Category: Music

Keele Rememberings: Confusion, Films, Adam Fairholme RIP & Elvis Costello Live, Late October 1983

I had returned to Keele in Autumn 1983 armed with my copy of Punch The Clock

At times I really didn’t write enough in my diaries. This last week of October 1983 is an example of that.

Put aside the fact that I went to see three films that week without noting any of the film titles. Anyone out there keep notes on Film Soc 1983/84? Where’s Keele Film Soc archivist Tony Sullivan when you need him? – I think Tony had left Keele by then, unfortunately.

Worse yet, I cannot recall what led to the Monday note:

…Busy day – classes etc. Const[itutional] Comm[itee] in eve – confusion in Union!…

I don’t think the confusion and the committee meeting were connected, but maybe they were.

Perhaps the confusion was connected with the other aspect of my memory which I am pretty sure was that week, which was news of the tragic, sudden death of Adam Fairholme.

As I remember it, Adam had gone into town with friends to see a movie and had succumbed to an epileptic fit. No-one in the party had known what to do to reduce the risk of serious injury or death in such circumstances and Adam had tragically choked on his own tongue.

I remember the news of the circumstances so clearly because several of us had gone to the flicks in town with Adam only 10 days or so before the tragedy – ironically to see The Meaning Of Life:

A Wild First Week Of The 1983/84 Year At Keele: Pete Wild, Amazulu, The Man Upstairs, Bobbie Scully, The Meaning Of Life & More

I remember in particular discussing with Ashley Fletcher the irony of our last evening with Adam, given the film’s title, together with the unquestionable fact that, had Adam had his fit while with us, we wouldn’t have known what to do in those circumstances either. Possibly we would have instinctively done something different and helped save him. More probably, we’d have been in the same helpless situation as his companions that night, who must have been in great distress.

My own sadness at the loss of Adam was accentuated by the fact that I had beaten him in the election for the Chair of Constitutional Committee the previous term…

Getting Elected To The Naffest Role In The Keele Students’ Union, But Did I Have The Constitution For It In May 1983?

…a role which I think Adam really wanted, whereas I ran for that election more than a little reluctantly. I vaguely remember Ashley making an off-colour joke about me now unquestionably being better qualified for the role than Adam…and then feeling badly about even thinking such a line, let alone speaking it.

Adam was a very decent fellow. His family, his friends, Keele and who-knows-what beyond was deprived of one of the good people when he died so young.

I am pretty sure the heavy drinking session and resulting hangover Friday/Saturday was in part a sorrows-drowning exercise with regard to Adam.

…went to party in Thorns – drank to[o] much

Saturday 29 October 1983 – Felt very ill when I rose – Hungover wasn’t the word. Recovered in time for Elvis Costello concert – brill.

Here I’m going to give myself a big gold star, as my memory sensed that this concert was at Victoria Hall Hanley, not in the Union. Checking in to the Elvis Costello wiki enabled me to confirm my memory and indeed to see more about that gig on a web page than I could possibly have imagined – click link below for all the details of the tracks played and even a link to the Evening Sentinel review that followed:

Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Victoria Hall Hanley, 29 October 1983

I cannot remember who came with me to that concert. Simon Jacobs, Keele’s one-man Elvis Costello Fan Club, had left Keele that summer and tells me that he is sure he did not return for that gig. Yet in my mind Simon was there. I cannot imagine having seen Elvis Costello perform without Simon being there.

Latterly, in the 1990s, as I report elsewhere, I got to know Elvis Costello surprisingly well, as we were both members of Lambton Place (now BodyWorksWest). I chatted with him idly for years before asking him what he did for a living and then, when he said he was in the music business, asking him his name.

Simon Jacobs is just about still talking to me after I told him about that. At least I hope Simon is, otherwise next week’s meal (I say, reporting 40 years after the Hanley concert) will be a rather quiet one.

