IN MY TEENS I believed that a person passed irretrievably into old age when they could no longer name the record at the top of the hit parade. Those lost souls who were never able to name a Number 1 even in their youth were irrelevant to my theory. They represented a sad minority to be pitied rather than pilloried. Having never experienced the joy of pop music they were, in effect, born middle-aged.
As for the rest of us, those with a normal healthy interest in what was going up or coming down the charts, who turned on Top of the Pops religiously every Thursday evening and tuned into Radio 1 on Sunday afternoons to hear the week’s newly minted chart, it was inconceivable that any of us would ever not possess, or not want to possess, such crucial knowledge.
I now accept that this is a state of being that comes to us all eventually, like listening to Gardeners’ Question Time and wearing a cardigan. But I didn’t expect it to hit me as soon as it did. I would date the start of that loss of interest to 1973, though it wasn’t immediate. It came upon me gradually, insidiously, until, when somebody asked me one day if I liked the artist who had just reached Number 1, I looked blank, and even blanker when I was told who it was.
Of course, losing interest in the charts is not the same as losing interest in music. Now the charts are a diminished force it is is hard to convey a sense of the importance they once had. However, they were never an exact science. In the early 1960s individual music papers compiled their own, and the BBC would use an amalgamation of them all to produce their chart. This threw up the odd celebrated anomaly, such as Frank Ifield’s ‘Wayward Wind’ unaccountably keeping ‘Please Please Me’ by the Beatles from the top spot in 1963.
And as the decade wore on, and the record companies worked out which shops were being used to submit their sales figures, they employed all sorts of tricks to promote their own records, from doorstepping DJs to try to persuade them to add a single to their playlists, or sending junior staff round London with a fistful of fivers to buy up stock in the key shops, to outright bribery, tempting shop workers with T-shirts or badges, sometimes even a bottle of whisky, to add more copies to their sales figures.
By the beginning of the 1970s, albums were more popular, outselling singles by almost two to one. The singles charts still mattered, and young music fans still really cared about their favourite artist getting to Number 1, but a growing preference for LPs over singles was usually the reason why record-buyers who had waved goodbye to their teenage years started to drift away from a slavish devotion to the charts, as was the case with me.
The last 45rpm record I ever bought was ‘Rocket Man’ by Elton John in 1972, which I decided was needed to add a more contemporary feel to our record collection for a party. The young families living in our corner of Long Furlong Drive would take turns to host the others every four months or so and our turn had come round. Ten singles stacked on the record-player was still the most common way for party music to be provided. The more expensive LPs were jealously guarded and rarely allowed out of their sleeves at these gatherings. Getting a splash of Watney’s Party Seven on one’s copy of Tubular Bells could ruin the evening. Singles were more robust and less valued. Nobody worried if they were blemished by beer stains or discoloured by the odd dash of Martini.
By 1973 I knew what the Top 10 albums were but was less interested in which single was Number 1. For good or ill, I was maturing into advanced adulthood, but there was one last youthful musical crush to get out of my system before I attained it. As a small boy I’d revered Lonnie Donegan; in my teens I wanted to be Paul McCartney. Now, in my twenties, I’d become a full-blown Bowie freak.
After being attracted in 1969 to ‘Space Oddity’, in 1971 I’d bought the Hunky Dory album, growing my hair to match the way Bowie wore his on the sleeve and raving about ‘Changes’ and ‘Life on Mars’. The following year Bowie was performing as his androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust and by 1973, when his sixth album was released, Ziggy had developed into Aladdin Sane. The record cover depicted Bowie sporting shorter, spikier hair and the face markings that were quickly copied by his followers.
I remember a teenage postman in Slough coming on duty with that Aladdin Sane lightning bolt painted across his face and immediately being sent home to wash it off. I wasn’t yet a union rep, but if I had been I’d have made a staunch defence of a man’s right to paint his face. There again, I suppose I must concede that answering the postman’s knock early in the morning to find a guy with an orange and blue lightning flash zigzagging down his face asking for a signature might have been a disconcerting experience for our customers.
