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New address! Update your bookmarks and check  the latest entry on Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Hollow Earth: Social Trends 1950-2010.

Matt comes correct with some hard data (and kittens).

Kind of amazed that they also used to do a reggae chart - check this out from 1986!

Apparently the reggae chart only ran from April to September 1986. I have no idea what the selection criteria were, but I’m guessing that actually having a video was more crucial than sales. It would be an unusual chart which featured both King Kong and UB40, I think – not much crossover in their respective markets.

Boris Gardiner’s video is awesomely cheesy and has includes some nice shots of eighties West London.

Moses on the Blood and Fire forum found this clip for me on Youtube. It seems to be the only one on there. In fact, the general consensus is that there weren’t very many of these broadcast. So if anyone else remembers the reggae chart or can post more on youtube, then please let me know!

See also this post compiling links to printed reggae charts from 1976-1999.

History is made at night: We were brought up on the Space Race, now they expect us to clean toilets.

Neil on the moon landings, the decline of utopian futurism, and pop music.

Steven Wells AKA Susan Williams AKA Seething Wells has died.

He was one of my favourite music journalists ever. People will scoff at this and remind me of Paul Morley or Greil Marcus or Lester Bangs or countless legendary articulate literary types.

But I’ve never been all that literary. I always looked forward to Swells’ ranty swearing and pretension-busting championship of pop music.

He also a wrote a lot of the NME’s more political pieces in the 80s, when the music press still had something resembling a backbone. I’ve reproduced his piece on the anarchopunk riot following Conflict’s Brixton Academy gig here, but he also wrote a load of stuff on the Jello Biafra vs Tippa Gore censorship trial and many other things besides.

I distincly remember him on Janice Long’s Radio 1 show taking some christian woman from the National Viewers and Listeners Association to task about her complete lack of knowledge of popular culture. And seeing him do a few readings at the Clerkenwell Literary Festival when he was pimping his Attack Books pulp fiction imprint (which included people like Stewart Home and Zodiac Mindwarp on the roster).

I met him once, after doing a talk about the Association of Autonomous Astronauts. He was very enthusiastic about the AAA’s Italian sub-group, the SHITS (SkinHeads as Independent Travellers in Space) and seemed like a top guy on a personal level.

There is something very reassuring about him going to the grave still taking the piss out of Smiths fans and goths, whilst simultaneously praising rioters in Tehran.

Stewart Home’s own thoughts on Swells are here.

“Thom Yorke: My Autobiography. By Steven Wells”

Previously on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

7. Test Dept, Hackney Empire, 23/1/87

We’d come down to London to go to a Julian Cope gig in Westminster but it was sold out (perhaps unsurprisingly as it was around the time of “World Shut Your Mouth”, his big chart hit). Tentative attempts were made to chat up some girls outside the venue, with the usual lack of results. I’d scanned the NME gig listings for a back-up option and managed to persuade my partner in crime to head out into the badlands of Hackney to see Test Dept.

We got the tube to Bethnal Green and walked up Mare Street not knowing what the fuck we were doing. It was the first time I’d even been to Hackney.

Peter Rehberg (now of Mego, KTL etc) was in the year above me at school and had been slowly warping my mind with cassettes of Some Bizzare acts like Foetus and Psychic TV. Test Dept featured on the Some Bizzare compilation “If you can’t please yourself you can’t please your soul” - an incredibly visceral tour de force of pulsing metal percussion and shouting. I’d read up on them in the NME and found out about their politics (slightly left of “old Labour” I guess, with lot of support for the Miners’ Strike and righteous scorn for Tory rule).

1986’s “Unacceptable Face of Freedom” LP alternated between propulsive rage and brooding hatred of the effects of Thatcherism. The incredible paranoia of the media at the time is captured especially well with a host of news samples and a general air of cold war dread. There is also some powerful spoken word provided by Alan Sutcliffe, a former miner (who was also onstage at the gig). And it’s easy to forget how funky Test Dept were alongside their anger. The cover was a vast foldout thing with photos of sculptures by Malcolm Poynter (the image above is composed of melted plastic soldiers, for example).

I’d been listening to this kind of post-industrial stuff a lot, alongside more middlebrow rock and pop records. I was reading everything I could as well – books like Tape Delay and RE/SEARCH. But I’d never experienced it live – the gigs either came at the wrong time or I couldn’t persuade people to go with me.

Of course, this was no ordinary event:

Siege of Wapping
Ministry of Power benefit on the first anniversary of the Printworkers’ Strike
With Alan Sutcliffe; James Phillips: The Printworkers’ Choir
- Hackney Empire, London

The Wapping dispute was the next major installment in the UK class war after the defeat of the Miners. Rupert Murdoch’s News International wanted to shift operations from Fleet Street in central London to Wapping in the east. The new shiny plant went hand in hand with new shiny proposed conditions for the workforce, including a “no strike” deal, job losses and “flexible working” (i.e. changeable hours at the bosses’ request). The unions weren’t having it – years of negotiations came to nothing. So a strike was called in early 1986.

The strikers were all sacked. Pickets clashed with the police. Local residents complained of police violence and being prevented from going home. Behind the heavily fortified walls and barbed wire fences of “fortress Wapping”, the presses rolled on and the newspapers continued to be produced. By scabs.

Samantha Fox famously rode through the picket line on a tank as part of an anti-strike story for The Sun. The government backed News International to the hilt.

We didn’t really know any of this when we trudged up Mare Street, trying determinedly to look like we knew where we were going.

My parents are both Church of England Tories (in that order) so that’s where my political evolution began. I was only vaguely aware of things like the Brixton riots and the Miners’ Strike at the time. I daresay I held fairly reactionary views about all that, passed down from my elders.

But I was anti-racist from an early age. I remember being 11 and sitting down next to three boys in the school canteen and them asking me to join the youth wing of the National Front. Their ringleader had even memorised the key points in the manifesto. I wasn’t up for it. On another occasion I stood next to two of my mates – one of whom was Jewish, the other Malaysian, whilst two dozen of our classmates sieg heiled frenziedly around the gym changing room.

These sorts of things lead me into the fringes of the anti-apartheid movement. I figured it was pretty obvious that if racism was wrong, then a nation run along racist lines was also wrong. Around the time of this gig I occasionally walked to school with a guy called Farasat who was Muslim. We had all sorts of mad discussions about religion and Palestine. I knew fuck all about Palestine. But we agreed on apartheid and he’d been involved with protests outside the local branch of Barclays Bank (who had been identified as key supporters of the regime). I tagged along. It was OK. I closed down my bank account there whilst wearing a “Free Nelson Mandela” sticker. The woman behind the counter looked a bit worried. The protests became a semi-regular thing for me on Saturday mornings.

I was photographed on one Barclays picket by the local newspaper. Someone who was a few years younger than me at school said he’d seen me in the paper and his parents thought it was a great thing to do and they supported it all.

In contrast, my parents went batshit mental about it over the dinner table. In their eyes Nelson Mandela was a terrorist – imprisoned for blowing up railway lines, the people on those protests were weirdos, communists etc. Unfortunately they weren’t nearly weird or communist enough for me. With the exception of a couple of anarchopunks, my fellow protestors were also schoolkids or liberal types, Christians and the odd socialist worker.

I hadn’t consciously set out to piss my parents off, it was just the consequence of thinking things through. Which continued, along with the rows. I don’t think I discussed Wapping with them. These days we agree to differ on many things but can have civilised discussions about things like the MPs expense scandal. I suppose they were worried about me falling in with the wrong people. I didn’t. For reasons which are still unclear (but I assume were to do with humiliating me in later life), my Mum ordered a print of the photo from the local paper – I look very young and awkward. I am wearing massive wire-rimmed spectacles and holding a placard.

So, anyway. This was half gig, half rally. If I remember correctly there were speakers and possibly some poets. I don’t remember any of it being hackneyed (if you will forgive the expression) or embarrassing. Perhaps this is because I was still only sweet 17, or perhaps it was actually very good. The Hackney Empire was incredibly atmospheric. We got cheap seats right at the top and looked down at this beautiful old music hall filled to the brim with freaks and lefties. It confirmed the impression of Hackney I had gleaned from reading Vague magazine – an oasis of radicalism and strangeness. If only.

In any case, we were there for the noise, not the politics. When Test Dept came on it was like a blast from another planet. Like the records but more intense, more dynamic, more urgent. I was blown away at the time, but can’t remember too much about it now, except being thrilled to see things onstage which weren’t guitar/bass/drums. Instead there were bits of metal, bagpipes, other stuff which was unidentifiable. Sure it was loud, but never oppressive or painful.