Well, Elvis Costello does look different latterly and I had no TV in the 1990s… Photo by Shayne Kaye, CC BY 2.0

Albums I Bought In Early October 1983 Ahead Of My Return To Keele

“Exchange” – in my case, was almost always buying, very rarely selling

The diary says that I went to Makro (Woolwich) with my Dad on Sunday 2 October and then to Record & Tape Exchange (in Notting Hill) on Monday 3 October.

Unusually, I can work out from the ink colour in my logs the purchases I made on those occasions. Forty years on, this will enable musicologists, Keele historians, friends, members of the Dull Men’s Club and others to analyse my purchases at will. Indeed, in excruciating detail if they wish.

Here is the batch of eleven albums I bought at Makro, each with a Discogs link:

Here is the extract from my R&T log for that October 1983 visit:

Allow me to translate and link to Discogs:

No wonder I had a frenzied bout of taping for the next few days, before returning to Keele 9 October. I put several of these albums onto cassette in their entirety and made up a couple of none-too-shabby mix tapes too.

Keen to know what readers think of these records, forty years on.

My First Night At the Proms: Me, Jilly & Claudio, 1 September 1983

Claudio Abbado in 1982 (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Judging from the notes in my diary, I was spending most of my working days late August and early September in Kenton, doing stuff for Laurie Krieger’s various enterprises, about which I have written a little elsewhere on Ogblog and no doubt will write more in the fulness of time.

As luck would have it, I was asked to return to the office that Thursday afternoon for the rest of the week. Luck, because Jilly, whom I had arranged to meet that evening, got a sudden compulsion to leg it over to the Royal Albert Hall to see the prom that night, as Claudio Abbado was to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra.

It’s Claudio Abbado. he’s the greatest. We’ve got to see him. We might never get another chance…

I was less sure than Jilly about this at the time. She was a budding music student of course, whereas I was still on the low foothills of appreciating classical music.

But I had heard of both pieces to be performed that night – here’s the BBC stub for that “show”:

  • Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Concerto No 5 in E flat major, ‘Emperor’
  • Hector Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique.

Indeed, I even owned a recording of the Fantastique.

I remember queuing for quite a long time. I don’t remember whether we enjoyed this concert from the arena or the gallery. My guess is that it was the gallery as I don’t think we could have got there early enough to get in to the arena, but perhaps in those days “after work arrival” was good enough for the arena.

Of course it was very good indeed. Of course Jilly was right – I can now always say that I saw Claudio Abbado conduct.

Feeling envious that you didn’t hear the concert? Wondering whether you remember what orchestras and soloists (Emmanuel Ax on the piano for the Emperor Concerto) sounded like live under Abbado?

Fret no more. A website named pastdaily.com uploaded the recording of this concert as a tribute when Abbado died in 2014. Embedded below.

Claudio Abbado Conducts The London Symphony – 1983 – Past Daily Mid-Week Concert/Tribute Edition

Thank you Jilly and thank you Past Daily.

Paul Deacon’s Summer 1983 Mix Tape, Side Two, c.August 1983

Side Two Track Listing

You can see/hear Side One of Paul Deacon’s exceptional Summer 1983 mix tape by clicking here or the link below.

Paul Deacon’s Summer 1983 Mix Tape, Side One, c.August 1983

Here are embeds for Side Two.

https://youtu.be/loHOhxsglKI

Paul Deacon’s Summer 1983 Mix Tape, Side One, c.August 1983

Paul some 34 years later – still crazy (about records) after all these years

The reel-to-reel mix tape that Paul made for me in the summer of 1983 was a true belter. Most of his mix tapes were terrific, of course, but this one I especially remember listening to a great deal that summer and during the 83/84 academic year at Keele, having ported the material onto cassettes.

Here’s Side One. I’ll up Side Two soon.

