Old Mods & Rockers Looking Back (Enjoy Yourself)

Phil, 67, and Joe, 62, walk their dogs around the park every afternoon at around the same time, throwing sticks for the dogs and insults at each other. Phil spent a lifetime working in the print business, apprenticed straight out of school to a typesetter. Joe spent most of his life at sea, working fishing boats out of small Cornish ports until the last few years, when he moved back to the town he grew up in and got work emptying recycling bins for the local council. They met three years ago and, in the way that men do, only slowly got to know each other, using their dogs—a golden labrador called Campbell for Phil and an Alsatian named Gabby for Joe—as the main source of conversational material.

For the first time, this week, they got to discussing their teen years, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Turns out that one of them was a Rocker and the other a Mod. Phil was the Rocker, which might seem a little odd, given that he was the one with the middle-class dog, apprenticed occupation and smart outdoor jacket worn just to walk the dog. 'I had no money for clothes', he told Joe. 'I had one whistle and that was for Sunday afternoons, taking the bird to the pictures. I had my first big motorbike when I turned 18 and wore my jeans, leather jacket and workbooks for riding that. It was only the mummy's boys who were Mods, they had to get their clothes bought for them 'cops none of us had money to waste'.

'Hang on,' Joe spluttered, 'I weren't no mummy's boy, I spent me wages on clothes because I wanted to look smart, and jeans were for work, not going out in. I had a Parka so my suit wouldn't get dirty on the scooter. My old man never went out to the pub or anywhere except in a suit and he wouldn't let us kids out of the house in scruffy gear if we were going drinking or dancing'.

'Bah', Phil stopped and threw his hands up in the air. 'No-one ever had any money for shirts that cost as much as they did in Carnaby Street. I went there once and had a look and it were £35 for a bleeding' shirt! I was only earning a tenner a week, and some of that went to mum for me keep. The rest went on beer and birds. I fixed the bike meself'.

'What you like', Joe laughed, 'I didn't pay that much, I got it all round here (waving in the general direction of the town), from local shops and the local tailor. I rode on my mate's scooter 'cos I was only 14. Couldn't get served in Pubs, but did love the dancing and the girls liked it too'.

'I tell you what, you never hear people saying that in the 60s they didn't have enough money for all that clobber, do you? Yeah, it was a problem getting birds to ride on the back of me bike', Phil sniffed. 'I couldn't wait 'til I had enough money to buy a car—I had a Morris Oxford with spots and everything, which birds loved to ride around in. But we'd ride our bikes to the seaside on Bank Holidays, try to avoid those oiks on their hairdryers, have a lash-up, ride the dodgers and Whip, maybe get a tattoo: here's the three dots I got on the pier at Yarmouth. Outside that place the ground was covered in spew where blokes had gone in drunk, come out tattooed and been sick'. Phil pulled back his North Face down jacket cuff to reveal three tiny blue dots above his right wrist bone.

'Was you sick, then?'
'Nah, I was drunk but not that bad. Had another one done next year. Where's your dog gone?
'Gabby! Come on, home'.
'Campbell! See you tomorrow then'.
'See you tomorrow".

The Unoriginal Beatles

The more time I spend on youtube and Facebook, the harder it becomes to get the wise words of Peter Allen out of my head; 'everything old is new again'. I first heard Allen's live version of his 1974 song of that title, which is played as backing for a dance scene in All That Jazz. Clearly it's supposed to sound like an old show tune, maybe from an MGM musical of the 1950s. There was a lot of that about in the '70s—Kander and Ebb's majestic 'New York, New York' for instance, was written in 1977 and recorded in 1979 by Frank Sinatra, in the same studio that parts of London Calling were being produced, by the Clash.

It shouldn't surprise anyone, though, when you consider that going way back to the 1950s, old songs or songs that were written and recorded to sound as if they were old, were the staple fare for emerging rock n rollers, lounge singers and Broadway musicals alike. The Clash's inclusion of Vince Taylor's Brand New Cadillac on London Calling was an admission by the former punk nihilists that the history of rock n roll had some good stuff in it—both musically and visually.

