Would You Like To Ride My Paper Plane? A History Part 5

Ah, the Mighty Quo! As I mentioned before, it was pretty much de rigeur during the mid-seventies, and probably beyond that, for teenage boys to get hooked into the wonderful world of rock by the "heads down, no nonsense, mindless boogie" that characterised the sound of Status Quo, and still does, bless them. Those who grumble that they only play three chords (per song, in fairness - they do play in different keys) are missing the point. Indeed, if you need the point explaining I am tempted to wonder what you're doing reading a music blog. The Quo sound is profoundly unsophisticated, but therein lies the charm of unpretentious simplicity which runs through the most enduring rock (and roll, if you must) music, from the fifties onwards.

To my constant irritation, I never learned to play even the crudest guitar chord, but you don't need Grade 8 anything to hear that Status Quo use minimal technical prowess to move their listeners, spine first, into a happier state. The chugging boogie music, broken by occasional, (sometimes mis-judged) ballads contains the same ingredients as 50's R'N'R through to Punk, much of which is just Quo at 78 r.p.m.

I brought myself up for a while on the three albums Piledriver, Hello & Quo, plus many of the subsequent singles. I also owned a cassette of "Golden Hour of Status Quo", a compilation of their sixties material like "Pictures of Matchstick Men" and "Ice In The Sun", brilliantly parodied in the Spinal Tap movie.

Later on, like many, I "grew out of " Status Quo. Once you had the three albums and as long as they released the best tracks from later ones as singles, there seemed little point in following them closely and I was being seduced by the more complicated sound of Progressive Rock and then the ferocity of Punk. Furthermore, the first of several live albums confirmed the suspicion that a Quo gig would be little different to listening to the studio recordings at high volume. So I didn't get to see them until they opened the Live Aid concert at Wembley in July 1985. They played a cover version (Rockin' All Over The World), which was appropriate for the occasion but not one of my favourites. Later, though, just a few chords of Caroline had me transported back from being 25 years old to 14 in an instant and I suppose that illustrates one reason for my addiction to music. As a time-machine it's a lot more reliable than a TARDIS, and while the memories it evokes may not always be good, they can be rendered more accurate in an instant by the application of an appropriate soundtrack than by simply "trying to remember".

In their four decades plus, the group have seen several line-up changes, occasional acrimony, substance abuse issues, in fact all the ingredients of a "normal" career band. These are all detailed extensively elsewhere. They still release new albums and the main protagonists (Francis Rossi & Rick Parfitt) are usually entertaining chat-show participants. Several years ago they took offence at being deemed too old for BBC Radio 1. Radio 1's loss, I'd say. They tour annually and I did see their set at Glastonbury festival in 2009 from the front row. I doubt it was very different to a performance recorded thirty years earlier. Still, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Take A Chance With Me - A History Part 4

Some of my contemporaries at secondary school were a lot more savvy about music than me, but once I got hooked on Top Of The Pops late in 1972 I was at least able to join the conversations, even if I was largely ignorant of what I was talking about. Plus ca change!

12-13 year olds, even those from relatively affluent background like those you'd have found at The King's School Chester then (more so now - it became independent soon after I left), didn't have a lot of disposable income to spend on records, so the significance of radio and its playlist restrictions, T.V. and its tiny coverage by today's standards was huge. Some boys had older siblings who did have significant record collections, though, and older boys would carry round their L.P.s in transparent covers that displayed their allegiances as clearly as football scarves. Consequently I was aware of the popularity of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer long before I ever heard any of their work. It was the golden age of the gate-fold sleeve too, so the few boys who pursued art to "A" level at a school where drier subjects were the norm paid regular homage to album cover artists, most notably Roger Dean (he of Yes, Uriah Heep and Greenslade adornments to name a few). Their work was given prominence on the art room wall and while I was and remain artistically inept, art was one of the lessons I'd look forward to, not least to see what the "big boys" had been up to.

I bought a single -  "Sylvia" by Dutch band Focus - in early 1973 and that May I bought their double album "Focus 3" with some birthday money. I was hugely disappointed by it. Expecting similar work to "Sylvia" and their other chart single "Hocus Pocus" from the previous "Moving Waves" L.P. i.e. tuneful upbeat instrumentals, what I got was about 75% tedious jazz-rock noodling of  very dubious merit and only a handful of proper tunes, two of which I already had on my single. I should have tried to return the album the next day. It wasn't cheap and I barely listened to most of it more than twice. I didn't. This was mostly because I didn't think they'd take it back (they probably would have, I now realise) and at thirteen I lacked the confidence to argue my case face to face with some dragon at W.H.Smiths. So, the first lesson is: if you don't know what you're buying, be prepared for disappointment. This fits my adopted global philosphy that a pessimist will enjoy only positive surprises while the optimist bounces from let-down to let-down.

