In his excellent book Listen, Michel Faber asks many important questions about why we like the music we like. Here are just three...
At what age do kids start getting doctrinaire about music, and anxious about the social esteem and reproof that society attaches to various stylistic allegiances?
At what age do kids start to be dishonest about what they like and envious of others' taste?
I've written many times about how I swam against the tide when I was younger, taking an active dislike to songs many of my peers cherished. I even ran an unfinished series called Songs I Hated When I Was A Kid, which included records by The Smiths, Madness and The Pet Shop Boys, all artists I've since come to cherish.
For a child to love the Pussycat Dolls when all of her pals don't love them anymore requires almost superhuman self-confidence - especially since self-confidence tends to arise from doing stuff which inspires the approval of others. By contrast, the social rewards for pledging allegiance to the latest thing that everyone likes are instant and plentiful.
I'm not writing all this to champion my younger self as a free-thinking rebels with superhuman self-confidence... since clearly I was none of those things. I was probably just stubborn, contrary, and responding to neural pathways that had been formed by an early diet of Radio 2 and Reader's Digest box sets. My tastes changed as I got older... but I also became more aware of how other people judged them, to the point of apologising profusely for liking uncool things, something I've never quite got over.
Below you'll find an excerpt from one of those APAs I found in my mum's attic. This was written in the early 90s, a list of my 100 favourite songs sometime in my early 20s. Many of them won't surprise longtime readers of this blog, especially those of you who shake their head in despair at some of my trad-rock and Dad-rock faves...
That said, I'd stand by much of the Top Ten to this day. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to list my ten favourite songs, I'd be remiss if I didn't include The Power of Love, This Old Heart Of Mine, Thunder Road and There Is A Light. The other six might not make my Top Ten, but they'd still be hanging around in the Top 50. In the rest of the list you'll notice strong showings from the usual suspects: Bruce, Costello, Morrissey & The Smiths, Billy Joel, Jim & Meat... although the song choices occasionally surprise me (Souls of the Departed? Sleeping With The Television On?) here and elsewhere (of all the Stones songs I might have picked, I'm mystified by my choice of Fool To Cry). God knows how Eric Clapton got in there though.
Beyond that, there are some interesting choices, many of which have more to do with records I was listening to / discovering at the time rather than seriously considering a long term bet. I'd obviously recently bought Suzanne Vega's 99.9°F album and Bob Seger's The Fire Inside. A lot of the choices feel like Greatest Hits fodder (Bo' Rap, Hotel California and American Pie will no doubt cause much consternation among the cognoscenti), although a couple of the deep cuts show a shift away from obvious radio fare (the solitary REM choice is about the only moment where I can claim any degree of cool).
I'm quite disturbed by the lack of female artists - apart from Suzanne, who was clearly a current fave, all I can see is Kirsty (singing a Billy Bragg song), Patti Smith (Springsteen) and Bonnie Tyler (Steinman). I can put that down to the male dominance of rock music back in the day, but still I'm disappointed not to see any Blondie or Kate Bush or even one of my crushes like Belinda or Wendy... hell, I'd even settle for Carol Decker to balance out the testosterone.
There are other huge gaps on show - all the indie and Britpop bands came later (and the 80s stuff I discovered through the gateway drug of The Smiths), but there's hardly any Motown or soul (especially The Supremes, one of my first loves). My country roots are showing in a couple of places, but not as much as I might have expected. This is clearly prior to me coming to terms with the greatest song ever written...
Even back then though, I was aware of the need to apologise for my taste in music to anyone cooler who might have been reading. Some things never change...
Continued from yesterday's post... when I was about 16 or 17, I was invited to join an APA. I had no idea what an APA was and the internet wasn't around to explain like it is nowadays.
"An amateur press association is a group of people who produce individual pages or zines that are sent to a Central Mailer for collation and distribution to all members of the group."
Initially I was just writing individual pages for a zine called Comic Critics Cavalcade, in which letter-hacks from all over the world could share their thoughts on new or old comics or the changing face of the industry.
After a year or two doing that, I was allowed into the inner circle: Inertron, an APA in which a small group of British comic fans made their own zines every couple of months, photocopied a batch, and sent them off to a central mailer for distribution to the rest of the group.
A week or so later, we'd receive a huge parcel containing every else's zines which we then read and commented on. Some of those zines were huge (for anyone who thinks writing this blog must be a time-consuming affair, it's nothing to the amount of time involved in being part of an APA). Yet it was also a lot of geeky fun... otherwise else why did we spend so much time on it?
Not everyone involved was a teenager like me - some of the other contributors were in their 20s, 30s or even older... but nobody thought there was anything odd about that. We were united by our shared love of comics... but also, films, music, TV shows, and life as we knew it. Nobody agreed on everything, but nobody violently disagreed either. We were interested, rather than angry, when someone liked different things to us. Being a part of that group was a natural precursor to the blogosphere - or this comfortable little corner of the blogosphere anyway.
I recently found all my old APAs up in my mum's attic, and I'm in the process of scanning them to digital files for posterity. Below is the cover to the first issue of my zine Rock n Roll, named after the sign off line I used for all my fan letters. At the top of the post is a cover from a later edition. Even though this was an APA for comics fans, we could write about whatever we wanted in our own zines, so music was a big part of my witterings even back then.