The thing is, Elvis made it singing songs of the 1940s by Wynonie Harris, Big Joe Turner, Roy Brown, and Bill Monroe. He dressed like all the sharp-dressed men he'd been in awe of growing up, the men who he'd see at the roadhouse on a Saturday night—pimps and gangsters of Tupelo during WWII, dripping with women, jewellery and hair grease to keep the Marcel wave in place. The roadhouse bands playing jump and jive got everyone shaking, rattling and rolling and, as one of the few poor white boys in the area, it was all supposed to be out of bounds to Elvis. So naturally he dug it.

Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra wanted to be like Bing Crosby, and loved Jimmy Durante, The Count and Duke, Mabel, Billie and Billy (Eckstine, below), the musicians who made it big in pre- and during WWII America. Sinatra's second wave of success came in the mid-1950s when he recorded old songs such as I Get A Kick Out Of You (1934), Just One Of Those Things (1935), My Funny Valentine (1937) and Taking A Chance on Love (1940). Like Elvis though, it was how Frank dressed, his attitude and how he sang the old songs and made them new again, which made them so successful.

In 1957, John Lennon and Paul McCartney formed a skiffle group together, called The Quarrymen, and the only surviving recording of them includes a live performance of a song that they might have thought was an Elvis tune; 'Baby, Let's Play House'. In fact the first and original recording of the song was by it's author, Arthur Gunter (in 1954). Elvis made a lot of old songs into new hits in his time, and to begin with The Beatles also performed lots of old, mostly American, material as they learned their trade.

I wrote about their love of US girl groups in an earlier blog, but the Liverpudlian beat combo also loved Little Richard, Buddy Holly and some rare—to Brits, anyway—other songs, too. 'Slow Down', which the Beatles played at the BBC in 1963 has since regularly been misattributed as a Lennon/McCartney original. Alexis Korner and Steve Marriott slowed it way down in 1975, but The Jam increased the same song's beat on their debut album, in 1977. The Replacements covered the song in 1981 (it's not clear whose version they're taking as their start point, probably all of them). In fact, the song was written and originally recorded by Larry Williams, in 1958. Perhaps best known as the author (and original singer) of 'Dizzy Miss Lizzy'—another Beatles' fave cover tune, done in the manner of Little Richard who had the big hit with it—WIlliams also wrote Bony Moronie. He and Little Richard were drug buddies in the 1960s and '70s, and despite attempts at resurrecting his recording career (with Richard and Johnny Guitar Watson both, at one time), Williams never got to be a big recording star. He shot himself in the head at age 44, in 1980.

The Beatles' version of Matchbox, which they'd been playing since 1962, was credited to Carl Perkins (1957) when they got around to recording it. But he seems to have been 'inspired'; by the much older Blind Lemon Jefferson-recorded Matchbox Blues (1927). Since the Perkins hit version the song's been recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis (1958), Ronnie Hawkins (1970), Bob Dylan and countless others. There's even a Derek & The Dominoes version in which Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins join in. That 1970 TV show footage is great for many reasons, not least of which is the other, major influence that the original, old rockers, bluesmen and country pickers had on the impressionable, austerity-beaten Brits. Eric Clapton stands at mic flanked by two very cool looking old dudes: Perkins (left) and Cash (right) make Clapton look like the stage sweeper in his bell-bottom jeans.

It's impossible to overstate the impression that the American stars made on British dress sense in the late 1950s and early '60s. While Bill Haley and Gene Vincent were dressed in British-inspired outfits (Vincent's was borrowed from Vince Taylor; it was re-designed for Elvis' 1968 TV Special), the suits, jackets, instruments and hair styles were all taken and adapted by Brits. The cyclical nature of pop culture means that the same looks—and the same sounds—have been coming around ever since the first commercial release of a 45rpm record (1951, Columbia). In the 1980s the pudding-basin hair cut, cowboy boots and fancy shirts, vests and fringed jackets favoured by the bands like Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds in the late 1960s were worn by The Long Ryders and similarly-influenced country/rock/psych bands (Rain Parade, Dream Syndicate etc). Today Morrisey's version of the Elvis quiff is to be spotted atop a new generation of Buddy Holly-style spectacles-wearing young people.

In the 1990s of course, Oasis (sorry, no links; can't stand them) slavishly copied the Beatles music and faxed over a thin version of Lennon's attitude for a generation yet to have youtube. Liam's daft hairdo could only have been improved by an original Beatles wig. If their fans could see how bad the Oasis facsimile was, perhaps not so many young people for whom the Gallaghers' rewrites were new, would have paid money for their music. Still, it couldn't happen again. Could it?

Are We Not Men?

For some reason the other day the radio in my kitchen—which was, as always, tuned to a talk station in order to avoid hearing random assaults on my/our once priceless pop music cannon by x-factor bums and screeching failed actors now given to recording 'music'—there was a package about AC/DC. Apparently the Aussie metal monsters will have been 'going' for forty years soon, and given that they've now taken on the mantle of everyone's fave tame extreme noise merchants (inherited from the Ramones), the smug middle class who think it ironic to carry the AC/DC logo emblazoned on their 'vintage' t-shirt/dress/yarmulke, are bound to rejoice and buy, buy, buy all the AC/DC merch and re-releases that are bound to flow soon.

Except of course, the 'new' fans who wear the logo on ridiculous items of merchandise, really don't want to listen to the hoary old metal that the ridiculous old geezers have been peddling for the last four decades. I am willing to bet an original Ramones holed plimsole to one of Angus Young's school caps that their new-found 'fans' have never sat through an ear-bursting hour of endless SG-chugging, tight-trousered screaming, walloping bass'n'drum-driven 'Whole Lotta Rosie'. Unfortunately, I did, once.

Because I was a precocious kid, at age 14 most of my pals were 18 and 19. There were six of us and we used to spend Friday night to Sunday mornings getting drunk, smoking, dancing, and driving around in a gold Ford Cortina MkII 1600E. While they mostly danced simply to pick up girls, I danced to the music and loved it. My musical tastes and that of my older pals differed somewhat, but I'd always liked different stuff, and so was willing to listen to what they wanted to hear on the car's cassette player. Mostly it was prog rock with a smattering of pro to-metal. So I learned how Yes, Genesis and ELP could bore in the time it took to play an interminable drum solo, how Led Zep were really quite funny if you listened for too long and that Deep Purple were deeply dull.

Occasionally one of the guys would suggest going to a gig, most often a few miles up the coast, in a tiny venue about the size of a church hall, but which amazingly attracted some of the biggest bands on tour at the the time. Tickets were cheap, booze was to be had and the place turned into a disco after the gig. So I'd stand at the back, drink beer and yawn as the Ian Gillan Band, Barclay James Harvest, Curved Air, Wishbone Ash or Gentle Giant plonked away on stage. One night, just as I was becoming intrigued by something called Punk which was happening in London (120 miles away), my friend with the car suggested we all pile along the coast to catch this new Australian band who the music press (or at least Sounds) were raving about.

And so I got to see AC/DC on their debut UK tour, in 1976, and they were stupid. Not entertaining, witty 'stupid' like the late, great Ramones who I saw later in the year and was blown away by, but stupid as in assholes. In order to stand out from every other metal-pushing band on the road in the mid-1970s who had a screaming, drunken, but really very butch lead singer (and yes, I know I saw the 'legendary' now dead guy, but he sounded hysterical to me), someone had the bright idea of getting the guitarist to dress up as a school boy, in shorts, blazer and cap. So there's me, who during the week was forced into wearing a school uniform (although not the shorts or cap), watching a supposedly grown man dressed like Just William and being carried on the shoulders of an enormous roadie through the less than sell-out crowd at this hick dive. What am I supposed to think? Exactly. Dumb.

Spool forward four decades and Angus is still wearing his uniform to play the same songs (isn't he?), and the band's resistance to change has made them an object of fondness for people who think metal is cute. And that puzzles me somewhat. How did the formerly macho, confrontational, teen-angst-driven Metal music become so acceptable in a post-PC world? As any normal person knows, when confronted with the ridiculous sight of that other dumb metal act with the Nazi-paraphenalia-loving frontman named 'Lemmy' (Motorhead), or the ludicrously camp leather-saturated-fronted Judas Priest back in the day, Metal was always funny, but it was also nasty. The absolute misogyny and self-delusional macho-posturing of metal music was, and remains, objectionable in the extreme. Spinal Tap is not fiction, it's absolutely drawn from the pathetic reality that metal bands of the 1970s and '80s enjoyed.

