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.
As a postscript to that piece, Jon Gorvett, in a feat of extraordinary memory, writes:
I do remember the Bootleg Beatles gig, too, which, like the assassination, happened on my birthday (59 today – what the flying fuck, indeed?). For some reason, I too have no other recollection other than that it happened, though – the ball, that is – so perhaps I too was at Karen’s extraordinary party. I do have a vague recollection of her – curly hair, went out with some kind of biker type and was mates with David Perrins? *
Jon’s note reminded me that I had uncovered his epic expose about a new block being built from the December 1980 issue of Concourse, which I have used above as the headline image for this piece.
Most of us, other than David and Jon, had to wait until our second term to get our juvenilia published, but I did get a mention for hard work in that December issue:
That hard work can only have been typing and was not hard enough to find its way into my diary, so I expect it was just a few hours over a couple of evenings with pint in hand.
I hope I didn’t type Jon’s above piece, as the typing is awful and even Jon’s name is spelt wrongly. I think I was better than that, having had plenty of experience “editing” lesser journals for which “doing the typing” and “editing” tended to be one and the same thing.
Tuesday 9 December 1980 (after the partyette vignette)… Tired today. Got Phil result [this will be my Descartes essay]. Lindsay Xmas dinner OK. Earlyish night.
Wednesday 10 December 1980 – Not bad day. Prepared for ball. Went to ball. V Good indeed, went…
Thursday 11 December 1980 – …on so late went straight to 9:00 lecture!!! Went to bed about 8:00 exhausted.
Friday 12 December 1980 – last full day (OK). Went to Party in eve v good.
Saturday 13 December 1980 – Left Keele return home tired. Relaxed for rest of day.
Simon Jacobs’s impersonation of Princess Margaret was a sight to behold. I think he might have reprised the role occasionally in Ringroad subsequently.
“Who was the poor, unfortunate lecturer condemned to teach the 9:00 lecture the morning after the Xmas Ball?”, I hear you all cry.
Well, as it happens, I had retained and have now retrieved my 1980-81 Foundation Year Programme, so I can exclusively reveal that it was Mr Smyth of the Economics Department talking about The Wealth Of Nations.
That week I started marking up my FY lecture list, so I can also exclusively reveal that I missed the 9:00 lectures on the Tuesday (after the Lindsay Ball) and the Wednesday (for no good reason) and apologise unequivocally to Keith Tribe and the late, great Les Fishman. I learnt from my mistake in the matter of missing Les’s lectures (which I found fabulous, as I discovered when I did show up at 11:00 on that Wednesday), so I did make it to Professor Fishman’s Marxian economics stuff on the Friday.
I have no idea whose party I went to on Friday 12 December but according to my diary it was “v good” and who am I to disagree with my own judgment on that?
Thanks for your hospitality, whoever you are. But let’s be honest, there probably wasn’t much hospitality involved – we probably all needed to bring our own booze. But that was OK.
Anyway, the first term was over. The diary is silent on how I felt, but I think I had probably already fallen in love with the place. Keele got lots of us like that.
*Postscript: an update to the above postscript on The Bootleg Beatles piece, supplied by globetrotting journalist Jon Gorvett, whose short-range memory is still absolutely fine. Whereas his long-range memory…
I’ve just realised that I have no idea who Karen was/is, and I have completely confused her in my addled way with Debbie, who was going out with the aforesaid biker and was a friend of DP’s. At least, I think that’s right…No, I’m pretty sure about that, because after reading your piece, I recalled how, at a much later date, I had had an unfortunate run in with said biker and his mates after they reckoned I was getting far too entangled with said Debbie at one of those Saturday night discos at the Onion. They were quite right, in retrospect, but in any case, it was Debbie I was recalling, I fear, not the mysterious Karen.
Jon Gorvett
It’s all in danger of getting very messy when I start writing up my 1981 diary, by the sound of it.
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.
There was only one “drunken fart” involved when I waded through my FY Philosophy topic on Descartes…and it wasn’t René Descartes. Memorable for me only because it was my very first Keele essay and I do recall finding the topic tough.
I have a vague memory of trying out Cartesian philosophy on my parents, eliciting bafflement, followed by an encouraging, “whatever you say, dear”, from my mum, which means I must have explained it all very well.
Everything is self-evident, sonny-boy
So deep was I in philosophy that weekend, I even failed to write up Sunday, which must surely have comprised finishing the essay, having lunch with my folks & travelling back to Keele…not necessarily in that sequence.
