THE 1970S ARE dubbed by some ‘the decade style forgot’. Certainly 1974 was a fallow year for music. Towering platform shoes and flares were everywhere, glam rock was at its zenith and Gary Glitter, Sweet and Mud dominated the charts, along with some more eccentric acts such as Showaddywaddy and the Wombles. At our Long Furlong Drive parties it was inevitable that some couples would do that curious non-dance that involved standing rooted to the spot and swaying their shoulders down towards one another in a rhythmic manner. I can’t remember what it was called, if it had a name, but it was closely associated with Gary Glitter (with whom nobody would want to be remotely associated today).
There was only one musical highlight for me but it was a significant one. I’d followed both Paul McCartney and John Lennon into their solo careers. McCartney’s first eponymous album, released in 1970, was impressive but seemed improvised and under-produced. Perhaps that was the idea: to strip everything back to basics. The second, Ram, was better. His first two albums with Wings, however, were a disappointment.
Then came Band on the Run, released in December 1973. I did not buy it until February the following year, taking the whole family to Maidenhead on a dreary Saturday for that specific purpose. Steve Coogan, in the guise of Alan Partridge, joked that ‘Wings were the band the Beatles could have been.’ Satire aside, Band on the Run is an LP the Beatles could have recorded, though they would have improved on it in the process. With only ten tracks, it was a little stingy by Beatles standards, but they were good tracks, every one of them. If a great album has to grab your attention from the start, none has done it better than Band on the Run, with the dynamic impact of its title track sustained by the next one, ‘Jet’.
Shortly after investing in McCartney’s latest project, I purchased a brand-new guitar (although the two events were not connected). My brother-in-law, Mike, who had begun to sell a few musical instruments at Henry’s Radios, the electrical shop he ran, told me he could arrange a 50 per cent discount on the price of my chosen model. I surprised myself by opting for an acoustic twelve-string. I blame a folk trio called the Rooftop Singers, who’d had a hit in the early sixties with ‘Walk Right In’. I’d always liked the sound of the twelve-string lead on that record, and in the expectation that I’d never be playing in a band again, I went acoustic rather than electric – a kind of reverse Dylan.
It was a lovely instrument, an Eko, made of Italian rosewood, but it was unsuitable for many of the songs I played and difficult to keep in tune. Foolishly, once this new guitar was in place, I gave my old Spanish guitar to a workmate whose son was keen to learn to play. All those memories, the sentimental value of a guitar on which I’d taught myself to play, its connection to my mother – gone with one rash decision. I regretted it immediately and thereafter, irrationally, somehow held it against the twelve-string, harbouring a baseless resentment towards my new guitar for having the temerity to usurp the one I’d treasured since childhood.
By now I’d passed my driving test (at the fifth attempt) and was on my third car, a sky-blue Ford Escort. It was only a year old but had already clocked up 20,000 miles when I bought it.
Judy and I had been forced to break our golden rule of never going into debt, but after two old Ford Anglias (the little cars with the curious inward sloping back window, described as ‘swept back’), we needed a reliable vehicle. I’d got the first Anglia for nothing, and the second only cost us £45. A decent car required a bigger investment. Our only option, we concluded, was to resort to the dreaded ‘never-never’.
Having a car ended our geographic isolation. We could get to see friends and relatives more easily and it enriched our cultural lives by enabling us to make the trip to London more often to see a show.
Our circle of friends in Slough consisted of couples like us with small children, most of them neighbours in Long Furlong Drive. The most socially adventurous were Dave and Pauline Henshaw, who lived on the other side of Slough. Dave was a postman at the tiny sorting office in Iver and played with me for the Post Office football team. Pauline had football connections as well: her cousin Joe Laidlaw played professionally for Middlesbrough. So whenever QPR were at home to Boro, I was able to get good tickets in the stands from Dave.
With Dave and Pauline we widened our horizons. There were outings to Windsor theatre, to Caesar’s Palace in Luton and the Shaftesbury theatre in the West End where, in the early 1970s, we’d seen the rock musical Hair. The famous nude scene at the end of Act 1 was so fleeting, and the stage so dark, that the age of Aquarius failed to dawn for us that evening. However, I just loved the soundtrack, particularly ‘Frank Mills’ (performed years later as a great rock song by the Lemonheads), ‘Let the Sunshine In’ and ‘Good Morning Starshine’.
In 1974 somebody (it might have been me) suggested a trip to the Duchess theatre in London to see Oh! Calcutta! While we liked to think of ourselves as broadminded representatives of our generation, none of us had ever seen a show that could boast two exclamation marks in its title.
Judy and I, Dave and Pauline, and Mick and Sandra from three doors down decided, with no cultural pretensions whatsoever, that we would go. We were just keen to be shocked. From the vantage point of today’s world, our prurience must seem almost quaint. But this was 1974 and Kenneth Tynan’s avant-garde revue offered not only nudity but profanity as well.
Dave hired a minibus for the night, and in the end there were eight of us on board after Pauline invited her elderly parents (well, we considered them elderly – they were probably only in their late fifties). Her mother even came equipped with opera glasses to get a better view. Strangely, I can remember nothing about the performance. Devoid of the great tunes that made Hair memorable, this show did shock, but that was all it did. It lacked even a trace of wit. We were almost unanimous in pronouncing it tedious and eminently forgettable, except for Pauline’s mum, who thought it was ‘interesting’.
After the show we went to a restaurant called Flanagan’s, one of a chain with an Edwardian music-hall theme. There was sawdust on the floor and a honky-tonk pianist playing in one corner. He was a big man in a canary yellow jacket whose wide, fat face was sweating profusely.
We were only too conscious of this because our table was right next to him in the packed restaurant. Every so often he’d take out the handkerchief hanging from the breast pocket of his garish jacket and use it to mop the sweat from his brow with one hand while continuing to play with the other. After a tune or two he’d burst into the restaurant’s signature song and his audience would dutifully sing along: ‘Flanagan, Flanagan, take me to the Isle of Man again …’ The words of this and other ditties were printed on the paper napkins.
Carried away by the atmosphere, the wine and my natural propensity to show off, in the middle of the chorus I lifted the pianist’s boater, which was lying open side up next to him on the long piano stool, and placed it on my head. Unbeknown to me, it was full of the coins he had collected as tips throughout a busy evening. As this small fortune scattered into the sawdust the pianist, still playing and smiling, leaned towards me and said softly: ‘If you don’t get down on all fours and retrieve every fucking penny, I’ll wring your fucking neck, you stupid little bastard.’
Profanity on the stage was one thing, but I felt this had a rather unnecessary personal edge to it.