Every Friday lunchtime five or six of us Burnham postmen would gather at the Lynchpin pub on the edge of the Britwell estate for a pint or two. Friday was pay day, and our wages, signed for that morning, still protruded in their entirety from the small brown paper envelopes in which they had been received.
There was a jukebox in the Lynchpin which contained Bowie’s ‘Starman’ and its ‘B’ side, ‘Suffragette City’, from his Ziggy Stardust period. I spent many a shilling piece (as we still called the new 5p coins) listening to both sides during our sojourns in the pub. I would even have my older workmates joining in the ‘Wham bam, thank you ma’am’ climax of ‘Suffragette City’ by the end of the session.
‘Starman’ carved a niche for itself in pop history for the way Bowie performed the song on Top of the Pops in 1972. In those innocent days his androgynous appearance, professed bisexuality and cavorting with Mick Ronson, the extravagantly talented lead guitarist of his band, the Spiders From Mars, were enough to create a huge scandal. Some of the guys at work swore blind they’d seen the two men kiss. With home videorecorders not generally available, let alone remotely within the means of the average consumer, until well into the 1980s, there was no such thing as a replay. If you missed a moment on television, you missed it, and even when you saw it, you had your own perception, and your own memory, of what you’d seen. Such was the autosuggestive power of repetition that it wasn’t long before I became convinced myself that the myth about the kiss was true.
Fanning the dying embers of my youthful desire to be a non-conformist, the ‘Starman’ controversy only increased my admiration for Bowie. I so wanted to display my allegiance by getting Judy to use her considerable artistic skills to paint me into character as Aladdin Sane. But I was married with three children. Responsibility held me down like a pin through a mounted butterfly. My face remained unpainted.
I made a big decision in 1973. I suppose I had come to terms with reality. I was probably never going to play in a group again, let alone worry the pop charts. It was time to concentrate on moving forward in the life I was living, not the one I might have lived; time to seek promotion. The route up through the Post Office ranks was pre-set and could not be altered or accelerated. In the entire nineteen years I spent as a postman, no manager at any level ever encouraged me to go for promotion. The process of advancement was self-regulated and governed by seniority. It was therefore length of service, not merit, that would determine whether and when I could take the first step of becoming a postman higher grade (PHG), as Sham had done in north London.
This arbitrary system was at least even-handed. Postal workers from ethnic minorities, like Sham, moved up through the ranks as quickly as everyone else once they had a few years’ service under their belts. They didn’t suffer the same discrimination in the Post Office, in this respect, at least, that they would have encountered in some other occupations.
Having acquired sufficient seniority, I went for my fortnight’s training to be a PHG (the grade that dealt with minor clerical duties and specialised sorting) and then joined an ‘acting list’, which did not mean becoming a thespian, just that my name would be on the list of postmen who had completed training and were available to gain experience by covering absences while waiting for a PHG vacancy to arise. Each rung on the ladder up towards the heady ranks of the postal executives (salaried senior managers) had to be taken in this way. If I started climbing now, I could reach the highest rung in ten years’ time.
It was a difficult decision for me to make because I so enjoyed the job I was doing already. As a postman, I was working outdoors, largely unsupervised; as a PHG I would be indoors. But a PHG’s wages were 15 per cent higher than a postman’s and I needed both to earn more money and to consider the future. I didn’t want to be working seventy-hour weeks into my dotage. I didn’t much fancy becoming a manager but the fact was, if I didn’t first apply for a PHG position, I would never have the choice. None of the stages could be leapfrogged.
So it was that by December I was working as an ‘acting PHG’ on the Outward Section of Slough sorting office, which handled mail posted in Slough for delivery elsewhere. Every Christmas the Post Office changed utterly. From late November the entire operation switched to ‘Christmas Pressure’ mode in preparation for the enormous influx of cards and parcels that would overwhelm the system in the run-up to the festive season.
Into our ranks marched an army of Christmas casuals, most of them students looking to earn extra money in the vacation. There was also a large contingent of wives and girlfriends of our predominantly male workforce, plus retired ex-employees tempted back by the prospect of supplementing their pensions.
Regular staff in Slough had their attendances altered to a compulsory twelve-hour daily shift, with Sunday included as a normal working day. Additional sorting frames were constructed and an extra fleet of vehicles hired. The influx of so many students brought down the average age of the workforce by at least a generation and the arrival of so many women made for a more diverse and colourful workplace.
Christmas was a jolly time to be a postman, though it must be said that the jovial atmosphere was due at least in part to the chaos that reigned during those weeks. The supervisors had no idea where the regular staff were, let alone where they were supposed to be. Space on the huge sorting-office floor was suddenly at a premium, the noise and bustle intensified and, in the most revolutionary departure from normality, radios blared out music day and night.
In 1973, down on the Outward Section, every one of the millions of letters we processed had to be sorted by hand. Alphanumeric postcodes were yet to be applied to every address in the UK so automated sorting was still a few years away.
My job that Christmas was to stack the sorting frames with letters. Despite my ‘higher grade’ and my pay rise I was employed basically as a manual labourer, lifting trays of ‘faced’ mail (letters that had been arranged the same way up, with the stamp in the top-right corner) and lugging them to the sorting frames, where I’d lay them out in front of the sorters, crammed together like battery hens waiting to be fed.
There was much banter, some interesting conversation and even a bit of mild flirting. I remember one stunningly attractive woman who worked as what was then known as a ground hostess, taking care of passengers before they boarded their flights, at Heathrow airport, just off the next junction down the M4. Heathrow was so close that we liked to refer to it as Slough airport. Don’t ask me why this woman spent a fortnight in December as a Post Office casual. It’s possible the pay wasn’t so good at Heathrow and she had to moonlight, but she didn’t seem to be short of a bob or two.
One day I asked her about the swanky vintage car I’d seen her drive into the staff car park. She told me it was an Austin. ‘Ah, that would be an Austin Tatious,’ I quipped, flashing my most winning smile. ‘No,’ she replied impassively. ‘It’s an A40 Sports.’ I moved on quickly.
My partner on this cushy Christmas duty was one of the most senior PHGs, ‘Buck’ Butler, whose nickname derived from his love of cowboy films. Nobody knew his real first name. Buck’s regular job was to oversee the telegram boys, but from 6pm, when the Telegram Office closed, he joined me to lend a hand through the busiest period of the day as the evening collections came in.
After the initial surge had been dealt with, Buck saw no point in us tripping over one another and insisted I go for an extended dinner break. I think I was entitled to thirty minutes, but with Buck’s active connivance this could be stretched to ninety.
Every evening I’d nip across to the Rose and Crown in Slough High Street, otherwise known as the Postman’s Retreat. The little snug at the back was full of postal workers – night staff on the way in, fortifying themselves before their shifts, and day staff unwinding with a swift pint before heading home.
In normal circumstances I would have worried about the overseer, the manager in ultimate control of the whole sorting office and everybody in it. But he was in the Rose and Crown as well. In fact, I distinctly remember him offering to buy me a drink one evening. It would have been rude not to accept.
The song that dominated the whole of that Christmas Pressure period, the pubs, the sorting office, everywhere, was ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ by Slade. It rang around the Outward and Inward sorting frames and had the regulars, the casuals, the students and old-timers like Buck singing along. By now many people will be heartily sick of this raucous anthem as it eats into its fifth decade of Christmas ubiquity. But back then it was fresh, full of energy and ebullience, and I was twenty-three years of age with so much to look forward to.
On Christmas Eve even more postmen than usual were packed into the Rose and Crown at lunchtime. The ‘Pressure’ was over and we had two days’ holiday ahead of us. A constant stream of 5p pieces went into the jukebox and ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ was played again and again, punctuated occasionally by Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’.
There is one of those little video clips of memory from that Christmas Eve in the Rose and Crown that replays in my mind with great clarity. Along with my comrades, I am lifting my pint glass joyously towards the ceiling at Noddy Holder’s exhortation to look to the future which, for me that year, really had ‘only just begun’.
Everybody knew which record was Number 1 in the charts that Christmas.