How come no one older than me ever seems to understand…

I know that this is a pretty unremarkable fact but, based on the party going antics of todays average twelve year old, I figure it is worth pointing out that I can only ever remember going to one birthday party. This is not to say that any recollection of the other squillion ice cream and jelly gigs has faded irretrievably from my memory, it is to quite categorically and unequivocally say that I only ever went to one. As I said before, my early childhood elapsed in part during the swinging sixties. A time when everyone was too busy getting whacked on the narc-du-jour or marching against whatever political outrage piqued their collective hysteria. So with that in mind, and despite the unavoidable truth that it was the birthday of the sister of a friend who I didn’t particularly like (the sister, not the friend), it has to be said that this was a major highpoint of my preteen social calendar.
She was about four at the time so I guess I must have been about ten.
I don’t remember much about it other than being told that neither the friend nor I were allowed to win ‘pass the parcel’.
Later that same year she would smack me over the head with a funny little garden rake thingy, leaving me with puncture marks in my scalp that I can still feel today.

I can place this episode perfectly in time as I remember we were having a kick around one Saturday afternoon, not in our usual place on the grass at the top of our street or in the big park at the end of the scheme but, for some totally bizarre reason, in the car park. I was ‘being’ Peter Lorimer because I could take the ball on the volley and Leeds had just won the cup. This was something of a big shout for a ten year old as this was a guy who was known to be able to give it some welly but he was Scottish and played for Leeds, which was good enough for me. So we larked about for a bit, ‘three and in’ or something similar I guess was what we called it; chipped a few crosses for the odd header on target; took the odd chest height cross on the volley into the neebs chrysaths; next thing I know, wallup, my cranium is the new resting place for some itinerant garden implement. There was that split second, “oh f4ck” moment when the rest of the lads quite literally went “oh f4ck” before I went “oohya bastard”.
Even at that early an age I had attained an interesting mastery of the English laguage.
Anyway, I don’t remember there being much pain or much drama, just the blood and, as anyone who has kids will know, a little head wound goes a long, long way.
Needless to say my Leeds top soon resembled an Arsenal top with a big red splat seeping down the front.
Some time later, in one of those typical 20 a side, next goal wins, jerseys for goal posts type of affairs, revenge would be mine.

Being as it was, by now, the infancy of a new decade, it was a strange sort of time. Forget all that Gene Hunt bollocks, this was the far north of Scotland; an insular community; one content to live firmly in the past in spite of all the trappings of the modern age delivered by the Naval and RAF bases nearby. This was the kind of place where old folk still pointed at aeroplanes; where kids tried to feed bread to the helicopters; where power cuts were looked forward to because you didn’t have to feed the meter and progress passed through town like it was the arseole of the world. Although there had been a lot of changes in the world of fashion and music, there was still a strong sector clinging to the haggis and shortbread ideal of ‘Grannies Heilan Hame’, the ‘But and Ben’ and the Sunday Post.
OK, so it wasn’t quite as bleak and removed from modernity as the Gaeltachd but it still held onto that daft pretence of being a city just because it had a cathedral.
Amid all this, and the centre of my universe, was my mother. She was an odd polarisation of what was trendy and what was most definitely not. She’d been to London to work, had loads of trendy clothes and, looking back, I guess she may have been the envy of a lot of her mates who were stuck in grimsville. But at the end of it all, she was still a single parent, struggling to bring up a family and have the life any normal 30-something would have.
She had a new man in tow. Another ‘uncle’.
I never got that whole pile of shite about “this is your Uncle Bertie Shagmeister” or whatever.
Did she really think I was that f4cking stupid?
If anyone asked, I was to say he was my uncle, home from the sea.
Like anyone cared a f4ck about who he was.
Everyone knew her story. Everyone knew what my father had done.
That was the small town mentality of it. Stuck in the 1940s where such things were frowned upon. Aye, we could all go to war and shoot the f4ck out of each other but God burn ye in hell if you were known to be shagging someone who wasn’t your lawful wedded.
Just a load of condescending and patronising bollocks.
Anyway, having hopelessly and pointlessly digressed, back to the matter in hand.
Revenge.

About this time, she became quite detached from the whole glam rock affair. She had no real interest in the new stuff, preferring to remain rooted in the world of her twenties. Under the influence of the new ‘uncle’ she was turning into a bit of a folkie. Unfortunately for me, this was around the time the Clancy Brothers and the Corries were starting to get quite big in the folk world. The consequence for me was the appearance of various hand knitted folk type garments, generally knitted from what I was told was arran, and emblazoned with funny little leather buttons that had an odd meaty taste when you sooked them.
How the fuck she expected a ten year old to keep a white cardigan clean, especially one that he definitely didn’t want to wear, is still beyond my understanding.
Also beyond my understanding, was the way the fates would conspire to iron out the playing field and set up the circumstances for my little slice of retribution.

Back then, we had something we knew as the ragman.
This amounted to some dodgy looking gypsy geezer who looked like Albert Steptoe, wasn’t really a gypsy but just some old tink from the caravans across the river who, once a month, would come round wheeling a hand cart, collecting old clothes in exchange for a balloon or a packet of sweets.
The guy was a magnet for the little kids but was frowned upon by their parents.
The whole across the river area was a big taboo for all of us. The only way across was by the railway bridge or by a big water pipe with spikes and barbed wire at either end. Although some of the bigger kids made the daring trip to the other side, I was never brave enough to try. I don’t know if it was the journey or the fear of what would happen if I was found out. Probably a bit of both.
So there we were, one Saturday afternoon, late in the summer of 1972, about twenty past tea time, a riotous assembly of about forty kids, raging from eight to fourteen years old, all chasing a big brown bladder stitched up to effect a barely passable impersonation of a regulation football. This wasn’t any regular kind of game and no regular kind of ball. The bigger kids took great delight in hoofing the ball straight up in the air, as high as they could and watching as the smaller kids tried to head the ball. This was something that, despite the ball being filled with air, left the recipient with severe neck strain, potentially debilitating eye injuries from the laces and at least two inches shorter in height from spinal compression due to the force exerted by gravitational acceleration. Remember that one? Force = mass x acceleration.
Anyway, on it went, the never ending game, in the hope that someone from our end of the scheme would be first to fire it between the two piles of apparel assembled for posts, thus signalling game over, and then it happened...
...someone scored just as the ragman came along and all the wee ones came out of the woodwork like a swarm of newly hatched spiders seeking their first taste of insect flesh or, in this case, their pink balloon or their packet of iced gems.
Everybody grabbed their gear and headed back home.

Now I know what you’re thinkin’.
Did he leave the cardi behind or did he give to the gypsy.
We’ll to tell you the truth, in all that excitment, I kinda lost track myself.
Being this is a white, cable knit, arran cardigan with leather buttons that taste like they've been stained with Bovril, the most powerful sweater in the world that would blow your credibility clean oot o’ the watter, you’ve got to ask yourself one question.

Did I feel lucky?

Well, in my defence I’d like to claim that I was distracted by the fact we’d won, that it was tea time and the that there were all these little beasties chasing after the ragman but to be honest, I don’t know for sure what happened. I like to think that, in my role as the agile minded criminal mastermind, I contrived a situation whereby someone else did my dirty work and, as the ultimate act of revenge, took the fall for something that wasn’t their fault but, the fact of the matter is, although I was smarter than the average ten year old, I wasn’t that smart. What is true is that one of the other kids claimed he saw this little blonde kid giving the gypsy a white jumper in exchange for a red balloon. That was good enough for me to be able to finger the little rake bradishing bitch from up the street as she trotted proudly past our kitchen window waving her little scarlet dirigible.

That was how it was.
Saturdays in the summer were an endless game of footy that ended with mathematically improbably scorelines and teams that would fluidly change as X or Y had to go for lunch, tea, haircut, de-lousing or whatever other refinement their parents saw fit and an endless struggle to avoid wearing some or other knitted abomination that was straight off the cover of a Clancy Brothers album.