Below I have embedded them all – hopefully most/all will still be here when you get to this piece, if you want to listen (and/or, in a few cases, watch).

https://youtu.be/LJBbinPkAEM

I feel compelled to interrupt this playlist to heap praise on the brilliant selection of the above three tracks as a sequence. It’s hard for me to explain (Paul might be able to do so) but it worked brilliantly for me. I realise, with hindsight, that any smidgeon of ability I brought to DJ-ing at Keele the following year was to a large degree attributable to what I learnt from Paul. What a pro.

So for you, Paul, as I know you will enjoy this, here is a live version of Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band at The Marquee introduced by a young German woman in a mixture of German and English that we might easily have made up:

And now, back to the playlist:

(I Married A) Monster From Outer Space – And What That Did For One Of My Earthly Romances, 15 October 1982

Ashley Fletcher reminiscing for me in The Sneyd Ams, 35 years later.

I retrieved this memory vividly at a pilot of Rohan Candappa’s new performance piece on 31 October 2017:

What Listening To 10,000 Love Songs Has taught Me About Love. It’s an exploration of love, and music, and how the two intertwine. it’s also about how our lives have a soundtrack.”

Here is a link to my write up of Rohan’s performance piece.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Rohan used (I Married A) Monster From Outer Space by John Cooper Clarke as one of his examples. If you have never heard a recording of it, here is a vid with an unexpurgated version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbRM-canDOs

It was Paul Deacon who introduced me to the recording (the expurgated version as it happens), in April 1982. I know these exact details because I still have the track listing from the relevant cassette, beautifully typed by Paul as part of the gift:

In October 1982, that cassette would have still been in the recent section of my cassette cases and was still getting plenty of play.

Now turn your mind to Freshers’ Week on the 1982/83 year; my third. Thus spake my diary:

That’s not a bad few days.

I saw The Beat at the Freshers’ Ball on the Wednesday. I’m pretty sure I liked them a lot before I saw them live. But once I’d seen them live I liked them even more. They were a terrific live act. I especially remember the Keele audience going wild for Ranking Full Stop and of course Stand Down Margaret, but pretty much all of the gig was superb as I remember it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFaFVhyjb5Y

Writing in October 2017, I only wish that someone would write something with similar sentiments about our current prime minister. I mean, where’s Simon Jacobs when you need him?…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM4lSw68-AE

…ah, there he is. Thank you, Simon. But I digress.

Two nights later, with just one evening between gigs for me to recover (by “getting quite intoxicated”, apparently) it was Culture Club. That gig was eagerly awaited. They had been unknowns when booked, but were Number Two in the charts come Freshers’ Week, with the clever money suggesting that they would be Number One by the time the next chart came out – which they were.

Liza was at that gig with Ashley Fletcher and a few others of that Hawthornes Hall crowd. Liza wasn’t a Keele student; she had just enrolled on an art school type course at North Staffs Poly as it then was. Liza lived in The Sneyd Arms; she was landlord Geoff O’Connor’s daughter.

35 years later…Ashley in The Sneyd Arms – with thanks to Ashley & Sal for the picture

I remember being underwhelmed by the Culture Club gig. To be fair, their rise (and therefore the increase in expectations) had been stratospheric – in truth they were still a fairly inexperienced band who would have seemed “better than most” if people hadn’t been expecting overnight superstars. I remember them playing “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me” at least twice. I think it was just twice. Fairly short set, though.

Weird vid, but if you want to see/hear the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nXGPZaTKik

Anyway, Liza and I went on to the Postgraduate Bar – KRA afterwards – I have a feeling that Ashley and the rest went on somewhere else. Then one thing led to another with Liza.

I was over the moon, I took her back to my place…and we ended up going out for the rest of that academic year, basically.

I vaguely associate the start of my relationship with Liza with Culture Club. Very vaguely. Until I looked at the diary to prepare this piece, I had completely forgotten that Liza and I got started the night of that gig.

But when Rohan spoke about (I Married A) Monster From Outer Space I had a strong memory flash about it. For a start, I realised that I always associate that record with starting out with Liza.

