Back to the Future (1985)

Breaking Glass (1980)

Flapping in the 20s . . .

I echo the sentiment . . . if not the choice of bands:

A Crafty Cigarette – Tales of a Teenage Mod by Matteo Sedazzari (Zani Media 2015)

Luckily for my father Theo did not press charges for criminal damage. Later my mother explained to him about my father’s problem with Charlie Cairoli. Theo, being the wise man that he is, totally understood and told my mother that he was once in The Kinks for a brief time, as 2nd guitar and backing vocals. They did a gig in Acton, this was before they made it big, by the way. Theo broke his strings during a song and Ray Davies never called him again, or so he told my mother. Now Theo can’t listen to any records by The Kinks and has to leave the room the moment their music comes on. 

Shit, both Vinnie’s father and my father could have been huge stars, that’s quite depressing.

Upstairs Planet: Cleaners From Venus & The Universe Of Martin Newell (2019)

The Red Machine: Liverpool in the '80s: The Players' Stories by Simon Hughes (Mainstream Publishing 2013)

On one occasion, Bates’s ego got the better of him. In the tunnel at Stamford Bridge ahead of a match and with a loose ball at his feet, he asked former Liverpool left-back Joey Jones to tackle him. So Jones did, leaving Bates in a heap.

‘Joey was a tough lad,’ Spackman says. ‘He and Mickey Thomas were nutters. They drove down to London every other day for training from their home in North Wales. Every Monday morning, John Neal would come into the dressing-room and say, “Sorry, lads, training’s been put back an hour – Mickey and Joey are stuck on the motorway.”

‘Because Ken Bates wouldn’t pay for them to stay in a hotel, they’d sleep in the referee’s room at Stamford Bridge on a Friday night before a game. It was a big room with a TV and a sofa, but not the ideal place to sleep if you’re a footballer preparing for kick-off. They’d walk up the King’s Road on a Saturday morning for a fry-up then go back to the ground and wait for everybody else to arrive. It was a ridiculous arrangement.’

Stamford Bridge was hardly a place you’d wish to watch a game of football, never mind spend the night.

‘It was big but a bit of a dump,’ Spackman continues. ‘There was one huge stand, but the rest of the ground seemed so far away from the pitch because of the greyhound track. You needed 25,000 in there to create any sort of atmosphere. The pitch was terrible, too. I was used to a nice bowling-green surface at Bournemouth, but at Chelsea – a club then in the Second Division – the pitch was a dustbowl. It made it difficult to play pretty football. Over the years, that’s probably why Liverpool found it difficult going there.

(From the chapter, 'SOUTHERNER, Nigel Spackman')

Round 202: Ooh, Gary Davies . . . ooh, Gary Davies . . . on my phone again.

Darts Thrown: April 4th 2019
Blog Written: April 4th 2019

Highest Score: 138
Lowest Score: 2
Sixties: 30
100+: 10
180s Missed: 1

Blogger's Note: Written in haste, so there will be spelling mistakes and slapdash grammar.

For some reason I was listening to that episode of The Sound of the Eighties again whilst throwing the darts. No idea why. I guess it was still on the phone and I couldn't be arsed to switch to something else. Anything to add to that show? Nothing much. Transvision Vamp are still shit. Early New Order sounded like Josef K, and 80s pop music really did turn irredeemably shit after 1985. Which sucked for me 'cos it was a formative time when I should have been lapping music up. I lapped something up, but it was thin gruel in comparison to music from the first half of the 80s.

Bingewatching the first season of Fleabag on Amazon. Grimly fascinating. Enjoying it more than I did first time round. I feel guilty watching it 'cos posh people usually get on my tits. It's why I've never watched Downton Abbey. 2016 seems so long ago  . . . or maybe it was never meant to be that kind of show.

The darts? I threw for a 180 but I bottled it. And I by bottled it, I mean the third dart hit the 18. That some jitters. I think next time I throw for a 180 I will close my eyes. What's the worse that can happen.

The book in the picture?  Toby Litt's Beatniks. Have I read it? Yep, about 20 years ago. I must have read it within months of it coming out. A random buy that bore fruit. I seem to remember reading it during teabreaks and lunch breaks whilst working nights on a nighshift in Hemel in 97 or 98. Would I read it again? I would . . . if I got my reading mojo back. I always thought it would make a great film.  There were rumours that it'd been optioned for a film but at the time of writing . . .  If Nick Hornby had written it  . . .  Two unfinished sentences for the price of one.

And, let's be honest, Beatniks were always more interesting than the Hippies.

Round 188: Another False Dawn

Darts Thrown: March 29th 2019

Blog Written: March 29th 2019

Highest Score: 140

Lowest Score: 3

Sixties: 31
100+: 6
180s Missed: 1

Blogger's Note: Written in haste, so there will be spelling mistakes and slapdash grammar.

I thought I might as well dive straight back in. Round 188 was thrown in one session whilst listening to Radio 2's 'Sound of the Eighties'. I've sub-titled it 'Another False Dawn' but that's bollocks. In truth, the darts thrown weren't that different from the previous round. I guess I hit more 100 plus shots this time around. And I did actually throw for a 180 twice. (One isn't shown in the pic above 'cos one of the sixties bounced out when I threw my third dart.)

Thankfully I'm not superstitious when throwing darts, otherwise I'd be locked into listening to Bananarama MegaMixes when throwing darts (fuck you Gary Davies), and I know I'm tired 'cos I was even enjoying a Terence Trent Darby track when throwing. (Sleep deprivation does that to you.) Before I leave the Sound of the Eighties, it was nice to hear Jody Watley picking Duran Duran's 'Save a Prayer' as her favourite song of the 80s. My first 7 inch. (Insert pic of Les Dawson here.)

Too many darts bounce out. I'm not sure if it's the board or the darts themselves. It's probably neither. I think my throwing acton can be a bit lack lustred  when I'm tired.

The book in the picture? B.J. Ripley and J. McHugh's biography of John Maclean. It was part of the Lives of the Left series that Manchester University Press published in the late 80s and early 90s. Have I read it? No. Will I read it? Not in the foreseeable future. Why did I buy it? "cos I'm like that. I read a few books in the 'Lives of the Left' series (the biogs of Kautsky, De Leon, Haywood and Mann off the top of my head) and I had even more of the series that I picked up as remaindered copies from London bookshops on my bookshelf back in Britain (all now in a landfill in the Home Counties, most probably), so the anorak in me means that I will still pick up cheap copies when I see them. Anyway, my excuse is that read Nan Milton's biog of her Dad years ago and I also read Harry McShane's autobiography around about the same time (both published by Pluto Press). I never really bought into the adoration of Maclean but that just might be my ingrained SPGB'ism. I do think it should be pointed out that he joined the Social Democratic Federation at the height of the impossibilist revolt within its ranks - 1903/04- so it begs the question, 'what was he thinking?'. I guess I'll leave that question for another day. There's a Denzel Washington film with my name on it.

Waiting for the great leap forward

Via a Facebook thread, one of those anecdotes you wish were true, if only to see Tom Watson and Nick Cohen's heads explode in indignation:

 "The competing Trot sects in 1980s Islington North CLP voted for Jeremy as their compromise candidate because each of them couldn’t accept that a member of a rival 4th International would be the MP".

"Dad, I went on a School Trip to London and all I brought back was this book on the Millies . . . "

Via Facebook:

A follow up to the album challenge.

Day #10
With no explanations, post ten books that have made their mark on your life. Once a day, post the book cover and nominate a new person.

PDH (The Tractor Millie)

Haircut One Hundred ‎– Pelican West (1982)

Imposs-006

Various ‎– Letter To Brezhnev (From The Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1985)

Imposs-005

Soul Boys of the Western World (2014)

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Rejoice, Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s by Alwyn Turner (Aurum Press 2008)

With a few exceptions – the anonymous narrator of Raymond’s Factory novels, Rankin’s John Rebus exploring the seedier side of Edinburgh with ‘its crooks and bandits, its whore and gamblers, its perpetual losers and winners’ – these characters primarily inhabited the small towns and middle-class world that had characterized the golden age. Even in Taggart, firmly located in Glasgow, the murderers whose stories were told in the first three series included a couple of small businessmen, a guest-house owner, a doctor, a philosophy student, a dentist and an ex-probation worker, as well as a group of bereaved parents meting out justice to the drug dealer responsible for their children’s deaths. Despite the urban setting, this is a world away from The Sweeney; there are no car chases, just Sgt Livingston running after teenagers and getting bitten by the occasional dog, and there is little suggestion of a criminal class separate from society: these are just ordinary, respectable people caught up in their own lives. And, at the other extreme of television detection, there was Jim Bergerac, investigating much smaller problems on Jersey and learning ‘to take the smooth with the smooth’.

