This is the script to a Podcast I created for Andy Oxley at Screen 3 Productions based loosely on the Desert Island Disks format. The audio version can be listed to here. Andy is creator of Terminal Gods' music videos and over the years I have had the pleasure of assisting him shoot live footage and on location reel. In 2015 he shot a music video in Bournemouth for Terminal Gods' Road of the Law, featuring my 1971 Vauxhall Viva.
Part One: Tenerife 1979
"I think my earliest musical memory is hearing Boney M’s “Hooray Hooray It A Holi-Holiday” at the Micky kids club in Tenerife. It came out on 26th March 1979 and I know we went there in April of that year and also 1980 because I had my first and second birthdays there. It seems doubtful that I would have remembered it from the first trip, but I like to think I had a genuine musical experience in the 1970s.
We stayed in resort called Tenbel, which was purpose built at the end of the Sixties. I think it was quite ahead of its time: a manicured garden enclave with different swimming pools and all inclusive restaurants. Years later, I went back to check it out and was shocked by how Brutalist the design was: it looked very tired, but the names of the different blocks evoked the exotic futurism of package holidays in the Seventies: Frontera, Primavera and Eureka.
Frank Farian who produced Boney M is an often overlooked figure in pop history: aways framed as a mysterious Svengali figure. Particularly after the Grammys scandal in 1990, when Milli Vanilli a group he produced had to give back their award when t was revealed then didn’t actually sing on any of their records. But if he’d been working in the 21st Century he would have understood quite differently: he’d have been like David Guetta or Avicci. ‘Hooray Hooray’ to my mind invented the whole 80s Club Tropicana aesthetic and Club Med sound of Euro Pop.
Part Two: Abba versus The Shining
October 1979. Abba released “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to promote their Greatest Hits album. My dad’s mum, Nanny Lilian, had this on vinyl; and we had a TDK C90 copy at home. I clearly remember listening to it riding around on my metal trike in the sitting room at Fern Cottage. Going faster and faster and faster, swerving to corner the 90 degree angles of the chequer patterned carpet.
I always hated it when ‘Dancing Queen’ came on, as it reminded me of this really smug looking lady monarch in my illustrated book of nursery rhymes. It seems impossibly to believe now that people didn’t always know what pop stars looked like; but I remember being really shocked a few years later seeing who Abba were. By this point MTV had gone from 0 to 100 and the Seventies looked like a foreign country.
Listening back to “Gimme Gimme” there something about the mix of guitars and synth that would shape my future musical tastes. When I listen to this I can hear The Cult, Sisters of Mercy even my 21st Century heroes Terminal Gods. I’ve never liked the way in which the Mama Mia franchise has bathed the legacy of Abba in Greek sunshine. I much prefer the lo-fi Swedish aesthetics of their 70s videos. The clips for ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ was apparently inspired by Ingmar Bergman. The video for ‘Gimme Gimme’ is recorded in the studio with shots of the mixing desk and Agnatha and Frida miked up recording vocals. Forget the kitsch costumes, it is this kind of technical precision that made Abba great.
Into the Eighties: Spread A Little Happiness
Into the 80s, and St Winifred's School Choir "There's No One Quite Like Grandma" resonated with my two and a half year old self, particularly the line “though you may be far away we think of you”. My Grandma, Margaret, lived 150 miles away on the Isle of Wight and was not very accessible. Unlike Badass Nanny Lillian, a Geordie from Derby: jet black hair, gentleman friends and a yacht in Malta.
My Mum and Dad would leave me with Nanny Lilian sometimes when they went out with my dad’s old school friends. She would have then have her friends round: nurses she worked with at the Manor Rose Hospital in Mickleover. They would drink whisky and play Abba records; I would put on an elasticated tie and eat smarties out of a Babycham glass feeling very grown up. “Super Trooper” was Number One.
Visiting my Grandma on “The Island”, as it was always referred to, was a little bit more gentile. Grandma would sing this song called “Spread a Little Happiness” from a 1920s musical called Mr Cinders, while she polished Green Wickets, the bungalow my Grandad built in the Sixties ,to domestic perfection. The version I have chosen here is by Ian Whitcomb and his Bungalow Boys from the 1960s: it somehow seems apt.Summer of 1984: Laser 558
The death of John Lennon on 8th December 1980 was marked at Fern Cottage by my dad sitting on the toilet in the bathroom crying. Double Fantasy has just been released and he seemed to play “Woman” and “Watching the Wheels Go By” over and over. It was the first time I really noticed that records sounded different: the crackle. Also, unlike my TDK C90 on the Teleton cassette deck, I was not allowed to touch the record player.
Vague recollections of the flying vinyl title sequence on Top of the Pops were more coloured by my parents enthusiasm for showing me it than anything I saw. Adam and the Ants and Toyah seemed babyish to me as a three year old. Also I hated the way Toyah lisped when she sang “Its a Mystery”. More sublime was the summer of 1984: spent mainly in the garden at Fern Cottage.
My parents were obsessed with a pirate radio station called Laser 558, which featured very little talk and, when it did, came from American DJs. Apparently it played whole sides of albums: Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Tears for Fears etc. It didn’t have advertising, but there was always some reference to a US style Summer Camp called Camp Beaumont, which Mum and Dad sometimes threatened to send me to. They played the kind of stuff I secretly returned to in the late 1990s when Brit Pop came to nothing. Gender ambiguity was the norm in 1984: Boy George, Frankie Goes To Hollywood Annie Lennox etc. Sexuality was not an issue to my Mum and Dad. Looks more so: Mum always said Jimmy Somerville was just “too ugly for her to look at”. Christmas 1984: Nelly the Elephant
Years later, we were in the garden at Fern Cottage and a Eurythmics track came on the remote speakers in the garden. In a voice that must have been audible to half the village, my dad emerged from the house shouting “There’s Been a Sex Crime”. I always like the live version of Sex Crime (1984) from their rockier Revenge Tour. When we finally got a VHS player in about 1990, we were obsessed with their Sydney concert film from 1987. Plus, as I would later discover, it featured Clem Burke on drums.
There is just something very comforting about that association of Eighties music with summers in the garden at Fern Cottage; and it has remained a family ritual. Likewise travelling to the Isle of Wight. The memory of getting up early to drive down in my Dad’s Triumph remains vivid. Tina Turner “What’s Love Got To Do With” crackling out of the Radiomobile speakers as we passed though the dappled light of the New Forest, en route to the ferry.
1984 was the last year we took the Triumph to The Island: it was usurped from then on as the frontline family vehicle. It was also, according to my dad, the last year of “good music”. We taped Wham’s “Freedom” off the radio on the end of the Abba C90. I didn’t understand about 7 inches. Christmas ’84 was also the only one we spent on the Island. I got a set of Dukes of Hazard matchbox cars and an upscale model of the General Lee. Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was Number 1, although I was more interested in The Toy Dolls ‘Nellie The Elephant”.
This was my first encounter with Punk. While we waited our turn to trundle on stage for the infants school nativity, a television trolly was wheeled into an adjacent classroom so we could watch Top of the Pops. I don’t know which member of staff thought this would be a good idea. Probably Mrs Peck. All I remember is being in a my first mosh pit with a load of other stable boys, shepherds and wise men.
13 July, 1985 and the day of Live Aid. My parents had it on in the car, driving home from a holiday in West Wales: we took a detour to visit Portmeirion, the Italianate village created by the architect Sir Williams-Ellis. It was the set of the Sixties TV show The Prisoner. Researching this, I discovered Williams-Ellis died three days after I was born. It was my dad who wanted to go: he was a big fan The Prisoner. But there was a funny atmosphere to that day, which I never really understood and have often pondered about. The weather was overcast but muggy and nobody seemed to be a in a good mood. In retrospect I think the day my parents had convened was just too much for them to take in or my brother and I to understand. On the way home we ate our one and only sit down meal of the Eighties at a motorway service area
The thing that always struck my about Live Aid was the incongruousness use of “Drive” by The Cars over imagines of starving Ethiopian families. The lyric “who’s going to drive you home tonight” seems so poignant yet non-sensical. When I watched it then it made my cry: sometimes now when I teach students I feel my self well up a bit at the opening bars. But we would make awful jokes at school about it, like “what do you call an Ethiopian family photography?”. Answer: “A barcode”. Looking this up I discovered that bar codes were first introduced into the UK in 1979, so I guess they were still a novelty item in 1985.
My magical primary school was called Gilmorton Chandler Church of England Primary. It was in a rambling old rectory in beautiful grounds with the second tallest tree in Leicestershire: a Wellingtonia, which you could see from the upstairs of Fern Cottage. We were all very proud of it. In Mrs Morris’s Class (J2) you could see the Wellingtonia when you queued up at her desk. When she went out the room we would all dive out of our seats, and file in front of the board “Walking Like An Egyptian”. The Bangles were at Number 3.The thrill was who would get caught when Mrs Morris came back in. She was a jolly lady but had quite a temper. To us it was like Russian Roulette.
Around this time I started learning the piano with Mr Baden Fuller. Baden Fuller was a gown-up public school boy who was as wide as he was tall. He played the organ at harvest festival at the church and was something of a village curiosity, living with his parents in a three story house called The Old Homestead. My parents didn’t want me to do grades and were happy for me to learn pop stuff. Although, at this point I was more keen on learning the hymns we sang everyday at school. As I played Baden Fuller sang along in what Dad mysteriously called “castrato” and he would often get the lyrics wrong. When I learnt “Candle in the Wind” he sang “your candle burned out long before your leg end ever did”. Maybe he was spoofing me?
The theme tune to BBC TV drama Howard’s Ways was included in my Easy To Play: Pop 3 book. Marti Webb had had a hit with it the same year my sister Nicola was born. But I preferred the upbeat closing sequence, which accompanied aerial shots of power boats off the Isle of Wight. The show was the BBC’s attempt to capture that glamour of American shows like Dallas and Dynasty, but on a budget. It certainly captured my imagination: champagne taste, lemonade money and all that.
The great thing about data streaming and bluetooth is that now whenever I go to the Isle of Wight I can queue the track up and play it loud as I drive onto the ferry. An 80s synth and sax solo can make even the most routine journey seem glamorous and exotic.A Bit of a Do: Navid Nobbs (1988)
I think the reason The Cars always stood out to me as a group was because I liked the name. Because that’s what I spent the Eighties doing: playing with cars in an approximation of The Dukes of Hazard, Knight Rider and The A-Team. My brother Simon preferred motorbikes and what my parents referred to disparagingly as “plastic rammel’: he would innocently repeat this in his requests for birthday presents “Can I have more plastic rammel please?” Likewise, Nicola had synthetic tastes: introducing us to Italo Disco at the age of three, when she burst into the bedroom singing Sabrina’s “Boys Boys Boys” , with the immortal line “looking for a good time?….”
The Cars debut album (from 1978) was a staple at Fern Cottage when my parents had friends over: augmented by U2’s the Joshua Tree and Eurythmics really quite avant-garde sounding Savage. If we were good, Simon and I would be allowed to stay up and listen in on grown-up time: and then go upstairs to watch the black and white TV in our bedroom. Sometimes if we were still awake Mum would bring us a bowl of profiteroles to eat in bed. This was the absolute height of 80s decadence. And we would often request Mum made them for us instead of a birthday cake.
My parents liked to watch something on TV called The Tube: it was so boring and I hated Paula Yates as she had tattoos. What I did love around this time was David Nobbs TV series “A Bit of a Do”: a comedy of manners set in a small market town. It starred David Jason and Nicola Pagett. She had been a sex symbol in the Seventies:playing Anna Karenina and femme fatales in various Hammer Horror movies. Now in her forties she fascinated me. She was so detached and icy. I am not sure whether my sister was named after her, but she definitely made the name seem cool.
However, it was the words to the theme tune A Bit of a Do I loved best: it encapsulated everything I loved about eves dropping at “grown ups” time when I was a kid. It also rings true in so many of the situations I have found myself in as an adult: “It’s a small town, posh nosh affair, best behaviour, being aware others who are doing it to. Others who are seeing through your”1989; The Girl from Ipanema/Bill Nighy in Plymouth
Primary school concluded for me in 1989 and really my interest in pop music was still quite minimal. Enya’s Orinoco Flow had captured my imagination the previous year. But it wasn’t as exciting as when we got the new Montego. We went to the Isle of Wight in it the day Mum and Dad collected it. They turned up at school at lunchtime and I was whisked away. I had never felt more International.
The occasion was my Grandma and Grandad’s Ruby Wedding. Marc Almond and Gene Pitney were at number one with “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart”. I played Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” on the piano in front of assembled relatives. I got a round of applause and my grandad offered me 50p to do it again: I declined. I sensed it was important to leave the crowd wanting more. But I still cringe at the precociousness of it.
The first Kylie album was also ubiquitous. I don’t even remember how it came into my possession. Simon had the Jason Donovan counterpart. We listened to them on the Goodman’s cassette tape ghetto blaster in the playroom: Mum and Dad wouldn’t have them on in the car. “Turn It Into Love” was always my favourite and “Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi”. Ten years later I saw Kylie Minogue live during her Show Girl phase: somebody gave me the ticket and I think I must be the only person in the world to have gone away underwhelmed.
The Montego allowed us to listen to what were referred to as “The Co-Op Tapes”: cassettes given away in exchange for coupons at our local supermarket. This schooled me in some really great Sixties Pop: Mama’s and Papa’s “California Dreaming”, Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman”, Len Barry’s “1,2,3”, and Marianne Faithful’s “Summernights”. The Beatles White Album was also on rotation. I liked “Martha My Dear”; I hated “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?”.
That summer was the first year Dad was external examiner at Plymouth Uni: we stayed at The Grand Hotel on the Hoe. It was very exciting. I spilt orange juice at breakfast trying to steel a look at Bill Nighy who was sitting at the opposite end of the dining room. I had no idea who he was, but mum and dad were excited and I didn’t want to look stupid.
More exciting to me was that somebody stole the wheel trims off the Montego in the carpark. With great haste my Dad took me to the nearest Rover dealership and had new ones fitted. They were a statement piece I guess and maybe he wanted to impress his colleagues.
The Girl from Ipanema was another favourite from the Co-op tapes. Whenever Astrid Gilberto sang the line “when she passes each one she passes goes ahhh”. The three of us in the back would all shout out “Ey Bye Gum Seymour”. I have no idea why we though that was so funny. Something to do with Lats of the Summer Wine I guess.Now 16/Def, Dumb and Blonde
Pop music was about to become a much bigger part of my life when I left Gilmorton Chandler to go up to big school. I knew I would hate it. But what I did like was getting to go on a coach everyday. This was a rarity up until this point: school outings and a residential trip to Scarborough. Always a Woods coach: usually a Duple. Transport was, once again a gateway drug: travelling on the bus meant I now listened to Radio 1.
It’s hard to believe Steve Wright was ever the voice of youth culture. 1989 is a curious year in pop. Lots of my subsequent favourite albums were made that year, but in retrospect the sound is often quite stodgy and over-produced. Getting a lot of heavy rotation at Fern Cottage was Tina Turner’s Foreign Affair. A line from the the title track captured my imagination: “In the South of France it was spring time”. “Uncle Frank” was obsessed with her and always spoke of her in conpsiritaotoiral tones that implied him and Tina really were on first named terms.
In the Autumn I went on school trip France: twin axel, double-deck Neoplan coach.Jimmy Somerville and June Miles Kingston were at Number 14 with a cover of Francois Hardy’s “Comment Te Dire Adieu”. It was all so continental. For Christmas I was got a AIWA walkman and Now 16. The soundtrack to all my coach trips condensed into a double cassette pack: Tears for Fears, Belinda Carlisle, Erasure and track 4: Deborah Harry “I Want That Man”.
The fold-out booklet from the cassette helpful explained that this was “Deborah’s” second big hit in the UK as a solo artist. I had never heard of Blondie. I played it over and over. Even to my eleven year old ears I could tell that this woman knew things Kylie did not. The poster of a frisby-framed Minogue on my bedroom wall was immediately redundant: ousted i by the charms of an older woman.
I bought Def, Dumb and Blonde with my Christmas money. I hated it. This was not Stock Aitken Waterman. It was not music for children. It made me grow up. Flipping autoreverse on my walkman, I would listen to the single and then album closer “End of the Run” on side two. Sometimes I would accidentally let it run on and get as far as track five, “Maybe For Sure”, which meant I had to work back from “Brite Side” half way through Side B. You didn't waste battery life fast-forwarding tapes in 1989.
Slowly, I began to realise that there were other songs on the album that had hooks and melody, they were just buried under guitars and fuzz. From that moment on, nothing would be quite the same. It opened my eyes to a world of music that was mine, and the soundtrack to what would become my teenage years: Iggy Pop, The Cult, The Ramones etc. It also made me want to go to gigs… and nightclubs, to travel and, most of all, to visit New York. Maybe it was something about the opening line of the chorus “Here Comes The 21st Century….” It was 10 years away, but this song made me taste it.
For this list though I have chosen the lesser-known second single “Brite Side’. I don’t normally like ballads. And Debbie Harry doesn’t often do them, so this is an enigmatic sign-off to the Eighties, and, unlike the rest of the album, it was produced by Arthur Baker so is much more electronic.My luxury item that I would take to my Desert Island would probably be my Alfa Romeo. It’s very comfortable and has a great stereo. I also enjoy washing it, so that would give me something to do. I’ve always been fascinated by taking my car to islands and find it quite thrilling to be in the middle of the sea on a boat knowing that my car is with me. So I think that would be very satisfying, even if I couldn’t drive very far. For my book I would choose The AA Book of the Seaside from the 1970s, which gives an in-depth review of the British Coastline advising on the suitability of bathing, prevailing tides,the provision of mini-golf and location of bowls pavilions. It’s fantastically detailed and dated, with earnest sections on things like piers, funfairs, and coastal erosion. I could use it as a template, to map the desert island and to remember what it is to be an Englishman and not a savage."
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