 15 Jul 2007, 20:13

The earliest musical memories I have are about age four or five. My dad had spent his youth loving rock n roll, but I don’t remember him ever playing any in the house. My mum,having been reared in a different country for the first twenty years of her life, didn’t really transport any of her musical memories with her, but she was very drawn to theatrical, emotional ditties and one of my earliest memories is her sat at the dining table crying to ‘Seasons in the Sun.’

1977 was the year that our lives all changed in lots of ways. We moved into a new house, and unbeknown to me, their relationship was already heavily on the rocks. Whilst lots of crying was going on in rooms around the house, me and my brother would immerse ourselves in music. I had just discovered the Bay City Rollers and decided I was going to marry Les McKeown; and my favourite pastime was to skip round the front room in my dressing gown singing ‘they sang shangalang as we ran with the band’ and my brother would draw moustaches and glasses on my album covers, much to my annoyance. He was thirteen then. He had a keen idea on what was happening to our parents relationship, and spent much of his time trying to distract us both.

Then he discovered punk.

He started to come home in leather jackets, stripey shirts and wear fluorescent patterns. I would stare goggle eyed at the troops of lads wandering in the door with trousers that were too small and jackets that were too big. They wore sunglasses indoors. They were fearless.

I started to listen to what he was bringing home. The Pistols, The Clash, The Jam, Penetration, X Ray Spex, Ultravox, Suicide. I fell in love. He would hold my hands and spin me round while I sang ‘The Day the Wooooorld Turned Da Gloooooooo’, and I would chew my fingernails in fear listening to Frankie Teardrop. My mum was even won over by Ultravoxs Hiroshima Mon Amour, which caused her to cry uncontrollably. Actually, in retrospect that was possibly because my dad had left six months before, just weeks after we had bought a new home. She would sit in amongst my brothers friends and drink cider; telling them all how she had been wronged, and they would nod and burp as she passed the bottle around.

So, from the ages of 7-10 I was a punk rock chick. Nobody in my peer group at school knew the songs I did, I felt I had a special friend in Joe Strummer, who talked to me. I have the school report from 1978 that says that ‘Annas mind is very full of punk rock at the moment and I do hope this does not influence her future.’

I had a major Gary Numan fixation in 1979. My brother bought me ‘Cars’ for my birthday. To hold that 45 in my hand, grey cover, with a heavily made up Numan on the cover was just incredible for me. I played the fucker to death. I did robotic dances round the front room and borrowed my mums eyeliner to look like him. My bedroom was adorned with Numan posters, which my brother took pleasure in sticking pins in. I also started to flirt with Toyah, and had an unsuccessful attempt at dying my hair orange.

Years 1980-1983. Very emotional ones for me. My brother had moved out in 1980 to go and love with my dad and stepmum and our stepsister and stepbrother. He couldn’t deal with mum anymore and it fair broke his heart to leave me there, but he would have killed her if he stayed. Musically, around this time I had discovered new wave and was listening to a lot of electronica, Soft Cell, Human League, Duran Duran, and I rediscovered Bowie mainly because Duran Duran rated him as an influence. I would mime to ‘Open Your Heart’ in the living room at my mums again and again and again till the needle on the record player just collapsed and died. That was one of the worst days of my life – I didn’t know where to get needles or how to attach them, and I remember sitting crying as I tried to play Ashes to Ashes and the stylus slid noisily across the vinyl without making contact. I thought my world had come to a fucking end.

In 1983, after a long night of listening to my mum pretend to kill herself and ring ambulances for herself I rang my dad and begged him to come and get me. By the end of the week I was living with my stepmum, dad and my stepmums two children, and the first thing I did, as shallow as I am, was make a beeline for the record player. I fucking hogged that thing for years to come. They bought a ‘vertical’ standing turntable which as anyone who has tried to mosh around a front room to them knows, they are fucking shit. They jump and skip and are useless bits of shit. Luckily by this point I had a cassette player of my own and I could slam my bedroom door, call my parents bastards and slide under the duvet with the knowledge that John Taylor loved me (probably.)

Still, in the midst of all this musical turmoil my first love remained a constant, punk. I would alternate Soft Cell with the Ruts, much to the relief of my brother who I feel panicked that I would desert the cause once I seemed to be in a bedroom wallpapered with Simon le Bon. He was friendly with Ian Astbury at the time and used to hang around with Southern Death Cult who would invite us along to his practice studio on Lumb Lane and we could play on the drums. I stopped listening to Duran Duran and discovered the One in Twelve Club, (I wont go into details yet ). I developed a liking for bands like The Three Johns, and stopped wearing pastel pinks and started buying camoflouage and army tops. Do you remember when every fucker in the world wore German Army shirts? Jesus, there were THOUSANDS of them in our house – and I wore them 24/7 with studded belts, a beret and my doc martens. My best mate at school and I went to see The Smiths. We stopped eating meat. We had black nail polish. I sang in my first band, and hung out with mates who drunk cider at lunchtime and had nicknames like ‘Boris’ and ‘Fuckface’. I did a cover of English Civil War for the school concert, and when it finished my pal smashed his guitar then chewed his nails nervously cos he knew his mum would kill him, as she hadn’t finished the payments on it yet.

I fell hopelessly in love with a sixth former who I nicknamed Spike who was a jutting cheekboned skinny Paul Simenon lookalike . He wouldn’t have noticed me if I had spontaneously combusted next to him.

By the time I was sixteen I had been dragged to a few gigs by my brother which had pretty much sealed my fate, I wanted to leave school, join a band and spend my time getting drunk and laid. Whilst still living at home, I met someone who would change my social/musical life forever. My best mate and I went out on a rainy Saturday night to the local punky type pub and playing there were Flowers in the Dustbin, whos’ singer posts on here infrequently as alans deep bath. They were on the last night of their tour I seem to remember, and I fell promptly in lust with the drummer, who I had an on-off relationship with for years. Enchanted by tales of living in London and being pernk, I left home and moved in to a student house with several other green haired ne’er do wells I had met at college. The next five years were essentially described as follows – an immersion into anarcho punk culture, becoming politically active, drinking endlessly, sleeping with people who didn’t wash and going to see some of the worst bands possible because they sang about Nestle. In fairness there were some wonderful bands in this genre – Chumbawamba et al – but there was some fucking awful dirge at the time, really.
I found some real hostility amongst other anarcho punky wunkies who despised the fact that I loved The Clash et al. I had endless arguments with housemates who would roll their eyes if I took them out to nightclubs that played pure punk (Bradford used to have a couple of these- The Spotted House being one, which was like a second home to me) but the greatest joy I had was Saturday night, pissed, dancing to PiL and throwing my red crimped hair about. I couldn’t play a Clash album without getting a lecture on why I should despise such a ‘sell out’ ‘conglomerate’ band etc and there were times when I seriously questioned my own taste. Luckily these moments never lasted long - and working behind the bar at venues where I listened to the eighty fourth song that was two seconds long and had the lyrics ‘KILL POLICE’ was simply the icing on the cake for that decision.

Then rave happened, and there was a lot of interesting crossovers culturally – lots of my pals, me included, thought the idea of going into a field at 2am to dance was a great idea. And why not indeed. And hot on the heels of this was the Madchester scene, which caused a great unification of the love of hooded tops. This was when I most enjoyed being a DJ – playing to a dancefloor that would listen to the Specials, Orbital and still kick off at the Dead Kennedys. Pure pleasure, to control a dancefloor like that,if I ever stayed sober enough.
That brings me to the end of this story really. From 22 upwards I have embraced most things both popular and more leftfield, I think 22 was the symbolic age as it was the year I started my nurse training. Being in full time occupation left me less time to seek out new music, and then becoming a nurse, getting into a long term relationship with someone who didn’t share my music tastes, ‘growing up’, leaving certain friends behind with a move to a different county – all these things contributed to me listening less to things I would usually have done 2/7. But I would say over the past five years my passion for music has been re-discovered to the extent where I am almost at the point where it mattered so badly when I was ten years old – I am eating new bands for breakfast and wanting to hear everything, now, NOW!

My only musical regret is that I haven’t had time to explore making more music with alans deep bath due to distance, and both of our lives being hectic, and being miles apart. Being on stage and performing is an immense high for me and is something I would like to explore.
And still I return endlessly to my chief love, punk. I think this is why I get defensive when people say der, punk, meh. It was the soil on my roots as a youngster and to criticise it is not just like saying that you don’t like my lipstick or my cooking, it feels like a direct attack on me. And I know that is nonsensical and the sensible part of my head wants to understand that, but it’s the way I feel.
Last edited by Minnie the Minx on 28 Mar 2015, 20:54, edited 1 time in total.
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

Dr Markus wrote:
Someone in your line of work usually as their own man cave aka the shed we're they can potter around fixing stuff or something don't they?


Flower wrote:I just did a google search.

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Postby beenieman » 15 Jul 2007, 22:53

Minnie the Minx wrote:
I have the school report from 1978 that says that ‘Annas mind is very full of punk rock at the moment and I do hope this does not influence her future.’



