Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 2: The mid-60s

We haven't reached the age of THE ALBUM yet.  Most bands prioritised the release of singles in the mid-60s.  People bought 45s and got up off their arse to change the record after 3 minutes.  LPs were merely collections of more songs, without the coherence and character that later came to define the pop/rock ALBUM. They were far less popular than singles, possibly due to their prohibitive cost - lots of guineas and shillings, whatever imperial measurement of money they still had in those days. Consequently, there just weren't enough good LPs around until 1967, so I don't own enough to list a top ten for each year.   As before, this post will be heavily dominated by the same two artists that are so highly favoured by me - Bob Dylan and The Beatles.

During this time, the two of these heavily influenced each other.  Dylan got The Beatles into marijuana and writing lyrics that went beyond "I love you, you love me" and The Beatles were a prompt to Bob to convince himself to get a band and plug into amps.  Consequently, each artist scaled a creative peak from 1965 into 1966 and produced between them four albums that have cemented a place in my all-time top ten.

1964

There's a lull before the storm, though.

Dylan peddled a couple of slightly dour folk offerings in 1964: "The Times they are a-changin'" (8/10) and "Another Side of..." (7/10).  More to be admired than liked, I feel.  In each case, Bob wrote and performed every song, no cover versions, a convention-shattering approach that paved the way for Dennis Waterman to write the theme tune and sing the theme tune to "Minder" in the late 70s and thus provide me with the perfect ringtone for my phone.

The Beatles matched this musical multi-tasking when they released "A Hard Day's Night" (9/10) and packed it with nothing but Lennon-McCartney accredited songs.  Not even poor George Harrison was allowed a look in this time, despite breaking his duck previously on "With the Beatles".  Between them, Bob, Paul and John raised the bar for other musical performers to write their own material.  Unfortunately, by the end of the year, much like 1963, the Beatles ended up cobbling together a relatively weak rag-bag of originals and covers on "Beatles for Sale" (7/10).  (Like I say, "relatively".  It's still a great album.)

Elsewhere, Simon and Garfunkel were on the bus behind, releasing their debut "Wednesday Morning 3am" (6/10) and putting the self-penned work of genius "The Sounds of Silence" alongside the traditional folk hymn "Go Tell it on the Mountain", which I remember singing (*miming to) at primary school and consequently couldn't get my head round seeing it in this context anymore than if Simon and Garfunkel had sung "Make me a Channel of Your Peace" or "Lord of the Dance"

1965

And then God said to Abraham...

These days, bands take three years to write and record an album of songs and they still can't match what The Beatles and Bob were doing every 6 months at this stage.  Imagine if that was the case with builders or decorators - "We can do the job, mate, but it'll take six times as long and won't be anywhere near as good as other firms."  You'd laugh them out of the door and back to their van, emblazoned with 'Coldplay and Sons' or something like that.

In 1965, these two leviathans of popular rock music each released their best album to date followed by an even better one.  Bob went electric, at least on side one of "Bringing it all Back Home" (10/10) and then demonstrated that this was merely a prophet making the path ready for the messianic "Highway 61 Revisited" (10/10 and my favourite album of all time).  The Beatles released "Help!" (9/10) and then "Rubber Soul" (10/10), the latter being worthy of a perfect score in my book, despite how much better it would have been if they had included on it the two singles from the time: "We can work it out" and "Day Tripper".  The mark of how untouchable Dylan and Lennon-McCartney were as songwriters, is the quality of the songs they left off their albums, remarkably still better than the best of what anyone else has ever done.  I sometimes think some bands would have been even better if they'd left more songs off their albums.  I'm thinking particularly of Manic Street Preachers, The Verve, The Killers, Coldplay and Mumford and Sons, all of whom should have left ALL of their songs off their albums and put someone else's on instead.