Until I found that dusty old box up in mum's attic, I hadn't thought about my time in the APA group for maybe a quarter of a century. I'm not sure why it stopped, but I suspect it was partly that the internet took over. I did find myself quite active in online comics groups from the mid-late 90s, and I suspect quite a few of my fellow APA-ers made a similar leap. I was also spending more and more time producing my own comics by then (not to mention completing my English degree and working in radio) so something had to give. I miss the creativity and community of it all, but other things came along to fill that hole... like writing this blog. I guess I've always felt the need to put my thoughts down and have them read by others, all that's changed is the medium.
In the Cheese Pavilion and the only noise I hear
Is the sound of someone stacking chairs
And mopping up spilt beer
And someone asking questions and basking in the light
Of the fifteen fame filled minutes of the fanzine writer
I'm writing this because it's the only way I can talk to you now, and I really wanted to tell you that I found out something that puzzled us for years! I know who killed Joey Salvo.
Maybe you'll never read this - I don't know if I believe in any kind of afterlife that allows you to watch over those you've left behind... I mean, I want to, because it'd make you being gone (and one day, me being gone) so much easier to deal with... but it could just be one of the great white lies we tell ourselves to make the futility of existence not as futile as it might otherwise seem. And I mean, even if you are looking down on me, or just checking in occasionally to make sure I'm not messing up completely, the chances of you reading my blog - any blog! - are pretty much zilch. Did you ever even look at the internet? I think maybe you watched the occasional tractor video on youtube if someone found it and started it playing for you. As someone born in 1929, you didn't quite get the appeal of all this new fangled technology... and I'm not sure you were wrong.
Likewise, I'm not sure you ever read anything I wrote... but then again, I never showed you anything. For years, I always thought, "when I get something published, then I'll show it to Mum and Dad," but that never happened, did it? I knew you'd have been proud... but you were proud of me anyway. You never told me what to do or what not to do, you let me find my own way, and I always appreciated that. When I got my A Levels and told you I wanted to pack in education and go work in a radio station for peanuts, you never told me I was wasting my life. Then when I found a way to keep doing that and go back to Uni, I know it pleased you, and I could tell how proud you were the day I graduated. The writing was the same - all those hours I spent up in my room at the old typewriter, word processor, computer... a lot of parents would have been up knocking on the door telling me to get out and get a life. But if I was happy doing what I was doing, that was enough for you. I knew you were always there for me when I needed you, and you'd have done anything for me - when I called you from Bradford at 2am to say my first car had broken down and I couldn't get home from work, you got out of bed, drove 45 minutes in the middle of the night and towed me home. No complaints. That was just what Dads were for. I know I thanked you, but I'm not sure I ever thanked you enough.
None of that is why I'm writing to you today though. No, I'm writing about NYPD Blue. Remember how that was always our favourite TV show? We didn't connect on a lot of popular culture - you never cared for Marvel or Star Wars and certainly not pop music, though you would always watch Die Hard when it showed at Christmas, and that made me happy. NYPD Blue though, that was the one thing we really agreed on. I don't think we ever watched it together, because in my early 20s when the show started, I was either out at work or I watched the little portable TV up in my room. (Plus there were quite a few racy bits in that show, and who wants to watch TV sex scenes with their parents?)
I can remember the odd occasion we'd be watching it live "together" (me upstairs, you down) and I could hear you laughing from the living room at some sarcastic remark Andy Sipowicz made to a skell, or the little sly glances between characters that spoke volumes and made us both crack up. We both loved Dennis Franz who played Andy, a wonderful example of a flawed hero. When the show started, Detective Sipowicz was a cranky, alcoholic bigot. Over the course of the next twelve years, he suffered more adversity than any fictional character deserved - including losing his son, his wife and his best friend - but he also went through a redemptive arc that I believe is unparalleled in popular fiction.
It took us both a while to follow Andy's story through to the end as Channel 4 inexplicably stopped showing NYPD Blue sometime in the late 90s. The final seasons eventually cropped up on More4 when that channel launched in 2005 and I know you stayed up late to watch it every weeknight, while I had to catch up on video when I wasn't at work. We'd still chat about it when I saw you at the weekend - how about when Andy said such and such? The look he gave another character across the crowded squad room. It's weird the things that bond a father and son, but even now when I watch the show on Disney+, it makes me think of you. And when it makes me laugh, I want to share that with you like I did back then.
All of which brings me to Joey Salvo. I'm sure you remember, Dad, at the end of Season 4, there was a pretty big cliffhanger. Andy's partner, Bobby Simone (played by the always excellent Jimmy Smits) had been caught up in a sting operation involving the FBI and Internal Affairs. A gangster called Joey Salvo, who Bobby knew from his past, had a mole in the police department, and the various agencies were using Bobby as a pawn to expose the leak. Bobby ended up suspended and his career was on the line, but still nobody could prove the identity of Salvo's informant. The season ended with Bobby meeting Salvo on a street corner in a last ditch effort to uncover the mole... and then, out of nowhere, shots were fired and Salvo was killed. A few seconds later, a car screeched up and it was Andy, Bobby's partner, asking if he was OK. Did Andy shoot Salvo to get Bobby out of an impossible situation? That was certainly the inference... but would Andy really do that? His character walked a thin line a lot of the time, he was immensely loyal to his partner and had no time for the FBI or the Rat Squad... but would he really resort to murder? It seemed unlikely to both of us, Dad, but we were going to have to wait till the next series to find out...