A wonderful post Minnie. I was enthralled as I wondered how it would all end.

I love the above quote.

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Minnie the Minx
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Postby Minnie the Minx » 15 Jul 2007, 23:01

Thanks beenie - I had more pleasure reading this thread and formulating a reply than I have ever had here before!
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

Dr Markus wrote:
Someone in your line of work usually as their own man cave aka the shed we're they can potter around fixing stuff or something don't they?


Flower wrote:I just did a google search.

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Postby beenieman » 15 Jul 2007, 23:03

Minnie the Minx wrote:Thanks beenie - I had more pleasure reading this thread and formulating a reply than I have ever had here before!


Every few years I get a good idea for a thread :shock:

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Minnie the Minx
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Postby Minnie the Minx » 16 Jul 2007, 09:21

King of the Dogs wrote:I grew up almost without music in the house. Even though my mum and dad were on the cusp of their adulthood and living in Liverpool when the Beatles were in their Cavern residency they didn’t bother to go to see even one of those 292 Fabs shows. Only last Christmas, my dad said to me “I always preferred the Searchers, to be honest.” Their antipathy to the Beatles remains a mystery to me although, to be honest, Liverpool has a history of not being over-impressed with its own.

No, my dad was a hard-working, honest man who had no truck with rebellion or, indeed, causing a fuss in any way. I imagine Little Richard, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis absolutely appalled him although I do seem to remember him waxing lyrical about Brenda Lee and Peggy Lee. Maybe I thought they were sisters at one time. But we did, by the time I was about nine, have a radiogram in our house – mainly serving as a nice piece of furniture and a way to listen to “Family Favourites” on a Sunday whilst we ate our roast dinner and wondered what on earth could possibly be going on in Gibraltar and Cyprus for us to have British troops stationed there, and Terry Wogan’s surprisingly entertaining Radio 2 breakfast show during the week as we got ready for work and school. Once the radiogram arrived a few LPs crept into the house, too. For a long time, not even having a radio of my own, I survived on three discs – “20 golden greats” by Nat King Cole, plus best of’s by Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison. What my dad did like was pretty unimpeachable when you think about it (if you conveniently ignore his enormous love of “Mississippi” by Pussycat). My mum seemed satisfied with her “a Festival of Carols” album. Possibly, she occasionally played it in August.

At some point in the early to mid seventies two things happened which proved instrumental in my burgeoning obsession with music; my kid sister got a Hacker mono record player for Christmas and I got a Binatone table-top cassette recorder. Whilst Diane busied herself buying various K-Tel compilations I set about putting together a modest cassette collection. Soon I had a best of Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Beach Boys Greatest Hits, the Shadows 20 Golden Greats, The New Goodies Cassette (well, I was only 11 and anyway, it had some great songs on it), Can’t Get Enough by Barry White and a compilation which I remember had “All the Young Dudes”, “Children of the Revolution” and “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” on it. I still didn’t have a radio at this point so much of the chart stuff of the time that was deemed too racy for Radio 2 (Racy themselves, somewhat ironically, were not deemed too racy in this respect) passed me by apart from the eternal struggle to see Top of the Pops which my dad, of course, hated and would sit through tutting and muttering to himself, often completely ruining my enjoyment of this crucial weekly half-hour of heaven. Why I never bought a radio for myself, I’ll never know. Maybe I was always skint when I was eleven.

At round about the time I turned a teenager something happened to me that happens, it seems, to many boys of that age. My music taste, almost overnight, completely deserted me. It was, of course, entirely the fault of my mates’ older brothers. Whilst the Pistols flitted from record company to record company and generally threatened western civilization I, starved of any decent music supply, began to believe my mates that their big brothers’ record collections were practically unimpeachable and much, much more sophisticated and, well, cleverer than any of that stuff in the charts or my own meager and now strangely embarrassing cassette collection. To rectify this potentially socially disastrous situation I began to borrow LPs off my friends, commandeering my sister’s Hacker in the process, and pretend to like them. Actually, although many of them were awful, I really did like some of them. I quickly became enamoured of early Yes, “Argus” by Wishbone Ash and Hawkwind– loves that persist to this day. I didn’t half listen to an awful lot of shite when I was thirteen, though. I began to buy actual LPs at this time although I still borrowed cassettes from Winsford library for some years to come, taking chances and discovering things such as Next by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Rubicon my Tangerine Dream. Also, my friends were less under the spell of Big Brother once punk well and truly took hold and we all began to read the NME (although I actually preferred Record Mirror and its more pop orientated coverage at the time). Punk – so scary at first not to mention rather shit to my 13 year old Yes-adoring ears – began to make sense to me as I got older and I devoured the music press more and more. I bought stuff by the Damned then the Clash and the Pistols and played them along side my Gladys Knight, Yes, The Real Thing, Abba and the Shadows. It seemed slightly absurd at the time, especially to my mates who, I’m sure, despaired of me, but I suppose by that point my musical taste was almost fully formed. I still didn’t have a scene of my own though. everything so far had been a bit retrospective or arriviste.

Then I began to become aware of weird goings on in, of all places, Liverpool. Nothing much of any note, save perhaps for the aforementioned Real Thing, had come from the Pool of Life since the Fabs had disintegrated nearly a decade before (one of my earliest memories, along with Armstrong walking on the moon, was hearing on the radio that the Beatles had split up. Even at the age of six it seemed incredibly shocking). But punk had had an odd effect on the city. Nobody had any real interest in jumping on the punk bandwagon (as Start Maconie notes, scousers are always suspicious of a trend they didn’t start themselves) but it did galvanise a whole new generation into wanting to create something new and slightly left-field. Bands, it now seems, were formed and disbanded on an almost daily basis and petty rivalries were rife. From all of this several bands actually did manage to stay together long enough to write songs and even release them. The three most significant ones all had wonderfully exotic and exciting names, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and Wah! Heat. I’m not quite sure if I decided that I liked them even before I’d heard them just because of the names.

Each of them, though, was causing a right hullabaloo in the pages of the inkies and they all gave great copy. What’s more, their music was fucking great too – post-punk but strangely psychedelic yet modern-sounding. I really liked the Bunnymen and the Teardrops but it was Wah! Heat, as you know, who became my band. Unlike the other two bands, they actually seemed interested in saying something about the world around them. Indeed, their singer seemed pretty keen on saying something about absolutely everything, according to any journalist who ever interviewed him. In 1980 I hung onto his every word in the press and when their album finally came out I pored over the cryptic insert (“wah! – deep as eternity. Onlookers, shallow as time!” etc.) for hours in much the same way I imagine people did with the back of those early Bob Dylan records a decade and a half before, trying to make some sense of it all, sure that it somehow meant something terribly important.

By now, of course, I’d bought my own record player and, with the aid of my Saturday job in a green grocers, was buying singles and albums pretty much every week, often on the advice of whoever was reviewing the singles in the NME or Record Mirror that week. As post punk gave way to that second golden era of pop I went with it happily, buying singles by Odyssey, In Deep and the like as well as those by the Jam, Madness and Orange Juice. Stuff like the Clash and Dexys were now hugely important to me but I still lived pop music first and foremost and despised heavy metal (and anything remotely like it, in spirit, apart from Hawkwind who I was convinced were actually rather punk) with a vengeance. I remembered Wylie saying he was in a pop group not a rock band and this seemed terribly important to me. In February of 1983 he finally had a top 3 hit with “Story of the Blues (Part 1)” and this got him onto Andy Peebles “My Top 12” radio show. His choices of Motown, Miles Davis, Phil Spector and, most importantly, Bob Dylan had a profound effect on me, making me go out and investigate all those artists to a greater or lesser extent. I became a musical archaeologist again, just as I’d started, I suppose, and I fell head over heels with Dylan. He is, to this day, my main man and I can’t imagine a world without his music.

I was at university by now and benefiting from the cross-fertilisation that comes of being surrounded by lots of other young music fans. During my time there I was turned onto countless bands and artists whilst at the same time getting hold of more and more Motown and Dylan (which most of my mates hated). Hip hop was beginning to break big and I loved what I’d heard of it although I bought relatively little for some reason. “White Lines” and “the Message” of course as well as a few compilations with things like Duke Bootee on them and even “The Crown” by Gary Byrd, if you can call that hip hop.

Then, in April 1984, I went to see the Smiths at the Newcastle Mayfair and they stopped me in my tracks. It was completely, truly stunning and remains to this day the most visceral, hypnotic thing I’ve ever seen. Suddenly, nothing else seemed to matter that much a lot of the time. Beyond New Order, Bob Dylan and a few other artists, everything seemed rather ordinary in comparison to the Smiths, at least for a while. I think that that’s partly because the mid eighties was a largely uninspiring time. Except for one other band. In 1987 somebody lent me Yo! Bumrush the Show! And I suddenly knew what it was like to hear the Sex Pistols for the first time, as they happened. It was like a bomb going off in my head. We all live for these moments, surely.

