The 1981 Easter vacation proved to be a bit of a mix tape-thon for me and my friends. This is the first of three cassette mix tapes that Graham Greenglass made up for me. My diary refers to them only indirectly, but Graham visited me and Simon Jacobs at Keele towards the end of the Easter term and my diary says, amongst other things:
Sunday 15 March – Lazy day. Made up Graham’s tapes. Cooked in evening.
…
Tuesday 17 March – Work Ok. Lunched with Graham…
…so am pretty sure that the swap occurred then. What I put on the tapes I made up for Graham is almost certainly lost in the mists of time.
…except that the Paul Deacon arrangement was sustained for several years, whereas this Easter 1981 multi-cassette swap was the high and final water mark of the “GG Swaps”, as I have referred to them ever since.
This first of the three was a superbly eclectic mix on Side One (see headline picture), which I shall try to replicate with YouTube links below on this article, followed by Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Hits on Side Two (see below), which I shall sample only.
The other thing to mention, before launching into the YouTubes, is that my numbering system for cassettes was a number sequence based on sides, so cassette 169-170 was the 85th cassette in my collection, which mostly consisted of scrapes from my reel-to-reels with some scrapes from my LPs and just a few mix tapes at that time.
OK, here goes, pop pickers. Or should I say, new wave pickers?
Katie Turner, Rick Cowdery, Robert Plant, Frank Dillon & Carol Downs, with many thanks to Frank Dillon for the photograph (added June 2017) – also thanks to Steve A Jones for restoration work on the e-pic (October 2018)
In many ways this is a darned simple story.
Robert Plant secretly arranged to play a warm up gig with his new band, The Honeydrippers, at the UKSU Ball on 11 March 1981. The gig was in one of the smaller performance rooms, Room 14, despite the fact that Robert Plant was the former lead singer and lyricist of Led Zeppelin, among the biggest names in rock then and indeed ever.
I was at that ball. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time when one of Robert Plant’s roadies was getting some drinks in just before the start of the gig.
I politely let the roadie go ahead of me at the bar; he returned the favour by tipping me off to get upstairs to Room 14 before word spread. I remember partly doubting the roadie’s word, but he did have a roadie lanyard and he also surreptitiously showed me a Robert Plant badge, so I thought, “if this is a practical joke, it’s a clever one and I don’t mind falling for it”.
I am extremely lucky to have seen that gig; Room 14 is small, so I don’t suppose more than 100-150 of us saw the gig. Even that will have blown the fire limit; once word spread most people who tried simply couldn’t get through the door. Far more people claim to have seen the gig than actually saw it.
The gig became a big news story at the time.
With thanks to Steve A Jones for sending me this image…several times, increasing the quality each time. This version hopefully good enough quality for most/all Ogblog readers.
The intriguing, complicating factor is that, back in 2013, I stumbled across a reference to this gig on-line and discovered that on-line sources, of the “rock history” variety, were all quoting the wrong date for this gig. Some 10 March, some 9 March, none 11 March.
My diary was not always a totally reliable source of dates back then – heck, whole days could disappear at Keele and sometimes I would “back-write” a few weeks if I got behind.
But this was at a ball and balls normally happened on Wednesdays. In any case, there was enough going on in my diary that week to suggest that I was…on the ball at that time (pun intended).
I posted some corrective comments on-line which triggered contact from the relevant Led Zep archivists. They were appropriately helpful but sceptical at first. They wanted additional evidence, so I sought the help of John White (who for some reason I recalled was at that gig, although I didn’t know him all that well back then).
John sent me a redacted copy of his diary page – John specialised in existential angst in his diary back then apparently – but I must say this is one of the most heavily redacted diary pages I have ever seen:
Many thanks to John White for his efforts digging out this page and redacting…almost all of it. We do learn from that note that Dr Feelgood was the main act at that ball. We also learn that John, back then, preferred the cabaret to Feelgood and Plant.
Our diary trawling efforts, together with the redoubled efforts of those real archivists once they had some more leads to go on, got to the bottom of the matter. There was a private, secret gig in a pub in Stourbridge on 9 March, but the secret gig that blew the story open was indeed at Keele two days later, So the Robert Plant Secret Keele Gig is now “officially” confirmed to have happened when it did happen; 11 March 1981. Some on-line sources might not yet have caught up with this news.
Prior to our temporal triumph, I also tried to engage the help of Daniel Rushton, a Keele alum who had worked at Z/Yen for a while but had recently returned to alma mater. Dan drew a blank, but subsequently said:
extremely happy to hear that this has all been cleared up and that a slight weight has been removed from my weak shoulders. Now I can go back to imagining having been there!