Somehow, thankfully, I managed to miss out the development stage which called for metal music, or wizards and dragons. Despite twice seeing Yes perform with Rick Wakeman, dry ice and laser light shows, seeing Deep Purple with Ritchie Blackmore and Genesis at Knebworth, I never owned albums by any of them. The last gig I gladly attended though, because of one of the support acts: Devo were brilliant and played on through a rain of beer cans with so much wit and energy (they tore off their paper-suits during Jocko Homo and I fell about laughing), that they are the only memory I have retained of the day. Well, that and sleeping in the Cortina.

Four decades later Devo are still doing kinda the same thing, but unlike the metal morons, the Akron Devo-lutionists are doing it with style. Always smart, always alternative, Devo continue to puzzle, intrigue and entertain. I'm sure AC/DC fans are just as entertained by their heroes, but really, it must be kind of like a very LOUD groundhog day going to see them, surely?

No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones (pt I)

Ever since reading Nick Tosches' educating, entertaining and effervescent Unsung Heroes of Rock n Roll (Secker & Warburg, 1991) which profiles the musicians who came before Elvis, I've been meaning to start something similar for the British scene. Hard as it is to believe—certainly if you only watch/listen/read current popular media on this stuff, anyway—there were people who played a key part in the development of the way that pop culture developed post-WWII, and who become more and more obscure as time goes by. They're likely to remain obscure unless a smart researcher points Alan Yentob in their direction and lets him imagine that he's re-discovering them…

There's no point in listening to Gerald Walcan Bright's (b.1904; d-1974) recorded musical output for clues as to his influence on the development of rock n roll in England. Better known as Geraldo, the Royal Academy-trained pianist began his professional career performing during silent movies in cinemas (younger readers; see The Artist for reference). He moved to the fledgling BBC radio of the late 1920s, and formed an orchestra named after himself. They became regular performers on live radio, at dance nights at the Streatham Locarno (probably), in short British b-movies and on recordings released as 78rpm records from the 1930s on. During WWII his orchestra played at the still dancing and swinging big hotels in London (Putting on the Ritz during the Blitz). In 1944 Geraldo hired Wally Stott as saxophonist; Wally went on to form his own orchestra and supply the backing for Diana Dors recordings (among others). In 1972 Wally became Angela Morley, moved to Arizona and won Emmys for composing music for Dynasty and Dallas. None of that's why Geraldo was important in the days before Elvis, The Beatles and Rolling Stones, though.

Geraldo's prime contribution to the development of rock n roll culture in Britain was to open, in 1946, a booking agency which organised for British musicians to work cruise liners going to America and the West Indies. Those musicians brought back to London records from New York, San Francisco, Miami and New Orleans. They returned to grey old, ration-confined Blighty wearing suits made in the Land of Plenty—with long drop jackets, wide lapels and turn-up peg trousers. Geraldo's Navy, as Nik Cohn so elegantly put it in Today There Are No Gentleman (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971), 'provided an invaluable source of supply for all things American.'

Teddy Boy meets American Look, circa 1954

The suits that Geraldo's Navy came back wearing looked as if they'd been peeled from the back of Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck. At a time when the British Mens Fashion Council were advocating slim lapels and slim leg pants in order to save material that was still hard to get, the excesses of the American Look as one enterprising young clothes retailer called it, was irresistible. At his shop on London's Charing Cross Road, Cecil Gee catered for the musicians and song pluggers who worked and hung out in Tin Pan Alley (Denmark Street), smoking and bullshitting in the hours before work started at West End shows and clubs. Gee soon had his cutters creating the 'American Look' for regular customers who were not in Geraldo's Navy, but who wanted to look like they were.

Edwardian style in 1952 outside Cecil Gee's store

Cecil Gee continued dressing the musicians of Tin Pan Alley throughout the 1950s, supplying Marty Wilde and Tommy Steele, Vince Eager and all the one-hit wonders of the late-1950s pop chart, as well as the jobbing musicians in Saturday night dancehall orchestras who'd begun to travel to Soho from all over London to get 'the look'. The records that Geraldo's Navy brought back were quickly transcribed and re-scored for British versions, whether they were blues, R&B, Country or jazz  numbers, by musicians eager to score a hit or simply play something new and different at parties and after-show gigs. In Liverpool, the teenage Lennon and McCartney were similarly impressed with the new 45 rpm records that they could buy from second-hand stalls down by the docks. The records had often been sold for the fare to other parts of the UK by Geraldo's Navy who'd docked there instead of Southampton. By 1956 Gee had adopted the emerging Italian suit look—all bum freezer jacket and ankle-flapping straight leg pants—that pre-dated but subsequently inspired the Mod look of 1963 (in the process prompting Brian Epstein to ask Dougie Millings to copy it for his boys in preparation of visiting America). Soon after, Bill Green opened 'Vince', selling Italian tight pants, briefs and sweaters at a store just around the corner from Carnaby Street where rent was cheap. It was the beginning of a trend that John Stephen (Lord John) would take over and dominate within a couple of years, but Bill began it.

