1983/84 was my finals year. I was Chair of Constitutional Committee that year (somewhat press-ganged into running I might add), so I was strangely on the inside of the students’ union politics without really being part of its core.
I thought it would be fun to have an anonymous gossip column, so came up with the idea of H Ackgrass, or “Hackgrass”. Many myths about that column spread in the years following about the column’s antiquity, but I know I made the name up myself. There had been others, such as Molesworth, in earlier years, but this name was new, as was the somewhat visceral nature of the humour. I know the name was subsequently re-used by others. I am flattered.
I knew the Concourse (and Union Committee) lot would want to know who H Ackgrass was and I thought I’d be a prime suspect. Thus I was rather harsh on myself, in this first column and subsequently, in order to try and divert attention. This approach pretty much worked.
I had a spare old portable typewriter, so battered about that I didn’t really use it any more; it was very obvious in its idiosyncratic type, so I thought that using it would add to the mystery and might put people off my scent, as long as I kept the offending machine hidden. Indeed, I know at least one Concourse person sneaked into my flat at one time to check out my (regular) typewriter, only to conclude that Hackgrass couldn’t be me.
Quentin Rubens, the Concourse editor at the time, hardly edited anything out of that first piece. I thought he would tone it down a lot; there were certainly a couple of edgy lines I expected would go. Surprisingly, Quentin did edit out one descriptive phrase I made about myself, “arch lefty”. I don’t know whether that reflected his feelings about my politics or his own sense of what is an insulting term. In later pieces, he got the redline pen out a lot more. Deservedly so in several cases.
Anyway, here is the very first column, both in published form and then its original submission form. My submission copies are clearly photocopies but I know they were originally carbons. I must have made photocopies just before I left Keele and disposed of the carbons.
My memory of this event was triggered at lunch the other day (October 2017) when Patrick Moore came up in the conversation.
“Oh yes, I interviewed him when I was at Keele”, I said, “I didn’t find him all that impressive”.
Janie ticked me off afterwards for being (or at least seeming) churlish about the matter, especially as Alan and Sue (who had brought Patrick Moore into the conversation) were obviously keen on him.
On reflection, I couldn’t recall why I had been unimpressed by him. But I could recall that I had recorded the interview and had digitised the tape a few years ago, without really listening to it again at that time.
I promptly listened to it carefully – you can hear it too if you wish:
Listening to the interview brought back a flood of memories and also made me feel very badly about my teenage impression of Patrick Moore. Because I realise, on listening to the recording, that the unimpressive contributor is me, not him.
I was under-prepared for that interview and Patrick Moore to some extent interviewed himself.
In my defence, the reason I was under-prepared was because I hadn’t expected to conduct the interview until later that day. I certainly hadn’t expected to conduct it in my own little study/bedroom.
Being me, I went to Ron Maddison’s office early afternoon on the day of the interview/talk just to confirm all the arrangements. It turned out that Patrick Moore was already there with some time on his hands. They both suggested that I could conduct the interview there and then. I explained that I would need my tape recorder and notepad, at which point Patrick Moore volunteered to come with me and be interviewed in my room.
I told him that my student room was less than salubrious, especially when I was not expecting guests, but my protests seemed to make him all the more eager to take this opportunity to observe how students really live.
Patrick Moore, the man who usually wielded the telescope towards the stars, was choosing to observe student life under the metaphorical microscope.
So we marched from the Astronomy Department to Lindsay and my very humble little room, F4.
I remember telling him, along the way, that I had planned to prepare the questions that afternoon so was under-prepared. He told me not to worry and that between us he was sure we’d cover plenty for my article.
I remember making us both a coffee when we got to my room. I possibly even had some biscuits to offer.
If you listen to the interview, it sounds a bit like a John Shuttleworth interview, but without the music. You can hear the sound of the coffee mugs being moved around. It is very folksy sounding, which indeed it was.
Some of my questions and interjections are positively cringe worthy, but on the whole I sense that I had roughly worked out a skeleton for the interview in my head and we worked through it – perhaps not as methodically as I would have planned, but the interview does cover a lot of ground. He was clearly a seasoned interviewee who could have conducted his own interview without me.
The recording runs uninterrupted for over 15 minutes, until c17:20, at which point I began stopping the tape periodically to try to make sure we were covering everything I wanted/needed for my article.
At 21:25 I ask a particularly ill-phrased question about black holes, followed by, during the embarrassing seconds that followed, the clear sound of someone knocking and entering the room. I remember this clearly. It was my neighbour, Simon Ascough (Sim), who was quite taken aback to see Patrick Moore in the room.
Sim had presumably popped in on a matter of extremely urgent student importance. Perhaps to recommend that we listen to In A Gadda Da Vida (yet again), possibly to suggest a mid afternoon spliff or quite possibly both. But I think (mercifully) that Sim’s request went unspoken; in any case I turned the recorder off at the moment of the knock.
At 23:55 comes the laugh out loud moment on the tape, when you can clearly hear the sound of a female (or females) being chased around the corridor of F Block. Again I turned off the recorder. I remember Patrick Moore asking me if my friend, having found me otherwise engaged, had decided to chase girls instead?
What I should have said was, “no, that’ll almost certainly be Richard Van Baaren and Benedict Coldstream chasing girls around the corridor”. But I didn’t say that. In fact, I think both Patrick Moore and I had a fit of the giggles for quite a few moments before I switched the recorder back on.
My only other profound memory of this interview was playing the recording to Paul Deacon during the summer holidays soon after the event. Paul is a DJ, voice recording artiste and a superb mimic; Patrick Moore is certainly one of Paul’s voices.
I remember Paul playing over and over again the bit at the beginning of the interview when Patrick Moore says, “and then along came Mr Hitler”, mimicking it better and better each time, until I begged Paul to stop. Perhaps it was the Paul comedy aspect that dampened my enthusiasm for Patrick Moore.
Subsequent contribution – May 2019: Dave Lee, who was the interim editor of Concourse in the months prior to the interview, has been in touch by e-mail to remind me, “If I remember you said at the time of Patrick Moore that he farted and stunk the room out. That might have been a distraction!” Oh yes, I now recall Paul Deacon including fart noises in his impersonation. Maybe it was the flatulence that diminished my opinion of the fine communicator that was Patrick Moore.
One of the strangest things about this very memorable event was that I didn’t register it at all in my diary, so I cannot be 100% sure of the date on which his lecture (and therefore my interview) took place.
It looks to me as though my diary got quite a long way behind at that stage of that term. To be fair on my 18-year-old self, it was a busy time. Uncle Manny (dad’s older brother) died suddenly a couple of week’s earlier, so I needed to go home unexpectedly to help with family duties and attend the funeral & shiva.
It was also essay and exam time – not ridiculously onerous in Foundation Year (FY) but I had been behind anyway (show me the FY student who wasn’t) and the Uncle Manny business had set me behind further.
I do recall, indeed my diary shows that, I was doing my own fair share of girl chasing at that time – not the screaming and corridor running type of chasing I hasten to add – with a kindly third year named Sandra. But that is another story – now to be found by clicking here or below:
Forensics on the scrap of paper emblazoned with the legend “Patrick Moore Interview” inside the cassette box reveals the following on the adverse side:
I’m guessing that the interview would have been a couple of days before the Jazz Night, as the following week there were lots of exams, so I am guessing that the interview was one of those quieter days between the essay deadlines and the exams; 27th or 28th May.
Here is a picture of the tape, box and legend itself:
If anyone reading this has any more information (or recollection) of that Patrick Moore visit, not least the date, please do chime in.
For some reason, I don’t seem to have kept the article that emerged from the interview, although it might yet emerge from some further archaeology through my old note pads and scrap files. If anyone has a copy of the Concourse article that resulted from the recorded interview, I’d love to see it again.
So, having dredged back the memories, I take back unreservedly my sense that Patrick Moore was unimpressive. Patrick Moore was the commensurate professional and incredibly natural/unassuming in the peculiar circumstances of this interview. My teenage self possibly mistook unassuming for unimpressive; that was poor judgement on my part.
The recorded interview is also an interesting thirty minutes in itself. Here’s the recording again.