Just as I was giving up on guitar music entirely the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays (and Chicago house, of course) came along and everything seemed suddenly exciting again, at least for a year or two. Then something awful happened. Grunge made metal fashionable and music went really rather shit for a while. If it wasn’t grunge then it was diluted house music or power ballads in the charts, it seemed. Depressing times, at least in terms of rock music.

That’s why Oasis going massive was so important and so wonderful. At last, it appeared, the indie kids had stormed the barricades.


...to be continued.


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Re: Share your Musical Life Story

Postby Jock » 30 Nov 2010, 16:09

The best thread i've read on here. A pity I couldn't write to save my life :lol: :oops:
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Re: Share your Musical Life Story

Postby Pete the Pick » 02 Apr 2015, 22:57

Not so much an expert, more an interested bystander…..

As a nipper, I was not overly fussed about music. Any cursory examination of the charts of the late 50s would, to my mind, explain why. My first musical memory seems to revolve around a guy called Don Lang, who I remember watching play trombone on the BBC’s first attempt at a Rock and Roll show called Six-Five Special: I would have been about five years old, and living in Cornwall. I now have no idea why the trombone appealed to me, but I remember asking for one for Christmas, and being completely disappointed in the plastic guitar that I did get. Culturally, my first exposure to the burgeoning youth culture yet to swamp the country also happened in Cornwall, Helston specifically. I remember a kid running up to a bunch of us and telling us that there were some Teds around the corner. We crept down the alley, and peered around the corner and, sure enough, there were three or four lads dressed in drainpipe trousers and drapes, hanging around the sweetie shop. We were so scared we didn’t dare venture any further! I was still about five years old, and this would have been in 1958, but I had no idea what those Teds would have been listening to, musically. I still had little interest in music: the parents always had the BBC Light Programme on, which obviously spouted little other than parents’ music. My mother was a big Sinatra fan, as well as Tony Bennett and all that sort of thing. My Dad was more big band, Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller and the like, and catering for both was what the BBC did in those days. I cannot pin down when I first heard of Elvis Presley, but fast-forward a few years, to 1962, and one of my best friends at my new school in Eston, Middlesbrough, was heavily into Cliff Richard. Try as he might, and he really did try, he could not convert me. And his family had a gramophone, and records! Another kid at school tried to do The Twist, the dance linked to Chubby Checker’s huge hit that year, but only succeeded in falling forward on his face. No, there was nothing out there that appealed. Good old BBC gave us a frugal amount of ‘pop’ music through Alan Freeman’s Pick Of The Pops on a Sunday afternoon, which at least played all the records in that week’s Top 20: I have memories of picnics with the family on the North York Moors listening to Ray Charles singing about taking these chains from his heart and setting him free, but there wasn’t much else I can recall. Everything changed in 1963. Somehow I’d missed PLEASE PLEASE ME when it was first released, but one day I heard it on radio and it blew my mind. Well, in a 1963 sort of way to a nine year old. The purveyors of this aural epiphany were a group called The Beatles. Then I recalled that FROM ME TO YOU was also by the aforementioned Beatles (my memory has always been that I got into PLEASE PLEASE ME after FROM ME TO YOU, even though it was released, and, indeed, a hit, before the latter: I can only assume that the DJ responsible was kind of reminding people that the people that brought you this current FROM ME TO YOU hit had previously brought you PLEASE PLEASE ME), and I thought “Hello? Something’s happening here”. I was hooked on music from that point on, though, unfortunately, my request to see The Beatles at Stockton Globe in December 1963 fell on deaf parents’ ears, and the closest I ever got to experiencing them was when my Mum took me to a cinema in Woking, when visiting my Nan, to see Hard Day’s Night when that came out, thus allowing me to experience at least the screaming: I understand that the date they played at Stockton coincided with news of John Kennedy’s assassination, so instead of seeing The Beatles, I came home from school to find my mother weeping, with all TV programmes suspended, with the BBC just playing mournful music. Well, after that, the groups and the hits came thick and fast. Exposure exploded, comparatively speaking. A magazine called Fabulous started, and I got the first issue because it had The Beatles on the front, and a colour photo of Heinz on the back cover: I wasn’t into Heinz in any shape or form - it was the beautiful cherry coloured shiny Gretsch guitar that he was cuddling! On TV, the BBC now gave us Top Of The Pops, a visual snapshot of the ‘Hit Parade’. Ann, who lived three doors down, shocked me when she admitted preferring The Rolling Stones to The Beatles. There was so much suddenly out there, but radio was, by and large, restricted to Saturday morning’s Saturday Club and Sunday morning’s Easybeat. In hindsight, there were so many groups that never got any airplay, but in today’s lucrative world of retrospective CD re-issues, thankfully a great deal of that product is now available. So it is now 1964, and I still haven’t got a record player. I dreamed of having my own electric guitar, and so wanted my parents to come back from Saturday afternoon shopping with that red guitar that used to hang in the window of a pawn shop that they had to go past to get into Middlesbrough. They never did. There was a competition that appeared on the back of a Corn Flakes packet, to win a Burns electric guitar “as used by recording artists The Ramblers” (I think that was their name), who I’d of course never heard of, and of whom never, ever, seen any evidence of said recording, though now Vernon Joynson’s revamped Tapestry of Delights (2014) rejoices in an entry for the aforementioned Ramblers, citing them as a Joe Meek project – for their seeming one and only recording. Naturally, I did not win the guitar, but got a signed glossy photo of the mythical Ramblers. I had to make do with my bastardised tennis racket, for which I created two cardboard cut-out cutaways, intended to at least resemble my beloved, unattainable Gretsch, with a bunch of rubber bands cut and stretched to resemble strings. My friend Steven, the Cliffophile, at least had a guitar, albeit an acoustic one. We painted a gold scratch plate on it, to make it look vaguely like it was an electric guitar, brushed our hair forward and entered a school fancy dress competition as faux Beatles. We took it in turns to hold the guitar. Neither of us could play it, mind. Another school friend Kevin told me about what was called a ‘pirate’ radio station, Radio Caroline, some time in 1964. Unfortunately, the only radio we had at home was in the kitchen, and I quickly tired of sitting on my own there, in the cold, trying to catch some crackly, interference-drenched pop music. But it was a further sign of the times, and one that I was to embrace not long after.