Except, when Season 5 began the following year, something really odd happened. You saw it first and I remember you coming to me and saying how it'd all started up again without any mention of the cliffhanger. Bobby was back in his job, the FBI and Internal Affairs weren't present, nobody even mentioned Joey Salvo. It didn't make any sense. It was like we'd both missed an episode... and clearly that's exactly what happened, though I still find it hard to believe, because back then we both checked the TV Times religiously to see when our favourite show was back on air. Part of me wonders if Channel 4 ditched the opening episode because they didn't consider all the back-story would make for a good jumping on point for new viewers. I wouldn't put anything past them - they didn't treat NYPD Blue fans with a great deal of respect during the time they were airing the show.
Anyway, Dad, the point of all this is that I finally got to watch the episode we never saw. And I can tell you that Joey Salvo was shot by the head of Internal Affairs - he was the mole! He was caught after trying to shoot Andy and he eventually confessed to everything. Neither you nor I thought Andy was the shooter, but there was always an unresolved question mark... and I wish you were still here so I could tell you what happened or show you the episode we missed. I only hope that somehow via some kind of unknown magic of the universe that science doesn't yet understand, somehow you can read what I've written today and know that I love you and I miss you and that Andy Sipowicz is still our hero.
When I say that, you probably picture an average garden shed, maybe 6 foot by 8 foot or a little bigger… well, let me stop you there. My dad was both a farmer and a joiner, so when he built a shed, it was often bigger than the average house, certainly big enough to house half a dozen cows for the winter or to store enough bales of hay to keep said cows fed while the grass wasn’t growing. Such incredible buildings regularly sprang from the earth as if by magic when I was growing up… and I took them in my stride.
The old barn, with mistel / cowshed attached. That was demolished when the barn was converted. Pictured is my nephew Gary, stood on the muck midden, and some random builder nicking the asbestos sheets from / mending the roof.
Wait, let me clarify that. My dad was in his early 60s back at this point, and had walked away from the car auction business. He’d started working as a joiner again, for my brother (the house builder of the family), but Dad didn’t have much of a pension and was worried about financial stability for his retirement years… so he decided to sell the big old rambling farmhouse I’d grown up in and downsize us all into the barn next door. He handled this conversion pretty much by himself (calling in my brother and a few other tradespeople for occasional assists) and within a year, the old hay loft I’d played hide and seek in as a child was now my teenage bedroom. It was a lot smaller than the house of my youth, but my brother and sister had long since flown the nest and my parents figured I’d soon follow (although that didn’t happen quite as soon as they’d expected). Anyway, with the barn out of action, other cattle sheds and hay storage buildings soon appeared to replace it… and again, I took it all for granted. Looking back now it seems miraculous, particularly given how much of this work my dad did on his own… with only the occasional assist from Mr. Bagley.
A memory came back to me earlier this week of a journey Dad took us on one misty Saturday… to buy a shed. For this expedition, he borrowed a truck from my brother, and drove me and my mum halfway across the country… I can’t remember exactly where, but it took a good few hours to get there. When we arrived, we met a man who was selling a huge wooden outbuilding that would soon become my dad’s joinery workshop (home to a table saw that would one day almost sever his thumb). This building must have been at least thirty feet long, by about ten feet wide. We set about dismantling it, piece by piece, then loaded it onto the back of the truck and drove it home. I’m guessing this would be some time in the mid-80s, so I’ve no idea how my dad found out about this shed for sale, in the pre-internet days… perhaps there was a classified ad in the back of the Farmers Guardian newspaper I picked up from the local Newsagents along with my weekly stash of comics. Likewise, I’ve no idea how much he paid for this enormous wooden edifice. All I remember is, he needed our help to get it on and off the truck. Beyond that – taking the shed down and reconstructing it on a long concrete foundation he poured and flattened a good three feet above the ground (with steps leading up to it, to keep it from flooding)… he did all that himself.
Some more random, ramshackle sheds I grew up around. Not pictured: the fancy joinery workshop shed
we travelled so far to buy. That replaced the hen-hut shed on the right of this picture.
Due to failing eyesight, my mum stopped driving more than twenty years ago. However, the stories about when she was a driver are the stuff of family legend.
And the time she almost drove me and my grandma (her mum) off a cliff. (They were arguing about which way to go. I was in the backseat, clinging on for deer life.)
Perhaps most famous of all is the time that she stalled in the middle of roadworks and the policeman who was directing traffic got down on his knees in front of her car and put his hands together in prayer, begging her to move.
We remember all these stories with good humour, even though our lives may have been at risk on one or more occasion... let's face it, none of us were wearing safety belts back then.
