I STILL HAVE the first compact audio cassette (CAC) I ever bought. It’s nothing to look at. A squat, stunted little thing that could never match for style or beauty the product it was designed to replace.
In the 1980s the desire to enjoy music any time, anywhere led to the demise of vinyl and the satisfyingly substantial LPs that were cherished for more than the music they contained. The problem was that they didn’t fit into a Sony Walkman or a combination car radio and cassette-player.
It would be a few years before I had a car that had a built-in cassette-player, but in 1982 we did update our domestic music-listening arrangements, replacing Judy’s old black English Electric record-player with a ‘Hifi Stereo Sound System’ that had two box speakers, a record turntable and a cassette device with settings for ‘play’ and ‘record’. The days of the reel-to-reel tape-recorder were over. Tapes were now reduced in size, sealed within a plastic case barely longer than a packet of cigarettes, and considerably thinner. There were blank ones for recording on and others, with album cover artwork reprinted on a bit of cardboard slotted into the case, masquerading as records.
Having acquired the sound system, I went out and bought that first CAC: Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain. I wish I could play it now. There is a connection between the music and the object on which it is stored. Just as those shellac 78s, and the Bachelors’ album bought for Lily which she didn’t live to hear, had a significance of their own, so can the humble cassette. The physical shape and feel of it, the ritual of taking it out of its plastic case and snapping it into the cassette-player, peering myopically at the tiny type of the ‘sleeve notes’ reduced to fit the small format, are all somehow bound up with the love of the music it holds, the memories associated with the early enjoyment of listening to it and, in the case of my copy of The Nylon Curtain, the novelty of this new mode of playing it. But the age of the cassette tape has, in its turn, passed and while it’s still possible to buy the necessary equipment, like double-breasted suits in the 1970s, it is extremely difficult to find.
The opening track of The Nylon Curtain is a belter. ‘Allentown’ was as profound a comment on the decline of America’s rust belt as anything Bruce Springsteen ever wrote. And ‘Goodnight Saigon’ is an eloquent statement on US involvement in Vietnam. Yet Billy Joel has never been considered cool enough to be an authentic social commentator. Such are the mysteries of public perception.
We chose our hi-fi sound system from a Brian Mills catalogue, for which one of our neighbours was an emissary. The big catalogue companies had agents across the council estates of Britain who formed an almost entirely female amateur sales force. They received a modest commission on items purchased and relied on friends and neighbours to boost their earnings. It was only through the ‘keepers of the catalogue’ that orders could be placed. The flimsy pink form on which they were recorded would be dispatched and the item delivered to your door a few weeks later, if not by the ‘next-day delivery’ we expect now, at least within a month. Usually.
The contraption was assembled on our sideboard down at the dining-room end of the through lounge and we thought it was one of the most exciting cultural developments of our married life. It came with an audio jack into which you could plug a microphone or headphones, and later in the year I invested in a set of headphones, which revolutionised the whole business of listening to records in a small council house with thin walls and three kids.
Our house was semi-detached by virtue of its position at the end of the terrace. We got on well with our friendly neighbours but the wall we shared wasn’t built to be soundproof and they had small children too, so we were constantly concerned about disturbing each other’s tranquillity. When we played records the volume had to be restrained. But the most immediate problem wasn’t the comfort of the neighbours. In a long living room with a telly at one end and a ‘Hifi Stereo Sound System’ at the other, there was a constant struggle between whether to watch or listen. The telly usually won.
As the children had small bedrooms (Judy and I had moved into the back bedroom when Jamie was little, enabling us to divide the larger front bedroom into two for the kids), and the house had no central heating, everyone tended to congregate in that long room with its Rayburn fireplace and large dining table upon which games could be played and homework completed.
So buying those headphones was as good as building on another room. Now any one of us could opt out of whatever else was going on, don the headphones, turn the volume up as high as we liked and escape into our personal choice of music.
It wasn’t a shared experience, but there again, it rarely had been before. And if we wanted to sit down and listen to a record together, we still could. More often than not my desire to play a record had been trumped by the kids’ desire to watch Fame, Dallas or Blake’s Seven.
I no longer needed the motivation of the tobacco bank. I remained a non-smoking record collector, and I collected a lot of them in 1982: English Settlement by XTC, Night and Day by Joe Jackson, Avalon by Roxy Music, 1999 by Prince, Love Over Gold by Dire Straits. I bought records by the well-known (the Jam, Tom Petty, Squeeze) and the more obscure (the Cocteau Twins, Todd Rundgren and an American artist by the name of Marshall Crenshaw, whose eponymous debut album was bursting with great pop songs but who never made the big time).