For me though, the best thing about Saturdays as a kid was a trip to one of the three shops that sold records.
This was the time of the K-Tel revolution. The time when the sixties, and those ridiculous Top of the Pops albums gave way to the 70s and albums boasting 20 original hits by 20 original artists.
The Beatles were gone, not that I’d really noticed, and music was noticeably changing. Flower power had been consigned to the waste heap of impropriety, giving way to glam, glitter and platform shoes. The Mexico World Cup was a distant memory that the Bolivian jewellery trade had survived only marginally better than the English World Cup Squad, although the latter did manage a No1 hit with Back Home.
Week after week, Top of the Pops was seducing me with ever more wondrous sights.
Things I’d never seen before; exciting and exotic sights that were beyond my imagination.
There was this strange curly haired wee fella in a feather boa with glitter all over his puss. There was another bloke with the weirdest hairdo I’d ever seen and a bizarre line in leg-wear, cuddling up to some weird looking guy in a blonde feather cut, a glitter suit and platform thigh boots. There was the poppy eyed guy with the funny hat that looked like his granddad cut his hair round a pudding basin and there were also those nice clean cut boys with the white suits that my granny liked. The only time my grandfather was even remotely interested was when the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards were at No1 with Amazing Grace. Everyone else was just a long haired gink.
What one of those was, I’ve no idea.


If grandfather was faced with something he couldn’t understand and hadn’t the vocabulary to deal with, he just made something up. He was six foot four. Nobody was going to argue with him.
He made stuff up all the time and I assume now, in adult life, that he was a pretty funny guy. He was a friend of Charlie Chaplin – they met when Chaplin visited Nairn on one of his many holidays to the north – and was full of funny stories about things he did during the war. The funniest thing ever was a road trip with him. This would invariably entail much swearing and gesticulating as he complained about every other driver on the road from behind the wheel of his Ford Anglia. This was something I would inherit some twenty years later but sadly, no I didn’t also inherit the old Dagenham Dustcart.
Once out of the town and onto the open road, he was free. His spirit would rise and he would break into song or into a shrill blast of whistling that made bagpipes sound like they were being heard from the inside of a concrete bunker.
The inescapable truth about this was that his musical repertoire was limitless because he just made stuff up. He’d start off singing some old favourite traditional Scottish tune like Road to the Isles or something equally dismal to a ten year old and then, suddenly he’d veer off into something else. Jim McLean’s Whisky Chorus, as popularised by Robin Hall & Jimmie MacGregor was a particular favourite that would naturally end up with about a hundred verses relating tales about everyone he’d ever known. Oh how I longed to meet the mystical woman to whom he promised, “I’ll buy a big sheep’s heid an gie the teeth tae Bella”
He did the same, in a way Edward Lear did, with poetry. He just made up nonsense. Contradictory nonsense.
He loved the great Scottish tradition of song making; Burns; the bothy ballads; Harry Lauder; and the White Heather Club. He loved the accordion – especially under the masterful hands of Jimmy Shand or Will Starr. He loved everyone – especially after a few drams – and everybody loved him back.
Like an aged version of Hen or Joe Broon, he was the archetype of Scotland in the forties, rooted so firmly in the time and the place that he just kept living it over and over. Today, he’d be seen as anachronistic and living in the past but there was much more to him than that.
When I think about it now, I wish could have known him in the present day, when we didn’t have a sixty year age gap. I wish I could have understood what he was about then instead of resenting the fact that he was a father substitute.
Some of his unbridled Scottishness must have rubbed off on me though as it would surface much later in life but, at the time, there was nothing remotely Scottish in the modern cultural mould, unless you counted Rod Stewart. But he was just another long haired gink, and an ‘English’ one at that.