To finish my list for 1965, I'd like to share the sad story of Jackson C Frank, whose self-titled one and only studio album (7/10) provides the pathos for his tale.  When he was 11 years old, a fire at his school killed 15 other students and left him with burns to half of his body, that caused him long term joint problems on top of the inevitable trauma he experienced from the whole incident.  He met Paul Simon in England, whilst both were plying their trade on the British folk circuit.  Recognising his talent and the strength of his songs (the best of which, "Blues run the game", he recorded a cover of), Simon produced Frank's album.  In the studio, Frank was so nervous singing, that he had to be hidden from view.  Within a year of the album's release, he had plunged into a deep depression and was admitted to hospital.  He was left completely devoid of any self-confidence or song-writing ability.  He married and had two children, but one died at an early age of cystic fibrosis, leading to Frank being admitted to a mental institution.  By the 1980s, he'd moved back to live with his mother, but went missing in a search for Paul Simon, according to a note he left behind.  He continued to be periodically institutionalised and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.  In the 1990s, he was shot in the eye by some kids messing about with a pellet gun and consequently blinded.  In 1990, he died of pneumonia, aged 56.  Not the luckiest man in the music business.  But a wonderful album that I recommend you listen to.

1966

On the subject of Paul Simon, two of his albums with Garfunkel feature in my list of best and only albums for 1966:  "Sounds of Silence" (8/10) and "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" (8/10).  By this point, Simon had found his song-writing spurs, proving a worthy rival to Dylan lyrically and Lennon-McCartney melodically.  Just imagine how shit these albums would have sounded if he'd discovered South African music this early on, like George Harrison did with Indian music.

George's Indian influences and his other song-writing contributions to "Revolver" (10/10) were a significant factor in making this Beatles album the best in my opinion.  So much so, that "Sgt, Pepper's", its 1967 follow-up, has always felt like a let down to me.  Not because it's not a brilliant album, but "Revolver" is just so amazing that it isn't even spoilt by having "Yellow Submarine" on it.  In film terms, that's like "The Godfather" having an animated musical sequence half-way through, in which Don Corleone, surrounded by cartoon woodland animals, breaks into a chorus of "The Bare Necessities" as he chases his grandson through the tomato plants with a water-spray-can before dropping down dead.  I'm not sure even "The Godfather" would retain its credibility in the same way as "Revolver" does.

And whatever The Beatles do (at this stage at least, as he has a year off while they're knocking out "Sgt. Pepper's"), Bob can do just as well.  And he does this with "Blonde with Blonde" (10/10), which I think is rock music's first double album and easily its best.  The nearest equivalent to a "Yellow Submarine" on here is "Rainy Day Women #12 and #35" in which Bob invents the hashtag two generations before Twitter, whilst singing that "everybody must get stoned" to the accompaniment of a comedy trombone.  "Blonde on Blonde" is all the better for this, for harmonica playing that is more seamlessly integrated into the electric blues sound, for more stunningly original expressionism in its lyrics and for the sheer audacity of putting an out-of-focus photo on the cover and giving the album a title that sounds like a lesbian porn film.

My final 1966 album, is not The Beatles or Bob Dylan for a change.  It's Richie Havens' "Mixed Bag" (6/10).  Richie covers both The Beatles and Bob Dylan on this album.  There's no escaping them.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 1: The early 60s

 I guess I should explain the title first.  

With almost 6 weeks of the school holidays ahead of me, I'm hit by the urge to self-indulgently write about stuff that interests me.  Again.  And, as normal, to justify putting this online, I'll attempt to make it amusing, so that you don't have to share my geeky interest in music, give a shit about my personal ratings out of 10 or appreciate the chronology around which I'm structuring this series of posts.  You just need to be bored enough to spend 5 minutes reading something half tongue-in-cheek that's hopefully half-funny enough to make you smile for (according to the maths) a quarter of the time.  That's one minute and 15 seconds of smiling.  Personally, I'd get face-ache if I smiled for that long.  But if I manage that, then job done.  If not, then you might at least find the music focus interesting.  And if not that either, then you probably won't have got this far reading anyway.

So, I'll start with 1962, the earliest year which spawned an album that I own.  I'm not including compilations, no 'best of' stuff (hence the lack of any old pre-1962 rock and roll records from the rack), just studio albums, because a cigar's a cigar, but an album is a good smoke, or something like that.

