Robert Smith photo by Andwhatsnext, CC BY-SA 3.0
Forty years on, I realise that Keele student life is not all about parties and gigs…
…except in some ways it is. The most memorable stuff in my diary around the start of that summer term of 1982 is all about parties and gigs.
If some Keele alums from that era are reading this and thinking, “crumbs, I REALLY don’t remember The Cure coming to Keele that term”, you can relax. The Cure didn’t come to Keele – I went with some Keele mates and got to see them play in Leicester.
Blooming marvellous they were, thank you for asking.
It happened, as best I can recall it and transcribe my hand-writing, like this:
Wednesday 28 April 1982 – Easyish sort of day – did quite a bit of cooking etc. Rana, Paul, Rick ate at mine & stayed till quite late – Diplomacy etc.
I don’t recall playing the board game Diplomacy with those fellas, but it seems I did. I suspect I showed no more aptitude for Diplomacy with those fellas as I had shown for Risk with other friends a few week’s earlier.
If I recall correctly, those Diplomacy fellas were quite heavily involved in the Rag Week and one of the things we talked about was going off in Rick’s car for the weekend to sell Keele rag mags to poor, unsuspecting students in other universities. The fellas had identified Leicester as a suitable place for Friday night as there was to be a Cure gig there and one of the guys had access to a crash pad for us in Leicester that night, from whence we could go on and sell more in Nottingham.
That’s what we did, after I spent Thursday attending many meetings so interesting I didn’t bother to describe them and a “busy morning” on Friday – lectures and tutorials I would guess.
Friday 30 April 1982 – Set off in afternoon for Leicester…sold mags there – went to pub -> Leicester Union – The Cure – more mags – stayed over in empty house.
Actually I don’t think the venue was Leicester Union – I suspect the gig was held at De Montfort Hall under the auspices of the Leicester Students’ Union. (Correction – The Cure Gig list tells us that it was Queen’s Hall Leicester that night – that hall was part of the Students’ Union in Leicester.)
My recollection is that going door to door around the halls on a Friday afternoon was hard work and not very effective for sales – mostly because few rooms were occupied at the time – whereas we hit pay dirt in the evening at the concert venue – selling loads of rag mags in a short space of time.
The students at the venue were very welcoming to us and the organisers absolutely insisted that we went in to the hall and watched the concert in consideration of our efforts towards the rag cause. This was an unexpected bonus, not least because The Cure were utterly superb live.
Here is The Cure song that sticks in my mind from that experience:
While here is a recording of a concert held just four days earlier in Edinburgh – the one we saw & heard will have sounded mighty similar:
Saturday 1 May 1982 – Rose quite early – went to hall -> Nottingham campus & town. Went on to Uttoxeter – pub and then on to party. Decided to return to Keele therefrom.
I didn’t realise that I used archaic adverbs like “therefrom” back then. I’m not sure about it. One for the adverb colander next year perhaps.
Anyway, I don’t think the return to the hall or the Nottingham campus proved all that fruitful for rag sales – at least not compared with the door of The Cure gig. I have a feeling that the Uttoxeter party was something to do with Rick and something to do with pre-nuptials for someone-or-other – his brother or sister perhaps.
Monday 3 May 1982 – Busy sort of day – sorting out for evening etc. Motion at UGM went through – Simon [Jacobs] & Jon [Gorvett] came back after.
Aha – so our collective recollection that the motion failed, as reported in my Festering & Fomenting piece, was incorrect.
The “failure” of it, I suspect, was that it was insufficiently specific to guarantee that the Union Committee did anything sufficiently radical for our taste, as we took an all-too specific occupation motion to the Union early the following academic year – with predictably hilarious results to be reported when those events become “forty years on”.
Tuesday 4 May 1982 – Busy day working. Went to film (9 To 5) in evening – quite good. Rana & Chevonne came back after for coffee.
I’m not sure how well all this “having people back” was going down with my new finalist flatmates – more on them anon.
The rest of the week reads relatively quiet. “Helen’s in evening – crowd there” on Wednesday 5th is probably Helen Ross, a big personality who was very friendly with Ashley Fletcher. I choose to mention Ashley in this context because he complained recently that he was getting insufficient coverage in the more recent Ogblog pieces.
Saturday 8 May 1982 – Lazyish day around campus. Went to Union in evening – Clint Eastwood & General Saint. Very good. Went back to Mark’s [Bartholomew] with loads of others – rolled back early hours [Sunday, presumably].
I really do remember the Clint Eastwood & General Saint concert fondly. Dave Lee also gives it a very good review in his book The Keele Gigs!
It seems they appeared on the Old Grey Whistle Test just a couple of weeks before our gig, so their rendering of the anthemic Another One Bites The Dust shown below is probably quite similar to the version we saw:
I certainly recall them getting all to shout out “another one bites the dust” in the stylee depicted in the above video.
Good times.
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