Category: Music

Elvis Costello And The Attractions, Hammersmith Odeon, 27 March 1981

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:

Graham Greenglass Easter Holidays 1981 Mix Tapes – Tape Three Of Three, 17 March 1981

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:

Graham Greenglass Easter Holidays 1981 Mix Tapes – Tape One Of Three, 17 March 1981

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.

Graham Greenglass Easter Holidays 1981 Mix Tapes – Tape Two Of Three, 17 March 1981

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:

Graham Greenglass Easter Holidays 1981 Mix Tapes – Tape One Of Three, 17 March 1981

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:

Graham Greenglass Easter Holidays 1981 Mix Tapes – Tape One Of Three, 17 March 1981

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:

A Mix Tape Fest With Paul Deacon, 11 April 1981

…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?

Robert Plant’s Secret Gig, Room 14, University of Keele Students Union (UKSU), 11 March 1981

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.

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.
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.
Watch this space.

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

 

Trust by Elvis Costello, Concourse, Simon Jacobs’s Review, 9 February 1981

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.

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