I remember telling dad that I had several essays to write in the next couple of weeks, which would limit my ability to go out drinking with my friends, so he gave me a little glass hip flask (quarter bottle size I think, or perhaps 5oz) full of whisky, which he said would sustain me on such evenings and could be refilled whenever I came home to visit. On reflection forty years later, dad’s kind idea not entirely devoid of enlightened self-interest.
I drink therefore I am…it wasn’t quite as posh as this example.
I think the hip flask had its first big dip on the Wednesday, when I finished my Law essay for Michael Whincup. I can’t remember for the life of me what the topic was about; a very general introduction to law, I think.
I’m pretty sure that I had near made my mind up by the time I completed that Law topic that I fancied switching to Law for half of my degree – my heart was already set on Economics for the other half. Philosophy (with all that Descartes) and Politics sessional (mostly Psephology with Mr Kimber that term) didn’t grab me sufficiently.
On the Friday evening, 5 December 1980, I:
Went to Union – Sim’s mates from Donny there
Ah yes, my next door neighbour Sim (Simon Ascough) and his home town mates from Doncaster. Sim was a great bloke and I very much enjoyed being his neighbour in F Block Lindsay for about four terms in the end. In those early days, I especially remember listening to his Neil Young Triple Album, Decade:
But I recall Sim’s friends from Donny being into a harder-boiled variety of rock than that; Iron Maiden, Rainbow and the like if I am not mistaken. I also recall them finding Keele quite baffling; they were pretty disparaging about the place and the whole idea of Sim being at University. I think I added to their sense of bafflement because I was Jewish; a state of being which, I guess, had barely entered their consciousnesses before and certainly never previously manifested to them in human form. I don’t think they were bad lads, but when Sim dropped out of Keele a year or so later, it felt to me like a real shame and I did wonder whether Sim had anyone “back home” encouraging him to persevere with university.
The next day, on the Saturday, Simon Jacobs and I went off to Leeds for a BBYO thingie. I apologise unequivocally to the people of Leeds who might have read the phrase:
Simon and I went to Leeds (yuck)…
..imagining that I had something against Leeds. In fact, I was fond of Leeds back then (still am to some extent) and I suspect the word “yuck” was a word play on the fact that we were going, in part, to a YCC meeting as representatives of BBYO. Simon had, in fact, resigned as National Vice-President over the summer, but I think might have still retained some involvement in whatever the YCC is/was – frankly I’m struggling to find anyone who can remember.
It’s a bit like SLAC Convenors at Keele – people vaguely remember the existence of the post but no-one seems able to recall what SLAC was…
John White in 1985 checking out the bona fides of SLAC Convenor Cath Coughlin – with grateful thanks to Mark Ellicott for this picture.
…but I digress.
Returning to December 1980, in my diary, in the matter of that Leeds trip, I went on to say:
…stayed at nice house (early night)
Sunday 7 December – coffee morning -> lunch -> YCC (🗸 & X) -> Inst[allation]. Simon & I left early
No idea what the 🗸 & X represented. Presumably something went right (from my point of view) and something else didn’t. The YCC was probably like that…whatever it was.
What I didn’t say in the diary, but popped straight into my main memory when I read this diary note, was the hellish journey Simon and I endured between Keele and Leeds. No wonder we left early.
As I recall it, we took the bus to Stoke, took a train to Stockport, where we changed to a train to Staleybridge, where we changed again to take a train to Leeds.
Staleybridge station looks in better nick now.
Then we did the whole trip in reverse, with the added excitement of a 1980 Sunday service to contend with. On returning to Keele after that epic journey, Simon and I agreed that we wouldn’t be attempting that voyage again by public transport in a hurry. I still haven’t attempted a rerun and strongly suspect that Simon Jacobs also can only boast that single expedition from Keele to Leeds and back, without oxygen.
Reading my diary references to Caroline’s visit to Keele in late November 1980 gave me a memory flash of an event earlier that term.
Caroline Freeman (now Curtis) was a good friend, through BBYO, of mine and of Simon Jacobs . Caroline chose not to go to university, although from memory she had as many UCCA points from her A levels as Simon & I had put together from ours.
I had long been the beneficiary of Caroline’s mum’s cooking on the many occasions I found myself in North-West London doing BBYO stuff in the year or so before heading up to Keele.
