To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the “Film Star Makes President” edition of Concourse, I have republished the whole paper in the form of high-quality scans in a Flickr album – click here or the embedded image at the bottom of this page.
Dave had generously given me a great deal of editorial control over the political pages, so the front page and the next two pages were very much mine, content-wise.
Presentation-wise, I think it was entirely down to Dave that we went for an audaciously eye-catching front page – big headline, big photo and election results table only. This was not the regular Concourse way but I think it did help us sell.
I was very proud of the headline; a nod to Ronald Reagan’s recent election and the fact that Mark Thomas headed up the Film Society.
I realise also on re-reading the paper that I interviewed almost all of the protagonists from that early part of the election season: Mark Thomas, Frank Dillon, Anna Summerskill, Ric Cowdery, Steve Townsley, Vince Beasley, Jon Rees…
…I already knew some of them reasonably well and got to know most of them a lot better as the next year or three went on.
Other highlights include:
Dave Lee editorially eating his own liver over the previous editors’ resignation scandal and the Katy Turner column faux pas, on Page 4 and then again at length on Page 13;
Jon Gorvett & David Perrins fret-piece about fire risk, following a Dublin disco fire, on Page 7;
Some Concourse memorabilia on Page 11, looking back 10 years (which now is 50 years), including a snippet about Neil Baldwin from 1971;
A couple of damning gig reviews on Page 17, including the Krokus one by Simon Jacobs which I have Ogblogged about here and the Rob Blow & Di Ball one from deadline night;
I rather like Phil Avery’s hockey team review on the back page, not least because I had to read the entire thing to the end to work out which sport he was reporting. If only his weather forecasts were so suspenseful.
If you want to browse/read the whole thing, simply click the link below and you will find all the pages in high quality digital form, easy to read/navigate on most devices and for sure downloadable.
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 our first term at Keele, Simon Jacobs and I signed up for a drama workshop thing, run by Brian Rawlins. Brian helped make drama great fun and gave us a great deal of freedom to do what we wanted to do in this extra-curricular group.
I’m not entirely sure who else was part of the group, other than Jonathan (Jon) Rees whose name helpfully appears in my diary and on the single relic I have from the experience.
That first term of ours also coincided with a big debacle over Princess Margaret’s invitation (or lack of invitation) to the students’ union ball. We decided to parody that debacle with a piece of street theatre as our contribution to the debate and as the culmination of our term’s drama work-shopping spree.
My memory of the whole thing is fairly hazy, but the diary and relic provide some help. Here are the relevant extracts from the diary:
11 November – decided to write play
13 November – met Simon and Jonathan in evening to write play
18 November – drama rehearsal good fun
25 November – rehearsed skit in evening – good fun
2 December – easyish evening – drama rehearsal
…and there the references cease. I know the intention was to perform the skit in front of the union on the day of the ball, but my diary is entirely silent on the matter so I wonder whether our skit was scuppered at the last minute. Simon might remember and I am due to see him very soon indeed at the time of writing (April 2016) and so shall update if his memory adds anything to the pile.
Meanwhile it seems from the relic that it was Jon who preserved a copy of (most of) the script and ensured that I had a copy in my memory box. The hand-written skit itself looks like Simon’s writing if my memory serves.
It reads as juvenilia, which is what it is – heck we were all just 18 at the time – but looking back I think we were quite plucky in our first term tackling this particular political debacle head on in this way.
Anyway, here’s the script. You can drill into the pages to make them bigger/legible size. Unlike my handwriting, this stuff is actually legible. I should add that the character Katy is Katy Turner, the President of the student’s union that year, Mike is Mike Stevens, the Union Secretary that year.
Geoffrey Withers – he is strictly for the unsquare
I’m not entirely sure when Paul Deacon and I came up with the character “Geoffrey Withers”, but it was a long long time ago when we were very small.
For sure it was at my house, because the nonsense started when I played this track to Paul and we started riffing on the idea that an uber-old-fashioned DJ might consider the piece to be “strictly for the unsquare” and use it as his signature tune:
I’m pretty sure that Paul himself “christened” the character “Geoffrey Withers” and gave him his pompous voice. Paul has used this character on his radio shows, sporadically, for at least four decades.