I got packed off to boarding school near Ipswich later that year. The only saving grace with that was its proximity to the Thames estuary and the Essex coast, as the following year a whole bunch of pirate radio stations became available to us. We didn’t bother too much with Caroline, but favoured Radio City, with its 5 by 4 show and its alternating Stones and Beatles tracks, and mostly Radio London, aka Big L. That kept us all in touch with what was happening in the pop world, and we were fine with that. Back home, I had to be satisfied with Radio 270 which was transmitted from a boat off Scarborough. And I still didn’t have a record player. After that nice Tony Benn’s Marine Broadcasting Offences Act became law in 1967, which outlawed our favourite stations, we had to resort to Radio Veronica which was broadcast in Dutch: I can still remember the advertising jingle for Stimorol chewing gum. Sadly it was no substitute really, so we had to succumb to BBC’s Radio 1. Eventually, my pop sensibilities were later satisfied by Radio North Sea International, which curiously morphed into Radio Caroline in the weeks leading up to the 1970 General Election, reminding its listeners that it was Labour that had introduced the bill that killed off the pirates. But something else had been happening to me. I was growing up, and increasingly began to ignore the contents of the singles charts. For a few years, other kids at school started to turn up with LPs. I remember listening to Cream’s DISRAELI GEARS in a friend’s study, and was completely amazed. I had never heard an album all the way through before. Barring the throwaway MOTHER’S LAMENT, every track seemed to be a wonder to me. This was probably in 1968. So, from then on, my ears started to be opened by the likes of UMMAGUMMA, ON THE THRESHOLD OF A DREAM, THE LEAST WE CAN DO IS WAVE TO EACH OTHER, STONEDHENGE, SMASH HITS, TONS OF SOBS and many others. Finally, in September 1969, I got a record player for my 16th birthday. Hurrah! I rushed down to Hamilton’s Music Store in Middlesbrough and purchased DISRAELI GEARS (something I have in common with Mick Jones, as that was also his first album bought) and Blind Faith’s eponymous debut, for just 37/6 each (that’s £1.87½ in new money). At least by not having a record player until I was 16 meant there were no skeletons in my closet regarding the first record I bought: the first single was Bowie’s SPACE ODDITY, although as I was in the habit of buying MAD magazine in those days, I’d acquired (1968?), courtesy of a particular MAD annual, a square cardboard ‘single’ with a laminated side purporting to be Alfred E Neuman ‘vocalising’, which was, in actual fact, a Sam Bobrick instrumental called IT’S A GAS, featuring a whole load of belching as the sole vocal input (but also featuring King Curtis on sax): these days you can even find this on Youtube. Back to the subject of radio, in early 1970 I had started to listen to a free radio station (decidedly not pirate, as there were no commercials) called Radio Geronimo, which initially was only broadcast from midnight until three in the morning on a Friday, from a site in Monte Carlo! This was literally a case of waking up to listen to my transistor radio (a Binatone, since you ask, which laughingly proclaimed “Stereo” and “Hi-Fi” in tiny tin plates on the front) nestling under my pillow. Radio Geronimo specialised in album tracks only, though it made an exception for CSN&Y’s OHIO when that came out – well, it was a protest song. The station also championed the short-lived Balls supergroup’s single FIGHT FOR MY COUNTRY, probably because Balls had been masterminded by The Move’s manager Tony Secunda and Stones’ producer Jimmy Miller, who were also partners in the Radio Geronimo venture: the Stones’ “lascivious mouth” logo, which was to shortly appear, was an adaptation of Balls’ own logo, so there you go. I ended up sending off for a poster, and T-shirt (still got them), though stopping short from joining the Geronimo Society, as that was far too expensive for me. Incidentally, an offshoot from the this venture, going under the name of Geronimo Starship, was responsible for recording the 1971 Glastonbury Fayre, and putting out a, now, very rare triple album of the event, REVELATIONS, although the album doesn’t seem to contain any product recorded at the event, relying on donations from the various artists from other occasions. However, stuff from The Fugs, or The Last Poets was pretty extreme for me, so I’d occasionally stray from Geronimo’s frequency at 205 metres, to Radio Luxembourg’s 208. At this time, David ‘Kid’ Jensen had a show on from midnight. One time I tuned in, and he announced a song by someone called The Steve Miller Band, called SONG FOR OUR ANCESTORS. From its intro, my imagination assumed images of dinosaur calls before the music kicked in. It was years later that I discovered that the ‘dinosaur calls’ were in fact ships’ foghorns sounding off San Francisco! You can credit the mighty Binatone for my misinterpretation. Jensen was also responsible for me hearing Bowie’s SPACE ODDITY, resulting in that first single purchase. During the summer of 1969, Jensen had also taken to playing tracks from the forthcoming Blind Faith album, and I managed to record some of these on my ‘Miny’ reel-to-reel tape recorder my Dad had brought back from the Far East. My Dad was employed by HM’s Royal Navy, which goes some way to explaining my geographical childhood. He had to do one last ‘tour’ before his ‘de-mob’: he’d been working in the recruiting office in Hartlepool since 1961, which is why the family ended up back in Middlesbrough, though that was indeed my Mum’s family home. Apparently, when given the choice of a guitar or a puppy for my birthday in 1965, I had foregone the long-standing wish of that guitar for the puppy that would help tide my Mum and little sister over while Dad was away (remember I was at boarding school by this time). I think it was a no-brainer, actually, but because I’d made that choice, my Nan got me a guitar that Christmas, as a special treat. Of course, it was only an acoustic one, an “Eko”, but everyone’s got to start somewhere. I initially got little further than being able to bang out single string melody lines, or riffs: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich’s HOLD TIGHT springs to mind as a pretty simple one (all of three notes) that I quickly mastered. While Dad was still away, I ambitiously decided that I wanted to bang the drums, and optimistically told Mum a kit was what I’d like for my birthday. There was no way my Mum could have afforded a full kit, but she did get me a pair of drumsticks, bless her. I even toyed with the idea of bass, when I managed to acquire a catalogue for Bell’s Music Shop in Surbiton, which was choc full of sexy four string, as well as six-string instruments. When Dad came back from the Far East, he came bearing gifts, including the aforementioned ‘Miny’. I think it was a variation on the ‘Sony’ brand which was considerably less ubiquitous then than it is now. However, I learned how to ‘jam’ the tape machine in ‘record’ mode, and by stuffing the microphone down the Eko’s sound-hole, I effectively created an amplifier. Oh, wonder of wonders! My Dad ended up back in uniform, though this time it was for HM’s Prison Service. In 1970 he got posted to what was then Feltham Borstal, and I took the opportunity to quit boarding school, and take up my A levels at the local comprehensive: Feltham is on the edge of London, you see. Finally, I became resident somewhere in striking distance of where the music was happening.

So, in the summer of 1970, I found myself wandering wide-eyed amongst the great unwashed at the Pink Floyd Hyde Park gig, after the disappointment of missing both the Blind Faith and Stones Hyde Park gigs in 1969 (while the Stones In The Park video has always been readily available, the only footage I ever saw of the Blind Faith gig was actually within a one-off TV play entitled Season Of The Witch, in which Julie Driscoll played a girl newly-arrived in the capital, and ending up dossing in squats, or something, but which did feature a scene where she goes off wandering through Hyde Park during that free concert: more recently, of course, the full gig has been available on DVD, since 2005, so everything comes to he who waits, or so it would seem). Then, amazingly, I got to go to the Isle Of Wight Festival. The new friends I made at Feltham School all seemed to be of a similar mind to me as far as music was concerned, so I started going to all manner of gigs locally, and in town. Because I’d started in such an auspicious fashion, I had written down all the bands I’d seen. I saw no reason to not continue to do so, and I’m glad I did, because without that I could not have been in a position to write this in the first place. In 1971, I and my school chums started to go to the BBC studios in Regent’s Street, aka the Paris Theatre, where initially John Peel hosted his In Concert recordings. We came on a bit rent-a-mob within the conservative environment of the BBC, creating something of an atmosphere, previously lacking, and Peel loved us for it. A number of these concerts have been subsequently released, so if you get to hear one from that period with what sounds like a rowdy bunch in-house, that’s likely to be us. We styled ourselves as The John Peel Boot Boys in the manner of football supporters at the time, with the obviously ironic non-violent emphasis, and the great man took to giving us name-checks in his Disc & Music Echo and Sounds columns. Peel stopped hosting the show at the end of 1971, coming back only for his mates, the Faces. I dare say that had Peel been able to complete his Margrave Of The Marshes autobiography there may have been a line or two describing the mayhem caused by the Boot Boys on a regular basis at The Paris, but as it was, his wife Sheila had to deal with the period beyond his US sojourn, and indeed his subsequent musical career, and sadly overlooked the possibility. I did meet her once or twice, and still maintain that she is a lovely lady, despite this glaring omission. Afterwards it was Bob Harris, Pete Drummond, or Stuart Black calling the compere shots, but a number of us kept in touch with Peel for some years. It was around this time that my latent rebellious streak manifested itself when the Headmaster at Feltham decided to implement a school rule that forbade blokes to grow their hair “longer than the top of the shirt collar”. We had a sit-in, five of us (all Boot Boys, naturally) were suspended, and we held a protest march to the local Education Authority offices in Hounslow, all of which made us front page news in the Middlesex Chronicle and the Surrey Comet. Phew! The school finally climbed down and let us long-hairs keep it, as long as we wore a headband or something to keep hair away from danger in science classes, bunsen burners mainly. Me and Martin were doing Geology, so had to keep our hair away from fossils and rocks. That lasted about five minutes. I finally got an electric guitar in 1974. Thanks Mum, but it was a Les Paul (copy) I wanted, not a Telecaster (copy). Never mind, beggars can’t be choosers. I’d graduated on to chords, to a degree, but saw myself as a lead guitarist, however minimal. Creatively, I guess I got little further than jamming with friends and annoying their parents. I did manage to write a couple of songs which were wholly derivative, and were never meant for external use. No, if you were going to do anything music-wise, you had to be damn good. In 1976, I remember hiring a studio in Shepherd’s Bush with a mate, Diljit, on bass and his brother-in-law on drums: after three hours, we could do a passable imitation of SUFFRAGETTE CITY. No, I couldn’t see it really happening. Then something weird happened. I’d started to eschew the long meandering rock rubbish that was prevalent at the time, and through seeing bands like Dr Feelgood, and The 101’ers and listening to albums by Graham Parker, Nils Lofgren, and Robert Palmer, I was appreciating short songs, with insistent hooks, and not necessarily flashy guitar. And then came The Sex Pistols, and everything that accompanied them. To a person who had long regretted not having been old enough (let alone not in the right place) to have been involved in the 60s Beat and R&B scene, the whole Punk thing was a godsend. I saw the bulk of the bands involved in the second half of 1976, and the whole thing was pretty small scale from the outset, so I and my friends felt like we were involved in something a little exclusive. Obviously this was not to last, as it exploded at the expense of Bill Grundy on TV, and became big news. But it led some of us to produce a fanzine, Situation 3, which, though short-lived, got the creative juices flowing. A couple of guys I’d jammed with invited me along to rehearse: they had a guy called Gary that could write songs, had hair like Malcolm McLaren, and who had worked at Watney’s Brewery in Mortlake with Sex Pistols’ drummer Paul Cook. They needed someone who could actually string a few lead breaks together. I was in a band!