There are many other unsung heroes of British rock n roll, some of whom should make an appearance here, soon-ish. One—Jack Good, deserves a blog all of his own, so maybe that'll be next. It'll not only include Rock n Roll icons (Good put Gene Vincent into black leather), but the cream of British jazz of the 1950s, too. See Lord Rockingham's XI, for clues.

Born Too Late

It's an odd thing for an old man like me to walk around London these days and be confronted with 3-D memories. Turning a corner into the Exmouth Market the other day I thought I'd stumbled into a video shoot for The Smiths in 1983 (I ran the mixing desk at a Smiths gig attended by 250 lucky students that year). There were four or five young men with quiffs, National Health spectacles and loose v-neck sweaters worn over t-shirts gathered together by a vegetarian food stall.

A month or so ago I saw a young couple (no more than 20 years old) dressed as if they were members of the Thompson Twins circa 1984; she even had a red quiff poking out from under a cap just like Alannah Currie. Both wore donkey jackets and turn-ups on their dark denim jeans, both probably unaware of the 1950s-reference in their dress,  thinking only of the 1980s as a 'golden period' of fashion, music and youth in revolt. Well, it was, kind of. It's the 1950s element of fashion and music that really surprises and delights me these days, though.

When I was 12 years old I managed to bluff my way into a cinema at the seaside town I grew up in, to watch David Essex and Ringo Starr in the excellent That'll Be The Day. Twenty years after Bill Haley (a fat, middle-aged C&W singer tricked up like a rocker) had inspired the original Teddy Boys into ripping up seats in cinemas, Rock n Roll and Teddy Boys were enjoying a renaissance among British youth. BTW, they were called Teddy Boys because, in the early part of the 1950s, with rationing still in place in the UK, young men with jobs and a little money to spend found the menswear shops empty of anything except demob suits. So they took their grandfather's suits into local tailors to have them refitted. The grandfathers having been Edwardians, the shortening to Teddy Boys seemed natural.

Original Teddy Boys wore much more ornate waistcoats, jackets and shirts than those worn by the post-Elvis Teddy Boys who usually just stuck some velvet on their lapels, bought brothel-creeper shoes, wore bootlace ties and grew their hair into quiffs. Teddy boys numbered thousands across the UK by 1957, and became infamous for their rowdy behaviour, violent disposition (according to the gutter press of the time) and wild dancing, with women who liked their men tough.

That'll Be The Day tells the story of a boy (David Essex) who rejects lower middle-class life as a shopkeeper in favour of a summer spent working at a holiday camp, and the pursuit of dream to be a rock star. He's roomed with an older Teddy Boy (Ringo Starr) who shows him how to live life properly. The scene in which Ringo short changes a customer is taken from real life. Or at least, I did it often enough when working the waltzers in the late 1970s. The soundtrack to the movie was so familiar to me that I didn't realise how old a lot of the music on it actually was. I'd grown up hearing the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Johnny & The Hurricanes and Johnny Tillotson etc constantly blaring out of the amusement arcades and parks along the seafront since I can remember. Naturally I thought it was all contemporary.

The movie's mix of sex and violence, the misunderstood Essex and fabulous music was thrilling. I fell in love with the wordily, sensual Deborah Watling (above) and didn't realise she'd been a Dr Who assistant.  The pop charts of the time were filled with bands who'd been born during he first wave of Teddy Boy uprising, and were now using glam versions of the clothes to sell their versions of 1950s classics. I despised Showaddywaddy, the Rubettes and Alvin Stardust because of their inauthenticity. Dr Feelgood, The Pirates (who'd once been Johnny Kidd's backing band) and Sha Na Na however, seemed to be the real thing. Teddy Boys in the 1970s were pub rockers and proud of it.

