Category: Music

Meninblack by The Stranglers, Album Review for Concourse, March 1981

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.

Meninblack plus

 

Mix Tape Recorded In The Middle Of My Second Term At Keele, 7 February 1981

I’m not sure if even Sgt Rock would have been able to help me much, back then Jean-Luc, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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:

Keele Concourse Controversy, A Weekend Back In London, Plus Several More Late-Nighters, 1 to 10 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.

Mix Tape Recorded Just After My First Term At Keele, c28 December 1980

Top of the bill – Elvis Costello. Braunov, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I recently published the playlist (mix tape) of contemporary popular music I recorded just before I set off for Keele:

Mix Tape Of Popular Music Around The Time I Started Keele, circa 1 October 1980

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.

The Teardrop Explodes supported by The Thompson Twins, Keele Students’ Union Ballroom, 5 November 1980

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:

My First “Proper” Rock Gig, The Sound, 101 Club, 16 May 1980

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!

Teardrop & Thompsons

Mix Tape Of Popular Music Around The Time I Started Keele, c1 October 1980

I have already written up the week I spent “training” to go to Keele:

A Week Of Serious Training For University Life Ahead Of Heading Up To Keele, 28 September To 4 October 1980

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.

Mix Tapes From Around The Time That I Left Alleyn’s School, Late May To 28 June 1980

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:

The Day I Left (Alleyn’s) School, 27 June 1980

One of those questions, around “what would you do differently?” might be answered in terms of the choice of music. Or would it?

I have recently (late 2020) enjoyed replicating and sharing the mix tapes I made in the autumn of 1980, around the time I started Keele University and the mix tape I made at the end of that first term at Keele:

Mix Tape Recorded Just After My First Term At Keele, c28 December 1980

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.

Anyway, here it is, as a playlist of YouTubes:

My First “Proper” Rock Gig, The Sound, 101 Club, 16 May 1980

I had been going to see R&B stuff in the pub for over a year before The Sound gig, as documented in my piece about going to The George Canning  in April 1979 – click here or below:

An Evening At The George Canning, 8 April 1979

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).

Here’s what the Derelict London site says about the 101 Club, so many years on – third derelict venue down the list at the time of writing.

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.

As it happens, just a few months later, a gig by The Teardrop Explodes, supported by The Thompson Twins, was one of my earliest and most memorable gigs at Keele – reported here and below:

The Teardrop Explodes supported by The Thompson Twins, Keele Students’ Union Ballroom, 5 November 1980

The next thing I remember…

…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?

Anyway, there is a splendid two-part interview on-line with Benita (who was known as Benita Marshall or Bi Marshall as an artiste), which tells her story from The Sound days:

Here is Part One of that Benita interview.

Here is Part two of that Benita interview.

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

https://youtu.be/VFNHMv9ptc4

Mauritius, Music During Our Visit July/August 1979

Music in Mauritius is currently described thus in Wikipedia.

While we were there, one might have been forgiven for thinking that sega was the only local style. Wikipedia specifically describes sega thus. Indeed, one might have been forgiven for thinking that Cousin Cousine by Joss Henri was more or less the only record in the charts.

Years later, I recall a very funny sketch by Barry Grossman at NewsRevue about the Tudor charts, the punchline of which was that Greensleeves was the number one for the 2,157th (or some such) week running. That sketch always reminded me of my trip to Mauritius and Cousin Cousine, which had been number one for as long as anyone could remember while when we arrived and was still number one when we left.

Of course, the whole idea of Cousin Cousine was very suitable for Anil, who was basically on a voyage around the island visiting a myriad of cousins (and cousines) he had not met before, so I’m sure that song must conjure up our trip in his mind as well as mine.

I have found this YouTube, which shows some good photos of people dancing the sega to the sound of Cousin Cousine, recorded pretty well.

I did buy three other records as well as Cousin Cousine, all of which can be heard on the soundtrack to the standard 8 movie from our trip to Mauritus, which I put up on YouTube.

Here is an instructional YouTube video on how to do the modern zumba version of the sega dance. Don’t try this on a full stomach.

While here is a UNESCO YouTube explaining the history, look and sound of it all in educational terms, complete with soporific schoolteacher voice to minimise the chance of you watching this video through to the end.

Suffice it to say, we had some fun listening to and dancing sega while we were in Mauritius in 1979.

Visiting Record & Tape Exchange With Paul Deacon, 29 April 1978

Chris Whippet / Music & Video Exchange, Notting Hill / CC BY-SA 2.0

My urge to write this posting emerged unexpectedly today (5 May 2016) after an emergency trip to the Retro Shop to try to find an appropriate pair of trousers for a 1960’s party.

Result: success, before you ask. Bright red, before you follow-up with the obvious next question.

The Retro Shop is at 28 Pembridge Road and the likely source of the party trousers was the basement of that shop. Despite its change of purpose within the “Exchange Empire”, I recognised the space immediately as the old bargain basement of Record and Tape Exchange. I inhabited that basement a great deal in my youth. Initially and several times subsequently, those visits were with Paul Deacon.

It was probably the pull of Record and Tape Exchange and my resulting familiarity with Notting Hill Gate that drew me to the neighbourhood in the late 1980s when ready to find my own place. With the benefit of hindsight, a most fortuitous draw.

But when did those visits start? I remember visits to The Slipped Disc in Clapham Junction with Paul perhaps as early as 1976 and certainly 1977. I’ll write that up separately once I have researched it.

But it isn’t until 1978 that I mention Record and Tape Exchange in my diary. 29 April 1978 to be precise.

Saturday 29 April – went to Jumbly’s, Record Exchange & Portobello with Paul.

Paul might remember what Jumbly’s is/was – I certainly don’t.

But I think our first attempt to go to Notting Hill Gate was a couple of weeks earlier during the school holidays. This entry from 12 April has got my brain ticking.

Wednesday 12 April – went out with Paul – bit of a disaster.

I have a vague memory of a day out with Paul when we were attempting to see Portobello and these second hand record shops we’d heard about, but somehow we got hopelessly lost and ended up wandering aimlessly around West Kensington and Olympia, until we returned home exhausted and unsatisfied. Paul might be able to fill in the details.

At the time I probably thought that any blame for such a “disaster” must rest with Paul. But nearly forty years subsequent experience of my personal geographical challenges suggests that the fault must have been at least as much, if not more, mine. The sat nav might have been invented just for me.

One more intriguing diary entry a few months later, but not (I believe) to do with Paul:

Saturday 29 July 1978 – Lazy day. Went to Record and Tape Exchange,

Very pithy. Doesn’t reveal much at all. I am pretty sure this must have been the day that I went up to Notting Hill Gate with a young lady known as Fuzz, with whom I’d had a gentle squeeze at Anil & Anita Biltoo’s party a couple of weeks before. This visit was especially memorable because it was a hot summer day and Fuzz became overwhelmed by the mustiness and dustiness of that basement, fainted, banged her head and needed to be revived by worried staff in the shop.

But apart from that, Mr Harris, how was your hot date?

I’m going to guess that I hadn’t been entirely straightforward with my parents (in particular my mum) with all the details of where I was going/had been and with whom, hence the pithy entry in the diary.

I am delighted to report that health and safety has improved a little at the 28 Pembridge Road basement in the past 38 years. Today it still had a musty, dusty atmosphere, but it was much mitigated by the back door being open to let in some fresh air.

Meanwhile, to support the comment below (triggered by a delightful Facebook message exchange with Paul) – here is the first page of my Record and Tape Exchange Transaction notes – there are pages and pages of them gathering dust in a file under the bed:

R&TE First Page 1978