Music – Page 28 – Ian Louis Harris

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 belo w :

“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?

The Cure, Clint Eastwood & General Saint – An Excellent Musical Start To A Keele Summer Term, Late April To Early May 1982

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.

Festering & Fomenting At Keele Late In The Easter Break of 1982

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.

The Soundtrack Of My Early Days In A Barnes Flat At Keele, Spring 1982

With thanks again to Paul Browning for this photo

The pop music of the time would mostly reach my ears through the Union disco and/or the juke box in the main bar of the Students’ Union. I didn’t listen to much pop radio in those days – Radio One didn’t please me much at that time – nor was there much alternative back then outside London.

My habit was to tape from the radio at my parents house onto reel-to-reel…

…then make a cassette copy to play at Keele on my trusty Philips Spatial Stereo Ghettoblaster/Boombox:

*Image “borrowed” from a defunct catawiki listing on fair use basis for identification*

Here’s the track listing of the spool I made during that Easter break – the first dozen during that Easter break – which I took back to Keele on cassette – the rest on my next visit to my parents:

Blue Eyes, Elton John
Party Fears Two, The Associates
The Damned Don’t Cry, Visage
More Than This, Roxy Music
Ghosts, Japan
Ever So Lonely, Monsoon
Give Me Back My Heart, Dollar
Just An Illusion, Imagination
Fantastic Day, Haircut 100
Six Months in a Leaky Boat, Split Enzz
Black Coffee in Bed, Squeeze
Really Saying Something, Bananarama & The Funboy Three
Papa’s Got a Brand New Pig Bag, Pig Bag
I Can Make You Feel Good, Shalamar
Night Birds, Shakatak
Is It a Dream, Classix Nouveaux
Ball and Chain, XTC
Perfumed Garden, The Rah Band

It’s an eclectic list. As usual when I revisit these tapes, some of the choices make me cringe, while others please me and might even become ear worms again, forty years after their first wriggle inside my head.

By the time you get to this article, some of the links below might have gone, but you should be able to hear and see most of the items from the list if you wish.

https://youtu.be/KybfTKNl2NM

Some stand the test of time far better than others. But oh, the synthesisers…oh, the hair styles.

Mix Tape Recorded From Radio, Mostly In February 1982

I have been a bit remiss lately, while writing up my forty years on series, about the early 1980s, in the matter of sharing my soundtracks from that era.

Two mentions of “taping” while in London, having a rare weekend away from Keele, in mid February 1982 made me reach for my spool catalogue and unearth the material I can be sure I was taping at that time. Music from chart shows and similar, which bear tell-tale dates.

An interesting mix, you might say. I make no apologies for my eclectic taste (or lack thereof) at that time.

Oh, the synthesisers!

Only a few of these would make my early 1980s playlist, were I to make one of those up for a forty years on party…not that we do parties any more, post pandemic. A theoretical, hypothetical early 1980s party.

For calligraphically-challenged readers unable to read my handwriting above, below is a version of the above list transcribed: