Friday Photo #65

Not too long ago, I stumbled upon a forgotten old external hard-drive, buried at the bottom of a box. Firing it up, I found 500GB of music, most of which I'd long since dragged and dropped elsewhere, plus a few dozen folders worth of photos. The majority of the snapshots had been backed up on other drives too, however to my surprise I spotted an unnamed folder containing around 30-40 Swedey McSwedefaces from 2017 & 2018, roughly half of which incorporated a cunningly positioned 7" single, where an LP would traditionally be. I have no memory of taking these shots, or what I originally had in mind for them, though they were obviously intended for the blog. Here's one now! 

Jon Hart's 'Toytown' was released in September 1980, very early on in my record shop career. The single marks Hart's one and only appearance on vinyl....and then the trail goes cold. Even this new fangled World Wide Web that everyone's talking about fails to throw up any further information about the man. One thing I can state categorically though, without fear of contradiction, is that Jon Hart was an admirer of  David Bowie's music circa 1967-69. How do I know this seemingly random fact? Take a listen to both sides of the single, then have a gander at the quite extraordinary, recently unearthed, period TV performance. Your jaw will drop.

Jon Hart - Toytown

Jon Hart - Recollections

Monday Long Song

So there I was, one November afternoon in 1976, propping up the counter of the record shop where, some three years in the future, I would eventually work. I wasn't yet as familiar with the staff as I would ultimately become, but, if I happened to be in the store when the kettle was boiling, I was invariably offered a brew. Customers trickled in, the cash register ker-chinged and the music played. Ah, if I close my eyes I can practically smell the old place.

The aforementioned kettle was pressed into service once again with the arrival of the rep from Phonogram Records. Back in the day, Phonogram handled the manufacture and distribution for a number of small labels including, at that time, Charisma. I'd wandered off up the shop, coffee in hand and was idly browsing through the racks when one of the staff called out to me. 'Do you wanna go to see Van Der Graaf Generator this evening?' I had a little history with band and knew they were playing locally, though with my abysmal teenage cashflow situation being what it was, I'd already discounted the possibility of going, but he was waving a ticket in my direction - a record company freebie!

A few hours later I found myself sitting in the stalls of a sparsely populated local theatre. Actually the phrase sparsely populated doesn't do the audience number justice. The room holds 1500, though I doubt there were 150 of us scattered around the place - little wonder that tickets were being given away. The band absolutely delivered nonetheless, playing a powerful set in support of their seventh LP, 'World Record'. The hefty (dare I say progfunk?) organ and sax driven 'A Place to Survive' was a favourite of mine back then and remains so to this day.

Van Der Graaf Generator - A Place to Survive

Friday Photo #64

It's the Spring of 1964 and I've just arrived home after a little rough and tumble down the park at the end of the road, probably instigated by the lad across at No.13 ringing the doorbell and, with all the innocence he could muster, asking Mum '...is Swede playing out?' My shirt hangs loose from beneath a favourite cardigan, one that I will outgrow within a matter of weeks. The wellies are still on and a plaster just above my left knee covers the most recent scrape in a childhood full of scuffs, cuts and grazes. Look at that face though - properly over-excited. The reason? It's right behind me. While I was out, Dad (and probably Uncle Ivor) had installed a full sized swing at the bottom of the garden - a swing! Actually at this point it's just the metal frame cemented into the ground, but the all important hanging bit would materialise shortly afterwards. The swing's arrival was a complete surprise and I'm impishly as pleased as punch about it.

On and off for a handful of young summers, that swing at the end of the garden was central to my world. The frame alone became a mini-chicane as I careered around the garden on a succession of scooters and bikes, it also formed the goalposts for a thousand kickabouts (reducing Mum's grass to a muddy swamp in the process) and it substituted as a Bat-pole for my imaginary adventures as the Caped Crusader. All this in addition to being a, y'know, swing! 

I've no idea (and irritatingly never thought to ask) how Dad acquired this magical plaything that made me the envy of my infant school pals and equally I have absolutely no recollection of it being dug up and removed from the garden a few years down the line, after I'd outgrown it it. The scruffy little scamp in the photo couldn't give a hoot about the details though. What larks he's going to have.

Mice Parade - Swing

Friday Photo #63

It's the summer of 1974. Go down to the bottom of my road, through the park, round the edge of the allotments beyond, on past the cricket pitches, then over the Lea Flood Relief Channel and you'd eventually find yourself in a remote open wasteland, criss-crossed by railway lines. It was the kind of no man's land where all sorts of mischief took place. Where burned out husks of cars, vans and fridges sat rusting and abandoned and where smashed bottles, broken bricks and jagged chunks of metal littered every surface. In short, it was our playground. Oblivious to the inherent danger of cuts and bruises from all of the dumped rubbish, or bloodied noses from the bigger boys who invariably loitered menacingly nearby, my mates and I often headed down there when nothing else was going on. And yes, each of us at one time or another, returned home with a cut, a bruise, a bloody nose, or occasionally all three.

In one area, a crude mud track had been carved out by the bigger boys on their mopeds and whenever they were otherwise occupied, no doubt giving some other poor unsuspecting youngster a bloody nose, we would hare around it on our bikes. Yay, yet more opportunities for cuts and bruises! And here I am, haring around that very track 50 years ago, long hair and flares flailing in the breeze, a vision in colour co-ordinated clothing. But what colour is that jeans/jumper combo exactly? Mauve? Purple? Violet? Scarlet? Vermillion? Who knows, but it sure ain't pretty and the fashion police have most definitely been informed. 

The good news to end on is that the dangerous sprawling urban wasteland of my youth is now home to a spacious nature reserve and lengthy walking trail.

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I'm sending today's tune out to our mutual blogging chum John Medd, as I reckon it fits in rather neatly with his recent Philip Glass/Steve Reich/John Adams post.

Hauschka - Blue Bicycle

Friday Photo #62

I started to seriously look into my family tree over the past winter, in an effort to make sense of the paper trail left by Mum. In the 1980s and 1990s she subscribed to various genealogy newsletters, spent hours poring over dusty documents at Somerset House in London and dragged Dad around endless country graveyards on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, in search of any clues about the life and times of our ancestors. She was keen to share her discoveries with me at the time, but of course I paid scant attention back then. Now that I am interested, there's no-one left to ask. However within a couple of clicks on Ancestry, cross-referred with Mum's handwritten notes, I'd already travelled further back into history than she managed in over 15 years of research. And I've barely scratched the surface.

This is the only known photo of my maternal grandmother's brother Sidney, with whom I share a middle name. He was born on August 30th 1895 and though I found all kinds of information about his parents and siblings with relative ease, Sidney's trail quickly went cold. Then it dawned on me and I turned my attention from birth, marriage and census records, towards an altogether more tragic resource, where I discovered that Sidney, a rifleman, was killed in action in Flanders on Good Friday March 29th 1918, 106 years ago today, and is buried in Arras, Pas-de-Calais.

Guided By Voices - Now to War

Friday Photo(s) #61

Just lately I've been spending more time than usual in London. My aunt is having a few health issues and my cousin has had to fly in from America to monitor the situation. I've bombed down the M11 at every opportunity over the past month or so to give them both a bit of moral support (I'm heading down again today). During this uncertain period, my cousin is also working all hours, including seemingly endless daily conference calls carried out on New York time. To see an unwell aunt and a horribly stressed out cousin without really being able to do anything to help either is upsetting to say the least. 

One day, while my cousin was up to her neck in unfathomably complicated technical discussions with multiple colleagues scattered around the globe and with the relentless rain briefly pausing, I took myself off to the East Ham Nature Reserve to clear my head. The reserve winds through the defunct 9 acre graveyard of an 800 year old church and in spite of incessant A13 traffic hammering across the flyover a few yards to the South and planes from the nearby London City Airport roaring overhead, it's a relative oasis of calm amid the turmoil of life.

Jape - Graveyard

Together Riding On a Crest, It Was Swell

Back in the 1970s, most of the Friday morning playground chatter concerned the previous evening's edition of Top of the Pops. A lucky few of us would've recorded selections from the programme on our new fangled cassette machines, turning to shush our parents as we held a microphone up to the tiny tinny speaker next to the screen. The rest relied on mental highlights, etched into transfixed memory and enhanced by the shared recollections of classmates. Memorable performances seemed to come thick and fast for us throughout those years; David Essex's extraordinary 'Rock On', Leo Sayer's pierrotesque tour-de-force 'The Show Must Go On' and our first glimpse of  the unique genius of Sparks, via 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both of Us', to name but a few - all of these before we even start on the likes of Bolan, Bowie, Slade, Sweet etc. The cultural impact of Top of the Pops may have been tarnished by the evil actions of some of the presenters and dimmed by the passing years, but those performances resonate with me to this day. Another that stands out is Cockney Rebel's 1974 TOTP debut with 'Judy Teen'. The following morning, before the school-bell rang, a group of us huddled together beneath the netball hoop to exchange our thoughts on the brilliant quirky oddness of the song and frontman Steve Harley's strangely alien appearance. It was the stuff we lived for. Needless to say, the BBC have wiped that particular edition of the show, though a later TOTP version of the song is preserved on YouTube.

I happened to be in London on Sunday, just half a dozen miles from my childhood stomping grounds, when news of Steve Harley's sad passing pinged onto my phone. In The Boleyn later that evening, I raised a pint of Five Points Best to Steve and to all those pals from the old schoolyard. 

Cockney Rebel - Judy Teen