So now fast forward. I’m on the train heading to Cardiff, Wales. It’s nearly thirty-one years since my last day at Fab magazine and it’s thirty-one years since I saw the people I’m on my way to visit. I’m looking forward to it.
The last time I heard from them was in October 1975, when I was in the intensive care unit, Princess Margaret Hospital, Swindon, after a car crash on the M4. They sent me a large bouquet of flowers and a telegram. In the years after my recovery, I moved on to other things, their star waned for a decade or two, and we lost touch.
I’m clutching a few tatty old photos of them and me, and of them taken by me, to jog their memories about the times we spent together. I expect they’ll need it.
And now I’m in the foyer of St David’s Hall, waiting for their PR, Jackie, to come and find me and take me backstage. It’s amazing – these boys have a huge crowd of fans arriving at the hall, chanting and singing. Not quite like the old days – then they were screaming teenagers, now a lot of them are middle-aged with a few extra pounds round their middles – just like the guys they’re shouting for.
Now I’m backstage. And here they are – Merrill, Wayne, Jay and ‘little’ Jimmy Osmond – the Osmond Brothers, hugging me and greeting me and we’re all laughing and of course we all remember each other and of course after a few minutes in each others’ company the wrinkles and those extra pounds and the grey hairs fade away and we’re young again.
I show them that old Book of Mormon given to me by their mother, Olive, during my US visit in 1973 and signed by all the family except Jimmy. He puts that right – he autographs it three decades late. And we have the obligatory backstage photo taken.
I could have chosen to seek out one of the many other icons of the ’70s who are still working and still popular today, to round off this tale. But I chose The Osmonds – just because they sum up my ’70s rather well.
I watch them perform, and when they strike up with ‘Crazy Horses’, a ghost of that old, pit-of-the-stomach feeling I used to have touches me. I remember what it was all about.
As Joni Mitchell once sang – give or take the odd word – you don’t always appreciate what you’ve got till it’s gone. We did pave paradise and put up a parking lot.
It wasn’t all good. It was by no means all good.
But it wasn’t half bad, was it?