I just couldn’t get enough contemporary music
At Keele in those days we had to take two subsidiary courses during our first degree year. I’ll write about those in time, but for now I want to write a trilogy of pieces about the informal subsidiary education I enjoyed around contemporary music at Keele that year.
My source for these pieces, for once, is not the diary – it is my collection of music; in this instance mostly cassettes that Keele people made for me.
I only had a radio cassette player at Keele – see image below for the one I had for the first couple of years – while my record and reel-to-reel collection at my parents house also burgeoned during my Keele years.
My system at Keele back then, a Philips Spatial Stereo Ghettoblaster/Boombox
Of all the pieces I shall write about friends influencing my interest in music, this is the most mysterious and perhaps the Keele alum community can help me identify Dave.
I don’t think I mention him at all in the diary – nor can I trace the particular evenings when, as my memory stores it – I went to his room with my blaster and he recorded several of his records onto cassette for me while we drank, smoked and chatted music.
I’m pretty sure he was Lancastrian – I can hear in my mind’s ear him saying “Depeche Mode” with the word “mode” sounding like the past tense of a cow making noise…”mooed”. Indeed, until recently I had assumed that Depeche Mode was a Northern electro pop band – only forty years on have I learnt that they were from Basildon. Dave was strangely attracted to their sound and style – I think he had cognitive dissonance about them. I was not a fan and have none of their music in my collection, but I must say, forty years on, the video below just oozes 1981/82 and I felt bound to share it with you.
I think my fleeting, casual friendship with Dave sprung up around the topic of Van Morrison, whom I had discovered in the summer of 1981. I played Astral Weeks incessantly and I think Dave might have first introduced himself to me by knocking on my Lindsay F Block door on hearing Astral Weeks blaring from my room.
I think Dave was involved with social committee to some extent – perhaps on the technical side. Unusually, he had connection leads to enable us to connect my blaster to his “gramophone”.
The two Van Morrison albums that comprise the first Dave tape – TB Sheets and Into the Music, while interesting and informative, did not get air play in my room to anything like the extent of Astral Weeks.
The tape with Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane and The Best Of Grace Slick & The Great Society on it got played so much, it is a miracle that it survived. For the Airplane heads amongst you, Dave’s “Pillow” was the 1967 UK release – I subsequently acquired decent copies of both the UK and the US version of the album. I also now have the digitally remastered Grace Slick & The Great Society collection.
Here are a couple of samples to whet your appetites:
In truth, I did not listen much to Crown Of Creation or Baron Von Tollbooth – perhaps I should give them a proper try now and see what I make of them in my dotage.
The other album I listened to oh so many times at Keele (and subsequently) was Goodbye Pop by National Lampoon. Much as I liked Not The Nine O’clock News, the sketches and especially the song pastiches on Goodbye Pop are of the very highest quality.
The Gilder Ratner song/sketch I’m A Woman is superb and seems just as relevant forty years on…
…and if you think the Sid Gormless character at the start of the Art Rock Suite reminds you a bit of Nigel from Spinal Tap, that might just be because it is indeed Christopher Guest playing that role. Oh, stuff it, here’s a link to the whole album. You can get it on Spotify and Apple and all those places now.
So thank you, Dave, whoever and wherever you are now.
Question for advanced students among the Keele alums of the time – any thoughts on who the mysterious Dave might be and where he might be now?