1962

I have just two albums from this year.  Bob Dylan's eponymous debut (6/10) is a raw first outing for my number one musical idol and best given a wide berth if you normally find his idiosyncratic voice a bit scratchy on the ear-drum.  You might wonder if he's gargling cat litter on this record, but there's some respite when he punctuates his verses with a toot or three on his harmonica, mimicking a locomotive steaming through the song with a little too much bluster.  No classic Bob on here, nearly every track is a cover, but "Baby, Let me Follow You Down" is a real favourite of mine and his version of "House of the Rising Sun" is notable for its bleakness and Bob's decision to sing it from a female point of view ("it's been the ruin of many a poor 'girl' and me, oh God, I'm one").  The traditional narrator of the song was a woman before The Animals (inspired by Bob's version to record it) switched the gender.  Bob may have been ahead of his time, but he wasn't identifying as a woman in 1962.

The second album from this year is Willie Nelson's "And then I wrote" (7/10) which, in contrast to Bob's, includes a suite of songs which he did indeed write.  Most notably, it features his classic "Crazy", made famous by Patsy Cline, who struggled, whilst learning it, to imitate Willie's unorthodox method of singing his words out of step with where the music suggests they should be. Patsy was eventually encouraged to just sing it her own way.  Which she did, beautifully.  But Willie singing it his way is equally wonderful in my book.

1963

Only 3 albums from this year, two of which mark the start of Beatlemania in the UK.  My own mania for The Beatles means that they each get a high rating.  "Please, Please Me" (8/10) was, for the most part, recorded in one day.  Knowing what a strain "Twist and Shout" would have on Lennon's voice, this track was left until the end of the session and you can hear his worn vocal chords being stretched in desperation as if he was an Everton fan in the last 3 minutes of losing a match 1-0 to Liverpool.  It took me until my uncool middle age to appreciate this album, due to the covers of easy-listening and girl-group pop hits of the early 60s; and even the Beatles originals don't stray outside of (what Lennon once referred to as) the "I love you, you love me" lyrical theme.  That album and the title track single launched The Beatles into instant stardom in the early Spring of '63 and so by the time the pressure was on to release a quick follow up in the autumn, they had a weaker set of songs to stick on "With the Beatles" (7/10).  Part of this was due to the start of the habit of not (usually) including singles on albums, as it was assumed the fans had already bought them or would do so.  Hence, no "From Me to You" (my favourite early song of theirs), "She Loves You" or "I Want to Hold Your Hand".  It was released the same day that John F Kennedy was shot dead, so might not have hit the headlines in that sense either.

The final record in my collection from 1963 was Dylan's second, the one that similarly catapulted him to fame.  "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" (9/10) showcases several sides of his early, folk troubadour persona.  There's folk protest ("Blowin' in the Wind" and "Masters of War"), folk ballads ("Girl from the North Country" and "Don't think twice, it's alright") and folk with apocalyptic abstract expressionist lyrics ("A Hard Rain's a-gonna fall").  I shan't avoid the predictable corny follow-up to that sentence - it's a folking good album! That's 5 of the best 30 songs he ever wrote, all on one piece of vinyl. (Well, maybe 4, as I'm never knocked out by "Blowin' in the Wind", so excuse the hyperbole.)  On a recent trip to New York, I posed for a photo in the same street as the album cover shot and had this as my Facebook profile picture for ages.

Me and Madness

Hey you!  Don't read this!  It's far too self-indulgent.  Not unless you like Madness,  In which case, have a quick drink first, like I just did, to get yourself into a similarly nostalgic and sentimental state of mind.  And then, have a butcher's.

In 1981, when I was 11 and on a school trip, I discovered the magic of popular music.  Robert Hutchinson brought along a copy of Madness's 7th single, which the teachers let us play on the hotel record player.  The single reached number 7 in the charts and was called The Return of the Los Palmas 7.  When I got back home to London, I bought it.  And later that year, a new LP was released, which the 7 members of Madness agreed to assign a simple title to. '7'. (Noticing a theme yet?) My first single and my first album and the start of a (near) 40 year love for a band that has gone (dare I say, 'one step') beyond any other music in how it has wrapped its way around my life.

Over the next 5 years, until they split up in 1986, I indulged a need to buy every record they released in every format - single, album, picture disc, 12" single, imports and even cassette versions of the albums.  Most of this collection, I still possess, all in mint condition, cared for protectively.  But while I was away at university, my little brother opportunistically decided to sell the 12" singles to fund his pub visits.  He's not forgiven.