I cannot swear that the following interaction took place that very first evening/night…I’d rather like to think it was…but I clearly remember Liza rummaging through my cassettes, finding the above one and yelping with joy that I had “I Married A Monster”, which she loved.

It was one of those joyous things; the shared pleasure in a rather obscure, let’s face it, weird, recording. It helped to cement Liza’s and my relationship in those early days. We knew that we must have plenty in common, because we both really liked that John Cooper Clarke record. What additional evidence could you possibly need?

In Rohan’s show, he didn’t really explore the business of how we use the discovery of shared taste in songs to help cement our relationships. But I think that happens often and is quite a central part of why music is so important to us, whether we are seeking, starting, in or ending relationships.

But thanks, Rohan, for helping me to recover this memory through “Monster”. And thanks Paul Deacon, for all you did to help me and Liza, without ever knowing it, until now.

By the way, Rohan’s favourite line from “Monster” is:

…and it’s bad enough with another race, but f*ck me, a monster from outer space.

That might be my favourite line too. But Liza’s favourite line was:

…she lives in 1999, with her new boyfriend, a blob of slime.

Perhaps that was Liza’s way of trying to keep me on my toes; “you’re not the only pebble on the beach…if you keep on like that I might prefer to date a blob of slime…”.

I’m done, but you might enjoy this ranting poetry version of I Married A Monster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6emQpBXe5Y

Winner, Winner, Radio London Pop Quiz Winner, Seven Singles – Summer 1982

Image “borrowed” from britishrecordshoparchive.org

I spent a few days that summer at the head office of Laurie Krieger’s empire in Kenton – I’m pretty sure that was the first of what turned out to be many accounting “gigs” there in the 1980s. I have written more about it in a 1983 posting, as I spent more time there in 1983, by which time various Krieger ventures were hotting-up.

In 1982 I think I was mostly looking at accounts for Price Buster Records, which was Laurie’s sole surviving record store from the recently sold Harlequin Records empire. At that time, Laurie’s son Paul ran Price Buster.

My 1982 memories are two-fold. One was the kind gesture from Laurie with guest passes for the Sandown Park races, covered in the piece linked here and below:

1982 Summer Subsides: Sandown, Spurs, Shule & Sleepy Start To My Second “P Year” At Keele, Late August To 3 October 1982

The other is a memory recovered when I looked at a unusual batch of seven singles in my collection from 1982. I didn’t tend to buy singles and I wouldn’t have bought this batch.

Then I remembered that I won that batch while at Laurie’s Kenton HQ.

Marge, who ran that office, was addicted to Radio London almost as much as she was addicted to cigarettes. In particular, she loved Robbie Vincent‘s afternoon show, which was mostly a phone-in show back then. I found myself able to close my ears to most of the phone-in stuff back then – now 40 years later I’d probably be distracted (or driven to distraction) by it.

The one distraction that became compulsory, though, was a pop quiz thing, where people were encouraged to be ready with their phones and phone in if they knew the answer. Once Marge and Jean worked out that I regularly tended to know the answer to such questions, they got busy dialling all-but the last number and trying to get me through to Radio London to grab the prize on air. One day, they got through, I answered the question, promoted Price Buster by stating that I was working there and I scored a batch of singles.

Marge was so thrilled by the win (and the publicity), it rather cemented my role there as a holiday-job-ista and latterly as a trainee accountant working on that account. Laurie liked my connection with Uncle Michael and his team liked me. Result in more ways than one.

“So precisely which singles did you score in the summer of 1982?” I hear you cry.

