UKSU – Page 2 – Ian Louis Harris

A Five Day Marathon To Produce Concourse With Dave Lee, The Result Being A Student Union Lock-In & Near Death Experience, Late February/Early March 1981

I have already written about the star-crossed relationship between SU President Katy Turner & Concourse editors Paula & Hugh, which came to a head in early February 1981…

Keele Concourse Controversy, A Weekend Back In London, Plus Several More Late-Nighters, 1 to 10 February 1981

The upshot of all that was the resignation of Paula & Hugh, the interim appointment of Dave Lee to edit the March edition (hot on the heels of the ill-fated February one), the rapid appointment of Owen Gavin and Gerry Guinan to take over the editorship immediately after the March edition, to alternative applicant Dave Lee’s chagrin …

…you might well be thinking to yourself, “none of this commentary bodes well for the harmonious and timely production of that March issue”.

What Does the Diary Say?

Never wanting to be seen as a rat who leaves a sinking ship, I offered Dave Lee my whole-hearted support to produce that March issue and/but found myself as part of a core team of two on the production side. To his credit, Dave steeled himself to the time-sensitive task with great determination.

Many other contributors of course; Simon Jacobs, Gerard O’Kane, Julia Parkes, Moira Neish, David Perrins, Jon Gorvett, Diana Ball, Robert Blow, David Bakhurst, Dexter…

David Perrins indicating that someone was out?

…but not a great deal of company in the Concourse office itself. To be fair on the others, it was a ridiculous post-shenanigans deadline, towards the end of term. I could just about get away with it as a Foundation Year student, but for most that level of commitment at that time of year was impractical.

Saturday 28 February – got up very late – went into Newcastle – ate & Concoursed
Sunday 1 March – late start – Concourse office most of the day and evening
Monday 2 March – OK day – busy with Concourse in evening
Tuesday 3 March – Not bad day – in Concourse office in evening.
Wednesday 4 March – Tough day working on Concourse. Nine Below Zero Concert…

I wrote a lot of copy – I was the political editor and there had been a whole swathe of union elections during February to report. I also did one heck of a lot of typing of my own and other people’s articles. My spectacularly fast four-finger technique was without question the best typing skill on offer…well, probably it was all that was on offer.

Yes, I remember matters becoming increasingly fraught as the days went on. Financially, missing the print deadline would mean ruination.

The set pages needed to go to the printers on the designated day, otherwise the printers would charge for the print run regardless but there would be no paper to sell.

Steve “Spike” Humphrey, a lovely, gentle chap whom I got to know quite well in other walks of Keele life afterwards, was the business manager of Concourse. Spike took pains to remind me and Dave that the print deadline really was just that; an immoveable deadline.

I’m not sure if this is William Randolph Hearst or Spike Humphrey in later life.

On that evening of 4 March, I’m pretty sure Dave & I were already well aware, even as we took a break to see the Nine Below Zero concert, that to get the pages ready for the printers the next morning, we’d be working much of the night to get the job done.

Nine Below Zero, Thirty After Three…

As for the Nine Below Zero gig, I’m sure Dave Lee’s forthcoming (due Summer 2021) book, The Keele Gigs – click this link for more details, will have more to say about that. They looked and sounded like this:

The other point to make about that gig, the very night of our deadline, was that Dave had commissioned and was determined to use, a review of the gig from Di Ball and Rob Blow.

That deadline upon deadline resulted in a little whimper of a hidden plea from me to Dave Lee at the end of that (quite lengthy) piece, when the copy finally arrived and when I finally got it ready for setting:

I apologise unequivocally, forty years on, to Dave, Di and Rob, none of whom were ever guilty of producing rotten articles. I must have been tired and emotional in the early hours of the morning, so, unforgivably, I mis-spoke.

I think Di & Rob kept us company for some time late that evening, as they completed their copy while Dave & I busied ourselves typing and setting other stuff.

But it was just me and Dave who remained once the porters (two from Ted, Walter & Wally no doubt) told us that they had to lock up and we agreed to being locked in.

With thanks to Mark Ellicott for this picture of Walter & Wally

Locked In…

In those days there were no CCTV cameras or anything like that. Yet I have somehow managed to uncover a couple of photos that seem to be pictures of me and Dave at work during that night.

I’d never done any page-setting before, so I think that’s a tentative me

Yup, I’m fairly sure that’s Dave Lee putting the finishing touches on a page

I’ll guess that my 3:30 am plea in that article was accurate but also that it marked the near conclusion of our work. I think we had set everything else by then and simply needed to slot in the material from that night’s concert to be done. In fact, I suspect that my joke paragraph was in part a device to use up the space we had estimated for that article.

So I’ll guess that we were done around 4:00 or 4:30 am.

I’ll guess we expected the union to be opened up around 7:00 am.

I recall that we both had a little bit of silver in our pockets and chose to decompress after our labours using the amusements available.

We might have played table football…

…but I have a feeling that Dave was more a pinball person…

…or perhaps my extensive experience playing table football with Simon Jacobs most evenings put me in a different league for table football…

…or perhaps we quickly landed on the notion that table football is a game where you try to use up your goes as quickly as possible, whereas pinball is a game in which you rejoice in your opponents success – especially if it yields free balls and free games so you can continue to play.

I was an enthusiastic pinball player in those days. here is one of the games we might have played – for sure UKSU had this one at that time:

Once we had blown all the silver in our pockets, I think we both felt the onset of fatigue and so we decided to retire to the quiet room at the end of the union extension to grab forty winks before the sun would go up and the union would re-open.

…Then Nearly Knocked Out!

I think we both woke up to the same sound – that of shouting.

“All right you scallywags, where are you? I know you’re in here!”

Words to that effect.

We dozily wandered out of the quiet room, to see Pat Lyons, the building manager, hurtling along the extension passageway towards us.

*It’s possibly a false memory, but I remember him wielding something a bit like the above implement.*

My life flashed before my eyes. I imagined a Cluedo-like synopsis of our demise: “Mr Lyons, in the Union Extension, with the pipe wrench”.

Dave and I had but a few seconds to advocate for our very survival. Fortunately, as skilled communicators, used to summarising key facts into few words for journalistic purposes, we somehow managed to convince Pat Lyons during that short period of time that we had been deliberately locked in to produce Concourse.

Again my doubtlessly false memory has Pat upon us, about to wield a killer blow just a fraction of a second before our story rang true to him and he disarmed.

“You scared the bloody living daylights out of me,” said Pat

Words to that effect.

The feeling was entirely mutual.

Still, in the end no harm was done and in fact I think we produced a pretty darn good edition of Concourse, all things considered.

We put the paper to bed (unlike ourselves) in the early hours of 5 March and it returned from the printers for sale on Monday 9 March 1981.

In the spirit of this “forty years on” Ogblog journal, I intend to publish scans of those Concourse pages on 9 March 2021. Watch this space…

The “Film Star Makes President” Edition Of Concourse, 9 March 1981

…ah, there it is. Click the above link – or here.

Keele Concourse Controversy, A Weekend Back In London, Plus Several More Late-Nighters, 1 to 10 February 1981

Concourse, Classes, Council & Concert

Oh dear!

Now I admit that I did much of the typing for that early February 1981 edition of Concourse. I was deemed to be a bit of a whizz with two fingers on the old keyboard. Still am, though I say so myself.

But I did not get involved with laying out the paper in preparation for the printers for that edition. That was, in theory, more experienced work. That was often the editors’ role. It was certainly the editors’ role to check that all the pages were well set.

Something went awry and I’m not sure that my writing about the controversy now will extract the true story.

One rumour had it that the skewiffy setting of Katy Turner’s Presidential Column was a deliberate snub to her by the editors, Hugh Peart and Paula Higginson. One rumour had it that it was an honest mistake by someone setting the paper in a mad rush to get the proofs to the printers.

It was always a mad rush to get the proofs to the printers.

Dave Lee might be able to shed some light on the cause.

Anyway, my diary suggested that I was busy on Concourse from 31 January to 3 February with little else to report. My FY Programme suggests I went to a few lectures & classes that week, but still I deemed such days “easy”. Easy meant “no essay deadlines and no exams” in my mind back then.

On Wednesday 4th February my evening comprised:

Local Authority meeting in eve. Au Pairs live – not too good.

I cannot imagine why I went to a Local Authority meeting other than a recommendation from Richard Kimber to do so as part of my Politics sessional. I don’t remember a thing about it, but I suspect that some Councillors would say the same thing about their entire career on the Council.

I’ll leave the review of the Au Pairs concert to Dave Lee in his forthcoming (due Summer 2021) book The Keele Gigs – click this link for more details.

I did become reconciled with The Au Pairs and grew to like their album Playing with a Different Sex. The following track, which is on that album, shows what they looked and sounded like:

Rumour had it that a couple of The Au Pairs had been students at Keele. I’m not sure whether I can get that “fact” confirmed or denied. I can confirm that lead singer Lesley Woods went on to become a practicing barrister.