What it's easy to forget though, is how much mum (and dad) drove me around, wherever I wanted to go, when I was a kid. Music lessons, band practice, comic marts in Leeds... we were reminiscing about the latter recently, about the time my mate Liam (who was notoriously car-sick) came with us, and when Liam started looking a bit queasy, Mum just handed him a paper bag and said, "do it in there". Or the time she went to pay for parking and the ticket machine started spitting out money. She shared it out between the two of us and we bought a few extra comics that day.
Then, when I started working in radio, Mum would get up early on a Saturday morning to drive me to Bradford in time for the 9am show I worked on... at least until I'd passed my driving test, which wasn't until I was 18, so she must have done it every Saturday for at least two years. One Saturday, I had a piano exam at the same time. I'd told the presenter I was working with that I was going to be half an hour late, but he'd forgotten, and in the pre-mobile phone era, there was no way of reminding him. Driving in, listening to the radio, we kept hearing him saying, "Where's Rol this morning? I've got nobody to answer my phones." Mum remembered that when she finally dropped me off and I sprinted into the studio, the first link she heard on her way home was, "Oh look, Rol's arrived... still wearing his pyjamas."
These days, when I spent many of my weeknights and weekends ferrying Sam to a variety of sporting activities and pre-teen social engagements, I like to remind myself that I'm paying it forwards. Thanks, Mum.
There's an obvious song to close today, but one that was over-played to the point that most people are sick to the back teeth of it. Never fear - Aimee Mann to the rescue!
Did anybody actually drink coffee in the 70s and early 80s? Everyone I knew drank tea from an early age, but the only coffee you could get was that nasty freeze-dried stuff, and although there might have been a jar in the cupboard, I think it was only there for if we had a weird workman in.
By the time I reached my late teens, I was drinking a lot of tea. A large teapot full every night. And because I don't like milk, I was drinking it black and strong. Three bags.
I've written before about how I was invited in for coffee after my first date, and I didn't even like coffee, but coffee was all that was on offer. I'm covering old grounds here (you see what I did there?), but I ended that post by explaining that I finally ended up a coffee drinker when I started using the Klix vending machine to keep me awake on nightshift. There weren't a lot of great options from that machine. The tea was white only - at least you could get coffee black. Beyond that, there was a hot lemon drink that tasted like wallpaper stripper... and a sub-sub-Bovril effort that I once tried in desperation and can still taste how disgusting it was 30+ years later.
I don't know when I first tried a proper coffee, maybe as an after dinner treat in a restaurant, but it changed my life forever. Nowadays, there are more coffee shops in the UK than there are pubs, but back then there were hardly any. The interweb tells me that coffee shop culture was a big thing in the swinging '60s but died away when people discovered instant coffee in the 70s and 80s. This confirms something I've long suspected: the general public are idiots.
Various articles online suggest that the UK coffee shop resurgence happened in the 1990s as a result of young Brits watching the Friends characters hang out in Central Perk. It may seem hard to believe now, but the first UK Starbucks didn't open till 1998. I'm not particularly a fan of Starbucks - a bit too close in texture to the Klix Vending Machine Gravy - but I will drink it as a last resort. Unlike Neil Young...
My preferred chain, Caffè Nero, opened its first in that London in 1997, so I'm guessing they didn't get to the rest of the UK till well into the noughties. I remember when the Bradford branch opened; I was working radio advertising and it became a daily ritual to walk across Bradford in the afternoon for a proper Americano. By then, I was pretty much a coffee addict.
That addiction only grew when I became a teacher, but all that caffeine clearly wasn't doing a lot to help with the anxiety caused by the pressure of working at The Bad Place.
Nowadays I'm mostly a two coffees a day man, and visits to coffee shops have become a luxury rather than a necessity... who can afford at nearly £4 a pop? That said, I always feel more relaxed in a coffee shop than I ever felt in a pub. Even when I was a drinker, I found pubs to be intimidating places. And not just because of the stress of getting served at a crowded bar. I know I'm in the minority here - most people find pubs to be welcoming places, but I never felt like I belonged... even when I was handing over a small fortune for a double Jack Daniels and Coke. (I dread to think how much my former beverage of choice costs these days... one more reason to be grateful for being tee-total.)
My dad became a coffee drinker later in life, and I wonder if my love of strong black coffee was in some way an attempt to emulate or connect with him? Although Sam's way too young to indulge, he spends a lot of time in coffee shops with me... in the same way I guess many parents might have taken their kids into family pubs when they were growing up, to acclimatise them to that culture. Although he liked a pint of lager and lime from time to time, my dad wasn't a big drinker and I never went to the pub with him.
Every Saturday morning, about ten a.m. (once the Snapshots excitement has died down), Sam and I stop off at the local Co Op cafe before starting the weekly shop. I have an Americano, Sam has an Appletiser, and we both have a pastry. We sit and talk... it's good father and son time. The highlight of my week.
It wouldn't be my coffee shop of choice... but any excuse to watch this video again...
