Yabba Dabba Doo We Support The Boys In Blue…

Growing up as I did, in the early seventies, I was of a generation that marvelled at the wonderful technological advances that graced the television set at half past seven on a Thursday. Top of the Pops would zoom past in such an uncontrollable surge of excitement that no sooner had Tony Blackburn introduced the first chart hope of the evening than Raymond Baxter and William Woollard launched into a glimpse of what mind boggling extravagance awaited us in twenty years’ time.
With all the advances our world had seen – television, the internal combustion engine and moon landings to name but a few, it was hardly surprising that such things as personal computers, mobile phones and cars that float on a curtain of air left us gazing in wondrous awe. No, they didn’t always get it right but that was the beauty of it; nobody was any the wiser and even today, as we look back at a legacy of unfulfilled prophecies, we still aren’t. Maybe someday we will find a use for floating cars, paper clothing and interplanetary etiquette. As it was though, the show ran and ran and, probably due to its close proximity to Top of the Pops in the scheduling list, found favour with at least one member of the family.
As well as having a desperate hunger for music, I was prepossessed with a strange thirst to know how things worked. One of the greatest presents I ever had was a simple throwaway thing. I guess he thought I was just going to play with them but a drawer full of my granddad’s old buggered up pocket watches was a mechanical wonder just waiting to be discovered. I guess a very significant thing was happening and I probably laid down my first roots in an engineering sense. It didn’t take long before I knew what each little gear did, the function of every spring and lever and had succeeded in making every one of them work. Soon, it went from watches to clocks to record players to vacuum cleaners to cassette players.
Of course the beauty of it was that in those days broken things could be fixed, the advances in technology were tangible and they were met with a great deal of expectation and very little sense of inevitability but things were moving on; we were moving away from a nuts and bolts world; it was a time of astonishing advancement. The dawn of the printed circuit board and the computer era was just around the corner and miniaturisation had bought up all the tickets for the next decade. Digital watches and pocket calculators would soon be common place and a power struggle would ensue over the comparative merits of VHS and Betamax, mirroring the Compact Cassette vs. Stereo 8 battle of the seventies. Now that was what I called progress. OK, so they were really inventions of the sixties but they really came to the fore in the early seventies. The idea of a magnetic tape onto which you could record whatever you wanted was a major step forward in the world of audio storage. It made it possible to capture audio from whatever source you wanted and, crucially, it was portable. Whatever songs your mate had, you could record; whatever songs you wanted form a radio broadcast, you could record. In a few short years, piracy stepped into thousands of bedrooms and it didn’t involve miles and miles of reel to reel tape; just a little plastic box smaller than a fag packet. Remember all those tapes you had of the charts; all the lists you made from the music press, so that you knew when the song you wanted was going to be played and how you hoped that this time Blackburn didn’t yap all over the intro. Aye, if only they’d foreseen the almighty shitstorm that the mp3 would unleash they could have saved all that money on their home taping is killing music, faux skull and crossbones logo; they might have realised that music would survive and that the art would endure and, besides all of that, with the amount of electricity, time and effort we wasted, we’d have been as well spending the 50p on the single. At least that way we got the whole thing; at least that way we didn’t get the neebs Alsatian barking like a maniac or the RAF jet going overhead that rattled the windows in their frames.
Another great advancement of the time was the rise in the fortunes of our national team. A World Cup beckoned - the first in living memory. We were there while England and Brian Clough presumably, stayed at home to lick the wounds inflicted by the famous Polish goalkeeping ‘clown’ Jan Tomasewski.

This foray onto the world stage however, would prove to be a short and frustrating one.
Ever the bridesmaid, glorious in defeat, and all those other daft clichés used to describe, in a favourable light, something that just doesn’t quite meet the required standard, we went home after the first group stage, undefeated, a credit to the nation, having held the mighty Brazil to a draw. Unmarred even by some idiotic advertising campaign for Maureen One One f4cking eight, Scotland still remain the only side to return from their world cup campaign undefeated but without the big golden nugget.
We even had our own song, Easy Easy.
A typically silly piece of work that, to the point of embarrassment, was as lyrically bereft and as brazen a slice of bubblegum as I’d ever heard, it was written by Bill Martin & Phil Coulter who had been responsible in no small way for some other fairly tragic events in the world of pop.

Shang a Lang, Congratulations, Puppet on a String and Back Home were the high points on their graph of achievement.
They were the Celtic equivalent of Nicky Chinn & Mike Chapman without the megahits.