I have already written about the star-crossed relationship between SU President Katy Turner & Concourse editors Paula & Hugh, which came to a head in early February 1981…
The upshot of all that was the resignation of Paula & Hugh, the interim appointment of Dave Lee to edit the March edition (hot on the heels of the ill-fated February one), the rapid appointment of Owen Gavin and Gerry Guinan to take over the editorship immediately after the March edition, to alternative applicant Dave Lee’s chagrin …
Dave Lee, trying not to look displeased
…you might well be thinking to yourself, “none of this commentary bodes well for the harmonious and timely production of that March issue”.
What Does the Diary Say?
Never wanting to be seen as a rat who leaves a sinking ship, I offered Dave Lee my whole-hearted support to produce that March issue and/but found myself as part of a core team of two on the production side. To his credit, Dave steeled himself to the time-sensitive task with great determination.
Many other contributors of course; Simon Jacobs, Gerard O’Kane, Julia Parkes, Moira Neish, David Perrins, Jon Gorvett, Diana Ball, Robert Blow, David Bakhurst, Dexter…
David Perrins indicating that someone was out?
…but not a great deal of company in the Concourse office itself. To be fair on the others, it was a ridiculous post-shenanigans deadline, towards the end of term. I could just about get away with it as a Foundation Year student, but for most that level of commitment at that time of year was impractical.
Saturday 28 February – got up very late – went into Newcastle – ate & Concoursed
Sunday 1 March – late start – Concourse office most of the day and evening
Monday 2 March – OK day – busy with Concourse in evening
Tuesday 3 March – Not bad day – in Concourse office in evening.
Wednesday 4 March – Tough day working on Concourse. Nine Below Zero Concert…
I wrote a lot of copy – I was the political editor and there had been a whole swathe of union elections during February to report. I also did one heck of a lot of typing of my own and other people’s articles. My spectacularly fast four-finger technique was without question the best typing skill on offer…well, probably it was all that was on offer.
Yes, I remember matters becoming increasingly fraught as the days went on. Financially, missing the print deadline would mean ruination.
The set pages needed to go to the printers on the designated day, otherwise the printers would charge for the print run regardless but there would be no paper to sell.
Steve “Spike” Humphrey, a lovely, gentle chap whom I got to know quite well in other walks of Keele life afterwards, was the business manager of Concourse. Spike took pains to remind me and Dave that the print deadline really was just that; an immoveable deadline.
I’m not sure if this is William Randolph Hearst or Spike Humphrey in later life.
On that evening of 4 March, I’m pretty sure Dave & I were already well aware, even as we took a break to see the Nine Below Zero concert, that to get the pages ready for the printers the next morning, we’d be working much of the night to get the job done.
The other point to make about that gig, the very night of our deadline, was that Dave had commissioned and was determined to use, a review of the gig from Di Ball and Rob Blow.
That deadline upon deadline resulted in a little whimper of a hidden plea from me to Dave Lee at the end of that (quite lengthy) piece, when the copy finally arrived and when I finally got it ready for setting:
I apologise unequivocally, forty years on, to Dave, Di and Rob, none of whom were ever guilty of producing rotten articles. I must have been tired and emotional in the early hours of the morning, so, unforgivably, I mis-spoke.
I think Di & Rob kept us company for some time late that evening, as they completed their copy while Dave & I busied ourselves typing and setting other stuff.
But it was just me and Dave who remained once the porters (two from Ted, Walter & Wally no doubt) told us that they had to lock up and we agreed to being locked in.
With thanks to Mark Ellicott for this picture of Walter & Wally
Locked In…
In those days there were no CCTV cameras or anything like that. Yet I have somehow managed to uncover a couple of photos that seem to be pictures of me and Dave at work during that night.
I’d never done any page-setting before, so I think that’s a tentative me Yup, I’m fairly sure that’s Dave Lee putting the finishing touches on a page
I’ll guess that my 3:30 am plea in that article was accurate but also that it marked the near conclusion of our work. I think we had set everything else by then and simply needed to slot in the material from that night’s concert to be done. In fact, I suspect that my joke paragraph was in part a device to use up the space we had estimated for that article.
So I’ll guess that we were done around 4:00 or 4:30 am.
I’ll guess we expected the union to be opened up around 7:00 am.