When I was in Primary School we still got a bottle of milk to drink every morning. In winter it was ice cold but in summer it was very warm and not so nice at all. I remember our teacher standing over one girl every milk time forcing her to finish her bottle of and we all had to wait as it took her a long time, going down only an 1/8th of an inch (pre-decimal times) every minute. Wouldn't happen nowadays of course - not been milk since the days of Thatcher the Snatcher and of course so many children now have intolerances to dairy.
This opened up a whole can of memory worms for me… but a couple of things first...
Kids do still get school milk – it’s just not free anymore (and not in bottles). Parents have to pay for it – unless they can’t afford, in which case it’s supplemented. Sam’s 10 now and still gets milk at school. He also drinks any leftover cartons he can get his hands on.
(Sam and his mates have likewise formed a Leftovers Club at dinner time. They make sure they’re the last in the dinner queue, then they’re more likely to be offered seconds after everyone’s finished their lunch.)
Speaking of an intolerance to dairy though, Alyson… this is exactly what I had when I was a kid. I still do, though it’s a rather odd variety of intolerance. I just can’t drink milk, especially if it’s cold. If I try, it makes me throw up. I’m fine with anything else dairy-related – cheese, yoghurt… no problem. I’m also OK with boiled milk, in certain circumstances. That’s how my mum used to serve me cereal – Weetabix, Frosties, Coco Pops etc… always with hot milk. If I tried to eat them with cold milk… bleurggghh! I’ve never been able to drink milk shakes either. Not without gipping. Sorry, Kelis. You milkshake wouldn't bring me to the yard.
I’m not sure I was aware of all this when I started Primary School, and I doubt my mum thought to mention it. On the first day of school then, out came the school milk bottles… “Drink up, children!”
My first teacher, Mrs. Kay (picture Julie Andrews, but slightly more posh) was a shrewd lady who quickly realised I couldn’t keep milk down, so she stopped offering it to me. (Saved her having to clean up her classroom every day.) When the school milk came out, I was excused.
Mrs. Tebb did not like me. That’s pretty much all I remember about her. Every other teacher at my junior school, I got on with OK. Not Mrs. Tebb though. She hated me. And maybe that’s because of what happened on the day I arrived in her class… but if so, she only brought it on herself.
“Time for your milk, children!”
“But, Mrs. Tebb, I don’t drink milk. It makes me sick.”
“Nonsense. Milk is good for you. It’s good for your teeth and your bones and your everyday health! Milk is nature’s perfect food!”
Back in 2007, Sheffield band Tiny Dancers put out their only album on the back of opening for Bob Dylan's UK tour the year before. The LP was called Free School Milk. This was their debut single, released on my 35th birthday.
I wasn't a fussy eater as a kid, and I generally loved school dinners. I had no problem with cleaning my plate... except on Fridays.
Fridays was usually fish and chips, which would have been a firm favourite, had they not been served with a huge dollop of that most detestable of food-stuffs: mushy peas. If ever there was a metaphor for the destructive tendencies of the human race and how we have to ruin everything we touch... who else would take the sweetest and tastiest vegetable on god's green earth and turn it into grey sludge? Why would anyone choose to eat mushy peas when you can have the real thing? I mean, even the adjective is disgusting. Let's look at some of its closest synonyms... pulpy, pappy, slushy, squelchy, gloopy... not to mention that mushy can also be defined as mawkish, cloying, sickly and icky. They look like puke on a plate, only that would be slightly more appetising.
And yet... every Friday, there I was, shuddering in the dinner queue, my voice cracking as I asked the serving ladies for a "very very very small" portion of mushy peas, please. But even when they looked kindly on me, I was still the last one in the school dining hall, pushing cold mushy peas around on my plate, unable to go out and join my friends in the playground until Mrs. Brown, the head School Dinner Nazi, had watched me eat them all. They wouldn't allow kids to be treated like that these days... but this was the late 70s and early 80s when sadism was still part of the National Curriculum.
When I looked for songs featuring mushy peas, I found them championed by the worst examples of musical depravity: The Macc Ladds, K*nt & The Gang*, U2 (are you completely unaware of the fact that I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For is about Bono going around every chip shop in town, trying to find the best place to buy mushy peas?). Not one song (worth listening to) leapt to their defence. Real peas, however, turn up in all kinds of wonderful tunes...
(*This is an actual band that I keep coming across when I do lyric searches. I normally ignore the hell out of them, but it seemed appropriate to give them a mention today. The asterisk is mine, not theirs.)
If you still believe there is any merit to mushy peas after reading this post, I will leave the final word to my expert witness from The Sugarhill Gang. Tell it like it is, Wonder Mike...
Have you ever went over a friend's house to eat
And the food just ain't no good?
I mean the macaroni's soggy, the peas are mushed
And the chicken tastes like wood
Minus points for anyone who quotes John Lennon in the comment box.
It's not the best photograph I've ever taken, certainly not one I'd submit to John's monthly Photo Challenge, but as soon as I saw this icy pattern on our bathroom skylight yesterday morning, my mind raced back to what must be my very earliest memory.
I had to explain the frost patterns to Sam as he's rarely seen them. With double glazing and better central heating, they're much less common than they were when we were kids. Google search "frost on windows" and you'll find all kinds of doomsayers telling you your house is about to collapse through poor insulation and frigid entropy... they have to spoil everything, don't they?