Second lesson, though, was: if you have lemons, make lemonade. Focus 3, whilst something of a disaster, was also a disaster which not everybody (indeed hardly anyone), had heard. Given the perpetual state of financial embarrassment enjoyed then as now by teenagers, the convention at school was to lend your album to someone who would lend one of theirs in exchange.If you enjoyed the loan copy it would usually fit onto one side of a C90 cassette and thus by lending an album to half a dozen people your record money "bought" seven, albeit six of them illicit. So after the 1973 summer holidays Focus 3 set off on a circulation that brought in samplings of  Status Quo, Slade, King Crimson and Emerson Lake and Palmer for my own collection.

Title for this entry Track 7 from "Avalon" by Roxy Music 1982. Not Abba - that's Take A Chance On Me!

Dedicated Follower Of Fashion? A History Part 3

The Beatles were already on the brink of going their separate ways by the time I caught up with them. My parents would grudgingly allow that they (especially that nice Paul McCartney) could write some decent tunes, but they assured me that ever since Brian Epstein's demise they had been corrupted by dark forces (i.e. drugs) and headed in the direction of the Rolling Stones, who my mother considered "dirty". As in unwashed, I think, but my father tutted at the cover of "Sticky Fingers" so perhaps it went deeper than that.
Point is, The Beatles, and pre-Pepper Beatles at that, were hardly the epitome of cool or where it was at, come 1971. I listened to the radio a bit. Ed "Stewpot" Stewart on Junior Choice at the weekends for the most part, if I'm honest. I watched the Saturday night variety shows hosted by Cilla, Lulu, Rolf et al, who would occasionally present credible musicians alongside the sanitised banality of The Young Generation, a dance troupe who proved how "down with the kids" the Beeb really was. But really I was clueless about what else there was beyond the Fab Four and I think I stayed quite naive until the summer of 1972.

During the summer holidays at the end of my first year of senior school I caught viral pneumonia. We were on a family trip to London when I developed a bad enough fever to experience hallucinations. Back then people smoked on tube trains, in restaurants, indeed virtually everywhere, so a respiratory condition was particularly challenging. By the time I was tucked up at home in Cheshire my lungs were becoming seriously gunked up and the G.P. took some persuading (on his visit to our home - another blast from the past) not to send me to hospital. Instead, along with antibiotics, I had to lie on my tummy three times a day while my mother rubbed and knocked my back so that I could cough out the accumulated unpleasantness. Probably the sickest I've ever been, and for a little while. Duly enfeebled, I started listening to Wonderful Radio One, the adjective being theirs, not mine. I realise now that the procession of disc jockeys, some long gone but some -Tony Blackburn & JohnnieWalker - still going, were seriously restricted in what they could play by the station playlist, but at the time I was quite underwhelmed by the constant repetition of tunes, some of which I found irritating on first listening. Lynsey de Paul's "Sugar Me" being a case in point!

Still, it wasn't all that grim! Hawkwind's only chart hit, "Silver Machine" went quite well with my drugged up state, and Alice Cooper's "School's Out" held sway throughout August. I developed a deep loathing of "Sylvia's Mother" by Dr Hook & The Medicine Show, while the novelty of Hot Butter's synth instrumental "Popcorn" soon wore off. The less said about Donny Osmond's relationship with his puppy, the better.

The best part of a month listening to chart radio in 1972, for all its irritations, did broaden my musical horizons and began to drag me into the decade in question. I have never lost my fondness for The Beatles, although I would now choose Abbey Road or the white album over A Hard Day's Night, but from the summer of 1972 I started to notice what was happening NOW, at least as far as I had access to it. A major contributing factor to my desertion of the church choir of which I had been a mostly enthusiastic member for four years was that choir practice was scheduled on Thursday evenings and clashed with Top Of The Pops. As teenagerdom approached it became increasingly obvious that The Devil Does, indeed, Have All The Best Tunes

A Hard Day's Night - A History Part 2

I told Barnaby, who sat next to me at school, that I'd seen The Beatles film "A Hard Day's Night" on television over the Xmas holidays.I thought it was funny (it is) but mostly I'd loved the music which even in 1970 was able to give me a nostalgic frisson for bygone days. My parents were old before their time, but I was ten wishing I could be four again! I remembered the singles, Can't Buy Me Love and A Hard Day's Night from when I was four, I suppose, and some of the other tunes played in the film pre-date that.

Anyway, Barnaby let slip that his big sister Nancy had the soundtrack album (actually, side 2 contains six songs omitted from the movie). So I pestered until he (presumably) smuggled it out of the house for me to listen to and record, via microphone, onto a cassette. File sharing, you'd call it today. Lo-fi, but it worked as long as nobody was in the room. Somehow Nancy discovered what had happened and demanded its immediate return, but not before my bootleg copy was completed (minus "I'll Cry Instead" - my least favourite track - so it made it one side of a C60).

