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!