I recall that we both had a little bit of silver in our pockets and chose to decompress after our labours using the amusements available.
We might have played table football…
…but I have a feeling that Dave was more a pinball person…
…or perhaps my extensive experience playing table football with Simon Jacobs most evenings put me in a different league for table football…
…or perhaps we quickly landed on the notion that table football is a game where you try to use up your goes as quickly as possible, whereas pinball is a game in which you rejoice in your opponents success – especially if it yields free balls and free games so you can continue to play.
I was an enthusiastic pinball player in those days. here is one of the games we might have played – for sure UKSU had this one at that time:
Once we had blown all the silver in our pockets, I think we both felt the onset of fatigue and so we decided to retire to the quiet room at the end of the union extension to grab forty winks before the sun would go up and the union would re-open.
…Then Nearly Knocked Out!
I think we both woke up to the same sound – that of shouting.
“All right you scallywags, where are you? I know you’re in here!”
Words to that effect.
We dozily wandered out of the quiet room, to see Pat Lyons, the building manager, hurtling along the extension passageway towards us.
It’s possibly a false memory, but I remember him wielding something a bit like the above implement.
My life flashed before my eyes. I imagined a Cluedo-like synopsis of our demise: “Mr Lyons, in the Union Extension, with the pipe wrench”.
Dave and I had but a few seconds to advocate for our very survival. Fortunately, as skilled communicators, used to summarising key facts into few words for journalistic purposes, we somehow managed to convince Pat Lyons during that short period of time that we had been deliberately locked in to produce Concourse.
Again my doubtlessly false memory has Pat upon us, about to wield a killer blow just a fraction of a second before our story rang true to him and he disarmed.
“You scared the bloody living daylights out of me,” said Pat
Words to that effect.
The feeling was entirely mutual.
Still, in the end no harm was done and in fact I think we produced a pretty darn good edition of Concourse, all things considered.
We put the paper to bed (unlike ourselves) in the early hours of 5 March and it returned from the printers for sale on Monday 9 March 1981.
In the spirit of this “forty years on” Ogblog journal, I intend to publish scans of those Concourse pages on 9 March 2021. Watch this space…
I didn’t write a lot of album reviews for Concourse, the Keele Students’ newspaper, but I did write this one, in March 1981. I think my neighbour in F Block Lindsay, Paul, had bought the album; I’m sure I didn’t buy it.
I ended up writing a great deal of that beleaguered March 1981 issue of Concourse, as I shall explain in another post, but clearly I had been commissioned to write this review before the hoo-ha that led to interim editing and all hands to the pump for the paper deadline.
Anyway, my hatchet job on The Stranglers sits next to an equally acerbic review of The Steve Gibbons Band by my good friend Simon Jacobs, without whom I, for sure, would not have ended up at Keele. But that’s another story.
I remember this particular evening surprisingly clearly. It has been brought back to mind in the spring of 2019 by correspondence with Dave Lee, with whom I and other friends worked on Concourse, the student newspaper.
My diary records the event:
18 February 1981: Easyish day – in evening went to Labour Club. Simon then forced me to see Krokus – yuk.
“…forced me to see” is not a phrase you’ll often see in my diary. But I do recall on this occasion that I did not want to see the Swiss hard rock (or should I say heavy metal) band Krokus, but Simon had agreed to review the concert for Concourse, so he had to go.
I remember Simon exerting some “more than gentle” emotional pressure, along the lines that he really didn’t want to attend this particular heavy rock gig on his own. Something about fear was mentioned, as if Simon attending along with an eighteen-year-old, eight stone weakling like me was going to make the evening any safer.
Of course, being a Keele Ballroom gig, there was no real danger of the gig being over-run by packs of Hells Angels intent on causing trouble for weedy students anyway, but I suppose we were newbies still and had not been to such a gig before, so didn’t really know what to expect.
Simon reviewed the gig in the famous “Film Star Makes President” March 1981 issue of Concourse, about which I shall write plenty in the fullness of time.
For now, please just enjoy Simon’s review, headlined “live or dead?”:
I think it is fair to say that Simon didn’t like the concert much.
I especially like the line that describes:
three overpowering guitarists with about as much style as an airbourne [sic] rhinoceros.