From the age of about 13, I was allowed to get the 29 bus down to Bayham Street, Camden Town, in order to buy each newly released single straight from Madness's record company, Stiff Records.  I would go down with my mate Kevin Keady and we'd be given free button badges and posters along with the records.  The badges bolstered a collection I obsessively added to every time I went to Carnaby St or Brighton promenade or Walthamstow market.  I had about 100 badges and I once put these all onto the back of my Harrington jacket; but this didn't prove to be particularly practical.  And the posters helped fill a huge amount of bedroom wall space, alongside anything I could cut out of Smash Hits magazine or obtain from any source.

Smash Hits also provided lyrics to the singles and I unleashed my inner geek to create a book of facts and lyrics and cut out pictures for every single, including each chart position (from The Prince in 1979 to Waiting for the Ghost Train in 1986, the chart placings are 16, 7, 3, 6, 3, 4, 7, 4, 7, 4, 14, 1, 4, 5, 8, 2, 5, 11, 17, 18, 21, 35, 18... most of that consigned to memory as a result of making that book).  

After one trip to Carnaby Street with Kevin Keady, to buy more Madness merchandise (and consider buying dog-tooth patterned drain-pipe trousers), we were upstairs on the 29 bus as it went along Camden Road and were stunned to see Mark 'Bedders' Bedford get on.  The Madness bassist was with two of the Belle Stars, a much less successful female version of Madness.  We shot downstairs, said hello (and what a lovely bloke he was) and I got him to autograph the back of a Madness mirror I'd just bought.

Kevin Keady remained my best friend for a short time - on account of his equal love of Madness - until he suddenly decided that he'd gone off them and was into Duran Duran.  One minute, we are watching the Madness film of how they started out (in which they play themselves), Take it or Leave It, at Enfield Town cinema, and the next minute, he's grown his fringe into a long wedge and started to show interest in girls (and girls' music, evidently).  To his credit, it kind of worked for him, he got girlfriends and I didn't, but Madness weren't worth the sacrifice, I still maintain.

Things went downhill from there.  Madness had run out of steam and they split up, just as I was moving on musically and was snobbishly heralding 'serious' rock music as superior to Madness's more jaunty, fun-loving pop sensibilities.  I probably stopped listening to them for a while in my late teens; and then in 1992, they returned to play what was intended to be one off weekend of gigs at Finsbury Park, cleverly named 'Madstock'.  By this point, I'd met my future wife.  We were engaged and having inflicted a really poor Bob Dylan gig on her in the early months of going out together, we discovered a shared love of Madness and went to Madstock with huge expectations and anticipation.  I had not been old enough to see them in concert first time around and the 6 years in which they had been absent felt like an eternity to me, as it would to anyone who found that time to fall between their 16th and 22nd birthdays.  We were not let down.  Madness were amazing and the impact of tens of thousands of fans jumping up and down caused a minor earthquake in the Finsbury Park area.

The following year, there was an easy and obvious consensus between us in regard to our choice of song for the first dance at our wedding:  It Must be Love.

Madness were back and they weren't going to go away.  Well not for long.  They would tour occasionally after this, usually around Christmas (we saw them again around the millennium at Wembley Arena) and from 1999 onwards they even managed to release albums of new music - not far off as good as their early stuff and sometimes equal to it - every  5 years or so.

We had two children and inflicted Madness on them with ease.  Both our kids love Madness and in 2014, the 4 of us saw them at the O2, the only gig we have attended together as a whole family.  I'm not one for dancing, but Madness are one band that can push me beyond my self-conscious reluctance.  Nonetheless, it took until the encore and Night Boat to Cairo  for my daughter to convince me to join the family in dancing along.  And then when I did, she just laughed at me and asked why it looked like I was just jogging on the spot.

Madness are also the only band I would sing karoke to.  Because I can't sing.  But then, nor can Suggs really.  His voice suits the music, because it has that wonderful North London brogue that I have grown up surrounded with.  Much as my love of Madness has been all about the songs, there are additional layers to them that make them special and part of that is the North London link.  They hail from the areas around Camden Town and have imbued a plethora of North West London characteristics into their lyrics, their attitude and the visuals for their music.  Living in some of these areas as a young child, meant that the nostalgia I have as an adult is interlinked with this aspect of Madness.  For example, I lived opposite Chalk Farm tube station (location for the Absolutely LP cover), and used to walk up to Primrose Hill to play (location of the Rise and Fall LP cover).  Camden Town was another short walk away, passing the Roundhouse as we left our flats, and here is the spiritual home of the band.