My earliest memory is of frosty patterns on my mum's bedroom window. I remember lying in my cot (that's how young I was!), looking up at the patterns and thinking I could see frosty faces staring back at me from the glass. It was dark, but I also remember a red toy fire engine nearby, so perhaps it was just after Christmas.
My mind has held onto this image, and the feelings attached to it (warmth, security... but also a fingertip of icy fear) for almost 50 years. But is it really still a memory? Or is it just the memory of a memory? Do I remember it now because I've remembered it before?
Maybe that's just how memories last. The ones we don't keep remembering eventually fade away completely, like frost on the windowpane. As I get older, that'll probably happen more and more. Important to write them down then, to preserve them for as long as I can read this.
I've been re-reading The Shining by Stephen King recently. Two reasons for this. One, the last couple of modern novels I've read have left me underwhelmed and frustrated. Two, Louise keeps saying, "you have all these old books on the shelves that you never read," and I needed a little more evidence to back up my claims that, "I'll read them again someday". Otherwise: charity shop.
Anyway, I like reading books set in the world of my childhood. A pre-internet, pre-covid, pre-modern day bullshit world... simpler times. The Shining was first published in 1977, when I was 5, a world where a telephone in your home was apparently something of a luxury...
Wendy had insisted on a phone in spite of their unraveling finances. She had argued that with a small child - especially a boy like Danny, who sometimes suffered from fainting spells - they couldn't afford not to have one. So Jack had forked over the thirty-dollar installation fee, bad enough, and a ninety-dollar security deposit, which really hurt. And so far the phone had been mute, except for two wrong numbers.
I'm not sure when my parents got their first telephone installed, but it was there on the wall between the kitchen and the living room throughout my childhood. I remember standing there, when I could reach it, and rotary dialling the numbers... then waiting for a friend's mum to answer. "Hi Mrs. Brook. Is Liam in? Can he come to the phone?"
Of course, the alternative was the good old-fashioned phone box, recently celebrated in John's August Photo Challenge.
Now he dialed the operator and she told him that for a dollar eighty-five he could be put in touch with Al two thousand miles away for three minutes. Time is relative, baby, he thought, and stuck in eight quarters. Faintly he could hear the electronic boops and beeps of his connection sniffling its way eastward.
We take so much for granted these days. A lot of people don't even bother with a home phone anymore, and to be honest, the only time I take a call on ours is when Louise has taken Sam out and she's calling to tell me to put the tea on.
I remember explaining to a bunch of phone-addicted students a few years back that we never even had mobiles when I was a kid. A look of genuine panic crept over their faces.
"But what if you were at school and your mum needed to speak to you urgently?"
"Well, I guess she'd call the school office and someone would come down to pass a message on," I replied... but I couldn't think of any occasion when such a thing had been necessary. Nothing was so urgent that it couldn't wait a few hours back then.
"Or what about if you were meeting up with some mates in town?"
"Well, you'd arrange a time and a place and..."
"But what if they were late?"
"Then you'd wait. And if they still didn't show up, I guess you'd go home and call them later."
Here are some more songs about the telephones of our youth...
Therapy time. Please feel free to skip today’s post, it’s just for me. (Then again, aren't they all?)
I was talking a couple of weeks ago about my… sadness. I’m going to use that instead of the “d” word, because it seems more appropriate. As we all know, writing can be good therapy. It’s certainly cheaper than real therapy, so here we are. And I’m going to use a therapist’s questions to help me.
Can you explain your sadness?
There are many different facets.
Pick one. Just one example.
OK. The present upsets me, but the past is starting to upset me too. Because it all seems to far away, and getting father every day. A while back, when I set up Memory Mixtape, I figured this would be one of my most popular series. Not popular with readers, since clearly I long since stopped trying to write for other people. Popular with me. I used to love writing about my childhood, my teenage years, and even just a few years back I had a long-running feature here called Radio Songs in which I relieved the highs and lows of my 20s, working in the radio industry. There’s comfort in nostalgia, in going back to the good old days, rose-tinting your past to airbrush out the bad times and create a glorious memory utopia where the sun’s always shining, even if it’s pissing down in the present.
So why aren’t you writing Memory Mixtape every week?
That’s the question, isn’t it? Because the comfort’s no longer there. Now, when I try writing about the past, I invariably just get sad about what’s gone – long gone, in many cases. 30, 40 years gone. Never to return, never to get back, never to be there again or have that again or feel that again.
For many years of my life, it felt like D:Ream were telling the truth. OK, things might be bad right now, but they will get better. You’ll do better, you’ll get better, you’ll feel better. Since turning 50, the D:Ream potential has evaporated, and all I’m left with is the certitude of entropy…
Last Friday, I wrote about how my dad was a smoker when I was growing up - first cigars, then a pipe... and then he quit, immediately, when the doctor told him he had to.
On Saturday, I went to see my mum (as I always do) and she said she had something for me. I couldn't believe the synchronicity when she showed me what it was... my dad's old cigar case and one of his pipes. This was just one of those moments... I'm sure I don't need to say anything else.