I should get a few bob each time Paul uses the character but heck, life is too short and anyway it’s probably best to save up that potential law suit material for a big one downstream.
With apologies to those who believe in Santa and who believe that there really is a piece of music named “Strictly For The Unsquare”, but this piece is actually named “Pop Sequence” and is from an album named “Cine Mood Music”. How cool is that?
Well, it’s unsquare, anyway.
I’m not sure that Geoffrey was really born on 14 April 1977, but the diary says…
…Paul in afternoon…
…so it might well have been that day. I’ll guess it was around about then, anyhow.
Who’d have thought that such a mucking around session aged 14/15 would have led to a character who still (writing in 2018) pops up from time to time on Paul’s radio shows?
I started keeping a diary in January 1974. So exhausting must have been the process for eleven-on-twelve-year-old me, I took a sabbatical between May and late November that year.
The 1970s diaries cover my secondary school years, at Alleyn’s School. I shall write them up fifty years after the event, in the same way as I have been writing up my Keele University years of the 1980s as a “Forty Years On” series.
The juvenile writing needs some interpretation, both in terms of deciphering the strange symbols that comprised my handwriting back then and in terms of matters stated and omitted. I’ll try to explain and interpret as best I can, fifty years after the event.
I apologise for my atrocious spelling back then. Spellcheck has spared my blushes incalculably often in the IT era that followed my school years, while also drumming in some improvement to my ability at spelling.
Here’s that first page in all its glory.
Tuesday 1 January 1974 – …”Dined At Schmidt’s”…
Dad was at home. Dined at Schmidt’s. Chocolate moose was nice. In evening watched a film. P.S. Traditional walk 6th year.
Schmidt’s was an extraordinary place on Charlotte Street. It was a German Restaurant trapped in time from the early part of the 20th century, operated by an aging gentleman named Frederick Schmidt and his moustached sister, Marie Schmidt. I knew them as Mr Schmidt and Miss Schmidt.
We ate there quite often, mostly when Grandma Anne was not with us, as she was kosher and Schmidt’s was quintessentially not so. I recall that Grandma would occasionally come there with us and eat fish there, while dad would choose his favourite dish, eisbein, a Berlin style of schweinshaxe, with dad pointedly asking for the “VEAL knuckle” as he pointed at eisbein on the menu. Naughty daddy.
I would almost certainly have gone for the liver and onions or the schnitzel as my main course. Both of those dishes came on a platter with some pease pudding and sauerkraut as well as potatoes and vegetables. More or less everything came on such a platter, now I come to think of it. The fact that I comment on the chocolate moose suggests that it might have been a new one to me, but whatever desert I chose there, I would insist on lashings of whipped cream, which, at Schmidt’s, was a highly aerated form of whipped cream which I absolutely loved, both in its look, its taste and its texture. Mum loved that stuff too, on her coffee.
We would sometimes see Esther Rantzen in the delicatessen section of the establishment, where we would usually spend some time after eating, perhaps choosing some delicacies to take home with us or just browsing. When I met Esther properly some 20 years later, I mentioned that I remembered seeing her in Schmidt’s several times and we had a joyous reminisce about that lost world.
The traditional walk was something I did with my dad over the festive season every year for many years – initially I suspect it was mum’s way of getting a bit of peace for an hour or so and giving us the chance to walk off all the food we’d eaten. I think of Boxing Day as the usual day for that event, but it seems it was held back until 1 January that season – perhaps a weather-related change.
Wednesday 2 January 1974 – …”bought 5 History Books”…
Uneventful yet bought 5 history books. I cannot quite reconcile those two phrases.
I can, however, identify the books. They were from the “Everyday Life” series. I still have them:
The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that there are nine books from that series depicted above, but the diary entry reports me buying five books. The even-more-eagle-eyed amongst you might be able to spot that the five “Everyday Life” books to the right of the picture look considerably more thumbed than the four to the left, which I’m sure I purchased at a later date.
I suspect that I spent my own money on those books (I’d have been flush with Christmas money or Hanukkah gelt at that time of year). The list price of the five books I bought that day comes to the princely sum of £1.45, but I’d wager a good few bob that these books were discounted after Christmas and I might have scored the batch of five for around £1 in W H Smith. I loved those books, which is why I have not been able to part with them, even when I cleared out most of my childhood books.