Another layer of specialness for me was the much overlooked depth to their music, their completely unique blend of different styles of genre (ska, old style R and B, boogie woogie, soul, rock and roll, 60s pop with a Kinks feel to it) and the unpretentious ordinariness of the subject matter for each song, which managed to provide an insightful social (and sometimes political) commentary or convey a dark humour (or humorous darkness) that made me want to listen to them closely rather than just dance along and laugh at the funny videos like casual fans did.

Madness songs - from the well known to the obscure - still give me a tingle when I listen to them after all this time.  The way in which they have seeped into my life, had an existence beyond the turntable, and projected a character which echoes my own, make them utterly special to me.  And to share that love with my family brings me pleasure that I can't put into words.  My daughter is the one whose love of Madness equals my own and this is partly reflected by the fact that we have matching Madness tattoos.  And this shared love was best celebrated last year, when the two of us went to see their 40th anniversary gig at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, which started with a short set of those obscure B-sides and albums tracks that they would have played when first starting out in 1979.  

What more can I say?  Madness, madness, I call it GLADNESS.

Live Aid when you're 15

It's Saturday night as I write and there's a documentary on about Live Aid and I guess, maybe, as it's July, it might be an anniversary.  And it surely is, 35 years, and it made me think back to those formative teenage years when something as globally STUPENDOUS as that could have a marked effect on your life when you're 15.  There's no denying, that - despite the posthumous tales of rock star diva behaviour and the perverse incentive of a career boost outweighing the moral imperative of the exercise - Live Aid was the most significant musical event of the decade and one of those historic moments when everyone knows where they were at the time.

I was in a transition stage of my life in 1985.  Not a gender one.  A musical one.  From liking pop songs that I'd tape onto a cassette during the Sunday evening Top 40 radio show to loving  PROPER rock.  The turning point for me was U2.  I loved them at the time.  I'd just got into The Unforgettable Fire, as a result of having sold a load of dodgy pirate tapes of that album at school, sourced from a Korean contact of my Dad's.  And therefore, U2's slot at Live Aid was something I was eager to see more than any other.  In those days, believe it or not, Bono could do no wrong in my eyes.  I wanted to BE Bono.  I was similarly short, with a big nose, loved Ireland, had some poncey boots and a brown mullet. Of course, nowadays, Bono can do no right in my eyes, the gurning, supercilious, self-aggrandising, overly-earnest, hypocritical, affectation-riddled, self-righteous bore. But in 1985, when he decided that there was too much space between stage and crowd, leading to his decision to forego U2's 3rd scheduled song (the brilliant 'Sunday Bloody Sunday') to climb down and direct security to pluck a pretty girl out of the crowd so that he could hug and dance with her (she was 'getting crushed'...yeah Bono, but she was also fit, eh?) , I naively thought, THIS IS SO COOL.

U2 were the second best performers of the day.  The very best, unarguably, as everyone agrees, was Queen.  I had just got into Queen at the time, as well.   So for me, Live Aid validated my decision that U2 and Queen were the two greatest rock bands of all time, which, given my very recent introduction to rock, says absolutely nothing.  But the general consensus is that those 8 boys done good.

Unlike the bands I went on to like in the next few years.

Within a year of Live Aid, I started my obsession with Bob Dylan.  This might have been delayed, had I seen him perform that night.  He was the closing act of the US leg of the concert.  He went on stage with Keith Richard and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones and the three of them had only about half an hour's rehearsal beforehand.  In true Dylan style, he then made a bad situation worse, by telling Keith and Ronnie, once on stage, that he wanted to play completely different songs, which they hadn't rehearsed.  Inevitably, the result was execrable. And, given Bob's pretty atrocious 1980s (though that's a non-devotee's opinion, not mine), Live Aid proceeded to be the shit cherry on a big fat cake made of shit for Bob in that decade.

