Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
We had a Sony TC377: I think Paul had an Akai or a Philips
Here is Side Two of Paul’s larger tape from that Easter vacation. I have explained the story of these tapes in the earlier postings; the piece about the smaller mix tape that Paul dated on 11 April 1981…
…and the piece that sets out Side One of this larger tape:
So here is Side Two:
Here is the play list, as best I can make it up from YouTube links at the time of writing, forty years on from that Easter of 1981:
Paul Deacon really went to town that 1981 Easter holidays, making me a couple of seriously superb mix tape spools. The 5″ spool came with a fact sheet dated 11 April 1981:
The 7″ Spool (twice as long) has a fact sheet dated 15 April 1981. I’m splitting the sheet into Side One and Side Two to make these Ogblog postings just about manageable in size.
Splitting the two spools into three postings in this way more or less equates with the three cassettes I ripped from the two spools. Those cassettes got a lot of play at Keele over the years, especially that summer of 1981. But more on that anon.
Here is the play list, as best I can make it up from YouTube links at the time of writing, forty years on from that Easter of 1981:
No recording available for Contrast, Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye.
This is one heck of a good mix tape, if you like interesting sixties and early seventies music.
The diary tells me that Paul popped around with records etc. on the Thursday evening (9th). My diary entry for the 11th reads:
Lazy sort of day. Shopped etc. Taped for Paul. Lazy evening.
My guess/vague recollection is that Paul popped around with a sample of the records he had been acquiring since we left school. I would have shown him the records I had acquired since he last had a look at my (by his standards) minuscule collection. So we agreed to do a mix tape swap.
Unquestionably I’ll have got the better end of the deal. I suspect that the mix tape I made for Paul is lost in the mists of time. Whereas the above tape is an absolute cracker. Not the only mix tape from Paul that week either; there is an even longer tape dated 15 April 1981 in my collection. And a great many others from the following two or three years. More on those anon.
This tape, along with the longer one that I shall write about over the next few days, was a huge part of the soundtrack of the summer term at Keele that followed and way beyond. I still listen to Paul’s mix tapes occasionally; these from Easter 1981 surprisingly often.
Great stuff Paul. Thanks again, forty years on!
To the extent I am able, I have made up that mix tape below with YouTube links. Some might get broken over time, but I’m sure you can find the items for yourselves if you are interested.
I did a holiday job at Newman Harris that first Easter holidays of my Keele life.
My motivation for working was purely financial. I was enjoying/wanted to enjoy my time at Keele. The student grant only went so far. There was no bank of mum and dad (BOMAD) for me. Getting into debt was anathema.
I hadn’t worked for Newman Harris since 1978 – that first experience being a subject I shall most certainly Ogblog in time. (I had worked full time during the summer of 1980, for BBYO – which should be another rich seam of Ogblogging once I get my head into that topic.)
The Easter 1981 vacation was the first time I worked for Stanley Bloom; he wasn’t at the firm in 1978. Yes, that’s right pop-pickers:
I got a job with Stanley, he said I’d come in handy.
Anyway, here is my diary from the first couple of weeks of that experience.
Graham in this instance must be Graham Greenglass. We were going through a process of swapping music on cassette at that time. Coincidentally, Graham furnished me with a fair smattering of Elvis Costello material, including rare groove such as Hoover Factory.
Jimmy (Bateman) was a friend from Alleyn’s. I wonder what has become of him? We met up a lot when working the University holidays those first couple of years at least.
David Robbins is Wendy Robbins kid brother. No longer a kid of course.
Caroline Freeman and I lunched and dined a lot in the holidays back then.
In fact, if my older adult self might be so bold as to observe my young adult self, according to that diary page, there seems to have been a heck of a lot of lunching, dining and going out generally. As a result, I’m not sure that the bank balance replenishment exercise could possibly have gone as well as I had intended. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t work Easter holidays again after that first year. But heck, I was having a good time.
On Friday 27th, a meal at Borshtch N Tears (posher and pricier now, I’d guess) followed by Elvis Costello and the Attractions at the Hammersmith Odeon, with Anil Biltoo (my friend from school, with whom I went to Mauritius in 1979), Caroline Freeman and Simon Jacobs, who I met through BBYO but with whom (and indeed through whom) I went to Keele.
Simon always claims not to remember anything from those days, although he might make an exception for Elvis Costello. Example: which tracks did Elvis play that night, Simon…
…and before you say, “don’t be ridiculous, I don’t remember stuff like that”, actually we don’t need your help with that question; Mr Google came up with the answer for us – click here…
…or if that link fails, I have scraped the answer to here.
Much of the material in that gig came from Trust, which was the latest Elvis Costello album at the time…
…and before Simon claims that he cannot remember exactly what he thought of Trust at that time, here is a link to Simon’s whole page review of Trust in Concourse, the Keele SU newspaper.
How Simon got allocated a whole page for an album review is anyone’s guess, but let’s just note here that the Concourse editors were sacked before the next edition went to press. That edition had to be cobbled together at the last minute by me and Dave Lee, with predictably hilarious results, which I shall write up soon enough. Simon got a regular-sized column that time.
Anyway, we must have really enjoyed the gig because we went back for more Elvis that summer; at least I know I went back with Simon for a second go and I think Caroline also joined us in the summer.
Anil, I think, was less sure about the gig. I’m not sure he had recovered from our evening watching his big sister Bi perform in The Sound the previous year.
Here is a great vid of Clubland (from Trust) to give you a taster of the gig, although the Hammersmith Odeon didn’t look like the vid as far as I can recall…
…Simon will simply claim that he can’t remember:
The context for the three mix tape cassettes that Graham Greenglass made for me as part of a swap-athon in early spring 1981 is set out in the Ogblog piece that shows the first of those three tapes – click here or below:
The headline picture at the top of the current piece shows Side A of the third swap tape. Below is Side B:
I set out below the YouTubes, other than the Simon & Garfunkle whole album, for which I have provided two favourite samples, one lesser known.
The context for the three mix tape cassettes that Graham Greenglass made for me as part of a swap-athon in early spring 1981 is set out in the Ogblog piece that shows the first of those three tapes – click here or below:
The headline picture at the top of the current piece shows Side A of the second swap tape. Below is Side B:
More theming than the first side of the first cassette, this second one. Several tracks from each artist. But still an eclectic mix. I don’t suppose many mix tapes include The Jam, Elvis Costello, Echo & The Bunnymen, T. Rex, Talking Heads, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross plus Quintet Of the Hot Club Of France.
Here goes:
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.
It was a similar arrangement to the mix tape swaps I undertook with Paul Deacon that same vacation:
…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.
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:
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.
In short, as a result of our efforts, the date sources for this gig now go up to 11 – click here only if you don’t get this joke or cannot resist seeing this Spinal Tap clip for the eleventh time.
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 Robert Plant 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.
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.