One further intriguing matter from an Ogblog perspective. In my correspondence with the Led Zep archivists back in 2013 I wrote the following:
I might write this business up for the Keele Alumni mag – some of the stuff in my diary has reminded me of some ripping yarns from that end of term week, not least that RobertPlant gig. I envisage a sort-of pseudo blog/diary – what would I have written back then if blogs and Twitter had existed? If/when I do write it up, I’ll let you all know.
This small matter might have planted (pun intended) the thought seed for the entire Ogblog project. Reading that 2013 e-mail again has certainly tweaked my interest in that week of my 1981 diary…there must be quite a bit of other juicy stuff in there.
I didn’t write a lot of album reviews for Concourse, the Keele Students’ newspaper, but I did write this one, in March 1981. I think my neighbour in F Block Lindsay, Paul, had bought the album; I’m sure I didn’t buy it.
I ended up writing a great deal of that beleaguered March 1981 issue of Concourse, as I shall explain in another post, but clearly I had been commissioned to write this review before the hoo-ha that led to interim editing and all hands to the pump for the paper deadline.
Anyway, my hatchet job on The Stranglers sits next to an equally acerbic review of The Steve Gibbons Band by my good friend Simon Jacobs, without whom I, for sure, would not have ended up at Keele. But that’s another story.
In many ways this playlist (to use the modern parlance, forty years on) was the soundtrack to that second term of mine at Keele. I refer to the making of this mix tape in my piece about that first 10 days of February 1981:
I probably didn’t record all of this mix tape one morning on 7 February 1981, although that day is the only diary mention of “taping, etc”. I suspect that I recorded some of this towards the end of the Christmas holidays and then some more of it on that February day. For sure I would have scraped the reel-to-reel tape onto cassette that day (along with a few more of my albums and stuff) to enhance the tiny collection I had so far taken up to Keele.
On reflection, this feels more a quantity selection than a quality selection. But now I was away from my recording equipment for weeks/months at a stretch, I can understand why.
Anyway, enough of my chatter, pop-pickers, here is the list and some embedded sound and video files for you to play with on those tracks you’d like to hear again.
I Ain’t Gonna Stand For It, Stevie Wonder
I Shot the Sheriff, Light of the World
Romeo and Juliet, Dire Straits
Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, David Bowie
Woman, John Lennon
Can You Feel It, The Jacksons
Is Vic There, Department 5
I Can’t Stand It, Eric Clapton
Twighlight Café, Susan Fassbender
Sgt Rock (Is Going To Help Me),XTC
I’m In Love With a German Filmstar, The Passions
Elephant’s Graveyard, Boomtown Rats
Gangsters of the Groove, Heatwave
It’s My Turn, Diana Ross
A Little in Love, Cliff Richard
That’s Entertainment, The Jam
Return of the Los Palmos 7, Madness
Young Parisians, Adam and the Ants
Fade To Grey, Visage
The Freeze, Spandau Ballet
Rapture, Blondie
Vienna, Ultravox
In the Air Tonight, Phil Collins
Flash, Queen
As usual. some excellent stuff in there, plus the odd embarrassment.
Now (around its 40th anniversary) I am publishing the mix tape I made over the Christmas holidays to take back to Keele with me after my first term.
There were some gems but also some dogs on my pre-Keele list. Let’s see what one term at Keele had done to my charts-scraping mix-tape-making taste. It is mostly stuff I was hearing a lot during that Autumn 1980 term at Keele, plus one or two late in the year releases. Here is the list and below a link to each track.
Clubland, Elvis Costello
Hungry Heart, Bruce Springsteen
If You’re Looking For a Way Out, Odyssey
Same Old Scene, Roxy Music
Enola Gay, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
I’m Coming Out, Diana Ross
Just Like Starting Over, John Lennon
Banana Republic, Boomtown Rats
Embarrassment, Madness
To Cut a Long Story Short, Spandau Ballet
Do You Feel My Love, Eddie Grant
The Tide is High, Blondie
December Will Be Magic Again, Kate Bush
Do Nothing, The Specials
Too Nice To Talk To, The Beat
Runaway Boys, The Stray Cats
Ant Music, Adam and the Ants
De Do Do Do De Da Da Da, The Police
Stop the Cavalry, Jona Lewie
I think this December 1980 playlist/mix tape is a higher quality list than the October one – fewer out and out embarrassments anyway. Except for Embarrassment, obviously, which is itself not an embarrassment in my view. Simon Jacobs will certainly approve the first one on the list.
https://youtu.be/GGl8tHar-Ko
Back in 1980 I would not have been seeing the videos. I doubt if I even got to see Top Of The Pops by that time. So I must say I am quite surprised by some of the garments – especially in the jumper and tank top department – in the above vids. I especially commend to you Andy McCluskey’s tank top in Enola Gay, Terry Hall’s jumper (indeed all of The Special’s jumpers) in Do Nothing and of course Tony Hadley’s bizarre upper garment – a tunic of sorts – in To Cut A Long Story Short. If only I’d had dress sense back then.
No fireworks for me in the conventional sense that year, but a couple of pyrotechnic splashes to be sure. This was my first term at University and what a billing. The Teardrop Explodes were reasonably well known among the cognoscenti, but back then no-one would have known that the Thompson Twins were also heading for new wave stardom.
I had actually rubbed shoulders with Julian Cope some months before, at a The Sound gig in a Clapham Junction dive:
Benita “Bi” Marshall was my-mate-Anil-from-school’s big sister – how cool was that?
Anyway, I thought that The Teardrop Explodes were just great and that this was one of the best gigs I had ever been to in my entire life. It was, of course, one of the first gigs I ever went to, so perhaps my judgement was not yet well-formed. Still, even with the benefit of subsequent experience and some more-informed hindsight, this was a pretty superb gig to get in your first term at University. I do remember it went down really well with the crowd.
I’ll leave it to the better-informed Concourse reviewer, in an article from the 1980 special Christmas edition, to let you know how the concert really was.
Although why the reviewer thought the concert was in October is a mystery; perhaps he’d lost all track of time that term. Bless him, it sometimes happened to the best of us at Keele. I registered this concert in my diary as 19 November, but I was going through a particularly hazy patch towards the end of my first term, if you know what I mean, writing up my diary while inebriated some weeks after the event. Oh dear!
At some point during that week, I will have made up a mix tape of current popular music.
In less frenetic times, I would record the odd song or two or a few, while listening to the chart show every few weeks. These were frenetic times, though. I had just finished working for BBYO all summer (living in at Hillel House most of the time) and was soon to go off to Keele University.
So I recorded quite a lot of stuff from the radio during those few days off. Initially, that would have been recorded onto the Sony TC-377 reel-to-reel tape recorder (see photo above). But as I knew I planned only have a cassette player with me at Keele, I then copied said recordings onto a cassette.
Quite laborious stuff.
Here is the list of recordings I made at that time:
Masterblaster Jamming, Stevie Wonder
I Die You Die, Gary Numan
Don’t Stand So Close, The Police
Don’t Lose Your Temper, XTC
Best Friend, The Beat
I Wanna Be Straight, Ian Dury and the Blockheads
Baggy Trousers, Madness
Give Me the Night, George Benson
Searchin’, Change
Oops Upside Your Head, Gap Band
Tom Hark, The Piranhas
Eighth Day, Hazel O’Connor
Feels Like I’m In Love, Kelly Marie
One Day I’ll Fly Away, Randy Crawford
What You’re Proposing, Status Quo
Stereotype, The Specials
Misunderstanding, Genesis
Fallout, Data
Fashion, David Bowie
Army Dreamers, Kate Bush
Mad At You, Joe Jackson
All Out of Love, Air Supply
I Got You, Split Enzz
Another One Bites the Dust, Queen
Amigo, Black Slate
Disco, Ottawan
In truth, I wouldn’t be choosing many of these for my Desert Island iPod now. I can try the slightly lame excuses that I hadn’t really been paying that much attention to the chart music that late summer/early autumn and that I will have made up this tape in a bit of a rush, possibly with more willingness to pad out the tape than usual.
Anyway, to the extent that I am able, below are links to public domain versions of each of the above, so you can decide for yourselves, if you can be bothered. In any case, I’m sure some readers will be curious enough to want to listen to some of the recordings.
The play list starts brilliantly…and ends.
Gosh, that was quicker and easier than making up a mix tape, by a long, long chalk.
Possibly Christine by Siouxie & The Banshees is the pick of the mix
Ahead of a virtual gathering of the Alleyn’s “Class of 1980” in January 2021, I have decided to share the mix tapes I made right at the end of my time at Alleyn’s School.
Rohan Candappa and Nick Wahla have asked questions for that gathering, which I answered here:
Those have led to some debate. Perhaps my “end of school” mix tapes will similarly cause some discussion. At the very least, I imagine they’ll spark some memories. Chart music was part of the soundtrack of many of our lives back then.
Effectively I recorded two batches right at the end of my time at Alleyn’s. One batch around the Whitsun long weekend (end of May 1980) and then another batch right at the very end – late June – mostly the weekend after the ‘A’ levels I’d guess.