Though the backdrop might have suggested a retreat from the city to the closed communities of Agatha Christie (encapsulated by Colin Watson as Mayhem Parva), there was an edge, to the literature at least, that was far removed from the cosiness of Miss Marple, an engagement with society, a desire to comment on contemporary mores. And although the likes of Morse and Dalgliesh spent much of their time behaving as though they were still autonomous detectives in the tradition of Holmes and Poirot, capable of solving any case through the exercise of their intellect, the central characters were still police officers, and couldn’t fail to notice the changing role of the force in the modern world. In one of Rendell’s novels, Inspector Burden initiates the putting of coloured lights in the tree outside the police station ‘in the interest of promoting jollier relations with the public’. His boss, Wexford, disapproves of the gesture, but it’s revealing that there was a perceived need for such a move: ‘surely you couldn’t go on feeling antagonistic towards or afraid of or suspicious about a friendly body that hung fairy-lights in a tree in its front garden?’ Elsewhere Peter Robinson’s character Inspector Banks was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the new role of the force: ‘he had many objections to the way the government seemed to look upon the police as a private army of paid bully boys to pit against people with genuine grievances and a constitutional right to air them.’ He consoles himself with the thought that he’s a detective ‘and he didn’t have to go on crowd control, bashing the bonces of the proletariat.’ But even detectives are affected by the rise of what Reginald Hill’s Andy Dalziel refers to as ‘porkism’, as his own sergeant concludes: ‘A man’s got to be mad to stay in a job where the public hates you and Maggie Thatcher loves you.’

Most political of all was Derek Raymond’s detective sergeant, who reflects on the police powers promised in a new piece of legislation (presumably inspired by the controversial Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984): ‘It was what I thought of as banana laws – the law of a society in the process of breaking down. Once properly tightened up, it would have meant that I could stop and arrest a man in the street simply because I didn’t like the look on his face, or the way his pockets bulged. It would have synchronized nicely with the plastic ID cards that every citizen would be required to carry by then, and before long we would have turned the country into a birdcage.’

The Human League - Fascination! (1983)

Imposs-001

We Are the Best! (2013)

The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian (MTV Pocket Books 1997)

Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it’s a trade-off that will gladly be made. When I was in my teens, I made an appraisal of how comfortable my life could turn out when I became the age I am now. Because of a mechanical failure, the prediction was inexact. Things reversed. I ended up living somewhere I once avoided, with a woman whom I genuinely once disliked.

Recently we celebrated our seventh anniversary together with a decent dinner and a not dreadful film. I got out of work early that evening and took the F train to Forty-second Street. I crossed Fifth Avenue toward the Main Branch of the Public Library, but paused in the middle of the crosswalk. It was filling up with the evening rush hour crowd: men in trench coats, secretaries in tennis shoes, cabs in the crosswalk, cars honking, leviathan buses zooming inches, braking, zooming again, and bike messengers slicing through it all. The last time I was in that spot, seven years ago, there wasn’t a person in sight.

Seven years ago that day, as dawn rose, I remember standing in roughly the same spot watching as the traffic signals hanging over each intersection slowly turned yellow then red. Cars zoomed forward, headlights still on, staying ahead of the changing lights; at dusk they could make it all the way down without a single red light.

At rush hour, the entire avenue was gridlocked. But I could still faintly make out the small white crown of the Washington Square Arch at the very end. The anniversary of my relationship coincided with that dawning, and although that morning marked something that eluded celebration, it couldn’t be forgotten either.

Something honked at me, so I crossed the street, reboarded the packed F train, and returned to Brooklyn for the anniversary dinner.

Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s by Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein (Abrams Books 2014)

Lori Majewski: Not sure if you realize it, JB [Jonathan Bernstein], but The Lexicon of Love is the reason we became friends. When you told me it was your favorite album of all time—back in the early nineties, when we were the only people who’d admit to liking new wave while working at a grunge-obsessed Spin magazine—I thought: Now, here’s a guy I can hang with. While I love Spandau and Culture Club, neither ever released a flawless long-player like Lexicon. The talky bits were my favorite parts, like in “The Look of Love,” when Fry says to himself, “Martin, maybe one day you’ll find true love.” He always came across as such a hopeless romantic—it was the beautifully tailored suits, the way he referenced Cupid and Smokey Robinson in his songs, how he pined for a more chivalrous era. For an eighties teenager experiencing the thrill (and then heartache) of her first crush, ABC offered a vision of love that I could only hope the real thing would live up to.

MARTIN FRY: Decades don’t always begin at zero. They begin a couple of years in, the mood and style. A couple of years into the eighties, when I was forming ABC, I realized no one could be more Sex Pistol–y than the Sex Pistols or more Clash than the Clash. I loved punk, but it never seemed to go as far as it could have. Maybe Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes or Tony Hadley and Gary Kemp might say something different, but for me and for a lot of my generation, it was really frustrating the Clash were never on Top of the Pops. I wasn’t going to try and be a proto-punk. I wanted to do the opposite.

That’s why I got so excited by disco, which was a really dirty word at the time. I wanted to make music that was funky and radical. The early ABC was the “Radical Dance Faction”—that’s what we called ourselves. I’d also grown up loving Motown, Stax, and Atlantic, along with Roxy Music—Roxy performing “Virginia Plain” on Top of the Pops in 1972 was my road to Damascus. So it made natural sense to try and fuse those worlds. When I think back, looking at stuff like the Pop Group, James Chance and the Contortions, Pigbag, and all the bands that came through just before and just after ABC—Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode—there was a whole generation itching to make dance music, populist music. I don’t think it was any accident that all those bands became internationally known.

I interviewed Vice Versa for my fanzine, Modern Drugs, in 1979. They were kind of a fledgling Human League, only younger and less revered. When I went to interview Steve Singleton and Mark White, they said, “We’re going on a train from Sheffield to Middlesbrough to open up for Cowboys International. We’ve not got a drummer, but we’ve got lots of synths in our holdalls. You can stand onstage with us.” We got bottled off by these skinheads who didn’t get us. We were mohair sweaters and post-punk and ironic, but I loved it. After that, they let me join the band.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut by Rob Sheffield (Dutton 2010)

THE HUMAN LEAGUE

“Love Action”

1982

 Around ninth grade, my trusty clock radio began playing something weird. First, it went clink-clank. Then it went bloop-bloop. After the wrrrp-wrrrp kicked in, there came a blizzard of squisha-squisha-squisha noises. It sounded like a Morse code transmission from another planet, a world of lust and danger and nonstop erotic cabaret. What was this? It was the twitchy, spastic, brand-new beat of synth-pop. For those of us who were “Kids in America” at the time, it was a totally divisive sound. You either loved it or hated it. My friends and I argued for hours over whether it even counted as rock and roll. I remember hearing a DJ explain that the Human League didn’t have any instruments. No way—not even a drummer? ” “Not even a guitarist? I was shocked.

I rode my bike to the public library and checked out the Human League’s Dare. This album was a brave new world. The sleeve showed close-ups of their mascara eyes and lipstick mouths on a frigid white background. Nobody was smiling. All summer long, I worked mowing lawns, listening to that tape over and over, taking it on the subway ride to driver’s ed. I spent countless hours trying to fathom Phil Oakey’s philosophy of life.

I was moved by “The Sound of the Crowd,” where Phil urged me to “get around town,” to explore the forbidden places “where the people are good, where the music is loud.” I had never been to a place remotely like this. It sounded awesome. The lyrics were a bit obscure, what with all the arcane cosmetics references (“The lines on a compact guide / A hat with alignment worn inside”—huh?), yet I devoured them. If I cracked his code well, I too would grow up to be a Phil Oakey, getting around the world on an existential quest for love action.