I was also a year away from getting into Bowie, but at least he did a decent set.  It was a bit 80s, and Bowie unfairly got a lot of stick for being too 80s in the 80s, until he died, when people started to celebrate how well he adapted to the times.  And I was also a year away from liking Led Zeppelin, who fell flat in the first of two (kind of) reunions since splitting after John Bonham's death in 1980.  They roped in Phil Collins on drums, possibly the most mis-cast drummer they could have agreed to use, and blamed him for their crap performance.  (I mean, Stairway to Heaven needs bud-a-dum, bud-a dum, bud-a dum-dum dummmm, and not a bu-dup, bu-dup, bu-dup, bu-dup, bu-dup,)

But going back to the whole concept of knowing where you were at a certain time, I was mostly in my bedroom, but had a short spell in North Mid's A&E department.  During an act that I was less interested in (and there were several, The Boomtown Rats most notably, because let's face it, Geldof's own band were WAY out of their league) I decided to re-arrange the posters on my bedroom wall.  In the process, the pin bit of a drawing pin drove its way through the flat head bit as I pushed it into the wall and so it ended up embedded in my thumb.  That part of the pin had a thickened end and so you couldn't simply ease it out as smoothly as it went in.  My Dad took some pliers to it to pull it out, but I felt faint and wouldn't let him, asking to go a hospital instead where they would have a less crude method of extraction.  At the hospital, they used pliers to pull the thing out.  Bastards.  It hurt like hell.  But it was quick and I was soon back watching Live Aid.

I'm not sure anything like Live Aid can happen again.  The sheer scale of it, relative to its time, was way beyond what was thought possible then.  The line-up of artists has been unequalled since and these days we are beyond even having that many iconic artists available to snort coke backstage, lap up expensive gifts on their riders, treble their records sales, demand everyone vacates the area around a port-a-loo so that they can take a shit without their straining being overheard (Madonna, apparently). ...er, I mean, iconic artist available to freely gift their services to save the lives of starving Ethiopians.  But then, that fact just helps to make Live Aid a one off.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 12 - Another School trip, ghosts, Adam and the Ants and Harringtons)

Junior 4 was all about trying to be cool.

My best friends (both now and in the years before Junior 4), John and Darren, were abandoned by me in favour of Robert Hutchinson and Gerard Lynch, who I considered to be the coolest kids in the class.  The girls all loved Hutch, he had that air of confidence and looked like a ten year old baby-faced David Soul, only, he was a bit of a short-arse and, if I'm honest, consequently chubby in the way that a baby is before it starts walking.  Puppy fat, maybe.  Or short-arsed kid chubbiness, stored up energy ready for when he grows tall, which he never did.  Robert knew about proper pop music and so did Gerard.  And they both understood fashion.  No one in our class even thought about fashion before that.  Maybe the girls did, but I wouldn't have known that and I doubt it, looking back.  But Robert and Gerard both declared themselves to be 'Rude Boys' and each owned a Harrington.  Gerard also had a Crombie and was tall enough to carry off the much longer coat.  Robert would have looked like something from Michael Bentine's Potty Time in a Crombie.  Anyway, I wanted to fit in and persuaded my parents to buy me a Harrington.  (Incidentally, my Dad bought me another one for my 50th birthday last month, knowing that I am both nostalgic and a creature of habit).  We were the Harrington gang and sometimes Robert suggested we turn our jackets inside out so that the iconic red tartan lining was fully on show on the outside.  At this point, my effort to fit in failed somewhat.  Robert and Gerard had plain white lining on the inside of their sleeves.  I had bright green.  That was embarrassing.  I looked like a Scottish racing jockey.

Despite the green sleeves, they agreed that I could be in a room with them on the school trip that summer.  That was where my temporary abandonment of Darren and John was most treacherously realised, having been in a room with them in Combe Martin the previous two years.  This year the holiday location switched to Lympsham in Somerset and there were 6 of us in that room, 6 of us self-styled coolest kids in the class, with our Harringtons and with Robert as our leader.  The holiday was brilliant, especially as somehow I had got over my chronic travel sickness and didn't puke once on the coach the whole time,  which was fortunate given how much my jacket meant to me.  I'd have been mortified if the outside ended up as bright green as the inner sleeves.

The hotel in which we stayed was reputedly haunted.  And we believed this, after all, we were all Catholics, so we were open to all sorts of superstitious nonsense.  Originally the building had been a farmhouse and our room was built on an annex where the dairy had once been.  This became significant once the spooky story gathered some meat and we were told that the ghost was a milk maid.  Someone then claimed to have looked through the frosted glass of our bedroom door to see the silhouette of a woman bending over as if milking a cow (I imagine if we were older and more worldly, we would have interpreted this rather more crudely).  If that wasn't scary enough, I then imagined - as I twisted the handle of the door leading to our corridor - that someone on the other side of the door was turning it back forcefully and yet, as that door also had glass in it, I could see no one there.  I totally pooed myself and ran back to the main building armed with this addition to the story of the haunting.

This holiday proved a rite of passage for me, though.  It was when I got into PROPER MUSIC thanks to Robert bringing with him two 45" singles to play at the party.  The first was Adam and the Ants, Kings of the Wild Frontier.  The second - and more in keeping with the Harringtons - was Madness, The Return of the Los Palmas 7.  I was blown away by both and became a fan for life of Madness and an obsessive Adam Ant fan for at least a year afterwards, much to my Dad's discomfort and concern over my sexuality, once the posters of this obvious 'poofter' in make-up went up on my wall.

On the last evening, each room had to perform an act for all the other kids.  John and Darren's room mimed along to a Beatles song, while we did the same for Kings of the Wild Frontier, just to highlight the chasm in coolness.  However, in a moment of self-conscious awkwardness reminiscent of my green sleeves, I was instructed by Robert to be 'on piano'.  There is of course no bloody piano on that song, so I felt like a bit of a prick.  We Ants weren't even allowed to put the famous white stripe across our noses, as only Adam had this, the Ants didn't, as Robert pointed out.  And Robert was Adam Ant.  Gerard was guitarist, Marco Pirroni.  And I was just the prick on piano that wasn't in the song.  Robert might have looked the coolest, but at least he suffered for his art.  As I discovered later, when I tried it myself, applying a thick white line of toothpaste over your cheeks and nose sends a wave of stinging mintiness into your eyes that hurts like buggery.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 11 - School trip to Combe Martin, the double bed, Dutch ovens and a nuclear waste vomit)

Combe Martin is a coastal village in North Devon and it provided the destination for our primary school's summer trips in 1979 and 1980.  The experience has ingrained itself on our collective memory, like seeing a Granny's bloomers on the bus, with that same mixture of comedy and horror.

The key source for the horror was the sleeping situation.  Four ten year old boys.  Three beds.  I know it sounds like a priest's midnight party, but fortunately our Catholic school had not invited any along to supervise.  It required a practical solution.  Three of us - me, John and Darren (still my best mates today, in spite of Combe Martin, or maybe because of it!) -  were joined by another John (there were 7 of them in the class).  The deal was that everyone had to have a spell with one other boy in the double bed and the other nights in a single; and that you kept your pyjamas on in the double (as if you wouldn't); and put pillows down the middle.  As for farting, well, there were no boundaries there and John was eager to perform a 'Dutch Oven' on anyone sharing the double with him.

Anyone sharing a double bed with a brutally malevolent farter like John discovered that it was almost as bad as sharing a seat on the coach with me.  My inclination towards vomiting on account of debilitating car (and coach) sickness in the 70s was as inevitable and as unavoidable as Ollie Reed being drunk on a TV chat show.  My stomach started to stir after about an hour, no matter where on the coach I'd sit or if I'd been sucking on enough of those boiled sweets that came in a round tin full of icing sugar to look like a hamster.  Given that we travelled from North London to Devon and back, and was on and off the coach for excursions every day of the week, my throat ended up with more hot bodily fluid flowing through it than a Port-a-loo at a spicy food festival.  I threw up on EVERY single journey.  I have to lay some of the blame on your average 1970s coach, with no air-con and rubbish suspension, but the packed lunches provided for us really didn't help.  SPAM, I worked out, is HAM which makes you SPEW, hence the portmanteau.  And that other invidious culinary invention, sandwich spread, just looks like pig sick, so naturally made you think of puking up as soon as you looked at it.  But I was my own worse enemy the time we had a day out to Exeter Cathedral (the other side of Devon from Combe Martin).  I washed a Mint Choc Chip Cornetto down with a can of lime-flavoured fizzy drink just before boarding the coach and the very moment I stepped off it back at the hotel, I unleashed a bright green torrent that looked like it would require a clean up from people in radiation suits.  You didn't want to ever tell a teacher when you were feeling sick, because they would give you a sick bag, which as we all know, was so-called not so much for what it was meant to catch, but more for what it already smelt like.  