In the 1980s the dead Elvis effect spawned new quiffs and an American interest in rockabilly music outside of the South. As well as Morrisey's quiff, The Stray Cats and Billy Idol put faux rockabilly into the charts both sides of the Atlantic. Punk's adoption of certain Teddy Boy clothing items, particularly the brothel creepers, was misinterpreted by the original Teds and their sons as an insult; we meant it as a compliment.

Seeing a renewal of interest in Teddy Boys and 1950s-era Rock n Roll today is both oddly nostalgic—my old man had been a Ted who wore razor blades sewn into his drape jacket lapels; anyone grabbing them in a fight got sliced doing so. It was another trick learned from the original 1940s Mexican zoot suit rebels of LA—and weirdly 'original'. Imelda May looks the part, even if she sounds too clean and packaged. New Teds really know how to look like the 1970s version of the originals, though. They make this old man feel almost as though he were born too late.

Much Too Young

Frank, the guy who cuts my hair, was born and raised in little Italy, New York in the 1950s and '60s. When his Ma, bless her, moved back to the old country (Sicily) to spend her final days in the sunshine and mountain air, Frank kind of went with her, or rather he moved the England for 2/3 of the year and spends the rest of the time in Palermo. He's a cool guy with a penchant for the doo-wop and lounge singers of his youth, and after a lifetime spent cutting the heads of Hollywood and St Christopher's Place royalty he's getting to know about the past and present of a very different culture.

Frank and I often shoot the breeze as he teases what's left of my barnet into a semblance of a decent haircut, sometimes about different cuts ("that's a French crop, a Napoleon", he told me as he scraped hair toward by forehead. "Or a Sinatra", I countered. Pause. "Yeah", Frank agreed with a shrug.) We also share musical and old movie tales. On Saturday Frank told me he'd just seen "that movie Quadrophenia? You know, about those Mods; that what they're called?"
"The Who".
"Mods—ain't that right?"
"No, sorry, yes, but the movie's based on The Who's concept album".
"Oh yeah? They're the ones used to smash up their gear, right?"
"Yeah, it was an expensive gimmick".
"I bet. But that other guy, Sting, he's the main man who turns out to be a what, a bell-hop?"

"That's right, he's the 'ace face', the guy that Nik Cohn based the character of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever on. Townsend was never an ace face. Cohn was an original Mod, and knew Townsend when the Who were still the High Numbers, back in the early 1960s. He didn't go into Odyssey nightclub the night he was supposed to, just went back to his apartment in Manhattan and wrote up an episode or three from his own Mod teens, changing the action from Soho London, to Bay Ridge".
"Loved those scooters with all the mirrors".
"A familiar sight of my childhood. I loved the balcony scene though".

Growing up in a British seaside town in the 1960s, one of my earliest memories is of watching Mods and Rockers fighting in a Woolworth's cafeteria. One of my abiding teen memories is standing in the gents toilets in a ring with ten or so other, similarly dressed youths, watching the local hardman ('Sailor' I think his name was), pick a fight with a guy just because he was several inches taller than anyone else at the club. The tall guy didn't want to fight, but Sailor hit, kicked and stomped him anyway. Out in the club the DJ played "Boogie Nights" and all I wanted to do was dance. I didn't get the need for the tall guy to be stomped and felt chickenshit for just watching and in doing so, condoning Sailor's dumb, macho act.

After that I chose my time to visit the gents carefully. Nightclubs and violence go together like soccer and expletives. No stranger to violence—I'd grown up with a Chelsea Shed End hooligan for a brother who was four years and several pounds heavier than me—I had enough of it at home to want to indulge when out and dressed up to dance and flirt.

Post-punk, the slight return of Mod culture to England was favoured by younger brothers of the Punks who didn't want to be just like their elder siblings. It was a shadow of the original movement, but it had its positives, the main one being anti-racism and the reintroduction of social realism into song lyrics. Unfortunately there would also be Absolute Beginners, but then again, we also saw the launch of Nick Logan's ace magazine, The Face. Its title was a reference to Mr Logan and his business associate Rod Sopp's formative years spent chasing down the clothes, records (and girls) that The Who, Small Faces and Equals etc so wanted to have, own, be. The mag featured hip young things in bright new clothes and conveyed the insouciance of effortless cool (even if it did major on the ridiculous Buffalo style for a while). The Face gave me one of my first writing commissions, for which I'll always be grateful—they didn't pay, but then having your name in the mag was considered (by them, mostly) as payment enough.