“That poor boy needs a good meal” – c1979
Anyway, I think Caroline must have got it into her head that Simon and I might struggle to feed ourselves properly at the weekends. Keele provided refectory meals to freshers Monday to Friday but at the weekends we had to look after ourselves.
Frankly, I don’t think the self-catering element of student life was a challenging aspect for either me or Simon…
…nor was I in want of food; I was just burning calories at a furious rate back then…
…but early in our time at Keele, Simon and I both received, through the post, from Caroline, an emergency food parcel styled in the mode of a Red Cross jobbie as depicted above. I don’t recall exactly what was inside the parcels, but I suspect it was more like “boarding school kid tuck” than “genuine emergency rations”. Simon and I were both amused, I certainly remember that.
Hawk-eyed readers (especially those with cipher-cracking skills) might have spotted the 17 November entry: “Jay was supposed to come – “did he heck”. Goodness only knows what that visit from Jay Marks was supposed to be for and why it went awry, but it will have been part of a BBYO National Executive unravelling towards the end of our year which makes the last 74 days of the Trump presidency…
…well, on reflection, it was bizarre (but in the grander scheme of things trivial) stuff around resignations, unresignations, with some of us trying to keep the show on the road with sufficient dignity to hand over to a new committee over the new year holiday. So nothing at all like the last 74 days of the Trump presidency.
Anyway, Caroline’s first visit to Keele is quite well documented in the diary:
Friday 21 November 1980 – Not bad day. Met Caroline at Stoke. Went to Lindsay, Union & coffee lounge.
Saturday 22 November 1980 – Simon & Roy popped in early hours. Got up q late. Found Simon., lunch there…
So far so sensible. Simon had met Roy and started going out with him almost as soon as we arrived at Keele. I’m pretty sure Caroline stayed in my pokey room, which was tolerably fine back then and would be unthinkable now considering the size of those student beds and bedrooms. “Lunch there” I guess was in Simon’s block in Barnes (D if I remember correctly), where the facilities for weekend self-catering were marginally better than those in my Lindsay block (F I recall most certainly).
I have used sophisticated computer-aided techniques to decipher the next bit and am pretty sure it must say:
…romped in lakes. Simon left. Spiff dinner (over top) -> over to Roys.
The Lakes at Keele is a rather charming wild garden beyond the ornamental gardens of Keele Hall. Originally planned to be a network of seven substantial artificial lakes, money and/or motivation must have run out for the Sneyd family in the early 19th century as the more far-flung lakes are more like puddles and only two or three have any scale to them. Still, they are pleasant enough to walk around and I dread to think what romping entailed on that occasion. Whether “Simon left” in disgust or simply to go over to Roy’s place is lost in the mists of time. Almost certainly the latter.
No idea what the sentence “Spiff dinner (over top) -> over to Roys” actually means. I sense an in-joke long since forgotten.
Sunday 23 November 1980 – Lounged around all day. Roy, C & I met Simon, went out for dinner. V nice.
Monday 24 November 1980 – Not bad day. Caroline left at 3:00 pm. Relaxing evening.
It would have been helpful if I had noted where we went out for dinner. There were a couple of passable restaurants in Newcastle-Under-Lyme and I suspect it was one of those. The Sneyd Arms didn’t qualify as going out for dinner. Nor did the Union and nor did The Golf. So Newcastle it almost certainly must have been.
Caroline will surely remember every detail and help fill in all the blanks. After all, she was the one with more UCCA points than me and Simon put together.
Mind you, she was almost silent about my write up of her visit the following term, which for reasons of happenstance I wrote up before this one:
It seems this weekend was no exception. Unfortunately, my diary keeping was poor that term and got poorer as the term went on. The mid November scribblings were, by the looks of them, written several weeks later while inebriated.
Still, I can just about make out the following:
Saturday 15 November 1980. Easy day. Got up late. Went over to Simon’s for shopping, lunch etc. Went to town for supper – ??
…and then it reads, sprawling over the Saturday and Sunday entry
Heather’s party v late // & drank etc.
I am pretty sure that this particular Heather was “Miriam & Heather” Heather, who lived, if I remember correctly, in The Hawthorns. Not the Heather who lived (or at least dined) in Lindsay, whom Simon nicknamed “The Heathertron Bomb” on account of her unfeasibly high-decibel-registering laugh.