Radio as an influence had more or less petered out. Barring John Peel, Radio 1’s output was derisory. London’s first commercial ‘pop’ station, Capital, had arrived with much trumpeting, but it was no better than Radio 1, with the extra aggravation of adverts. The Clash’s CAPITAL RADIO was to sum up my, and others, frustration with this some years later. Now it was the musical press that became more and more influential, as the 70s wore on. There’s an argument that New Musical Express fomented the whole punk thing, usually bandied about by provincials that weren’t able to partake of the capital city’s music scene, but the NME was at least giving us names of bands to see, and as a result, yes, we got involved with the nascent scene to varying degrees. By the beginning of 1977, as mentioned above, I got involved with a few friends in writing and distributing a fanzine, Situation 3. My involvement was limited due to having got involved with a band, but when able, I, together with the others, could be found outside, haranguing punters leaving venues like The Nashville, or The Red Cow, trying to flog our cheaply photocopied product for the bargain price of 10 pence. It was shortlived, the reason for which I describe in the book, but it was fun: the others had hired a stall in Portobello Road to sell it on Saturdays, and got to know Geoff Travis of Rough Trade, which in turn led to him distributing it elsewhere in the land. We’d all painted a red band around the left arm of our leather jackets, so we kind of looked like a gang. All that did was get us thrown out of a party when a bunch of rugby players took exception. Worse, my leather was merely a brown bomber, not even a biker’s jacket. Nul points for cred value. I did eventually get a decent biker jacket, but ended up lending it to Gary, our singer, to let him wear it in. He left it in the Bierkeller in Richmond one night after going out for a drink with my sister, so I never saw it again.

The band initially used to rehearse in a room adjoining a pub called The Lamb, overlooking the Grand Union Canal in Southall. The only reason I mention it is because there was a fish’n’chip shop in the adjoining parade, where there was a punky looking bloke working there Saturdays, all eye make-up and coloured hair. He ended up being featured in the Daily Mirror in an article on these new-fangled punks: trouble was, he was a Soul Boy. In those early days, both tribes looked quite similar: when we were down in Cornwall, Gary nearly got into a fight in a pub in St Ives when he advised some punky looking sorts that the jukebox was good, having Ramones and Stranglers stuff available, but they turned out to be Soul Boys. The band got our first gig thanks to me getting to know Arturo Bassick, prior to him joining The Lurkers, with us supporting them at what was then The White Lion in Putney. I learned the fact from the NME’s gig guide, the night before. We began life as The Zeros, then had to change to The Takeoffs, and ultimately became The Ekoes, until the wheels came off for a few years. On a trip to Simon King Sounds music shop in Tolworth with Big G, our drummer, I’d spotted a Shaftesbury that looked a lot like a Rickenbacker for £55. Mum came to my rescue with the money, making up for the earlier poor choice of the Tele copy. Good girl! As far as amplification went, I ditched the Sound City Concord, and went for a Vox AC30, which was a stylish move, methinks. It was a treble-boost one as well, which sadly went missing from our rehearsal studios in Shepherds Bush over one Christmas break. I believe Girlschool had been in over the period, but I’d hate to think it was anything to do with them. The sum of our achievements was to be a demo that we recorded at Fair Deal Studios in Hayes. Some of us reformed with renewed personnel and vigour as The Form, after a hiatus of nearly two years. I upgraded my replacement AC30 to an HH 100 watt beast that I bought from little Nick, when he opted for a Marshall set-up. I’d found a Les Paul copy in a local junk shop in St Margarets, Cheyne Gallery, going for £25, and rushed home to get the necessary. We got some management, quite a few gigs, and a new demo pressed up as a limited edition single, which, by shamelessly trading on that old association with John Peel, found its way onto that previously maligned Radio 1. Then we just kind of went our separate ways, and it had taken all of nine months: I believe that we had good material, and were a good live act, and wish we’d had a chance to record that later material. Still, c’est la vie.

In 1985, a bunch of computer programmers from work asked if I’d be interested in helping them out, as their band Blank Generation were undergoing a ‘restructure’ as the drummer was leaving to pursue a married career, and the guitarist was taking over on the skins. Thus, I started an eight year association with a band that never really was more than a hobby. If The Form had had aspirations, then The Blanks had very little. We were all in good jobs, relatively well paid, so there was never any suggestion that we discard these in order to become professional musicians, something which had certainly reared its head in The Ekoes’ days. No, we were content to just play the occasional gig, and go into the studio every two years or so, to record a few numbers. Eventually, I approached the age of 40, and decided to hang up my plectrum. I’d got bored with the limit of ambition being to get a gig in Reading (‘cos that’s where most of them lived) on a Friday night.

All in all, things were quite stale up until 1988. My car radio was tuned to Capital, as the best of a bad bunch, for the journeys to and from work. Chris Tarrant was vaguely amusing as a DJ, although the musical output was utter tosh. The last straw came when, on holiday, he was replaced by Jeremy Beadle. I’d heard that a new local radio station had been pushing out test transmissions for a few weeks, and had remembered the frequency. I admit my liability during my haste to retune the car radio while negotiating the Sunbury Cross roundabout on my way to work, but I was desperate. Fortunately, I quickly found Greater London Radio, and was rewarded with three consecutive numbers that not only did I like, but that I owned. It was like listening to my own jukebox. Hurrah, a decent radio station at last! For the next 12 years, I listened to nothing else, and it seriously informed my record collection, as you’d hear stuff there that you’d never hear elsewhere. Plus they did sessions that gave chances to new bands. Basically what a music radio station worth its salt should be about. Sadly, in their misguided wisdom, the BBC pulled the plug in 2000, and rebranded the station as London Live, a rolling news, meaningless phone in, talk talk talk radio travesty, with absolutely minimal music.

After another fallow period where I more or less went introspective about music, I discovered the Mojo4music website, associated with the Mojo music magazine, which I’d been religiously buying since the first issue. On the website, a message-board was introduced in May 2001. It was my first experience of any kind of internet-based networking, so for a while I just looked and listened, or rather read. Gradually I started to join in, and soon felt in my element, trading info, opinions, and ultimately music with a whole bunch of like-minded cyber freaks. This again re-ignited my passion for music, though that was probably more for recorded work rather than live gigs, but one does beget the other. Due to the fear that the Mojo site was likely to be closed down (Mojo’s sister magazine Q had a similar message-board which was indeed curtailed), an enterprising chap from North Yorkshire set up a new site, to which we (mostly) gravitated almost at once. That is the Black Cat Bone site, and over the years a number of members have gone from being cyber pals to real life chums, and in some cases, even more. We have periodic get-togethers, usually involving a fair deal of drinking and merriment, and quite often with a musical bent (jolly-ups organised in the US have centred on cities of musical pedigree, such as Memphis, Chicago, Nashville and New Orleans). And we’ve swopped an awful lot of music with each other. I have always regarded it as being rather like being with your buddies from school who were the ones into the music rather than the ones solely into football or other interests.

So, over 40 years of music, dictated and influenced by friends, radio, press, and internet, have led to this ‘calendar’. I remain no expert, but still a most interested bystander, leading to this veritable cornucopia of trivia, facts, memories, odds’n’sods, and opinions based on, and associated with, all the performances I’ve seen. And while it can be argued that any number of professional music journalists could have produced something along these lines, it should be remembered that I’m merely a punter: I elected to attend everything I describe herein.

In 2013, I answered the call for volunteers to work on a Lottery-funded project to celebrate the musical heritage of Eel Pie Island. That led to interviewing survivors, editing interviews, a bit of filming, proof reading of a new book and participation in the best attended exhibition ever held at Orleans House. Now I’m effectively the admin bloke on www.eelpieislandmusic.com and I compiled a roll-call of performers who appeared, well, at least those I can offer some sort of proof that they did.
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Re: Share your Musical Life Story

Postby pcqgod » 03 Apr 2015, 16:38

Born the same month of the UT Tower shooting spree and the release of 'Revolver.' Music was present in my life from an early age but never a focus. First record I remember liking is "The Blue Tailed Fly," and my Dad would play records by Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Roger Miller, plus some classical. My mom liked Mexican/Latin American pop music and border music. I took piano lessons for a while. I enjoyed pop singles like "Billy Don't Be a Hero" in the 70's and would watch The Lawrence Welk Show and Hee-Haw with my Dad on the weekends and not think anything of it. "Rock around the Clock" became a favorite when it was the original theme for "Happy Days." When my older brothers came back from college they would bring back records by the Beatles and New Wave artists, and that got me more interested, but it took the murder of John Lennon for me to go out and finally buy a record (the Beatles Red Album followed by the Blue), and finally start listening regularly to the radio. Early favorite bands: Blondie, Queen, The Cars, Boston, Styx, then on to more new wave like Elvis Costello, Squeeze, XTC, Talking Heads and Split Enz within a year, plus other 60's groups like the Stones, Byrds, Kinks, Moody Blues and the Doors. By my high school years got into punk mainly as a reaction to all the obnoxious metal kids who would sneer at my music. There was always some hard rock that I liked, like Zep, Purple and AC/DC, but I thought bands like Motley Crue and their followers were just clowns. Hardcore punk led me to thrash metal. Liked some the early hip-hop rock crossover. Was fully into the punk/alternative/underground thing until the early 90's when grunge went commercial. I loathed bands like Pearl Jam and the bands that came after. I started listening to jazz and Zappa, returning to Crimson, Floyd and 70's arena rock, plus discovered Krautrock. Around that time (mid 90's) the whole Nuggets revival was reaching a peak. Tower records even had a separate garage section, so that was the start of my major interest in obscure 60's garage and psych. Discovered a love of mambo along with my jazz discoveries, and a love of Cajun music when I visited New Orleans in the early 2000's. Mom and Dad's early influence made an interest in classic country and border/Tejano sounds almost inevitable. Since the late 90's, I've just gone in all directions musically, trying my best to hear everything that is good out there. But sometimes I put on some Beatles and still think, now THIS is proper music!
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Re: Share your Musical Life Story

Postby Minnie the Minx » 04 Apr 2015, 15:28

Pete the Pick wrote:Not so much an expert, more an interested bystander…..

As a nipper, I was not overly fussed about music. Any cursory examination of the charts of the late 50s would, to my mind, explain why. My first musical memory seems to revolve around a guy called Don Lang, who I remember watching play trombone on the BBC’s first attempt at a Rock and Roll show called Six-Five Special: I would have been about five years old, and living in Cornwall. I now have no idea why the trombone appealed to me, but I remember asking for one for Christmas, and being completely disappointed in the plastic guitar that I did get. Culturally, my first exposure to the burgeoning youth culture yet to swamp the country also happened in Cornwall, Helston specifically. I remember a kid running up to a bunch of us and telling us that there were some Teds around the corner. We crept down the alley, and peered around the corner and, sure enough, there were three or four lads dressed in drainpipe trousers and drapes, hanging around the sweetie shop. We were so scared we didn’t dare venture any further! I was still about five years old, and this would have been in 1958, but I had no idea what those Teds would have been listening to, musically. I still had little interest in music: the parents always had the BBC Light Programme on, which obviously spouted little other than parents’ music. My mother was a big Sinatra fan, as well as Tony Bennett and all that sort of thing. My Dad was more big band, Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller and the like, and catering for both was what the BBC did in those days. I cannot pin down when I first heard of Elvis Presley, but fast-forward a few years, to 1962, and one of my best friends at my new school in Eston, Middlesbrough, was heavily into Cliff Richard. Try as he might, and he really did try, he could not convert me. And his family had a gramophone, and records! Another kid at school tried to do The Twist, the dance linked to Chubby Checker’s huge hit that year, but only succeeded in falling forward on his face. No, there was nothing out there that appealed. Good old BBC gave us a frugal amount of ‘pop’ music through Alan Freeman’s Pick Of The Pops on a Sunday afternoon, which at least played all the records in that week’s Top 20: I have memories of picnics with the family on the North York Moors listening to Ray Charles singing about taking these chains from his heart and setting him free, but there wasn’t much else I can recall. Everything changed in 1963. Somehow I’d missed PLEASE PLEASE ME when it was first released, but one day I heard it on radio and it blew my mind. Well, in a 1963 sort of way to a nine year old. The purveyors of this aural epiphany were a group called The Beatles. Then I recalled that FROM ME TO YOU was also by the aforementioned Beatles (my memory has always been that I got into PLEASE PLEASE ME after FROM ME TO YOU, even though it was released, and, indeed, a hit, before the latter: I can only assume that the DJ responsible was kind of reminding people that the people that brought you this current FROM ME TO YOU hit had previously brought you PLEASE PLEASE ME), and I thought “Hello? Something’s happening here”. I was hooked on music from that point on, though, unfortunately, my request to see The Beatles at Stockton Globe in December 1963 fell on deaf parents’ ears, and the closest I ever got to experiencing them was when my Mum took me to a cinema in Woking, when visiting my Nan, to see Hard Day’s Night when that came out, thus allowing me to experience at least the screaming: I understand that the date they played at Stockton coincided with news of John Kennedy’s assassination, so instead of seeing The Beatles, I came home from school to find my mother weeping, with all TV programmes suspended, with the BBC just playing mournful music. Well, after that, the groups and the hits came thick and fast. Exposure exploded, comparatively speaking. A magazine called Fabulous started, and I got the first issue because it had The Beatles on the front, and a colour photo of Heinz on the back cover: I wasn’t into Heinz in any shape or form - it was the beautiful cherry coloured shiny Gretsch guitar that he was cuddling! On TV, the BBC now gave us Top Of The Pops, a visual snapshot of the ‘Hit Parade’. Ann, who lived three doors down, shocked me when she admitted preferring The Rolling Stones to The Beatles. There was so much suddenly out there, but radio was, by and large, restricted to Saturday morning’s Saturday Club and Sunday morning’s Easybeat. In hindsight, there were so many groups that never got any airplay, but in today’s lucrative world of retrospective CD re-issues, thankfully a great deal of that product is now available. So it is now 1964, and I still haven’t got a record player. I dreamed of having my own electric guitar, and so wanted my parents to come back from Saturday afternoon shopping with that red guitar that used to hang in the window of a pawn shop that they had to go past to get into Middlesbrough. They never did. There was a competition that appeared on the back of a Corn Flakes packet, to win a Burns electric guitar “as used by recording artists The Ramblers” (I think that was their name), who I’d of course never heard of, and of whom never, ever, seen any evidence of said recording, though now Vernon Joynson’s revamped Tapestry of Delights (2014) rejoices in an entry for the aforementioned Ramblers, citing them as a Joe Meek project – for their seeming one and only recording. Naturally, I did not win the guitar, but got a signed glossy photo of the mythical Ramblers. I had to make do with my bastardised tennis racket, for which I created two cardboard cut-out cutaways, intended to at least resemble my beloved, unattainable Gretsch, with a bunch of rubber bands cut and stretched to resemble strings. My friend Steven, the Cliffophile, at least had a guitar, albeit an acoustic one. We painted a gold scratch plate on it, to make it look vaguely like it was an electric guitar, brushed our hair forward and entered a school fancy dress competition as faux Beatles. We took it in turns to hold the guitar. Neither of us could play it, mind. Another school friend Kevin told me about what was called a ‘pirate’ radio station, Radio Caroline, some time in 1964. Unfortunately, the only radio we had at home was in the kitchen, and I quickly tired of sitting on my own there, in the cold, trying to catch some crackly, interference-drenched pop music. But it was a further sign of the times, and one that I was to embrace not long after.