I suppose the acknowledged album of the year has to have been Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which is the biggest-selling record of all time, or so I am told. But it didn’t thrill me, and I am not among the many millions who have bought it, despite some mild pressure from Natalie, who was by now sixteen and considered me, at twice her age, to be hopelessly out of touch with youth culture.
My album of the year, and one of the best in rock history as far as I am concerned (irrespective of how many it has sold) was Imperial Bedroom by Elvis Costello. Listening to it through those headphones was an exquisite experience. There were elements of tracks such as ‘The Long Honeymoon’, ‘Pidgin English’ and ‘You Little Fool’ that would have been indiscernible without them.
Imperial Bedroom is one of the many albums that I now own in triplicate. First I bought the LP, then I got it on cassette so that I could play it in the car (a listening experience almost as good as the headphones for purity of sound) and finally, in the early 1990s, I acquired the compact disc. Now, despite ever more sophisticated methods of listening to music being developed, it is my original vinyl version that is coveted. One thing is for sure: the compact audio cassette will not be making a comeback. But I have kept mine. They are small chunks of musical history and they take up little space in proportion to all the memories they hold. Like old foreign coins, they will always be around in a corner of a drawer somewhere in whatever house I am living in.
I went to my first Labour party conference in 1982, having been elected as a UCW delegate. Following Labour’s defeat in 1979 the party had fallen into a frenzy of infighting and self-loathing, with the main thrust of the hostility being directed against previous Labour governments. This ‘culture of betrayal’ was driven by a sect whose members had always despised Labour and the democratic socialism it represented. Now this outfit, the Revolutionary Socialist League, was infiltrating our ranks through its newspaper, Militant.
The local party in Slough wasn’t as factionalised as those in many other constituencies but there were enough militants there to turn our meetings into endurance tests. Obsessed with the rules and standing orders, they imposed their stern and humourless presence to such an extent that party events became increasingly disorderly and unpleasant.
The troublemakers were predominantly middle-class men in their thirties whose declared aim was greater membership involvement. In reality this meant ensuring that their small clique could run the show. They were like religious zealots demanding that anybody who rejected the true faith be denounced as traitors. Those Labour party members who had a life to lead and no time to waste in long, unproductive, bad-tempered meetings soon stopped attending, leaving the clique in greater control.
These people may have made inroads in local constituency parties, but they had yet to capture the castle. That the Labour leadership was still beyond their reach didn’t prevent the 1982 conference in Blackpool being a rancorous affair. Every point of procedure was contested, with a line of shouty people queuing to take the rostrum and deliver little two-minute harangues on obscure procedural matters.
Our delegation of postmen and telephonists, dressed smartly, as we believed we should be when representing our members, felt out of place in a conference hall where half the delegates were in denim or dungarees covered in badges bearing uncompromising slogans proselytising the causes they’d come to advance.
In the wider political landscape, the Falklands War had begun in April, as the Tories struggled in the opinion polls, and ended in June with Mrs Thatcher riding the wave of patriotic pride generated by a military victory over the Argentinians, who had tried to invade a British Crown colony. And a third force had entered British politics after four prominent Labour MPs left the party to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which had quickly formed an alliance with the Liberals.
So far had the stock of my divided party fallen in the eyes of the electorate that back in April it had been the new SDP–Liberal Alliance that had been ahead of the Tories in the polls, not Labour.
On the Thursday of the conference Joan Lestor invited me to have lunch with her and the Slough delegates. Also present was her predecessor as Labour MP for the town, Fenner Brockway. Fenner was the grand old man of British socialism. He was ninety-four and now sat in the House of Lords as Baron Brockway of Eton and Slough. A founding member of CND, he’d been a Labour rebel himself on many occasions, but the latest upheaval, he declared to me, was more uncomradely than any of the clashes he’d seen in the past. The Labour party had always been a coalition of idealism and pragmatism but had managed the tensions between those two strands with mutual respect and tolerance. Now he feared those values were being undermined.
He told me he had only ever had two heroes: Keir Hardie, who’d adopted Brockway as his political protégé, and Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish Marxist feminist who was murdered by paramilitaries during a political uprising in Germany in the 1920s. Fenner said to the table at large: ‘If only Lenin had listened to Rosa, the whole course of history would have changed.’