Over the next few months I must have worn that tape thin. It was the only pop music recording I had, albeit six years out of date already, and I played it over and over again. With hindsight, it is far from The Beatles' best effort, but it is pretty much instantly accessible and when I see celebrity interviews in which the subject gives their dewy-eyed recollection of their first encounter with Elvis, Little Richard or whoever, I think back to A Hard Day's Night.

Later on that year the BBC screened "Help!". At home I begged to be allowed to sit up past bedtime to watch it. This was not an infrequent campaigning issue as my parents normally enforced bedtime rigidly and earlier than most of my friends seemed to experience. Somehow, though, a pester period that ran from the publication of the relevant issue of the Radio Times until the film was shown proved to be just long enough to wear them down. My father grumbled intermittently about what a load of rubbish it was, but otherwise I got to see it all the way through and decided that my next record purchase would be "Help!". I had to wait until Xmas, but then, £2.15 clutched in my sweaty paw, I made my way to Rushworth and Dreaper's Chester branch and sought out the disc of vinyl I'd craved, and at that point an addiction was born...

From The Beginning - A History Part 1

It has been a rite of passage for most teenagers since the Second World War to "get into" music, and I was no different. Yet, while for some music is little more than a fashion accessory that helps brand them in the same way as a hairstyle or the cut of their jeans, for a significant minority, the interest becomes a more permanent and pervasive obsession, and I would have to place myself in that group.

My parents didn't "get" pop music for the most part, nor its big brother rock. They owned a nice teak radiogram (a sixties precursor of the music centre), whose tiny integrated speakers made it impossible to generate a genuine stereo effect. Most of their records, however, pre-dated their marriage in 1959, and additions to the collection were rare and often inexplicable. No Beatles albums until one of the British Army's military bands produced an L.P. of cover versions. An album of Joan Baez "because she had a nice voice", which barely left its sleeve. Soundtracks to "Gigi" and "High Society". A bit of Glenn Miller, and some ten-inch mambo records which might be of some interest to a collector now, had they not been binned years ago. Chris Barber because my father played trombone at school. And a selection of Classical music so conservative I ignored the whole genre until I was twenty. There was also a Readers Digest box-set of abridged Shakespeare tragedies (Hamlet in 50 minutes-ish), a BBC dramatisation of A Christmas Carol and a selection of Bob Newhart monologues (which I now own on CD).

Nostalgia makes me miss one album that used to be brought out for each of my first eight Christmases or so. It was Carols played by Swiss/German/Austrian? musical boxes in that unique twinkly timbre. I have searched the past few years in the run up to Xmas for something similar on Amazon etc, but to no avail as yet. And, as nostalgia ain't what it used to be, I expect I'd be disappointed if I did manage to hear it again.

Although they didn't care for it, pop music was nevertheless heard in the house, at least early in the day, as The Light Programme, which became Radio 2, provided the background to my mother's chores, or more accurately, the efforts of The Lady What Did, of whom there were a succession. The first "cleaning lady" I remember was Joyce who, knowing that I liked it, bought me Helmut Zacharias' "Tokyo Melody" (the BBC theme for the Tokyo Olympics) on vinyl 45 (what else?) for Christmas 1964. My first record and one I managed to replace a couple of years ago via eBay. It went missing (I believe) courtesy of one of my school contemporaries when I was growing up in Cheshire. That the replacement turned up in nearby North Wales suggested it might be the original seeking out its rightful owner, but just a coincidence I suppose.

Birthdays and especially Christmas saw a slow drip of additions to my collection in the form of the "humorous" novelty records of the time: Two Little Boys by Rolf Harris and so on. The first one I bought (with a Xmas record token) was The Scaffold's Lily The Pink. My first twelve-inch investment was a Walt Disney narration (with all the songs) of  Lady And The Tramp, which I had somehow managed to miss at the cinema, followed by a West End recording of  Lionel Bart's "Oliver!"in mono, because the stereo film soundtrack was a lot more expensive.

Then in 1970 the lad I sat next to at school lent me his big sister's copy of The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" L.P., (without her knowledge) and that, a bit belatedly, was that...

Title to this entry courtesy of track 4 on Emerson Lake & Palmer's 1972 album "Trilogy".

Landing, itself, was nothing...

This is a new attempt at blogging. It's not so much intended to replace my previous effort as to provide a bit of focus, namely upon my obsession with music, which had become the main subject of Lost In Barnwood (http://lostinbarnwood.blogspot.co.uk) since I started what I had hoped would be an online diary.My occasional socio-political rants will still crop up there if I can be bothered, but I'm hoping that by concentrating on a subject that evolves daily I might persuade myself to make a bit more of a "go" of it, i.e. manage more than posting every few months! The infamous road being paved with good intentions, I'm not sure that will work, but let's see shall we?

The name "Air Sculpture" refers to Frank Zappa's term for music as a planned re-organisation of air molecules, while this entry owes its title to a line from "The Awakening", one of the spoken narrations included in Hawkwind's "Space Ritual". So I get Frank Zappa and Hawkwind (both of whom will probably re-appear 'ere long), in my first post. Got to be good...