As it happens, I have subsequently been to visit rhinoceroses in person (in the jungles of Assam in 2005) and can confirm the resemblance:
The airborne one can just be seen in the distance through the undergrowth.
In any case, I think my single word diary entry review – “yuk” – says enough. Although possibly my take would have been insufficient detail for Dave Lee’s editorial needs at that time.
Now I admit that I did much of the typing for that early February 1981 edition of Concourse. I was deemed to be a bit of a whizz with two fingers on the old keyboard. Still am, though I say so myself.
But I did not get involved with laying out the paper in preparation for the printers for that edition. That was, in theory, more experienced work. That was often the editors’ role. It was certainly the editors’ role to check that all the pages were well set.
Something went awry and I’m not sure that my writing about the controversy now will extract the true story.
One rumour had it that the skewiffy setting of Katy Turner’s Presidential Column was a deliberate snub to her by the editors, Hugh Peart and Paula Higginson. One rumour had it that it was an honest mistake by someone setting the paper in a mad rush to get the proofs to the printers.
It was always a mad rush to get the proofs to the printers.
Dave Lee might be able to shed some light on the cause.
Anyway, my diary suggested that I was busy on Concourse from 31 January to 3 February with little else to report. My FY Programme suggests I went to a few lectures & classes that week, but still I deemed such days “easy”. Easy meant “no essay deadlines and no exams” in my mind back then.
On Wednesday 4th February my evening comprised:
Local Authority meeting in eve. Au Pairs live – not too good.
I cannot imagine why I went to a Local Authority meeting other than a recommendation from Richard Kimber to do so as part of my Politics sessional. I don’t remember a thing about it, but I suspect that some Councillors would say the same thing about their entire career on the Council.
I did become reconciled with The Au Pairs and grew to like their album Playing with a Different Sex. The following track, which is on that album, shows what they looked and sounded like:
Rumour had it that a couple of The Au Pairs had been students at Keele. I’m not sure whether I can get that “fact” confirmed or denied. I can confirm that lead singer Lesley Woods went on to become a practicing barrister.
After my classes on the Friday I went to my parents’ house for the weekend; my only such visit that term.
A Weekend In London 6 to 8 February
Friday 6 February – arrived about 7:00 – ate, phoned – turned in earlyish
Saturday 7 February – easy day, taping etc. Caroline [Freeman, now Curtis] came over for supper ->town for coffee and cakes.
Sunday 8 February – easy day – lunch locally with Grandma[Anne] – got back to Keele about 8:00 – had a few drinks
The diary entries are intriguing. I mention that I phoned. These days no youngster would consider phoning to be “a thing”, but it was time consuming to queue up for the payphones at Keele and expensive. So it was “a thing” to me that I could spend some time that weekend calling people.
I shall write a separate piece on the chart music I taped on that Saturday. I’m pretty sure I also taped some of my albums and such to increase my mini collection of cassettes up at Keele.
I don’t remember Caroline coming to the house for supper but I know for sure that my mum would have felt that she owed Caroline and her family many, many meals for all the hospitality I’d had from them when doing my BBYO stuff in the year or so prior to Keele, mostly in North-West London, with Caroline’s mum Jacquie providing warm and wonderful hospitality of the edible kind regularly.
I don’t know why I recall the trip up town with Caroline for coffee and cake (and a chance to chat), but I have a strong memory of a place near or possibly even in Whiteleys. From the late 80’s onwards, I didn’t think of that Bayswater/Notting Hill Gate neighbourhood as “town”, I think of it as “home”.
Lunch locally with Grandma Anne was probably at Il Carretto in Streatham.
Skewiffy-Column-Gate
On the Monday, 9 February, the concourse controversy kicked off proper. The diary reads:
Not bad day. Concourse came out. UGM in eve – spoke about Concourse etc. Went back to Mark’s [Bartholomew] for coffee – stayed chatting all night…
In many ways I think the controversy passed us by at the time.
So we Concourse “cub reporters” were simply thrilled to see our pieces and credits in print. Also, the very fact that Concourse was the centre of attention at that evening’s UGM only added to the sensation that the University of Keele Students’ Union’s fourth estate, in the form of Concourse, was terribly important.