I got packed off to boarding school near Ipswich later that year. The only saving grace with that was its proximity to the Thames estuary and the Essex coast, as the following year a whole bunch of pirate radio stations became available to us. We didn’t bother too much with Caroline, but favoured Radio City, with its 5 by 4 show and its alternating Stones and Beatles tracks, and mostly Radio London, aka Big L. That kept us all in touch with what was happening in the pop world, and we were fine with that. Back home, I had to be satisfied with Radio 270 which was transmitted from a boat off Scarborough. And I still didn’t have a record player. After that nice Tony Benn’s Marine Broadcasting Offences Act became law in 1967, which outlawed our favourite stations, we had to resort to Radio Veronica which was broadcast in Dutch: I can still remember the advertising jingle for Stimorol chewing gum. Sadly it was no substitute really, so we had to succumb to BBC’s Radio 1. Eventually, my pop sensibilities were later satisfied by Radio North Sea International, which curiously morphed into Radio Caroline in the weeks leading up to the 1970 General Election, reminding its listeners that it was Labour that had introduced the bill that killed off the pirates. But something else had been happening to me. I was growing up, and increasingly began to ignore the contents of the singles charts. For a few years, other kids at school started to turn up with LPs. I remember listening to Cream’s DISRAELI GEARS in a friend’s study, and was completely amazed. I had never heard an album all the way through before. Barring the throwaway MOTHER’S LAMENT, every track seemed to be a wonder to me. This was probably in 1968. So, from then on, my ears started to be opened by the likes of UMMAGUMMA, ON THE THRESHOLD OF A DREAM, THE LEAST WE CAN DO IS WAVE TO EACH OTHER, STONEDHENGE, SMASH HITS, TONS OF SOBS and many others. Finally, in September 1969, I got a record player for my 16th birthday. Hurrah! I rushed down to Hamilton’s Music Store in Middlesbrough and purchased DISRAELI GEARS (something I have in common with Mick Jones, as that was also his first album bought) and Blind Faith’s eponymous debut, for just 37/6 each (that’s £1.87½ in new money). At least by not having a record player until I was 16 meant there were no skeletons in my closet regarding the first record I bought: the first single was Bowie’s SPACE ODDITY, although as I was in the habit of buying MAD magazine in those days, I’d acquired (1968?), courtesy of a particular MAD annual, a square cardboard ‘single’ with a laminated side purporting to be Alfred E Neuman ‘vocalising’, which was, in actual fact, a Sam Bobrick instrumental called IT’S A GAS, featuring a whole load of belching as the sole vocal input (but also featuring King Curtis on sax): these days you can even find this on Youtube. Back to the subject of radio, in early 1970 I had started to listen to a free radio station (decidedly not pirate, as there were no commercials) called Radio Geronimo, which initially was only broadcast from midnight until three in the morning on a Friday, from a site in Monte Carlo! This was literally a case of waking up to listen to my transistor radio (a Binatone, since you ask, which laughingly proclaimed “Stereo” and “Hi-Fi” in tiny tin plates on the front) nestling under my pillow. Radio Geronimo specialised in album tracks only, though it made an exception for CSN&Y’s OHIO when that came out – well, it was a protest song. The station also championed the short-lived Balls supergroup’s single FIGHT FOR MY COUNTRY, probably because Balls had been masterminded by The Move’s manager Tony Secunda and Stones’ producer Jimmy Miller, who were also partners in the Radio Geronimo venture: the Stones’ “lascivious mouth” logo, which was to shortly appear, was an adaptation of Balls’ own logo, so there you go. I ended up sending off for a poster, and T-shirt (still got them), though stopping short from joining the Geronimo Society, as that was far too expensive for me. Incidentally, an offshoot from the this venture, going under the name of Geronimo Starship, was responsible for recording the 1971 Glastonbury Fayre, and putting out a, now, very rare triple album of the event, REVELATIONS, although the album doesn’t seem to contain any product recorded at the event, relying on donations from the various artists from other occasions. However, stuff from The Fugs, or The Last Poets was pretty extreme for me, so I’d occasionally stray from Geronimo’s frequency at 205 metres, to Radio Luxembourg’s 208. At this time, David ‘Kid’ Jensen had a show on from midnight. One time I tuned in, and he announced a song by someone called The Steve Miller Band, called SONG FOR OUR ANCESTORS. From its intro, my imagination assumed images of dinosaur calls before the music kicked in. It was years later that I discovered that the ‘dinosaur calls’ were in fact ships’ foghorns sounding off San Francisco! You can credit the mighty Binatone for my misinterpretation. Jensen was also responsible for me hearing Bowie’s SPACE ODDITY, resulting in that first single purchase. During the summer of 1969, Jensen had also taken to playing tracks from the forthcoming Blind Faith album, and I managed to record some of these on my ‘Miny’ reel-to-reel tape recorder my Dad had brought back from the Far East. My Dad was employed by HM’s Royal Navy, which goes some way to explaining my geographical childhood. He had to do one last ‘tour’ before his ‘de-mob’: he’d been working in the recruiting office in Hartlepool since 1961, which is why the family ended up back in Middlesbrough, though that was indeed my Mum’s family home. Apparently, when given the choice of a guitar or a puppy for my birthday in 1965, I had foregone the long-standing wish of that guitar for the puppy that would help tide my Mum and little sister over while Dad was away (remember I was at boarding school by this time). I think it was a no-brainer, actually, but because I’d made that choice, my Nan got me a guitar that Christmas, as a special treat. Of course, it was only an acoustic one, an “Eko”, but everyone’s got to start somewhere. I initially got little further than being able to bang out single string melody lines, or riffs: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich’s HOLD TIGHT springs to mind as a pretty simple one (all of three notes) that I quickly mastered. While Dad was still away, I ambitiously decided that I wanted to bang the drums, and optimistically told Mum a kit was what I’d like for my birthday. There was no way my Mum could have afforded a full kit, but she did get me a pair of drumsticks, bless her. I even toyed with the idea of bass, when I managed to acquire a catalogue for Bell’s Music Shop in Surbiton, which was choc full of sexy four string, as well as six-string instruments. When Dad came back from the Far East, he came bearing gifts, including the aforementioned ‘Miny’. I think it was a variation on the ‘Sony’ brand which was considerably less ubiquitous then than it is now. However, I learned how to ‘jam’ the tape machine in ‘record’ mode, and by stuffing the microphone down the Eko’s sound-hole, I effectively created an amplifier. Oh, wonder of wonders! My Dad ended up back in uniform, though this time it was for HM’s Prison Service. In 1970 he got posted to what was then Feltham Borstal, and I took the opportunity to quit boarding school, and take up my A levels at the local comprehensive: Feltham is on the edge of London, you see. Finally, I became resident somewhere in striking distance of where the music was happening.

So, in the summer of 1970, I found myself wandering wide-eyed amongst the great unwashed at the Pink Floyd Hyde Park gig, after the disappointment of missing both the Blind Faith and Stones Hyde Park gigs in 1969 (while the Stones In The Park video has always been readily available, the only footage I ever saw of the Blind Faith gig was actually within a one-off TV play entitled Season Of The Witch, in which Julie Driscoll played a girl newly-arrived in the capital, and ending up dossing in squats, or something, but which did feature a scene where she goes off wandering through Hyde Park during that free concert: more recently, of course, the full gig has been available on DVD, since 2005, so everything comes to he who waits, or so it would seem). Then, amazingly, I got to go to the Isle Of Wight Festival. The new friends I made at Feltham School all seemed to be of a similar mind to me as far as music was concerned, so I started going to all manner of gigs locally, and in town. Because I’d started in such an auspicious fashion, I had written down all the bands I’d seen. I saw no reason to not continue to do so, and I’m glad I did, because without that I could not have been in a position to write this in the first place. In 1971, I and my school chums started to go to the BBC studios in Regent’s Street, aka the Paris Theatre, where initially John Peel hosted his In Concert recordings. We came on a bit rent-a-mob within the conservative environment of the BBC, creating something of an atmosphere, previously lacking, and Peel loved us for it. A number of these concerts have been subsequently released, so if you get to hear one from that period with what sounds like a rowdy bunch in-house, that’s likely to be us. We styled ourselves as The John Peel Boot Boys in the manner of football supporters at the time, with the obviously ironic non-violent emphasis, and the great man took to giving us name-checks in his Disc & Music Echo and Sounds columns. Peel stopped hosting the show at the end of 1971, coming back only for his mates, the Faces. I dare say that had Peel been able to complete his Margrave Of The Marshes autobiography there may have been a line or two describing the mayhem caused by the Boot Boys on a regular basis at The Paris, but as it was, his wife Sheila had to deal with the period beyond his US sojourn, and indeed his subsequent musical career, and sadly overlooked the possibility. I did meet her once or twice, and still maintain that she is a lovely lady, despite this glaring omission. Afterwards it was Bob Harris, Pete Drummond, or Stuart Black calling the compere shots, but a number of us kept in touch with Peel for some years. It was around this time that my latent rebellious streak manifested itself when the Headmaster at Feltham decided to implement a school rule that forbade blokes to grow their hair “longer than the top of the shirt collar”. We had a sit-in, five of us (all Boot Boys, naturally) were suspended, and we held a protest march to the local Education Authority offices in Hounslow, all of which made us front page news in the Middlesex Chronicle and the Surrey Comet. Phew! The school finally climbed down and let us long-hairs keep it, as long as we wore a headband or something to keep hair away from danger in science classes, bunsen burners mainly. Me and Martin were doing Geology, so had to keep our hair away from fossils and rocks. That lasted about five minutes. I finally got an electric guitar in 1974. Thanks Mum, but it was a Les Paul (copy) I wanted, not a Telecaster (copy). Never mind, beggars can’t be choosers. I’d graduated on to chords, to a degree, but saw myself as a lead guitarist, however minimal. Creatively, I guess I got little further than jamming with friends and annoying their parents. I did manage to write a couple of songs which were wholly derivative, and were never meant for external use. No, if you were going to do anything music-wise, you had to be damn good. In 1976, I remember hiring a studio in Shepherd’s Bush with a mate, Diljit, on bass and his brother-in-law on drums: after three hours, we could do a passable imitation of SUFFRAGETTE CITY. No, I couldn’t see it really happening. Then something weird happened. I’d started to eschew the long meandering rock rubbish that was prevalent at the time, and through seeing bands like Dr Feelgood, and The 101’ers and listening to albums by Graham Parker, Nils Lofgren, and Robert Palmer, I was appreciating short songs, with insistent hooks, and not necessarily flashy guitar. And then came The Sex Pistols, and everything that accompanied them. To a person who had long regretted not having been old enough (let alone not in the right place) to have been involved in the 60s Beat and R&B scene, the whole Punk thing was a godsend. I saw the bulk of the bands involved in the second half of 1976, and the whole thing was pretty small scale from the outset, so I and my friends felt like we were involved in something a little exclusive. Obviously this was not to last, as it exploded at the expense of Bill Grundy on TV, and became big news. But it led some of us to produce a fanzine, Situation 3, which, though short-lived, got the creative juices flowing. A couple of guys I’d jammed with invited me along to rehearse: they had a guy called Gary that could write songs, had hair like Malcolm McLaren, and who had worked at Watney’s Brewery in Mortlake with Sex Pistols’ drummer Paul Cook. They needed someone who could actually string a few lead breaks together. I was in a band!