She also asked if I wanted any of his old tools. Dad was a joiner by trade and had lots of tools, but most of them will be more use to my nephew who's followed in his grandad's footsteps. All I took was the saw and the ruler above, because I haven't got either, but also because they both contain powerful memories. The ruler in particular, Dad would carry it with him in his overalls at all times. It'd always be sticking out of his pocket. This is years ago, he hadn't done any joinery in over a decade, but it's good to remember him as he was before, rather than an old man who struggled to even get up out of his chair.
When Louise and I moved into our first house, I was pretty clueless about DIY. (Louise will tell you I still am, but I've learned a few things.) Dad came round and helped me put up a few shelves, just the basics, but it was a start. For years I'd watched him tinkering away and never really took any of it in. But I started to try when we got that house. One day the lock went on our old wooden front door. Dad came round, cut it out and fitted a new one. I can still see him standing there in the sunshine, with his bag of tools beside him on the doorstep. It wouldn't be long before he couldn't do that kind of thing anymore, but I know it meant a lot to him, to be able to help us while he could.
I asked Mum if there was one more thing I could have. The copper bracelet my dad wore to help with arthritic pain. Now, various studies say there's no proof these things help relieve arthritis in any way - hey, I've got the internet, so I checked! - but I've been getting pain in my wrists and thumb joints for some time now and I figure it won't hurt to try. There's another reason I wanted this bracelet though, and it's a much more morbid one, I'm afraid.
When the undertaker came to take my dad away, she asked me if I wanted to remove any jewellery he had on. He'd stopped wearing his wedding ring some years back because he was scared it would he'd lose it. So all he had on was this bracelet. The last thing I did for my dad, the very last time I saw him, was to take this bracelet off his wrist. And now I'm wearing it.
Martin wrote about BC Camplight back in April. He was a name I'd heard bandied about but not paid a lot of attention to. I still haven't got around to buying his new album (largely because I've just had to pay £480 for brakes and tyres), but I've been listening to this track a lot on one of my walking compilations. It reminds me of John Grant, and it's already a shoe-in for one of my songs of the year... my dad loved Die Hard too.
I am almost through watching Die Hard 2 for the 38th time
I would go insane
On a burning plane
I gotta block out most of the pain just like John McClane does
I wanna look myself in the eye and be a normal guy
And say some clever shit when I’m about to die
I told my Mom I wanted to kill myself
She said, "Brian, grow up
You're 40 years old, ain’t it time to stop that shit?"
Looking through old Truprint envelopes the other day, I came across two snapshots of my sister's geese. She had these two about 35 years ago, and they were vicious brutes. Worse than any guard dogs - in fact, all the dogs would steer well clear of them. Especially when they put their heads down, as in the photo above... that meant they were going in for the attack.
Sometimes I'd be given the job of herding them back into their hut on a night time, which is probably when I took these photos. They would go, if you stood your ground, but it was best to go armed with a stick for defense in case they turned on you. They liked a good ruck.
They weren't the worst geese I ever encountered though. There were a couple on a neighbouring farm that were even more savage. One day, I went with my dad to fetch a couple of cows back from a field he'd been renting near that farm. Dad gave me the job of leading a particularly flighty young calf back with a rope round its neck to stop it running away. I was basically walking the calf like a dog on a lead. Until we passed the open farmyard where the diabolical geese lived. They came out charging, hissing, wings up, terrifying the little calf, which set off at full pelt down the lane... dragging me behind it like a stuntman in a Western. When the calf finally stopped, I was covered in cuts and grazes... but at least the geese hadn't got me.
When I was a teenager, one of our dogs got scared by
fireworks and ran away from home. The dog was a Border Collie called Lad. My
dad chose the name. “When I call him, I’m just going to say ‘Come here, Lad’,
so we might as well just call him Lad.”
Lad was the son of Snow, an all-white
sheepdog who had the sweetest temperament of any animal I’ve ever met, but was
also easily scared as he’d been beaten as a pup by the farmer my dad rescued
him from. Neither of them would have been any good at actually rounding up
sheep, but that was OK because my dad only had cows. Lad’s mum was my sister’s
dog, Bess. She was a bit of a bimbo too, as dog's go, but also very affectionate. Really, Lad
had no chance when it came to brains.
Lad was missing for what felt like weeks, and we’d pretty
much given up on ever seeing him again, when one night my brother was driving home
through Marsden and saw what appeared to be a very familiar dog running around
in a farmer’s field. He stopped and knocked on the farmer’s door, asking him if
he’d found any stray dogs recently. The farmer denied having done so, and my
brother couldn’t see Lad anywhere around on the farm, so he had to abandon
his quest. He asked the farmer to get in touch if he saw Lad anywhere
around. The farmer grunted and told him not to come back.
The following morning, a little after 5am, I woke up to hear
a tractor stopping outside our house. A door slammed and then the tractor drove
away. I didn’t think much of it, but when we all got up… Lad was back! Waiting
outside the back door as if he’d never been away.
There are loads of songs about pets dying. Seven years ago,
I compiled A
Top Ten Dead Pet Songs. The Number One would be unchanged even if I did it
again today. However, there aren’t half as many songs about pets going missing.
Here are a handful, starting with the most appropriate band I could find…
Your dog got lost, you got distraught
You plastered posters all round town
The dog was found and it was fine
High time… you took those posters down
For me, that lyric sums up everything that is wonderful
about Nigel Blackwell in just four lines. But then comes the real kicker…
Ruth Gould’s been out every evening
Ruth Gould has got pneumonia
We end with not a lost cat or a lost dog… but a lost
tortoise.
I wasn’t sure about Dry Cleaning at first, but they’ve really
captured my attention with their latest album, Stumpwork. Undertones drummer
Mickey Bradley does a very entertaining show on BBC Radio Ulster (which you can
catch on the Sounds app if you have any sense). He recently summed Dry Cleaning
perfectly by saying that the band were doing their thing in the background
while lead singer Florence Shaw rings her mate and has a random conversation
about the dull minutiae of her life, oblivious to the fact she’s in a band.
Gary Ashby is the perfect example of that. You see, Gary is Florence’s
tortoise. Only he went missing during lockdown. And this is the result…
Gary Ashby
Have you seen Gary?
Family tortoise
Are you stuck on your back without me?
Dogs running free
Dad’s got blood on his head
Have you seen Gary? With his tinfoil ball He used to love to kick it with his stumpy legs
Sam's football training has changed nights, from Tuesday to Thursday. They've also got a new venue since last year... my old high school.
Last night then, I set foot in my old school gym for the first time in 34 years. (I left in 1990, but I never went near the gym after the end of the 5th form... why would I? There had to be some perks to being a Sixth Former.)
But now, here I was again, staring up at that same wood-paneled ceiling, breathing in the same stench of stale sweat and plimsolls, hearing the squeaky echo of gym shoes on barely-polished tiles... a shudder went down my spine as a juggernaut of memories came rushing back.
Two nights ago, I had an anxiety dream about returning there and being met by my old P.E. Teacher, Mr Sh***ocks, who always called me "Roly". Which. I. Fucking. Hated. But was powerless to do anything about. Only in the dream, he didn't remember me at all, and he was struggling to give directions, and I realised what a sad little man he actually was, not the terrifying ogre of memory.
The weirdest thing of all was how nothing had changed. From the outside, the school looks quite different. They've built a whole new wing and turned one of the playgrounds into another car park (more teachers driving to work than in the 80s?)... and there are huge green security fences surrounding everything. There were no fences when I went there. You could have walked up to the entrance at any hour of the day or night and peered in through the classroom windows. It's more prison that high school now.
Inside though... time had stood still. The gloomy stairs up to the staff room, the grubby corridor leading to the Sport's Hall... the horror of the changing rooms... they were all exactly as they had been 34 years ago. Admittedly, I only walked that one corridor; the rest of the school was closed off. Still... I might as well have driven there in a Delorean, at 88 miles per hour.
I think they've painted the metalwork blue... but the woodwork, the walls, the floor tiles, the showers (not pictured - I'll spare you the horror)... for a second, I almost went and hung up my bag and started getting changed. With that ugly lump in my throat I felt every Tuesday afternoon when it was time for games...
Compared to a lot of my friends, we didn’t get a video recorder
till quite late – probably 1985 or ’86. Not soon enough to record the first
series of Moonlighting when it aired, but I taped and kept every episode from the
second season on. An even bigger thrill was in store at the weekend...
By the time I was 15, I was regularly baby-sitting on a
Friday or Saturday night for my brother or sister’s kids, so a trip to the
video shop beforehand was a must. I’d usually grab two or three films: a
blockbuster (small ‘b’ – we didn’t get a Blockbuster near us till the 90s), a
teen movie (I must have watched Ferris Bueller fifty times before it became
available to buy) and the worst 80s horror flick I could find. I worked my way
through all the Halloween & Friday The 13th movies and their
ilk, developing an abiding love for the slasher movie, though I never really
dug Freddie Krueger. I mean, it was all just a dream!
There is no greater symbol of 80s nostalgia than the video rental shop. Within a decade, video had been replaced by DVD, video shops
had been replaced by online DVD rental (remember how Netflix started out? DVDs
mailed to you in the post!) and within the blink of an eye, we were all swamped
with choice fatigue by the streaming platforms. Everything you could ever want
to watch available whenever you want to watch it (except when it’s not). Things
were so much simpler back in the good old days…
I don’t have anything particularly revelatory to add to this
post, no specific anecdotes to illustrate the excitement of a Friday night
trip to the video shop, when compared to the mundanity of flicking through
endless online options. Still, this delightful little time capsule from Moxy
Früvous, released back in 1993 at the height of the video rental boom (hard to
believe, but DVD didn’t come along till 96/97) does the job for me…
Don't be too confused by the
little reviews On the back of the box, just pick
up the boxes, all the boxes you can use The hipedi-hoppest videos in the
land Maybe something foreign, maybe
something panned, maybe something formerly banned Perhaps it's something you can
watch with friends, or something that inevitably lends Itself to shapely curves and bends
of exploited women and their friends Perhaps it's "New York, New
York" with Liza Minnelli and Mickey Rourke No. That's not right... It was
Robert Deniro, everyone's favourite video… hero