Here’s a list of the first batch – the May 1980 batch:
Messages, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Dance, The Lambrettas
Breathing, Kate Bush
I’m Alive, Electric Light Orchestra
Teenage, UK Subs
Let’s Go Round Again, The Average White Band
Over You, Roxy Music
The Bed’s Too Big Without You, The Police
Theme From M*A*S*H, M*A*S*H
We Are Glass, Gary Numan
Here is the list of the late June 1980 batch:
Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime, The Korgis
Christine, Siouxsie and the Banshees
The Scratch, Surface Noise
New Amsterdam, Elvis Costello
Who Wants the World, The Stranglers
Play the Game, Queen
Breaking the Law, Judas Priest
Let’s Get Serious, Jermaine Jackson
No Doubt About It, Hot Chocolate
Funky Town, Lipps Inc
Crying, Don McLean
Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please, Splodgenessabounds
Given the amount of time I spent in The Fox On The Hill in that last Alleyn’s week, the final recording on that list comes as no surprise. (Although for sure I’d have been drinking bitter, not lager). Anyway, I don’t think “Two Pints…” will make it onto my Desert Island Discs list. Frankly, I can’t see any of the above making that list. Christine’s a great track, as is New Amsterdam. There’s some good stuff, but it’s not my best mix tape, that’s for sure. I was kinda busy with other stuff at that time.
But 16 May 1980 was surely my first “proper rock” gig; The Sound at The 101 Club. And my mate Anil Biltoo’s sister Benita was in the band – how cool was that?
My diary entry for the day is light on detail:
Friday 16 May 1980: Helped at charity shop => Anils (Fox) => home for dinner => 101 Club (Benita’s concert).
Fortunately, my memory is quite good on detail for this one and The Sound gained enough cult status to be pretty well documented too.
“Fox” can only mean The Fox On the Hill pub on Denmark Hill. What a couple of 17-year-olds might have been doing in there on a half-term Friday afternoon is anybody’s guess.
The 101 Club was a fairly iconic venue back in the late 1970s and early 1908s. It was a couple of blocks up St John’s Hill from my dad’s shop (No 43).
I knew that Anil’s big sister was in a band – all three of the Biltoo kids were very musical – and Benita used to talk to us about music if we were hanging out at Anil’s house and if she was in the mood for chatting; which was quite often; she was very friendly and inclusive with us youngsters. A top girl.
So when this gig came up, Anil and I were very keen to go and were included in the entourage.
The 101 Club was a proper dive. Smoke filled and grimy.
At one point during the gig, I remember someone telling me that the bloke next to me with whom I was rubbing shoulders was Julian Cope from The Teardrop Explodes.
Imagine that. I’d even heard of The Teardrop Explodes!
The fact that my knowledge of The Teardrop Explodes almost certainly extended no further than Benita having played Treason to us some weeks earlier was beside the point. Indeed the circularity of that argument has only just occurred to me as I write, more than 37 years later.
I made sure to acknowledge Julian Cope. I realise it’s just a story…but a true story.
…apart from The Sound being incredibly good, I mean, like, far and away the best rock gig I had ever heard in my entire life…
…was the MC calling a halt to proceedings on The Sound, before they had finished their set.
We members of The Sound’s entourage tried to reverse this decision by shouting for more…
…the next thing I remember was being ejected, in a collar-lifting stylee, from the 101 Club, along with The Sound and the rest of The Sound’s entourage.
Anil, Benita, her (then) boyfriend Muffin and I ended up back at my parent’s house, nursing our dignity.
I remember my mum supplying tea and biscuits. It can’t have been all that late; mum never could stay up all that late. I remember mum asking Benita and Muffin all sorts of questions. I remember learning that they were now sort-of living together in South Kensington.
After Muffin and the Biltoos (by gosh that would be a good name for a 1980s band) left, I recall my mum saying that she thought Muffin had smelly feet. Why that particular fact from that evening has stuck in my brain all these years is a mystery to me. But there in my brain it is; no false memory in that factoid; just extremely weird recall.
This story really isn’t as rock’n’roll as it should be, is it?
Benita stuck with The Sound for some further months after the 101 Club gig and she was an integral part of their first album, Jeopardy, before a parting of the ways with Adrian Borland and the boys.
I remember being so thrilled when that album, Jeopardy, came out and got a double-page spread in Melody Maker during my first term at Keele – around the time I saw The Teardrop Explodes perform.
Of course I bought a copy of Jeopardy. Of course I still have it.
You can click through below to hear the title track
