- the protagonist suffers musical outrages and sexual confusion near Milton Keynes…
Age 10.
Parents LP collection…partial remembrance due to trauma…Elkie Brooks, Elton John, Barbara Dickson, James Taylor and worse…Hand of Fate intervenes via inexplicable presence of a Steely Dan LP and the White album…
…Dad tries to spend what I now know to be Quality Time with me by taking me to see massive Queen gig at Milton Keynes Bowl…a blasted heath filled with seventies metal fans…to see the acts, I stand on an orange and white plastic cool box Dad has thoughtfully brought packed lunches in…This elevates me above a sea of hair and denim cutoffs…lineup is Heart…unspeakable…the Teardrop Explodes…Copey is bottled off…bottles contain a yellow liquid…who booked this lineup?..Queen arrive by helicopter…why did we bother having Punk Rock if this was going to happen afterwards?…despite the influence of Freddie Mercury live and exposure to the Flash Gordon soundtrack I grow to be a heterosexual with a hatred of stadium rock…Dad continues trying and gets me my first record…INTERMISSION…
…as you can see I bare my soul in this blog…so I can reveal it was Cold as Ice by Foreigner, not a Captain Beefheart bootleg or the first Burning Spear LP…
…of course this is a shocking single but it does alert me to the 10p bargain record bin in Woolworths…a formative influence…Destiny?…
…Dad redeems himself from the Freddie Mercury grooming incident by taking me to a proper gig…the Passions at Oxford Poly…we are the youngest and oldest people there respectively…not a great band but the gamine, intelligent girl singer and the really cool Echoplex guitar sound stir something up the creek of my psyche…
- in which our hero begins to relate a murky saga variously featuring records, girls, gigs, vinyl, drums and love –
Born.
…ten years is wasted…I don’t go to see any of the classic acts of the Seventies as I am in primary school…anyway, on with the formative years with their clearly marked clues as to what I would become…
No early memories of music being played around the house. Mum is musical..but it’s church related…bells – big and small…singing…
Sister and I are allowed to linger in the attic (sounds cruel but it was big and basically derelict) and play parents’ 45s…all were stored in a plastic concertina folder I still have…majority of awful sixties pop crap but…Kismet…lots of Beatles, some Stones and a Dylan 45 as well as the only good thing Cliff ever did; Move It b/w Dynamite…45s are played by a stacking phonograph which drops the 7”s and plays them in sequence… to get bass you shut the lid…
…our attention is concentrated on these records as we are not allowed to listen to pop music on the radio and I don’t think we were allowed to watch ITV either…