My grandparents were growing old. I was growing up. The new man in my mother’s life was sticking around and things were starting to change.
She was spending more time at home. I was spending less time at the bowling club.
We were starting to at least look like a proper family.
I was allowed to grow up a bit; grow my hair. I got some fashionable clothes and got a bit of a social life.
Then, one Christmas, it happened.
My great Road to Damascus moment. The moment when music really reared up and I knew I was hooked.
It was 1972.
For my main present I was given a huge red model Fokker triplane, an interest by proxy, that I succumbed to in preference to being an ungrateful a brat. It was accompanied by an apparently insignificant little red transistor radio, the type with a little off white earpiece shaped like a mutant earwax collecting mushroom. This is so strongly etched upon my memory that I can even remember the song I heard when I first switched it on. From then on, it was my salvation.
I could stay in my room and listen to it at the weekend without disturbing anyone and, more importantly, without anyone disturbing me.
I could listen to the charts every Sunday evening.
It was on this very machine I first heard all the greats of the time.
The Jean Genie with its thunderous ‘duh duh duh, duh du-du duh duh duh’ riff.
20th Century Boy and Wishing Well.
It’s easy to mock but, at ten years old, I first heard them all on the Ed Stewart Saturday morning Junior Choice request show.
There was the other stuff too. The Osmonds, the Jacksons and all the Chinn & Chapman stuff; the Sweet, Mud and Suzi. Then, out of the blue it happened. Something Scottish. Something that swept through the country like a plague. Something that that was so unashamedly crap that it made being Scottish even more ridiculous than it actually was. Something that can only be described as Rollermania.
What, oh please will someone tell me what, in the name of God, were we thinking about. How on earth did we let five talentless oiks from Edinburgh, and their allegedly crooked manager, con the great British public into believing they were the next big thing? They even had their own TV show for f4ck’s sake.
That little radio though, for all the crap that came out of it, was my subterranean passage to a different world. The real revelation was Radio Luxembourg.
This was an education as it shifted in and out of phase. The sounds were less mainstream than on daytime radio and certainly better than the stuff they played after Radio 1 reverted to Radio 2 after the top 20.
After a week listening to Stuart Hendry and Tony Prince, at the weekend I’d eagerly drag my mother to Woollies, Clydesdale or Barr & Cochrane to buy some obscure sound I’d heard on the radio.

My next great revelation was hearing Johnnie Walker on Radio 1 at lunchtime.
He did a thing called Pop Quiz. I’d listen intently to the questions and amaze myself at the knowledge I had been absorbing through some form of osmosis.
By the age of 12 I was a confirmed muso.


That first song on that wonderful Christmas day by the way. ‘C Moon’ by Paul McCartney & Wings, complete with false start.
Why that stuck, I don’t know. But it did.

And so to the whole point of it all, the music.

The usual mixed bag starting with that song.
Never did like it…

Paul McCartney – the Nashville Sessions 1974
http://www.sendspace.com/file/66vg1u

The Waterboys – An Appointment With Mr Yeats Premiere, Dublin Abbey, 15.03.2010
http://www.sendspace.com/file/sf3td7

Editors – Dundee Fat Sam’s 11.03.2010
http://www.sendspace.com/file/9c2rup

Glenn Tilbrook – Farmingville,NY, 18.03.2009
http://www.sendspace.com/file/xdw3rw

Laura Marlin – Cellar Door, 05.02.2010-06-04
http://www.sendspace.com/file/3ztlof

Primal Scream – Milan, 01.05.1994
http://www.sendspace.com/file/eqgevb

REM – Manchester 17.11.1984
http://www.sendspace.com/file/fezkum

Vampire Weekend – Reykjavik, 19.10.2008
http://www.sendspace.com/file/80zddn

Saw Doctors – House Of Blues, Cleveland OH, 06.03.2009
http://www.sendspace.com/file/pgq0am
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ordyvb

Them Crooked Vultures – Edinburgh Corn Exchange, 15.12.2009
http://www.sendspace.com/file/eoa7fb

Joe Pug – The Ark, 27.03.2009
http://www.sendspace.com/file/hqup8h

And So I Watch You From Afar - XFM Session 2009
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vsmjj6

Orange Juice – Caley Palais, Edinburgh, 13.05.1984
http://www.sendspace.com/file/olnsx4

The Earle Family – Newcastle Opera House, 06.11.2001
http://www.sendspace.com/file/3vvl9v
http://www.sendspace.com/file/5f8hzi
http://www.sendspace.com/file/9lyzmq


OK.
So that’s it for now.

Back in a few weeks.
Hopefully I’ll post something before I head stateside.

Enjoy

Hooli