The day after the gig several policemen were filmed at Wapping brutally attacking strikers, journalists and even first aid workers. The dispute ended a fortnight later, an abject defeat for the strikers.

Check out this very good introduction to the strike over at Libcom.

There was a lot of sympathy and support for the miners, the printworkers and the ambulance drivers (who went on strike a few years later). By 1989 I was living in London and ended up in a pub in Bethnal Green for lunch. An old guy came over as I tucked into a chilli con carne and talked about the area. He had some nice memories of the strike, including nicking bundles of News International papers from outside newsagents and throwing them in the canal.

It’s almost impossible to believe now but there was a time when vast amounts of people felt that the unions were there for them – and could make their lives better. Now that has been legislated away by successive right wing governments. Bob Crow and the tube workers are almost universally reviled for having the temerity to stand up for themselves collectively and improve their lot.

I didn’t realise how important this all was at the time. It was simply an amazing gig which also gave me a lot to think about.

One of the reasons I keep harking back to the eighties is because (in retrospect) things seemed a lot more certain then. I don’t think that was just my age at the time. In fact it seems to me that circumstances are now conspiring to make things a lot more certain once again. I take no pleasure in saying that.

8. Psychedelic Furs, Hammersmith Odeon, 19/2/87

Arguably the Furs were well past their best at this point. But the Odeon was rammed, we had good seats and  pogoed away in our leather jackets. Looking nothing like the teenage punks we aspired to be. Punks didn’t get their Mums to ring up the Hammersmith Odeon and buy tickets for them, did they?

This was a good gig, they played a lot of their classic early stuff. But after Test Dept it was just more rock ‘n’ roll…

NOT THE REAL BEYOND THE iMPLODE: 7″ EXPLOSION PT 1.

Martin, with an outstanding series of posts about his fave sevens, what they mean to him, when and where he got them. Top stuff – 6 installments so far…

Previously on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

6) Marillion, Aylesbury Civic Centre 28/12/86

This was an Xmas fan club gig, in the band’s home town. Yes, I was in the Marillion fan club as well. Jesus. Probably only for a year though, if that helps.

The fan club was called “The Web” after a song on their first LP. It commences, with typical pomp:

The rain auditions at my window
Its symphony echoes in my womb
My gaze scans the walls of this apartment
To rectify the confines of my tomb

I remember its name only because some spectacularly shit policing linked this fact with the horrific “Ealing vicarage rape” earlier in the year. The scumbag attacker had a tattoo of spider’s web, like hundreds, possibly thousands, of skinheads – none of whom would have had much time for Marillion. The fan club agreed to help the cops with their enquiries, as I guess anybody would even if the investigation was clearly going down completely the wrong track. I remember discussing all this with my parents over Sunday lunch.

Anyway, as well as a possible knock on the door from the old bill, fan club membership got you a magazine and the odd newsletter. And the chance to attend an exclusive gig, strickly fi de ‘ardcore.

Unfortunately I can’t remember too much about the night because I have blanked it from my mind. This bit of light repression is because I now find recalling the event more embarrassing than associating it with having been in the fan club of an 80s prog rock band. We heckled the support band. They were rubbish, we were pissed. We probably had a load of teenage sneery punkish hormones racing round our bodies. They were friends of the headliners and… they were just boring blokey rock. So we hung around at the back and shouted the odd comment, I can’t remember what. Except for one thing.

There were I think a number of asides to the audiences between songs, which is a bit much for a support band. One of them concerned the drummer being involved with a car crash and being out of action for a good while. To my eternal shame we responded to this by shouting “we don’t care!”. I am cringing right now, typing that.

I’m sure by this time the band and most of the rest of the audience had realised we were pissed twats and proceeded to carry on as if we weren’t there. In many other gigs I have attended since, this sort of behaviour might have resulted in a severe kicking. So it’s Marillion fans: 1, me: nil, in the tolerance and goodwill stakes.

The rest of the night passed in a drunken blur. There was possibly more friction between fans and band during “Kayleigh”. One of my mates’ Dads kindly drove us home. It was the last time I ever saw Marillion. By the time their next album “Clutching At Straws” came out, I was much less easily impressed. This was down to the fact that the quantity and quality of gigs I attended in 1987 would be immeasurably greater than what had gone before…

Previously on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

4) Ultravox, Wembley Arena 5/11/86

Barrel-scraping time. This was Ultravox well after their peak, touring an album (U-Vox) that even their die-hard fans regard as rubbish.