After my classes on the Friday I went to my parents’ house for the weekend; my only such visit that term.

A Weekend In London 6 to 8 February

Friday 6 February – arrived about 7:00 – ate, phoned – turned in earlyish
Saturday 7 February – easy day, taping etc. Caroline [Freeman, now Curtis] came over for supper ->town for coffee and cakes.
Sunday 8 February – easy day – lunch locally with Grandma[Anne] – got back to Keele about 8:00 – had a few drinks

The diary entries are intriguing. I mention that I phoned. These days no youngster would consider phoning to be “a thing”, but it was time consuming to queue up for the payphones at Keele and expensive. So it was “a thing” to me that I could spend some time that weekend calling people.

I shall write a separate piece on the chart music I taped on that Saturday. I’m pretty sure I also taped some of my albums and such to increase my mini collection of cassettes up at Keele.

I don’t remember Caroline coming to the house for supper but I know for sure that my mum would have felt that she owed Caroline and her family many, many meals for all the hospitality I’d had from them when doing my BBYO stuff in the year or so prior to Keele, mostly in North-West London, with Caroline’s mum Jacquie providing warm and wonderful hospitality of the edible kind regularly.

I don’t know why I recall the trip up town with Caroline for coffee and cake (and a chance to chat), but I have a strong memory of a place near or possibly even in Whiteleys. From the late 80’s onwards, I didn’t think of that Bayswater/Notting Hill Gate neighbourhood as “town”, I think of it as “home”.

Lunch locally with Grandma Anne was probably at Il Carretto in Streatham.

Skewiffy-Column-Gate

On the Monday, 9 February, the concourse controversy kicked off proper. The diary reads:

Not bad day. Concourse came out. UGM in eve – spoke about Concourse etc. Went back to Mark’s [Bartholomew] for coffee – stayed chatting all night…

In many ways I think the controversy passed us by at the time.

I had seen my first piece in print, as had Jon Gorvett [his New Block At Lindsay piece which I showed in December 1980 I now discover was actually from this February 1981 edition] and as had Simon Jacobs – a lengthy review of Trust by Elvis Costello:

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

So we Concourse “cub reporters” were simply thrilled to see our pieces and credits in print. Also, the very fact that Concourse was the centre of attention at that evening’s UGM only added to the sensation that the University of Keele Students’ Union’s fourth estate, in the form of Concourse, was terribly important.

In the aftermath of that day, the controversy about the Concourse skewiffyness was quite fierce; the result was that both of the editors resigned. I don’t think that happened publicly on the night (otherwise I’d have written about it differently in the diary). That hoo-ha and multiple resignation incident had momentous and amusing consequences for me (and for interim editor Dave Lee) a few weeks later – watch this space.

Coffee Afterwards…Or Did I Mean “Coffee”?

I don’t think I went back to Mark Bartholomew’s place for all-night coffee and political chat on many occasions, so I suspect this might have been the day (night) that I met Neil Infield, who became a good friend, to some extent during the Keele years, to a greater extent after Keele. More on that anon.

Anyway, the location of that gathering was, if I remember correctly, L Block Lindsay.

I did not use the word “coffee” as a euphemism for other stimulants or relaxants. I used a little “//” marking in my diary for those. So on this occasion, I am pretty sure that the phrase “coffee and chatting all night” was literal and descriptive. If we were lucky the coffee would have been freeze-dried granules of the Nescafe variety. If we were less lucky, it would have been cheap powdery stuff with a generic supermarket label that had an insipid, bitter taste that vaguely resembled coffee.

Simon Jacobs reminded me (February 2021) that Mark Bartholomew, at that time, held himself out to be of the Polish nobility or something of that kind. The more inebriated he became, according to Simon, the more elaborate those Polish royalty stories became…see what I mean?

I remember Mark berating me for being unable to pronounce Łódź properly. I can do that now. Sounds more like “Woodge”. Never forgot it.

Sound file of Łódź from Wikipedia Commons, with thanks.

I’m not sure whether either Simon Jacobs or Jon Gorvett were part of that particular all-nighter – they’ll doubtless deny all knowledge of the occasion anyway, whether they were there or not.

10 February -> brekky -> 9.00 -> bed -> got up for dinner -> union for drinks

I love that little diary note – I can see from my FY Programme markings that I went to Stephen Banfield’s 9.00 lecture on Romantic Music but then went to my bed rather than attend Roger Marsh‘s 20th Century Music lecture.

Glad to see that my untimely slumber enabled me to revive in time for dinner and some drinks in the Union. Priorities.