The double-slash marking in my diary I believe was to indicate that I partook of some cannabis, which would probably have been in the resin form illustrated above.
It probably wasn’t even my first toke at Keele, but I think it is the first time I used that symbol, probably suggesting that the rest of the evening/night was somewhat of a haze for me.
This photo of Simon Jacobs, from 1979, was tobacco only I am sure
But not a total and utter haze, so I am fairly sure that I met Ashley at that party and he might be able to confirm or deny the matter.
Simon Jacobs had thrown himself into Keele’s gay scene as soon as we arrived at Keele. I think Simon might have started going out with Roy 25 minutes after arriving at Keele; that was the rumour anyway…a rumour proliferated mostly by Simon, I suspect. Anyway, the gay crowd was a welcoming bunch, supremely tolerant towards my unfortunate lack of gayness. I made a great many good & enduring friends, such as Ashley, while enjoying “honorary membership” of the clan throughout my years at Keele.
With thanks again to Martin Ladbrooke & Steph for this quintessentially 1980s photo of Ashley
“So what did we discuss late into the night at Heather’s party in the early hours of 15 to 16 November 1980?”, I hear you ask. Well, if anyone pretends to remember that level of detail, they are probably making it up as they go along.
I do however recall, from those early days, one particularly shocking party trick of Ashley’s. So shocking that I suspect he didn’t pull the trick on this first occasion, but he did so soon after.
Ashley pretended that he knew Hitler speeches by heart and would rant at length, in mock German, sounding just like a Hitler speech. Eventually, someone’s limited knowledge of German brought the blessed revelation that Ashley’s rant was a mock speech and not, as advertised, a vile feat of memory.
Get Ashley inebriated enough today and it’s just possible that he could still pull off the trick. Of course trigger warnings and safe spaces hadn’t been invented back then. The trick might not be appreciated in quite the same way today.
Frankly, writing up my early days at Keele University forty years on, I was baffled when I read, in my diary for that day:
No law, Molly Badcock’s instead.
To be honest, my diary is not especially helpful for that November/early December period of my life. It’s pretty clear from the scrawl and my own graffiti, that I was writing up several weeks later, in some manner of inebriated state.
But in truth I couldn’t remember who Molly Badcock was, so I tried Googling her. I am sorry to report that, at least initially, this only made matters worse, as Google did that, “surely you mean Lolly Badcock” thing, allowing me to discover that Lolly Badcock is a porn actress; Molly’s less appetising twin, perhaps.
Clicking (or rather, mostly not clicking) very carefully indeed by this stage, I tried Molly Badcock Keele as a search term and found Molly Badcock’s diaries on the Merchant Taylors’ Alumni Network site – Item 30. There I learnt that Molly was a cultured girl, who became a biologist, teaching ecological science at Keele.
Ah, yes. Now I remember.
Although Molly Badcock didn’t teach me at Keele, I was allocated to her for “pastoral care”, I believe as something known as a “resident tutor”. She lived in an academic’s house or apartment in Lindsay Hall, near to my humble fresher diggings in F block (long gone; possibly her place has also gone).
I think Molly had set up a series of “pop around for tea and a chat” slots for her fresher charges. I believe I met (amongst others) a lovely lass named Mary Keevil that day; another of the people who became a chatting & nodding acquaintance for many years. I certainly didn’t hike the Appalachian trail or discuss Uganda with Mary. I do remember running into her in London mid to late 1980s by which time she was working for SportsAid. I also have a funny feeling I first met Rob Whitehead there that day; we subsequently became work colleagues at BDO Consulting.
My visit to Molly Badcock’s that day might have been my only resident tutor encounter that year, although I have a vague memory of returning at the end of my first year for another informal session at Molly Badcock’s.
Fascinating to learn that Molly, like me, kept diaries as a school kid. But look how neat and tidy Molly’s were compared with mine. She was 12 in 1934 (roughly the same age as I started) and 15 in 1937.
Postscript To My Molly Badcock story: Karen Walsh reports on the KUSU Facebook Group that:
I was a biology student so had molly as a lecturer – and escort for a field trip to aberystwyth where she patrolled the corridors to ensure there was no “mixing” 😂😂”
Enough said.
Concourse Needed Me
Although it is not mentioned in my diary, I recall that I (along with Simon Jacobs) responded to the above shout out in the October 1980 issue of Concourse, the students’ union newspaper.