  • That’s A Lady, Shock USA
  • Rock Baby Rock, Gene Latter
  • Theme From Paradise, Phoebe Cates
  • Planet Rock, Africa Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force
  • Love Come Down, Evelyn “Champagne” King
  • No Love, Joan Armatrading
  • European Female, The Stranglers

Not a bad mini-collection. One or two misses, one or two absolute bangers. Here they are as an embedded playlist:

Another Informal Subsidiary In Contemporary Music From Keele In the Summer Of 1982: Tutor On this Occasion – Jon Gorvett

Jon Gorvett on the far right (pictorially, not politically) next to Simon Jacobs (also a Keele alum), together with me and Jon’s partner Stephanie in 2018

In August 1982, during the Keele summer break, Jon Gorvett visited my family home in Streatham for the weekend.

The diary is a little low on detail. It looks as though we focussed on wine more than beer (unusually for me at that time) and we seem to have focussed on trendy London places – Brixton, Camden Lock & Notting Hill – how cool is that!?

Somewhat higher on detail is my log of tape recordings, which lists a whole heap of albums with Jon’s name beside them. How we found the time to rip all those albums onto tape while doing the listed activities from the diary is a mystery to me. I’m guessing that Jon might have left that pile of albums with me and I returned them to him at the start of term. Either that or there were some recording sessions deep into the early hours.

Here is a list of the albums:

There were some singles too, which I used to fill up the tapes, but I was not so meticulous about logging who lent me which singles and I know I had a similar (smaller) recording session with Wendy Robbins later that summer break; she also had some cool singles. But I think the following classics were from Jon:

Yet still questions remain about that visit. Why was Jon delayed on arrival on the Friday? How scary did he find my mum? Which wine bar did we go to in South London – I don’t remember such places existing in those parts in those days.

Memorable sounds though, for sure. I listened to those recordings one heck of a lot in the subsequent years and still rate several of those albums very highly indeed.

Thanks, Jon.

Informal Contemporary Music Subsidiary Course At Keele In The Summer Of 1982, Tutor: Mark Ellicott

I have discovered a cassette tape of “contemporary” music which Mark Ellicott made for me in the summer of 1982. I remember little of the background to this tape, but I did play it a fair bit during that summer break from Keele and quite a lot during the ensuing academic year 82/83, which Mark missed.

During his first year at Keele, Mark was, self-confessedly, going through a bit of a transformation, from “Tory Boy” at the Keele Royal Ball…

Mark Ellicott Guest Piece: A Right Royal Keele Ball, Starring Princess Margaret, But At What Price?, 3 December 1981

…to becoming a more iconoclastic figure in Keele circles, going on to become Social Secretary later in the 1980s and subsequently managing some of the best-known venues in the UK.

I think Mark might have given me this tape right at the end of the summer term in 1982, perhaps by way of an apology for getting me roped into playing cricket on his behalf – long story told here and below:

“Got Roped In To Playing Cricket All Afternoon”, Gentlemen v Players Cricket Match, Keele Festival Week, 24 June 1982

Below is the tape listing from Mark’s one-side of a C90 offering, which I labelled “ME Batch” with a clear note on my log that Mark had made this for me:

Some fascinating choices there, which I have attempted to find in the best versions possible on the web. It will be interesting to learn Mark’s thoughts about this mix tape (or what people latterly would call a playlist) forty years on.

To add a little to the intrigue, the second side of the cassette is a recording of Changestwobowie, which my log says was made for me by Andrea Collins (now Woodhouse). Did Mark and Andrea collaborate on making this cassette for me, or did Andrea offer to fill in the second side of the tape for me after Mark gave me a one-sided cassette? My diary and logs are silent on such details and my memory only retains the extent to which I played this cassette quite a lot in the second half of 1982.

To close, here’s one of my (many) favourite tracks from that Bowie album:

Forty years on, just in case I didn’t express sufficient gratitude at the time: thanks Mark, thanks Andrea.

Informal Subsidiary Course In Contemporary Music At Keele In My P1 Year, 81/82, Part One: Dave From Lancashire

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.

Listing “the Dave Eight” just before my March-June charts rip tape sort-of dates it

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.

Dave thought Depeche Mode had hidden depths, I thought hidden shallows

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”.

I guess we made a din recording those albums

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?