My Rock 'n' Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn (Canongate 2021)

 

1989

Finally – finally! – it all comes to a head, and Robert and Grant, both desperate to escape, decide that they will break up the band in the most brutally symbolic manner possible. They arrange that on the day after Boxing Day each of them will confront their lover, or ex-lover, and sack them. At the exact same  moment, but in separate locations, Robert will sack Lindy, and Grant will sack Amanda. The thinking is hard to fathom, impenetrable even. The weird symmetry; the ex-couple and the current couple; the men telling the women; the brutal display of where the power lies. There is a glaring absence of band democracy, any sense that this could be a discussion in which all voices might be heard. The act itself seems designed to humiliate and to hurt. A childish, unnecessarily theatrical scheme, it is no wonder that it ends in catastrophe.

The hour arrives, the news is delivered, like a telephoned warning of a planted bomb. And the explosion is immediate. The two women, in separate rooms, in separate houses, can’t see each other, which seems deliberate. Like blindfolded hostages, they are powerless. Lindy catches a glimpse of her reflection in the window, but she has to imagine Amanda’s face. She wonders if it is as desolate, as furious, as her own.

Robert describes Lindy’s reaction in these terms: ‘Her bitter laugh almost held a touch of admiration. How had two guys she’d always regarded as being weak-kneed suddenly found the balls to do something like this? . . . Lindy walked to the phone. She looked back at me after dialling and then turned in profile to talk. Her first words: “Leave him.”’

For Lindy, on hearing the shocking news, has immediately called Amanda, asking whether she has just been handed the same information. She has, and her response echoes Lindy’s. She is packing her stuff and leaving Grant, and as she says now, ‘Listen, I didn’t need telling.’ Indeed, she is resentful of any suggestion that it was Lindy who dictated her reaction.

Simply Thrilled: The Preposterous Story of Postcard Records by Simon Goddard (Ebury Press 2014)

In need of cheap soup and rich gossip, most lunch times Alan would wander to the Victoria Cafe, the social heart of the art school, open to students and casual interlopers, where the vain and resplendent gathered in conspicuous segregation according to their different artistic disciplines. Alan and Edwyn's catchpenny clothes stirred scornful laughs from the puffy new romantic posters of  the fashion school, but complemented the surrounding second-hand fixtures and fittings, plucked from an original site in Govanhill which had been due for demolition until rescued and reinstalled by the architecture students. The queen of the Vic was a big Irish woman called Mona, who specialised in assuring all patrons that the soup was vegetarian as she hauled the thigh bone of some poor slain unspecified beast from the same bubbling cauldron, and whose short-fuse hospitality blew at regular intervals in her cutlery-bending yell, 'Get outta ma cafe!'

The aloof fashion fops and their equilateral hair-dos aside, the art-school crowd and those who buzzed around its cafe and weekend discos were a sweet, oblivious antidote to the nice bores Alan had suffered at university. They were funny, nutty, fascinating and, to Steven's barely concealed annoyance, invariably 'greeeeeeat!'

The roll call of human specimens read as follows:

A candied darling who called himself 'Lucy Lastic'; who knew 'they' could never touch him for dragging up Sauchiehall Street as long as he didn't wear women's knickers; who knew no fear when it came to roaring 'fab doll!' at men the size of shipyards; who knew no shame when it came to recounting the gory details of his latest straight-corrupting conquest with his starter for ten, 'I've just been shafted'; and whose ultimate destiny in certain surgical procedures was beyond all reasonable doubt.

Jill Bryson, a pretty polka-dot Alice looking as if she'd missed the bus for Wonderland and ended up in Glasgow by mistake, living on the Great Western Road with her boyfriend and the rampant 'Lucy' in a flat below a dentist's surgery which rattled daily to the sound of drilling enamel.

Peter McArthur, Jill's boyfriend, a photography student and Southside punk who'd first befriended Edwyn at Glasgow College of Building and Printing, and later bewitched Alan with his shared love of Fellini, Pasolini, Cabaret and his unused ticket stub for the Pistols' phantom Apollo show. 

Drew McDowall, a performance poet from Paisley, and his young wife Rose from The Wee Scone Shop. When not surreptitiously handing out free pies to fellow punks under her boss's nose, Ross also played drums in Drew's band The Poems, once joined on stage by Edwyn and James for 'a musical recitation' of the hunting scene from War And Peace.

Gerry Hanley, Alan's usual lunchtime companion, who allowed him to join her cafe table of angry women in boiler suits, monkey boots and cropped hair, who shared a flat with the painter Adrian Wiszniewski and who herself, sometimes, could be coaxed on stage by Alan for a spot of performance art.

The tweedy man out of time called Malcolm Fisher, sufferer of untold allergies and pianist of unending jazz flourishes, who danced with his hands glued inside his raincoat pockets, whose flat, a chintz flock and floral eyesore like something from 101 Dalmatians, he shared with his similarly allergic sister.

And a punk graphic designer called Robbie Kelly, whose brother had very briefly strummed chords for the mythical Oscar Wild, and whose girlfriend, Anne, was usually seen pushing a shopping trolley down the street with a doll sat up front like a genuine baby.

As far as Alan was concerned, his new art school associates' rapturous reception to Orange Juice was an exploding plastic inevitability. He wouldn't be disappointed.

Detonation date was Friday 20 April 1979, as James Callaghan took forlorn stock of his final hours in Number 10 and as Art Garfunkel's 'Bright Eyes' bunny-hopped at number one somewhere above the shaking body of Michael Jackson, the wondering why of Sister Sledge and recently deposed yet eternally resilient Gloria Gaynor. The 1980s were but one catastrophic landslide victory and a few spins of the  glitterball away. The perfect time for Orange Juice, a name so wrong that it had to be right, to yodel their first Lifebuoy-scrubbed 'hello' to the universe.

The Next 30 Day Song Challenge - day 26

Day 26 - Your favourite song by a group

I think today's challenge is a bit confusing, to be honest. Am I being asked to pick my favourite song that happens to have been performed by a group, or is just a case of picking your favourite song by a random group?

For the sake of variety I'm going for the latter suggestion. I'm then going to immediately contradict myself by plumping for a jingly-jangly song from the eighties. Step forward Brisbane's finest, The Go-Betweens, with 'Right Here'. If this song and video doesn't raise a smile, I'd suggest you lay off the botox for a while: