Ticket image borrowed from The Fall Gigography
It’s hard to imagine a week getting more exciting after the “Truda Smith incident” on the Monday, reported last time…
…and indeed the rest of that week has little worthy of report in it.
Union Stuff
The diary suggests a fairly settled pattern of work, spending time with Bobbie and spending time in the Union, mostly around elections and such matters. The Chair of Constitutional Committee also chaired Election Appeals Committee and it seems there were elections that week.
I found a stray voting slip some years ago, when rummaging through a file for something else – it might well have been for the election that week.
The other thing that is clear from my diary that week is that I became good friends with Vivian Robinson around that time. She was SU Secretary (and therefore also returning officer) that year – so we were thrown together ex officio in terms of running elections.
Fortunately we got on well and I think the elections that year ran smoothly – even the one that I ran in…just about. Viv and I remained friends after Keele, not least when she lived on Bedford Hill in the late 1980s, about 10 minutes walk from my parents house. Watch this space for future tales.
Anyway, that week, it seems, Viv cooked me dinner one night and I made her lunch a couple of days later.
Anarchist Bonfire Party, 11 November 1983
I like the reference to going to an “anarchist bonfire party” after dinner with Viv on 11 November. Ashley and/or Sally Hyman might remember some details about that event, but I must admit I don’t remember much about it.
Perhaps it was part of a trend at that time to perceive Guy Fawkes as a radical hero, which, frankly, he wasn’t. Or perhaps it was more an excuse to have a bonfire party a week or so after the conventional Guy-effigy-burning occasion and avoid the unpleasant connotations of all that, by simply having a lively bonfire party, which I’m sure it was.
The Fall Supported By the Stockholm Monsters, 16 November 1983
This was a pretty memorable Keele gig in my book, as much for the buzz there was around The Fall at that time as the sound itself, which was only sort-of to my taste.
The Stockholm Monsters were a more than half-decent support act, well suited to support The Fall. In 1983 they sounded like this:
The Fall appeared on The Tube just over a week after our Keele gig. Their set on The Tube looked like this:
Andrea’s Party At Bushy House, 19/20 November 1983
By the end of that week I was writing in red ink, reporting on a trip to London. I love the fact that I note that I had a haircut on the Saturday morning. I’m guessing that my mum would have strongly suggested I needed a haircut, probably because of the location of the party I was going to that night.
My friend Andrea Dean was living in Bushy House, Teddington at that time. Her father had become Director of the National Physical Laboratory and a rather sprauncy apartment came with that job.
Bushy House is a former residence of King William IV, although I suspect he made use of the whole house.
I remember more than one entertaining party/gathering at Bushy House when it was Andrea’s place. This November 1983 one was especially memorable.
…And Forty Years On?
I rather like the juxtaposition of an anarchist bonfire party one weekend and a party in a formerly royal residence the next in November 1983.
Forty years on, both of those parties were good training for the week that I have just been through:
1983 is where I jump onboard as an extra in Ian’s, very vividly, drawn biopic of Keele life. I came from a community that, apart from digging coal from the ground, seemed to have an obsession with rock music…and particularly with the ‘new wave of British heavy metal’ (or NWOBHM’ as Sounds magazine called it). After years of adherence to this cult (including The Cult) my ardour for 3-minute guitar solos eventually waned. It was at Reading 1983 where, on a hot Sunday afternoon, I suddenly realised there was such a thing as ‘too many notes.’
Thus it was, I arrived at Horwood X block, in October ’83, with a thirst for new musical stimuli. Three of my flatmates were from an entirely different universe of musical genre fandom – including, crucially, two from the greater Manchester area. Within days I had been exposed to the delights of the The Smiths , New Order and The Fall. We listened, by candlelight, to Unknown Pleasures, as an act of remembrance of Ian Curtis, (no kidding). I became enamoured with Cocteau Twins, Killing Joke and, at Keele, later discovered my all-time favourite band Cardiacs.
Going to Keele and achieving escape velocity from my former musical micro-verse was one of the most formative experiences of my life. Setting aside this pomposity, I return to The Fall gig Ian mentions.
This was one of my first Keele gigs (I escaped Joboxers) and it was one of the best gigs I’ve ever attended. It’s good to know this was 16th November 1983. 40 years and two days ago as I write. The spectacle of a dishevelled Mark E. Smith and his rather glamorous (then) wife Brix – together with a gang of unassuming fellow travellers (bands with two drummers always kick ass) – will always stay with me. After three or four weeks of exposure to ‘other’ genres this gig was the culmination of some kind of musical Gestalt shift. The metalhead duck became the indie-kid rabbit. It’s an appalling metaphor, but it’s the best I’ve got.
This is what happens when kids from different backgrounds and geographical locations mix. I’ve always felt student mobility…that geographical and cultural melting pot… is a particular strength of the UK university tradition. Or it was. Universities and private providers deliberately price accommodation fees at, more or less, the average student loan income. It’s pushing many students of limited financial means, who want out of their home town, into staying put and living with their folks. That’s a disgrace.
John – many thanks for this wonderful and evocative comment. I would welcome guest pieces from you, if you care to write them, as your thoughts would get a bit more prominence on the site if featured that way. Not that Ogblog is an especially prominence-oriented site! Thanks again for your interesting thoughts. I completely agree with you, btw, on the matter of leaving one’s home environment for further/higher education being an important part of the learning and growing up process, denied to a great many students now, especially those from less well-to-do backgrounds. I wouldn’t have been willing/able to go to Keele in the current system as my parents would not have been able to support me financially and I don’t think I’d have had the guts to saddle myself up with debt. Thanks again.