The final night of each trip was celebrated with a disco.  Some boys plucked up the courage to dance with the girls, which was always a strange sight, as at that age girls tend to be taller.  Were we among those brave, confident boys?  The four of us, who shared a double bed, with one of us a serial puker?  Of course not, we hid under the table the whole time.

The hotel we stayed at in Combe Martin has long gone, but the spirit of those trips SHALL live on, because my 50th birthday present from my wife was to book me, John and Darren into another hotel in Combe Martin for a nostalgic re-enactment.  And she booked the 3 of us into a room with just one single bed and one double.  Oh dear.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 10 - Diamond socks, rubbish songs, Steve's spits and pissing up the wall)

It felt like a rite of passage, moving from infants into juniors, the other side of the school, with all the big kids, scary.  And for the first time we had a male teacher.  Which felt more grown up.  Mr C_____ managed to fit my Dad's contemptuous view of male primary school teachers, insofar as he WAS "wetter than a pair of pissed-in pants".  The evidence was plain on first sight.  The corduroy trousers, the yellow diamond-patterned socks, the soft shoes that looked like they were made of macaroons dipped in tea.  And he played guitar and piano, as in those days before portable stereos it was a prerequisite for primary schools to have at least one competent musician.  His most ubiquitously played song was something so sickly sweet and mawkishly sentimental that even at the age of 7 you'd cringe every time you were made to sing it.  The words were:

    Friends, I will remember you, think of you, pray for you,

    When another day is through, I'll still be friends with you.

And Mr C____ claimed that he wrote it.  It took me about 30 years to find out that John Denver did.

Singing was something we did LOADS of in school, especially hymns, most of which were dirges, as the Catholic Church preferred something more solemn than the Church of England's frivolous melodic nonsense.  But I hated singing and mimed every time.  It was even worse if you had to stand next to Steve A____ who had a speech impediment (just one of many afflictions) in which he SSHHHed his S's.  I had the misfortune to be next to him once when we sang Boney M's 'When a Child is Born'.  Imagine the saliva-soaking from this verse:

    A shilent wisshh shails the sheven sheas

    The windsh of schange whishper in the treesh

    And the wallsh of doubt tumble tosshed and torn

    Thish comesh to passh when a child ish born

I'm not sure a song exists with such frequent use of the letter S and if he wasn't as limp as a Willow Tree (another of my Dad's analogies) I would have suspected Mr C____ of choosing that song with Shteve in mind.  Not that Steve had the slightest self-consciousness about his lisp.  If he did, he wouldn't have constantly run around the playground pretending to be his heroes - the Shix Million Dollar Man or Kenny Dalglisshh.  Poor old Steve.  He was quite smelly too.  And fat.  And in the remedial group.  And a motor bike once went right into him as he crossed Bowes Road without looking and bounced straight off, sending the rider to the ground, while Steve merely rubbed his leg and said, "Ouch".

Back to the whole excitement thing about joining the juniors...  We got to play in the big playground, or rather we didn't because Junior 4 and Junior 3 dominated it with football, so we just ran around the fringes or stayed in the grassy area where girls skipped and sang songs (Mr C____ was probably dying to join in).  We also got to use the big boys' toilet, the novelty being that it had a urinal.  Not individual ones.  One of those shared metal ones, where if you stood too close you'd get splash back all over your light grey jumper and not much darker grey trousers.  There was a clip halfway up the water pipe above the urinal where it was fixed to the wall and we had competitions to see who could piss high enough to hit it.  You had to get your distance from the urinal right, not just the angle, otherwise you'd end up pissing in your own face in an effort to point your willy too far upwards.  It might be that Steve did this quite often.  It would explain a lot about the smell coming off his jumper.

I don't remember much more about Junior 1 with Mr C____, except that me and my best mates John and Darren were in top group for Times Tables and the following year we skipped Junior 2 and went into Junior 3.  Our parents probably had us ear-marked for Oxbridge from that moment onwards.  But having recently seen a class photo of Junior 3 with less than 20 kids in it, we worked out that they only stuck us in it, because it had too few kids and our class had too many.  We had to stay in Junior 3 for 2 years anyway, in the end, while our original class joined us.  Pointless.  But at least we got to go on an extra school trip to Devon which only Juniors 3 and 4 went on.  But that's another story....