"Deep within the Heart of Nowhere", circa 1978, there was a certain scruffy Irishman that somehow spoke to me.
I was still in full discovery mode, you know the sort that has you trying to unscramble the lyrical belt from the St. Cleve Chronicle....the twists of Jethro Tull's fine flutist himself, magical mister Mephistopheles ( if ever there was a cat so clever) his own self, Ian Anderson .I will understand then,as is so appropriately stated in the first few lines of the epic "Thick as a Brick" side one..." I really don't mind if you sit this one out" you see how quickly it gets to me even today, usually just buzzing around the inside of my cranium, now I just want to type the titles of Jethro Tull songs all day long, I mean "Jeffrey goes to Leicester Square" "Skating away on the thin ice of the new day" or the veritable "Too
old to Rock n roll Too young to die" how could you not...
Unsurprisingly I was as fascinated back when with music and Lyrics as I am today, even in the late 60's and early 70's the more "words" the better.
Can you relate to the "...Real imperial aerosol kid" of "Lamb lies Down on Broadway" infamy.... or wonder if the "Maples were right about the Oaks" in what on the face of it is a simple tune by Rush from their "Hemispheres" album, oh lets not go down the oppression path...I know there are many other examples and many that followed later in my life , one that took me on a trek, on a cold December day in 1987, driving the winding roads of the Utopian British countryside, wearing thin through sideways rain as I stared at the misshapen images through raindrops on the windshield, the shops on Princess Street decked out in their blurred seasonal finest as I arrived for a two night stand with "Marillion" at The Edinburgh Playhouse.
Sometimes moments and memories are best served on the home turf of a Band, and that little extra is given, absolutely the case as this "root-in too-tin cowboy", was grateful for those "lonely stretches of headlights" as I searched as a "wide boy" to "wear my own White Feather", lost voice and ears ringing, I wondered if I had hit the pinnacle in the "heart of Lothian" and my "Misplaced Childhood" was over...
So there I was in 1978 surrounded by the latest sounds of this tremendous era of rebellion and angst
Most certainly the unrequited feeling of being "in love with the girl on the Manchester Virgin Mega-store checkout desk"
The Freshies nailed it as they sang the lines, I mean c'mon there was no better promotion to being hip than having a Virgin bag hanging at your side crossing Market street to the Arndale Center on a Saturday afternoon in Manchester town center...
"She takes money She gives change
She sells records
And that's special"
(take a listen and a wander down memory lane, I can recite this song word for word even today, and it really does take me back to those halcyon days)
Yeah, there was Blondie, Elvis Costello, Buzzcocks, The Damned or XTC, but it was that scruffy Irishman that had me. Understandably looking back you realize these guys couldn't sing they just seamed to shout down the microphone and that bothered some folks...
But "Joeys on the street again" ...
" Look at the brick wall gravestone, where some kid has sprayed nobody could be bothered to rule here OK"
I always thought that I wanted to be Joey and get out of town. The song spoke of a time where it was hard to leave your blue collar surroundings, its hard to grab a hold of your self before sinking into the abyss of factory labor or unemployment, and what that looked like when you did leave, I will leave one day and folks will say I wonder what hes up to " someone said they had seen him, they were nearly always wrong, no one knew how much he had, where he'd gone or for how long".
I thought of this moment some 15 to 20 years later, when I heard I was missed at a college reunion, the only one not there as I was "In America or something" a romantic notion I dare say.
As their second album hit the charts "it was a Rat Trap Billy" and I had been caught, fortunate enough to see the "Boomtown Rats" play numerous times at Manchester Apollo or Dominion Theater London or the Empire in Liverpool, even at the Shobox in Seattle. There was one time along with a cluster of my closest chums, we had taken the very familiar route to Ardwick Green where we would see them on "The Fine Art of Surfacing Tour" The X'sand O's of the stage lights, "Someones looking at You" or "Diamond Smiles", but it was here for the first time, live, I heard the haunting lyrics about a girl in the USA who shot her school class mates because she "Didn't like Mondays"Maybe a tear did roll down the face that evening, does that make me uncool... gee I hope so
It was merely 6 or so years later as I stool with 72 thousand of my closest friends that those lyrics again poignantly hit the sky with a clenched fist "...and the lesson today is how to die"
13th July 1985 was Live Aid, Bob Geldof's Opus and he deserved the roar, the children of Africa deserved that roar, the victims of Barbra Spencer's shooting deserved that roar, and if I am being totally honest, even as I screamed aloud myself being in attendance, yeah maybe I deserved a bit of that roar...
On another equally grey British weekday, having landed at Piccadilly Station in Manchester, I trudged the very familiar fifteen minute walk to Ardwick Green once more. Times were changing, and the feeling crept over me that things would never be the same again, hunched over from the rain as I walked those final steps to the Apollo, I side stepped into the stale brick faced Aspley Cottage Pub for refreshment, fate plays tricks on me sometimes and it sure has its quirks, but sitting at the bar, unkempt, un-assuming and seemingly happy for that moment, in that instant every memory hitting my synapses at the same time, I couldn't gush, it wasn't that kind of moment, I wanted, no I needed to play it cool......thirty seconds to last a lifetime.
So as Vinyl makes its come back, I smile at times gone by, and think I must dig out that Autographed album..
#bennysantiniproductions #grahamsataconcertagain
I got soul but im not a soldier