I especially loved the two about life in the stone ages. These related to the period of history we were being taught that year at school.
In both of the Stone Age books, I have written:
Ian Harris 1.S.
If found please return to 1.S.
I must have been taking these books to school with me on history days – possibly leaving them at school overnight sometimes. Only those two have that inscription, but inside the one about Roman Times, I discovered…
…an ancient, small piece of blotting paper, with one quite large blot on it, marking the place between pages 64 and 65 which, judging by the spine of the book, is as far as I got with that one 50 years ago. This discovery felt like a bit of a Pompeii moment, my juvenile reading trapped within a moment of time many years ago, providing evidence of reading interrupted and never resumed. I feel a relentless desire now to finish reading the book, which I think, fifty years later, will require me to start again from the beginning. I’m guessing that I’ll be able to whizz through the 130 or so pages quite quickly. But again I have put off the task to another day. It won’t be another 50 years, that’s for sure.
…”Saw Tommy Cooper”…
The Tommy Cooper Hour will have been this one – Episode 3 – click here. It will have looked a bit like the vid below, an episode from the same series, shown a few months later:
Thursday 3 January 1974
Went to dentist. No fillings yet. Drawn darts match. 5p Kalooki. 2 Rons [The Two Ronnies] good.
The dentist will have been Harry Wachtel, a slightly eccentric Austrian-Jewish refugee dentist who practiced in Streatham for several decades.
How a darts match ends up drawn I have no idea. Neither do I know who I played in that drawn match. Can’t have been one of my parents (dad would have gone back to work and mum would never go near my dartboard…come to think of it, nor did dad). Possibly Andy Levinson came round. Ot possibly I had a game of my own devising which enabled me to play against myself and secure a draw.
Kalooki probably did involve my mum and it seems that I got lucky, skilful or both, making 5p (that’s a shilling in real money).
The Two Ronnies was this episode. Interesting that I was allowed to watch TV that late at that age – it was possibly my starting secondary school that got my bedtime shifted towards and beyond the watershed.
Friday 4 January 1974
1×2 + bull at darts. Saw Fantasia for a third time – it is great.
I’m guessing that Fantasia was not shown on TV that week, so it would have been a visit to the cinema. I don’t say who I went with, but that might have been with mum (she loved Fantasia too) as I think I would have named my companion if I had gone with a friend or even if I had gone with Grandma Jenny. Probably local, at the Streatham ABC or Odeon.
My burgeoning darts career tails off soon, at least in the matter of diary mentions. I suspect that the dart board was a new toy for Christmas 1973.
Saturday 5 January 1974
Mum bought coat £22 reduced to £9.95. Went to Lytton’s. Played Striker with dive goalies.
Striker with dive goalies. That sounds amazing. I have re-established contact with Steve Lytton in the 50 years since that epic event. I wonder whether he still has his Striker set and is up for a rematch.
My interest in early music has not only led me to a great many concerts, but also in recent months it has led me deep into the archives to seek rare early music manuscripts and attempt to perform them.
Brave readers might click through to watch my performance of this one (below).
A few weeks ago I uncovered a most unusual piece, which seems to originate from a lesser known order of monks known as the Litorean Order, in the late 13th or early 14th Century.
The Litorean Order is believed to have been established in the far western coastal fringes of civilisation…”beyond St David’s Cathedral” if that is possible – could they have meant Ireland?
…but I digress. Let us return to the canticle Deus Intellegit.
The canticle appears to be intended for use at Lauds on the third day of Easter. It is attributed to Brianus Filius Willelmi and Antonius Fraxinus, the latter seemingly a visiting monk – there is no record of him being a member of the Litorean order.
It is an astonishing canticle. Musically, it begins in the Lydian mode, but the piece modulates and includes touches that seem centuries ahead of its time.
This canticle is an entirely and utterly charming piece. In the hands of those Litorean monks (or indeed in the hands of modern expert performers) I imagine the canticle to sound heavenly. In my amateur hands it still sounds out of this world, but sadly not in that heavenly sense.
Canticle performed by Ged’s Virtual Throdkin. Soloist: Ged.