During the lead up to all of this, we were gripped by world cup fever and by the end of the school term, at the age of twelve, I had broken into the school team. I played in goal, which was pretty surprising given that even now, if I straighten my back and puff out my chest, I’m only five - nine. Back then? I was pocket sized and I don’t mean jacket pocket sized; not even shirt pocket or hipper sized. I mean I was the comparative size of one of those totally f4cking useless little efforts that you get in jeans that are just a complete pain in the arse because nobody can figure out what they’re for other than snagging your pinky on when you head in to fumble for some loose change. Anyway, I guess the one thing that made me any good at all was that I could jump about all over the place and dive at the feet of on-coming opponents without any fear of getting hurt. I also had a knack for reading penalties.

For as long as I could remember our school either won the league or came second to our west end rivals. We had a headmaster who could only be described as an evil bastard. Without doubt, he was the headmaster from the Wall. I actually remember at the time the Wall came out thinking that Roger Waters must have gone to the same primary school as me. Surely there couldn’t be more than one such evil, sadistic bastard. He was, without fear of contradiction, the most feared and despised man any of us had ever come across, topping our schoolboy list of evil wrongdoers that included other such notables as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ted Heath and Bob Monkhouse but by the time I reached my last year at primary school, we had a new head teacher and a new modern extension.
The new regime was much less draconian and the sight of pupils sneaking around in fear of serious, and most likely, illegal, assault was consigned to memory and the fading scars on the back of the legs. Unfortunately, our success on the pitch followed suit. We were having a disastrous season and had been beaten by everyone except the neighbouring RC school. Every year, for as long as I could remember, they were the whipping boys of the Primary School League. This year was no exception and they’d suffered defeat after defeat. The only thing making them look good was the fact that we too had been utter shite in every game. We had only managed a one all draw in our first match against them so it came to the last game of the season to decide who would get the old spurtle. That’s like a wooden spoon but without the spoon bit, specially designed for stirring porridge and, to every sane person outside of Scotland, is commonly known as a stick.

This was a home game for us but, having just had the school partially rebuilt, the pitch was a cross between the Somme and the surface of the moon. Anyone from Primary 4 and under was strictly forbidden from playing there in case one of them fell into a crater and was never seen again. The tarmac playground was much safer for them. There was also the lack of a perimeter fence around the ground which meant if someone skied it, or if one of the bigger lads just wanted to be a bit of a bastard, some of the juniors would have to walk all the way round the block or scale the six foot wall to get the ball back. It would have been ok for us to play on this pitch as we all knew where the holes were; we knew that the whole thing sloped to the north end and we knew where all the builders rubble was scattered but for them, a bunch of pansy convent boys, it was considered too dangerous so off we trooped that glorious summer afternoon to the academy sports ground.

Bearing in mind that this was the seventies, and a good twenty years before you were allowed to have an entire second eleven sitting around posing for Adidas on the subs bench, we were restricted to two subs. Thirteen, picked from a squad of about sixteen, that being the exact number of boys who actually knew what a football was. Admittedly there were some in the team who couldn't spell the word football - probably still can't - but the entire squad were there on the merit of having a full set of limbs, no embarrassing illnesses and no symbiosis with the insect world. On the day, by some strange and fateful twist, three of the regular team players were off sick so there were only thirteen of us left to choose from. At least this time I was going to get to along to the game.
I hadn’t had a start all season and, expecting nothing to be any different this time round, had already taken my place on the bench – a row of breeze blocks in actual fact. Next thing I know, there’s some frantic waving and I’m summoned to the changing room and getting changed. “Big eins got the shites. Pit these oan” the captain roared, clearly feeling the stress. If this had happened today, I would have been pulling on some designer breathable fabric, padded at the elbows and shoulders and a pair of high tack padded gloves. As it was though, this was 1974. Bearing in mind what I said before that, in some ways at least, we were in a bit of time warp, I ended up pulling on a yellow top that had obviously been knitted out of old Brillo pads and fashioned with a month’s trawling in the North Atlantic in mind. It carried the smell of moth balls like Van Helsing would carry a crucifix to ward off vampiric molestation though why the f4ck any sane minded moth would wish to molest such a garment is way beyond the scope of my wisdom. The gloves were like a pair of welders gauntlets but I never wore gloves anyway so they just got chucked next to a post.
I wanted to wear my own green top with the number one on the back like David Harvey wore but the heidie was having none of it.
Again, if this were in the modern age, I would have probably told him if he wasn’t happy with my kit, he could put big skittery breeks between the posts, but as it was, I was just glad I was getting a game at last.
As we ran out into the sweltering heat of the afternoon, I was flushed with pride and excitement. I stood between the posts trying to make myself look big but succeeding only in a passable impersonation of flea in a matchbox.
The game kicked off and, from here on, only the truth can be told, that being that my defence and I had a blinder. I use this term, not in the sense that we were so good you would have been blinded by our brilliance, but in the sense that we played like five blind men.
Even as a twelve year old, and from my vantage point in the six yard box, it was clear to me that these guys didn’t have much of a clue about protecting their keeper who was by now feeling more than a wee bit skittery himself.
Attack upon attack rained down upon my goal and it was only the fact that their forwards couldn’t have hit a bear’s arse with a banjo that kept the score down.
The law of averages however, was stating that eventually they would hit the target but when this happened, with my one and only save of the day, I managed to push the ball behind for a corner.
From the resulting corner, they scored. A bit of shoo-in really as I totally missed the low cross as did all six team mates crowding my area. Eight people in the six-yard box and the one it had to hit was the only opponent.
Ten minutes later their striker broke away against the run of play. As the ball bounced before him from a speculative punt out of defence I tried to anticipate what he would do. There was only him and me. I quickly tried to psyche him out. Would he go to my left or my right? I expected he was right footed and tried to show him a bit more of my right hand side to push him to his left. I don’t know if my edging towards him panicked him, if he suffered some rare and involuntary spasmodic affliction or if he just fluffed it but he lashed out at the ball with his right foot and sclaffed it. The ball, in mid bobble, flew off his shin and over my head and all I could do was turn and watch it bounce feebly over the line.
For anyone watching from the other half, his and my team mates, it must have looked like he made an audacious chip from about 18 yards out with the advancing keeper at full stretch.
As it was, the low shot I was expecting never came. The torrent of abuse however, like ten Lorimer volleys, was furiously despatched and delivered by first class post.
It didn’t matter to me. I was deflated. I’d been beaten by a deflection and a miss hit.
It didn’t matter that we played with a ten-man attack and had absolutely no shape whatsoever.
It’d didn’t matter that the lazy bastards all thought it was worthwhile running back to give their goalie some stick but couldn’t be arsed running back to defend every once in a while.
Two – nil down at half time and I was pissed off and beginning to feel a bit envious of big shitey kegs’ spot in the toilets.