I had mixed feelings about going to the gig but said Ultravox fan was well up for it, obviously. And then was hospitalised with something very nasty shortly beforehand (I can’t remember what, but we went to visit him in an isolation ward).

So I ended up going on my own. I was walking down the street trying to get people to buy my spare ticket (which was near impossible as everyone had them already) and managed to walk into a bollard, crushing my balls mid-sentenc. People laughed. That was the way I rolled as an awkward teenager in the 80s on the mean streets of Wembley.

I eventually sold the ticket to a tout for about 6 and a half pence. The support band were Terraplane, who I remember thinking were shit. I was seated about as far back as it is possible to be in Wembley Arena – i.e. probably in a different postcode to the stage.

The ‘Vox did a passable set of old and (shudder) new material. I am sure Midge Ure was on form.

It was Guy Fawkes night and I was on my own at the back of a fucking aircraft hanger listening to stadium synth pop. I have never been back to Wembley Arena since that night.

5) New Model Army, Town & Country Club 23/12/86

OK so perhaps this gig looks like a bit of a leap. I doubt many of the people who at the Ultravox show made it here as well. I’d been steadily falling under the spell of slightly punkier music. Tapes of Bauhaus and the Sex Pistols had been circulating at school. Parents were being pestered into buying DMs and leather jackets…

Until this point I’d had no idea about punk except seeing something about one of the Sex Pistols being sick at an airport on the news. The few punks that St Albans had to offer seemed incredibly exotic with their mad hair and slogans painted on their backs.

It was angry and there were lots of swearwords and it was definitely better than Midge Ure.

I’d hooked up with this guy at school called Wal. He had originally come to my attention when it was rumoured that he’d taken on his whole class during a woodwork lesson. With a large bit of wood. We bonded over music and hung around a lot, eventually venturing into the local gothy coterie.

Wal seemed like a natural punk to me, he was prone to spontaneity and getting into trouble. He brought me out of myself quite a bit. He ended up really badly falling out with his parents and living in a tent in a mate’s garden. At one point he stole his parent’s car while they were away on holiday (“don’t have any parties, don’t use the car”) . We went on a week-long jaunt to the south coast, sleeping in said car in multistoreys.

So Wal and I headed down to the gig on the train. New Model Army are the godfathers of a particular strain of “crusty” – all that celtic tribalism and tats and jewelry. (Didn’t chart pop sensations The Levellers emerge out of their following or something?) They had a slightly odd puritanical streak to them. And wore clogs.

Some years later when I was a student one of my housemates invited a bunch of New Model Army fans to stay. The noise of their fucking clogs going up and down the stairs was some way beyond my fairly elastic definition of acceptable behaviour for guests.

I can’t remember anything much about the gig.

Previously on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

2) Midge Ure Wembley Arena 23/12/85

Back to the Arena, two days before Xmas. I had another school friend who was a big Ultravox fan. He used to regularly curse Joe Dolce whose accordion-bothering “Shaddap You Face” had kept “Vienna” off the number 1 spot in the UK charts.

I thought Ultravox were alright – all those moody synths, overcoats and big words. More on them anon, though. I vaguely recall the queue being flyered by young women in skimpy Santa Claus outfits. Stuff like that makes an impression on you when you’re 16.

The support act was Belouis Some – the great wannabe pop star of the era who never really made it. His one big hit “Imagination” has the classic first line “she lit a cigarette, both hands behind her back” which sounds either glamorous or like a fire hazard depending on your cynicism. It’s here on youtube, but any info on what he is doing now has eluded me. His set was alright but I remember being quite down on his attempts to get everyone to put their hands in the air.

This gig was part of Midge Ure’s post-Live Aid solo career and wasn’t really all that. The place was half full and lacked the atmosphere of the Howard Jones gig. We were sitting up in a balcony miles away from the stage, so we had a better view of the gaps in the audience than the, uh, “action”.

I couldn’t remember what was played, but a quick google turned up “Sleepwalk” (Ultravox), “Fade To Grey” (Visage, which Midge was also in) and “No Regrets” (Scott Walker, which he had released as a solo single many years earlier). I remember quite liking “The Gift” (the album Midge was promoting), but the setlist looks like a bit of a crisis of confidence in retrospect.