In the aftermath of that day, the controversy about the Concourse skewiffyness was quite fierce; the result was that both of the editors resigned. I don’t think that happened publicly on the night (otherwise I’d have written about it differently in the diary). That hoo-ha and multiple resignation incident had momentous and amusing consequences for me (and for interim editor Dave Lee) a few weeks later – watch this space.
Coffee Afterwards…Or Did I Mean “Coffee”?
I don’t think I went back to Mark Bartholomew’s place for all-night coffee and political chat on many occasions, so I suspect this might have been the day (night) that I met Neil Infield, who became a good friend, to some extent during the Keele years, to a greater extent after Keele. More on that anon.
Anyway, the location of that gathering was, if I remember correctly, L Block Lindsay.
I did not use the word “coffee” as a euphemism for other stimulants or relaxants. I used a little “//” marking in my diary for those. So on this occasion, I am pretty sure that the phrase “coffee and chatting all night” was literal and descriptive. If we were lucky the coffee would have been freeze-dried granules of the Nescafe variety. If we were less lucky, it would have been cheap powdery stuff with a generic supermarket label that had an insipid, bitter taste that vaguely resembled coffee.
Simon Jacobs reminded me (February 2021) that Mark Bartholomew, at that time, held himself out to be of the Polish nobility or something of that kind. The more inebriated he became, according to Simon, the more elaborate those Polish royalty stories became…see what I mean?
I remember Mark berating me for being unable to pronounce Łódź properly. I can do that now. Sounds more like “Woodge”. Never forgot it.
I’m not sure whether either Simon Jacobs or Jon Gorvett were part of that particular all-nighter – they’ll doubtless deny all knowledge of the occasion anyway, whether they were there or not.
10 February -> brekky -> 9.00 -> bed -> got up for dinner -> union for drinks
I love that little diary note – I can see from my FY Programme markings that I went to Stephen Banfield’s 9.00 lecture on Romantic Music but then went to my bed rather than attend Roger Marsh‘s 20th Century Music lecture.
Glad to see that my untimely slumber enabled me to revive in time for dinner and some drinks in the Union. Priorities.
Frankly, writing up my early days at Keele University forty years on, I was baffled when I read, in my diary for that day:
No law, Molly Badcock’s instead.
To be honest, my diary is not especially helpful for that November/early December period of my life. It’s pretty clear from the scrawl and my own graffiti, that I was writing up several weeks later, in some manner of inebriated state.
But in truth I couldn’t remember who Molly Badcock was, so I tried Googling her. I am sorry to report that, at least initially, this only made matters worse, as Google did that, “surely you mean Lolly Badcock” thing, allowing me to discover that Lolly Badcock is a porn actress; Molly’s less appetising twin, perhaps.
Clicking (or rather, mostly not clicking) very carefully indeed by this stage, I tried Molly Badcock Keele as a search term and found Molly Badcock’s diaries on the Merchant Taylors’ Alumni Network site – Item 30. There I learnt that Molly was a cultured girl, who became a biologist, teaching ecological science at Keele.
Ah, yes. Now I remember.
Although Molly Badcock didn’t teach me at Keele, I was allocated to her for “pastoral care”, I believe as something known as a “resident tutor”. She lived in an academic’s house or apartment in Lindsay Hall, near to my humble fresher diggings in F block (long gone; possibly her place has also gone).
I think Molly had set up a series of “pop around for tea and a chat” slots for her fresher charges. I believe I met (amongst others) a lovely lass named Mary Keevil that day; another of the people who became a chatting & nodding acquaintance for many years. I certainly didn’t hike the Appalachian trail or discuss Uganda with Mary. I do remember running into her in London mid to late 1980s by which time she was working for SportsAid. I also have a funny feeling I first met Rob Whitehead there that day; we subsequently became work colleagues at BDO Consulting.
My visit to Molly Badcock’s that day might have been my only resident tutor encounter that year, although I have a vague memory of returning at the end of my first year for another informal session at Molly Badcock’s.
Fascinating to learn that Molly, like me, kept diaries as a school kid. But look how neat and tidy Molly’s were compared with mine. She was 12 in 1934 (roughly the same age as I started) and 15 in 1937.
Postscript To My Molly Badcock story: Karen Walsh reports on the KUSU Facebook Group that:
I was a biology student so had molly as a lecturer – and escort for a field trip to aberystwyth where she patrolled the corridors to ensure there was no “mixing” 😂😂”
Enough said.
Concourse Needed Me
Although it is not mentioned in my diary, I recall that I (along with Simon Jacobs) responded to the above shout out in the October 1980 issue of Concourse, the students’ union newspaper.
There I met, for the first time, John White. I recall that John was sitting on a bar table looking rather sinister with a football scarf around his neck (Tottenham Hotspurs for some reason; he has been relentlessly Leyton Orient for decades) and Doc Martin boots.
I now realise that John was somewhat shy or at least introverted back in those very early Keele days. The problem was, his look fitted the exact stereotype I had been warned about; racist (or at least very right wing) students who seek to disrupt student life, often by getting involved in student politics and student journalism. I so clearly remember thinking, “be careful of him”.
I now know, of course, that John is a gentle fellow; we worked tremendously well together in student politics and have been firm friends ever since. Actually it didn’t take long for my “John stereotype” to collapse in a heap, as John had been quick off the mark to sign up for the Labour Club and for Concourse – he was already credited although not bylined in the October edition that contained the shout-out:
In fact none of us new arrivals got bylines until the January 1981 edition, apart from David Perrins, who coincidentally was Simon Jacobs’s next door neighbour in Barnes, who was so quick off the mark he had become the “Arts Correspondent” on arrival, presumably by dint of dressing in a dandified fashion and talking in an Oscar-Wilde-stylee…
David Perrins – the first of our batch to get a big column (as it were) – October 1980
…or perhaps because no-one else put their hand up to review the drama.
Anyway, I must have made a huge impression when we were asked if we had any previous experience of journalism by admitting that I had edited the national magazine for BBYO – an organ with a circulation in the hundreds or low thousands, much the scale of Concourse – albeit a much simpler style of publication – Gestetner printed rather than “proper” letterpress printing.
But I could type fast with two fingers (still can) and was credited in the next issue which came out in early December…
…by which time John White had dropped off the chart, although just for one issue…and Simon Jacobs hadn’t yet got a mention. Like me and John, Simon got his first byline in January 1981. But that part of my past is still in the future, as far as my Ogblog write-ups are concerned.
Meanwhile, returning to 6 November 1980, the other thing I remember doing that evening (although the diary is silent on this point) is queing up for ages to get a turn on one of the handful of payphones and calling home to speak with my parents. It was a hugely onerous, time-consuming and expensive routine, which lives long in the memory of those of us who had to put ourselves through all of that just to make a phone call. A phone call is now so cheap, so casual, so simple…
…anyway, the reason I know that I subjected myself to that routine on that evening is because 6 November 1980 was my parents’ silver wedding anniversary and I couldn’t let an occasion like that pass without a phone call.
No fireworks for me in the conventional sense that year, but a couple of pyrotechnic splashes to be sure. This was my first term at University and what a billing. The Teardrop Explodes were reasonably well known among the cognoscenti, but back then no-one would have known that the Thompson Twins were also heading for new wave stardom.
I had actually rubbed shoulders with Julian Cope some months before, at a The Sound gig in a Clapham Junction dive:
Benita “Bi” Marshall was my-mate-Anil-from-school’s big sister – how cool was that?
Anyway, I thought that The Teardrop Explodes were just great and that this was one of the best gigs I had ever been to in my entire life. It was, of course, one of the first gigs I ever went to, so perhaps my judgement was not yet well-formed. Still, even with the benefit of subsequent experience and some more-informed hindsight, this was a pretty superb gig to get in your first term at University. I do remember it went down really well with the crowd.
I’ll leave it to the better-informed Concourse reviewer, in an article from the 1980 special Christmas edition, to let you know how the concert really was.
Although why the reviewer thought the concert was in October is a mystery; perhaps he’d lost all track of time that term. Bless him, it sometimes happened to the best of us at Keele. I registered this concert in my diary as 19 November, but I was going through a particularly hazy patch towards the end of my first term, if you know what I mean, writing up my diary while inebriated some weeks after the event. Oh dear!