The second half was a minor improvement and we at least managed to claw back the deficit.
In truth, I’ve forgotten most of the details about the rest of the game. I know I could easily have nipped round the corner to the bakers for a pie or gone for a snog in the bushes with the wee lassie from the end of the street because I didn’t have a single touch for the rest of the match.
That was my first and last taste of school football.
I never felt the same about it after that.

And so to the music…

What else at this time of year…

Various Artists - World Cup Anthems
http://www.sendspace.com/file/lk8pw1

Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, Live 09.04.1991, Orpheum Theater, Minneapolis, MN
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q6aucd

Green On Red, JC Dobbs, Philadelphia, 30.06.1986
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ebrv0r

TMTCH, Hamburg 03.02.1986
http://www.sendspace.com/file/6ql8kv

Wilko Johnson Band, Half Moon Putney, 19.05.1985
http://www.sendspace.com/file/4t5kht

Edwyn Collins - 1997-12-xx - Kultkomplex Cafe, Cologne
http://www.sendspace.com/file/1u6u67

Orange Juice, Coasters 29.11.1982
http://www.sendspace.com/file/kxkzmp

The Alarm, Bremen Aladin, 10.06.1991
http://www.sendspace.com/file/x5s4jn

Josef K, Art College, Edinburgh
http://www.sendspace.com/file/fkttdw

James, Alton Towers, 04.07.1992
http://www.sendspace.com/file/3ha78z

Stranglers, Zurich 85
http://www.sendspace.com/file/6hmlwp

In Tua Nua, Torino
http://www.sendspace.com/file/jbf10w

Sparklehorse - Ambassador - Dublin - 2001-11-02
http://www.sendspace.com/file/5x0gsa

Richmond Fontaine – Live in the Club Q-Bus City Leiden Holland 27.02.2010
http://www.sendspace.com/file/uuxfuo

Zerra One, Paris - Olympia 07 June 1982
http://www.sendspace.com/file/cyyxtb

Nick Lowe, ritz.ny.1985.xx.xx
http://www.sendspace.com/file/3g7bfz

Joe Pug, Mission Creek Festival 01.04.2009
http://www.sendspace.com/file/n0sirx

MikeScott, _Dublin, 01.09.1991.rar
http://www.sendspace.com/file/5egs7p

Television, Masonic Temple Auditorium Detroit 13.03.1977
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vjzh8p

The Who, Live In Phoenix
http://www.sendspace.com/file/422dlr

Tom Robinson, Live in Liverpool, 1986
http://www.sendspace.com/file/crjoql

til the next instalment,


Enjoy.

Hooli