All of this flashed through my mind as Frank finished his work with a clip of my eyebrows, and Little Anthony & The Imperials cooed in the background. "Ya done," he said, whipping off the sheet from round my neck.
And sure enough, I was.

Deeper Roots

I like to use time while out running to go over work, letting my mind wander around whatever subject I have to write about, giving books shape and form, sorting out order in which things should go into a chapter or a blog. This morning, while struggling with a sore medial meniscus over 5 miles I found myself (once again) wishing that I'd started running when I was much younger. Like at High school, where I'd hated the 'cross country' runs we were forced to endure along snow-capped sand dunes in mid-winter so much, that I didn't even consider running for 'fun' until I was into my late 30s.

Thinking back so far though brought me to a time in my life when I seemed to gain consciousness for the first time, or rather realisation that I was a separate entity to my family, that I was developing an 'identity'. That time I now think, was 1972 (or at least it's become 1972, if only for the purposes of this blog). As a pre-teen I'd inherited from an uncle some 78 rpm records, a lot of 1960s-released 7" 45rpm singles and a few albums, and I'd found in music (and football) a sense of elation and freedom that the rest of my life seemed intent on restricting.

In 1972 I found a host of new—to me—music that raised my spirits, and made me want to dance, sing and do anything. Especially if it meant doing something that did not involve my restrictive family. Most of my school pals, being male, white and working class like me, were into awful, pretentious, boring prog rock. I really couldn't get into it. The glam rock bands of the time, such as Sweet, Slade and the Glitterband (see above) were funny and loud, but even then I found their macho male overweight builders' physiques squashed into satin and silk hilarious and impossible to believe.

T. Rex, David Bowie and the great Alice Cooper, however, were different. They all displayed acres of androgynous flesh, had attitude, hooks, great clothes and were unspeakably cool. The impact of Alice Cooper was particularly profound, especially because he so outraged parents and schoolteachers at the time. In 1976 Johnny Rotten and Glen Matlock would 'bond' over Alice Cooper, and Rotten got the job as singer with the Sex Pistols after miming to Cooper's "Eighteen" as it played on the jukebox in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's boutique. In 1972 Jean Genie, Children Of The Revolution and School's Out embedded themselves in my brain and heart.

I had my haircut like Bowie, bought some silver stack-heeled, zip-up boots and a cheesecloth shirt and made my first trip to a discotheque. Looking back, I can only wonder at my luck. In my unreliable memory of the first night at Tiffany's I tripped down the staircase onto the dance floor as the Temptations' "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" hit its groove—and stayed there for the full 11+ minutes of the album version. Next up was the O'Jays' "Backstabbers" which merged easily into Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" and then became The Meters' "Do The Dirt" before Curtis Mayfield told us all the tragic story of "Freddie's Dead".

The end of that first night at the disco (or perhaps not) saw me slow-dance with someone whose name I can't recall, but whose presence remains pressed against my psyche. Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes' "If You Don't Know Me By Now" featuring the inimitable Teddy Pendergrass, "I'm Still In Love With You" by Al Green and the perennial floor-filling, last-dance hit, "Me & Mrs Jones" by Billy Paul made up an unholy trinity of sensual smooch songs to which countless teenagers in 1972 discovered their  sexual orientation.

Other unreliable memories of that year include learning how to really dance to the sound of James Brown's "Get On The Good Foot"(this is a great version, by the way), War's "City, Country, City" and, surprisingly perhaps, Boz Scaggs' "Dinah Flo". 'Surprising' because at the time Scaggs was barely known in the UK except as the former guitarist with the Steve Miller Band, and therefor thought to be a hippie, rock-oriented, AOR artist. Yet "Dinah Flo", like his later "Lowdown" (1976) was a disco hit, at least where I learned to dance, it was.

That first night at Tiffany's (wishing I looked as cool as this guy above) led to regular Friday and Saturday night visits and the beginning of a long-lasting romance with disco. It's probably where I first damaged my medial meniscus.