There I met, for the first time, John White. I recall that John was sitting on a bar table looking rather sinister with a football scarf around his neck (Tottenham Hotspurs for some reason; he has been relentlessly Leyton Orient for decades) and Doc Martin boots.
I now realise that John was somewhat shy or at least introverted back in those very early Keele days. The problem was, his look fitted the exact stereotype I had been warned about; racist (or at least very right wing) students who seek to disrupt student life, often by getting involved in student politics and student journalism. I so clearly remember thinking, “be careful of him”.
I now know, of course, that John is a gentle fellow; we worked tremendously well together in student politics and have been firm friends ever since. Actually it didn’t take long for my “John stereotype” to collapse in a heap, as John had been quick off the mark to sign up for the Labour Club and for Concourse – he was already credited although not bylined in the October edition that contained the shout-out:
In fact none of us new arrivals got bylines until the January 1981 edition, apart from David Perrins, who coincidentally was Simon Jacobs’s next door neighbour in Barnes, who was so quick off the mark he had become the “Arts Correspondent” on arrival, presumably by dint of dressing in a dandified fashion and talking in an Oscar-Wilde-stylee…
David Perrins – the first of our batch to get a big column (as it were) – October 1980
…or perhaps because no-one else put their hand up to review the drama.
Anyway, I must have made a huge impression when we were asked if we had any previous experience of journalism by admitting that I had edited the national magazine for BBYO – an organ with a circulation in the hundreds or low thousands, much the scale of Concourse – albeit a much simpler style of publication – Gestetner printed rather than “proper” letterpress printing.
But I could type fast with two fingers (still can) and was credited in the next issue which came out in early December…
…by which time John White had dropped off the chart, although just for one issue…and Simon Jacobs hadn’t yet got a mention. Like me and John, Simon got his first byline in January 1981. But that part of my past is still in the future, as far as my Ogblog write-ups are concerned.
Meanwhile, returning to 6 November 1980, the other thing I remember doing that evening (although the diary is silent on this point) is queing up for ages to get a turn on one of the handful of payphones and calling home to speak with my parents. It was a hugely onerous, time-consuming and expensive routine, which lives long in the memory of those of us who had to put ourselves through all of that just to make a phone call. A phone call is now so cheap, so casual, so simple…
…anyway, the reason I know that I subjected myself to that routine on that evening is because 6 November 1980 was my parents’ silver wedding anniversary and I couldn’t let an occasion like that pass without a phone call.
Richard Marks With Terri Vine (now Phillips) c Spring 1979
In truth, the only bit of this visit I remember is Richard talking me into joining him at The Victoria Ground to see Stoke City play Manchester United on the Wednesday. But the diary is clear that Richard came to visit initially on the Sunday.
My guess is that Richard did not hang around on campus with us for several days. My guess is that he visited us on the Sunday, went on to Manchester to visit some of his many BBYO friends and/or attend to some other business for a couple of days, then returned to North Staffordshire for the football match he yearned to see.
Simon’s party trick
I’m fairly sure Simon could not be persuaded to come with us to the football match, so it was just me and Richard.
Richard’s purpose was to see the debut of Garry Birtles for Manchester United, as Birtles had just been signed from Nottingham Forrest for a record transfer fee. Get this number; £1.25 million. I’ll repeat that number in words, just in case the sheer scale of it blows readers away. One-and-a-quarter-million pounds.
People who know me well know that I am not exactly a football person. Cricket, yes. Tennis, yes. Rugby, no. Soccer, no, not really. But I was up to have a butchers at my now local soccer venue on an historic night.
Here’s the 11v11 card for the match – sadly lacking the Stoke team but delightfully full of names that even I recognise on the Manchester United side of the card.
But my main memory of the evening was Richard suggesting that I might get us both killed.
The thing is, not being a football person, I didn’t really understand some of the subtleties of going to watch such a match.
Richard had got us seats in a part of the ground where Stoke home fans watch.
It didn’t occur to Richard that I wouldn’t understand that neutrals and/or supporters of the other team need to travel incognito in such circumstances.
I don’t actually support any team but I was with Richard and he was there to see Birtles and Manchester United so I started cheering for my friend’s team.
It was at that juncture that Richard warned me that I might get us both killed and I must admit that I noticed a few dagger-like looks coming our way. Richard found a way to mollify those around us (I think by signalling with eye rolls and gestures that I was simply a clown, an imbecile or both), enabling us both to survive the potential ordeal.
Diary says that I enjoyed, so I must have enjoyed..
Thanks for the educational and entertaining evening out, Richard.
I was still on the National Executive of BBYO and spent my first weekend in Glasgow. Travelling to and from Glasgow from Keele for the weekend is not a brilliant idea but according to the diary I got back to Keele early enough on the Sunday evening to show up at the Union bar. Yes, really that is what the Sunday entry (below) says.
Monday 13 October – First lectures – OK. Went to Union in evening. Quiet day.
Tuesday 14 October – Lectures OK, Politics OK. Went to drama workshop in eve – good.
I was doing the Foundation Year (FY). In those days most Keele undergraduates did four year courses, starting with FY. It is was a wonderful course which helped me to learn how to learn and also enabled me to decide what to study for my degree. Politics was one of my two sessional courses (the other was History).
Simon Jacobs did a three year degree without FY. Simon and I threw ourselves into the drama workshop in our first term.
Simon Jacobs throwing himself into something, 1979
…or, if anything ever goes awry with the above Wirral Festival link, click here for a scrape thereof.
Several of us who had enjoyed doing drama at school wanted to do a bit of performance stuff without getting involved in the formalities of the drama society and full scale productions. This group proved to be just the ticket for us. We were very lucky to be led by someone of Brian Rawlins’s quality for such a group. That story ends with this piece of street theatre…
Wednesday 15 October 1980 – dull lectures today. (??) Pleasent [sic] afternoon. Went to J-Soc & Freshers Ball till very very late.
Didn’t take long for the novelty of foundation year lectures to wear off, did it?
Our Freshers Ball was supposed to be headlined by Gary Glitter, but apparently he fell ill, so Alvin Stardust was wheeled out at the last minute as a replacement. This event was long before Gary Glitter’s infamy as a child sex offender, of course. Indeed Glitter did show up at one of the balls I attended some time later in my Keele journey. Unlike Glitter, there was nothing edgy about Alvin Stardust, neither in performance nor, as far as we know, in real life.
There are two Concourse pieces about the Freshers Ball. The first one a damning news piece with no byline…
…the second a rather more upbeat music review by Dave Lee. Do you know who wrote the first piece, Dave? If so, do tell.
Dave Lee talks highly of Glass Torpedoes. I certainly recall enjoying the warm up act more than the Alvin gig. Embedded below is the Glass Torpedoes Peel Session from earlier that year:
Dave Lee also talks up the Tour de Force gig in Room 14 upstairs, which I also vaguely recall enjoying more than Alvin. I have managed to find some interesting material on the former, including a rare recording on the following embedded vid.
Thursday 16 October 1980 – V tired today. Law v good. Got some letters written, received some letters as well. Went to bar with Simon in evening.
Law was a four week topic with Michael Whincup. We needed to do several such topics during FY. So inspired by that law topic was I, that ended up switching to study law (along with economics) as my degree the following three years.
Going to the bar with Simon in those early weeks/months of Keele not only included beer drinking but invariably a few games of table football. I have no pictures of me playing table football with Simon, sadly, but more than a quarter of a century later, when visiting Jinka in the South Omo Region of Ethiopia, I learnt that I hadn’t mis-spent that aspect of my youth at all; I was able to call on the skills acquired in those all-too-frequent games in the Keele Students’ Union to great effect:
Friday 17 October 1980 – Not bad lectures today. Disco in eve, bad.
Saturday 18 October 1980 – Easy day. Went to disco in eve, good.
How was I assessing the discos in those days? I doubt if I was doing the “disco aficionado” thing at that stage. Admittedly, I had experienced an Ian Levine special at Mecca in Blackpool by then…and a few good ones in London no doubt. But my guess is that “bad” and “good” would have been determined by the extent to which I had managed to perk up any interest among the female freshers who were still in the market by the Friday and Saturday of that week.
Not that I had really worked out what to do about it when I got a bit lucky. As much as anything else, I was committed to traipsing up and down the country for the rest of that term still. I do recall getting friendly that week with a pretty girl with a turned up nose from the North-East named Jo. Her father was a vicar and she was even more shy with that sort of stuff than I was. We didn’t get far. I think we went back to her place for a cup of coffee and had…coffee. But we remained smiling, nodding acquaintances for several years at Keele. Bless. That pleasing non-event might well have been after the “good” disco.