Radio as an influence had more or less petered out. Barring John Peel, Radio 1’s output was derisory. London’s first commercial ‘pop’ station, Capital, had arrived with much trumpeting, but it was no better than Radio 1, with the extra aggravation of adverts. The Clash’s CAPITAL RADIO was to sum up my, and others, frustration with this some years later. Now it was the musical press that became more and more influential, as the 70s wore on. There’s an argument that New Musical Express fomented the whole punk thing, usually bandied about by provincials that weren’t able to partake of the capital city’s music scene, but the NME was at least giving us names of bands to see, and as a result, yes, we got involved with the nascent scene to varying degrees. By the beginning of 1977, as mentioned above, I got involved with a few friends in writing and distributing a fanzine, Situation 3. My involvement was limited due to having got involved with a band, but when able, I, together with the others, could be found outside, haranguing punters leaving venues like The Nashville, or The Red Cow, trying to flog our cheaply photocopied product for the bargain price of 10 pence. It was shortlived, the reason for which I describe in the book, but it was fun: the others had hired a stall in Portobello Road to sell it on Saturdays, and got to know Geoff Travis of Rough Trade, which in turn led to him distributing it elsewhere in the land. We’d all painted a red band around the left arm of our leather jackets, so we kind of looked like a gang. All that did was get us thrown out of a party when a bunch of rugby players took exception. Worse, my leather was merely a brown bomber, not even a biker’s jacket. Nul points for cred value. I did eventually get a decent biker jacket, but ended up lending it to Gary, our singer, to let him wear it in. He left it in the Bierkeller in Richmond one night after going out for a drink with my sister, so I never saw it again.

The band initially used to rehearse in a room adjoining a pub called The Lamb, overlooking the Grand Union Canal in Southall. The only reason I mention it is because there was a fish’n’chip shop in the adjoining parade, where there was a punky looking bloke working there Saturdays, all eye make-up and coloured hair. He ended up being featured in the Daily Mirror in an article on these new-fangled punks: trouble was, he was a Soul Boy. In those early days, both tribes looked quite similar: when we were down in Cornwall, Gary nearly got into a fight in a pub in St Ives when he advised some punky looking sorts that the jukebox was good, having Ramones and Stranglers stuff available, but they turned out to be Soul Boys. The band got our first gig thanks to me getting to know Arturo Bassick, prior to him joining The Lurkers, with us supporting them at what was then The White Lion in Putney. I learned the fact from the NME’s gig guide, the night before. We began life as The Zeros, then had to change to The Takeoffs, and ultimately became The Ekoes, until the wheels came off for a few years. On a trip to Simon King Sounds music shop in Tolworth with Big G, our drummer, I’d spotted a Shaftesbury that looked a lot like a Rickenbacker for £55. Mum came to my rescue with the money, making up for the earlier poor choice of the Tele copy. Good girl! As far as amplification went, I ditched the Sound City Concord, and went for a Vox AC30, which was a stylish move, methinks. It was a treble-boost one as well, which sadly went missing from our rehearsal studios in Shepherds Bush over one Christmas break. I believe Girlschool had been in over the period, but I’d hate to think it was anything to do with them. The sum of our achievements was to be a demo that we recorded at Fair Deal Studios in Hayes. Some of us reformed with renewed personnel and vigour as The Form, after a hiatus of nearly two years. I upgraded my replacement AC30 to an HH 100 watt beast that I bought from little Nick, when he opted for a Marshall set-up. I’d found a Les Paul copy in a local junk shop in St Margarets, Cheyne Gallery, going for £25, and rushed home to get the necessary. We got some management, quite a few gigs, and a new demo pressed up as a limited edition single, which, by shamelessly trading on that old association with John Peel, found its way onto that previously maligned Radio 1. Then we just kind of went our separate ways, and it had taken all of nine months: I believe that we had good material, and were a good live act, and wish we’d had a chance to record that later material. Still, c’est la vie.

In 1985, a bunch of computer programmers from work asked if I’d be interested in helping them out, as their band Blank Generation were undergoing a ‘restructure’ as the drummer was leaving to pursue a married career, and the guitarist was taking over on the skins. Thus, I started an eight year association with a band that never really was more than a hobby. If The Form had had aspirations, then The Blanks had very little. We were all in good jobs, relatively well paid, so there was never any suggestion that we discard these in order to become professional musicians, something which had certainly reared its head in The Ekoes’ days. No, we were content to just play the occasional gig, and go into the studio every two years or so, to record a few numbers. Eventually, I approached the age of 40, and decided to hang up my plectrum. I’d got bored with the limit of ambition being to get a gig in Reading (‘cos that’s where most of them lived) on a Friday night.

All in all, things were quite stale up until 1988. My car radio was tuned to Capital, as the best of a bad bunch, for the journeys to and from work. Chris Tarrant was vaguely amusing as a DJ, although the musical output was utter tosh. The last straw came when, on holiday, he was replaced by Jeremy Beadle. I’d heard that a new local radio station had been pushing out test transmissions for a few weeks, and had remembered the frequency. I admit my liability during my haste to retune the car radio while negotiating the Sunbury Cross roundabout on my way to work, but I was desperate. Fortunately, I quickly found Greater London Radio, and was rewarded with three consecutive numbers that not only did I like, but that I owned. It was like listening to my own jukebox. Hurrah, a decent radio station at last! For the next 12 years, I listened to nothing else, and it seriously informed my record collection, as you’d hear stuff there that you’d never hear elsewhere. Plus they did sessions that gave chances to new bands. Basically what a music radio station worth its salt should be about. Sadly, in their misguided wisdom, the BBC pulled the plug in 2000, and rebranded the station as London Live, a rolling news, meaningless phone in, talk talk talk radio travesty, with absolutely minimal music.

After another fallow period where I more or less went introspective about music, I discovered the Mojo4music website, associated with the Mojo music magazine, which I’d been religiously buying since the first issue. On the website, a message-board was introduced in May 2001. It was my first experience of any kind of internet-based networking, so for a while I just looked and listened, or rather read. Gradually I started to join in, and soon felt in my element, trading info, opinions, and ultimately music with a whole bunch of like-minded cyber freaks. This again re-ignited my passion for music, though that was probably more for recorded work rather than live gigs, but one does beget the other. Due to the fear that the Mojo site was likely to be closed down (Mojo’s sister magazine Q had a similar message-board which was indeed curtailed), an enterprising chap from North Yorkshire set up a new site, to which we (mostly) gravitated almost at once. That is the Black Cat Bone site, and over the years a number of members have gone from being cyber pals to real life chums, and in some cases, even more. We have periodic get-togethers, usually involving a fair deal of drinking and merriment, and quite often with a musical bent (jolly-ups organised in the US have centred on cities of musical pedigree, such as Memphis, Chicago, Nashville and New Orleans). And we’ve swopped an awful lot of music with each other. I have always regarded it as being rather like being with your buddies from school who were the ones into the music rather than the ones solely into football or other interests.

So, over 40 years of music, dictated and influenced by friends, radio, press, and internet, have led to this ‘calendar’. I remain no expert, but still a most interested bystander, leading to this veritable cornucopia of trivia, facts, memories, odds’n’sods, and opinions based on, and associated with, all the performances I’ve seen. And while it can be argued that any number of professional music journalists could have produced something along these lines, it should be remembered that I’m merely a punter: I elected to attend everything I describe herein.

In 2013, I answered the call for volunteers to work on a Lottery-funded project to celebrate the musical heritage of Eel Pie Island. That led to interviewing survivors, editing interviews, a bit of filming, proof reading of a new book and participation in the best attended exhibition ever held at Orleans House. Now I’m effectively the admin bloke on http://www.eelpieislandmusic.com and I compiled a roll-call of performers who appeared, well, at least those I can offer some sort of proof that they did.



Mind bogglingly brilliant. Thanks Pete. I'm grinning like a loon having read that. Superb stuff.
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

Dr Markus wrote:
Someone in your line of work usually as their own man cave aka the shed we're they can potter around fixing stuff or something don't they?


Flower wrote:I just did a google search.

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Tom Waits For No One
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Re: Share your Musical Life Story

Postby Tom Waits For No One » 04 Apr 2015, 17:25

Smashing stuff Pete.
If I remember rightly you were the first person to generously share a 'cough' with me on the Mojo boards.
It's all your fault! :lol:

Roll on the full book!!
Give a shit or be a shit.

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naughty boy
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Re: Share your Musical Life Story

Postby naughty boy » 14 Dec 2018, 19:55

we need more
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.

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Jimbly
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Re: Share your Musical Life Story

Postby Jimbly » 17 Dec 2018, 00:03

Never seen this thread before. What a find.
So Long Kid, Take A Bow.

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Minnie the Minx
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Re: Share your Musical Life Story

Postby Minnie the Minx » 05 Jan 2019, 17:23

Jeemo wrote:Never seen this thread before. What a find.


Great isn’t it?
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

Dr Markus wrote:
Someone in your line of work usually as their own man cave aka the shed we're they can potter around fixing stuff or something don't they?


Flower wrote:I just did a google search.


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