The diners fell silent. How do you engage in conversation about left-wing politics with a man who has been personally acquainted with Keir Hardie, Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin?
Back in the real world, which the Labour party seemed to have temporarily vacated, my friend Andrew Wiltshire had become a victim of the rising unemployment statistics.
He had been working for a drugs company that had spent months training him to be a salesman, only to discard him along with half the sales force. It was the first time either of us had experienced redundancy in the twenty years since we’d entered the world of work. When Andrew rang me to convey the bad news I could tell he was upset and worried about the future. We agreed to have one of our regular get-togethers and soon I was on my way to Tring with Judy and the kids.
It was a Sunday, the day that Andrew usually played drums in a jazz band at the Crown in Berkhamsted, a few miles down the road from Tring. By now our eldest children were old enough to take charge of our amalgamated tribe at Andrew’s house while Judy, Ann and I went off to see Andrew in action and enjoy a pub lunch.
He had reassembled a drum kit in the years since the Great Theft from the Fourth Feathers. Jazz had always been his first love and, as he’d given up any serious musical ambitions, playing in this pub gave him the opportunity to do something he was extremely good at just for fun.
The band played in a room over the pub that was all bare boards and massive beams. It gradually began to fill up and by 1pm it was jam-packed with jazz enthusiasts from all over the county. You could tell they were jazz enthusiasts because they wore corduroy and drank real ale.
I watched Andrew with an almost fraternal pride. He was such an outstanding drummer and it was a pleasure to see him lost in the enjoyment of each long piece the band played. This was the perfect antidote to the gloom that had descended on him with the redundancy notice.
It wasn’t long before I discerned that there were a couple of celebrities in the audience. John Williams was one of the world’s most renowned classical guitarists. It was his solo recording of Stanley Myers’ ‘Cavatina’ that had become a worldwide hit record after it was used as the theme to the Oscar-winning film The Deer Hunter in 1978. And here he was on this Sunday lunchtime, sitting a few feet away from Andrew Wiltshire, the brilliant former drummer of the Area.
By this time John was with the fusion group Sky. He was accompanied by the other celebrity – his partner Sue Cook, the Nationwide TV presenter. Apparently, the couple lived nearby. I reflected on Andrew’s strange ability to gravitate into the orbit of the famous. The boy who had become friendly with Pat Boone and almost joined the Mindbenders was now playing a lunchtime jazz session in front of one of the greatest musicians in the world and one of the most familiar faces on British television at the time.
Watching Andrew play reignited my desire to make music as well as listen to it. I still played guitar for my own enjoyment, although the piano had gone, almost by accident. It was getting very old and went out of tune quickly, so when I saw an advert in the local paper for a company in Windsor who offered to collect unwanted pianos, fully restore them and then offer them back at a reasonable price, it seemed like a good solution.
As things turned out, the first part of the deal was completed but not the second. Off went our battered old piano, with a promise from the driver who collected it to ring me when it was fully refurbished. No call ever came. It seemed I’d been had, but I’d failed to keep the advert with the phone number on it and, with no means of tracking the piano down, there wasn’t much I could do about it. The space left in our through lounge was very soon filled with other things. Perhaps that white piano found its way to someone else’s living room and is still sitting there today. Who knows?
My Eko twelve-string still hung from the wall on its picture hook and I’d written a fair number of songs over the years that sounded OK to me. But my working schedule was too unpredictable and involved too much travel to allow me even to think of joining a local band. So how could my yearning to be involved in pop music again be satisfied?
As we drove back to Slough that Sunday evening, an idea suddenly seized me. It was one of those lightbulb moments beloved of cartoonists. I would place a blank cassette tape into our ‘sound system’, record some of my songs and send the tape to Elvis Costello at the address printed on the sleeve of Imperial Bedroom. Only he would have the impeccable taste to appreciate my oeuvre and the contacts at Stiff Records to nurture this raw talent.
I waited until the house was empty one Saturday morning before arranging myself on a dining-room chair next to the sound system, guitar on my knee, microphone positioned in front of me on its little tripod, and rushing quickly through six of my songs – the best of the hundred or so I’d written over a twenty-year period. The crème de la crème of my songwriting genius.
I wrote a nice letter to Elvis, listing the song titles along with my name and address, and sent it off by first-class post in November 1982.
I’m still waiting to hear back.