I saw Keele University for the very first time on 8 October 1980. I entered through the main gates, on the bus from Stoke, carrying a suitcase and a holdall; less stuff than I would take with me for a weekend these days.
[“These days” means almost exactly 40 years later at the time of writing].
I stayed at Keele for five years.
It was Simon Jacobs’s fault. (Simon, right, trying to look cool and uninterested).
It was Simon Jacobs’s fault that I was there. No ifs no buts no maybes.
It happened like this.
Both Simon and I had made a similar mess of our A levels. We’d both thrown ourselves into BBYO at a local level (Pinner in his case, Streatham mine) and at a national level as well; we were both on the National Executive and indeed that summer I had been running the office after the sole full-timer, Rebecca Lowi, had left.
Simon started to address the educational “oops, what happens next?” problem far quicker than I did. On one unsung occasion in mid-to-late August 1980 Simon popped in to see me at the office at Hillel House, after he had visited Keele.
It seems like a really nice University. It’s small and friendly, the campus has large and very attractive grounds…and…they’ve offered me a place, even with my crummy A levels. You should give it a try.
I phoned Keele the next morning. I explained my predicament. The official I spoke with sounded quite promising.
Sure – come and have a look in the next week or so and we’ll have a chat about what we might be able to offer you with your so-called crummy A levels.
I demurred.
That might be a bit difficult. I am running this office all by myself and we have our annual National leadership training course starting next week and a bit of a governance crisis going on at the same time. You come highly recommended to me by Simon, whom I trust, so if you have a place for me I’m sure it will work out well for me and for Keele.
The Keele official demurred…slightly.
Well, that is a rather unusual request, but I suppose you have described a rather unusual predicament…let’s see what we can do…
I recall being asked to provide character references from senior teachers at my school, Alleyn’s, which wasn’t too difficult for me to achieve. Thank you, Colin Page; house master, games master, nice guy and teacher whom, I believe, never actually taught me academically-speaking. Not quite sure what he organised for me, but it worked.
My diary on Wednesday 10 September notes:
…good day (possible good news from Keele)…
I think that might be the news that I had a place subject to references.
Then Monday 15 September:
Got back from Nottingham [BBYO that was, not University hunting] – phoned Keele – in.
So when I entered through the gates on that bus with my measly bags, all I knew about the place was Simon’s review from his interview/tour day and the correspondence the University sent me between accepting me and my arrival.
Still, by 8 October, Simon had been there for a few days, so he was an expert already. He recalls being taken up at the weekend by his parents. That must have been the Sunday, because my diary says that Simon (along with several others) spent Saturday at the Harris residence in Streatham, but Simon wasn’t among those who stayed over.
Wednesday 8 October. Left home early. Easy journey. Registered. Met Simon, easyish day. Disco in evening v good.
That first day of Keele reads a bit Adrian Mole.
Thursday 9 October. Tons to do. Sorting things out. Saw Supercharge in evening.
No comment on Supercharge there. I do recall buying, for a very modest sum, one of their albums, Local Lads Make Good, in Record & Tape Exchange later that academic year. I realised on listening to it that they worked better live than they did on album…and I recalled that they hadn’t worked all that well for me live. They were fun, it was Freshers’ Week and we were all up for pretty much any live music.
I have subsequently found the micro review of the Supercharge concert from Concourse, the student newspaper – see below. I don’t think Christine was impressed.
Friday 10 October. Lots to do today. Sorting things out. Evening down union & singing songs avec Simon.
Cripes. I’d been at University for fewer than 72 hours and already I was clipping phrases such as “down Union”…
…and where did the phrase “avec Simon” come from? Was it an in joke from the evening – perhaps we had sung a French song or parodied the French chanteur style.
I recall the singing taking place in the Walter Moberly Hall. Certainly on more than one occasion and I’m pretty sure that evening must have been the first. Simon was itching to play the piano, so after a drink or two (and almost certainly a game or three of table football) we went in search of a piano for Simon to play and discovered that the Walter Moberly Hall was left open in the evenings for the convenience of scallywags like ourselves.
Of course, Simon has subsequently gone on to have a glittering avocational musical career, with album launches…
…and more recently his latest album, from lockdown, which is previewed on the following track:
Coincidentally, Janie and I had arranged to visit Simon 10 October 2020 in blissful ignorance of the fact that it was 40 years since he and I had started Keele. It was only some chat on Facebook that alerted me to the “anniversary”.
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