The graphic for the hit single off the album (“If I Was”, Number One for a week) was one of those desk toys where you have a load of shiny silver nails in a frame that you can put your hand in and “wooh!” it leaves an impression of a hand in there. That probably sums up a lot of the stadium pop of the time – executive desk toys. Youtube link.

A dodgy download of the album confirms my worst suspicions – dangerously portentious wordy business. There are a lot of cringeworthy lyrics about teenage alienation though:

“She tries to understand what her father preaches / She wants to live a life that a new world teaches”
(She Cried)

“The boy is listening to those records from the past / he wants to make them last / for they make him feel alive / they are the voices of the faces on the wall / he listens to them all / hangs on every little tale they tell [...] one day he even cut their names upon his skin / they mean that much to him / his bedroom window opens to the evening air / the fox is in his lair”
(Wasteland)

I even bought a Midge Ure t-shirt. I managed to drop it a few months later whilst walking somewhere or other and by the time I’d retraced my steps someone had ripped it to shreds. (Or maybe it was “the fox out of his lair, walking in the evening air” eh?). I don’t remember being particularly upset by this.

I didn’t know it at the time but somewhere else somebody else was skanking to untold versions of King Jammy’s “sleng teng”. I had a long way to go…

3) Marillion, Milton Keynes Bowl 28/06/86

Yes, yes, what were we thinking, eh? I spent my 17th birthday here. There was a coach from St Albans to Milton Keynes and four of us from my school got on it.

My main memory is that there were loads of blokes with long hair and denim. In fact I have a horrifiying suspicion that my own barnet had moved beyond Howard Jones spikey into a mullety type affair by this point.

Jethro Tull played “Living In The Past” which I suddenly realised Midge Ure had also covered at the previous gig. I remember someone referring to them as “The Tull” in a Brummie accent.

But I can’t remember anything about the Mama’s Boys, which either means they were middle of the road nonsense, or were so dire I have blanked them from my mind in an act of psychic self defence. Things improved slightly when we struck up the courage to try and get some cider. In retrospect it’s pretty obvious that nobody at these events really gives a toss who they are selling alcohol to as long as you can physically see over the counter. At the time it seemed very daring, ha ha.

Magnum were OK, my rockier mates liked them and they’d even played St Albans Civic Centre I think. (Other fixtures including Hawkwind and Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts – all these rockers would come out of the woodwork from surrounding villages…)

Six years after the great secondary school two tone / heavy metal wars, we were a lot more tolerant of musical diversity. I was never that into “rock” and I’m sure some of our crew were never convinced by Marc Almond. Everything was a negotiation, alliances shifted. But a day out was a day out, always riddled with exciting possibilities.

Having said that, Gary Moore was fucking bollocks, obviously. Wanking about with a guitar and big hair. Parisian Walkways and all that. I liked to think of myself as open-minded back then, but I was 100% certain about that not being my bag.

I liked Marillion though.

Perhaps it was that faux sophistication thing again – lots of wordy lyrics and worldly songs about the horrors of war and bad women and messed up situations. And weird proggy little musical freakouts. Oh and those dark bits of sleeve art with jesters lurking in dark bedsits looking abject.

Marillion was the first thing I ever heard on a Sony Walkman. Some kid smuggled his onto the school sports field and we sat around waiting patiently for our turn. It sounded pretty amazing – properly inside your head, loud and majestic and all that. Another dodgy download confirms that it was in fact a load of boshing drums, senselessly tweaky keyboard solos and sixth form poetry.

Marillion were the antithesis of punk (apart from the odd “fuck” in the lyrics), but you forget how popular this stuff was (and is) when you spend your time on more tasteful pursuits – Milton Keynes Bowl has a capacity of 65,000 and it was pretty rammed.

I bought a t-shirt, yes sirree. It had a little drummer boy on it and big yellow Marillion logo. Somewhere there is probably photographic evidence of me with a mullet, wire-framed specs and a Marillion t-shirt. I’ve always had that kind of effortlessly stylish glamour about me, I can tell you.

I think I knew all the words to the songs as well. In fact I can still recall something like “gracefully polluting satellite infested heavens” right now, 23 years later.

We were half cut by the time they came on. I’m sure everyone over 18 was ripped to the gills. We were all outside, under clear skies as the sun was setting – watching one of our favourite bands. Fish was a great frontman.

So we all sang along to all the wordy words in every song. Except “Kayleigh” – even Marillion fans refused to stand for that.