“It’s the 22nd November 2023 and by this time in two months I’ll be seventy years old. So I’ve come up here to the top of the hill at Everton, my sacred place and a favourite place always for thinking about my life, to think today about the 1970s, the next chapter in my book. And walking here this morning got me thinking about two songs, two Pet Shop Boys songs about:
Invitations to teenage parties in my 1970s…and we were never being boring…you could always rely on a friend”. Immediately followed that one, and on the same LP by “This must be the place I’ve waited years to leave.
So that’s my up and my down of the years this chapter’s going to be about in two songs I didn’t of course hear until decades later. But the two songs are up on this hill here with me now, together with the memories they invoke. Of being a teenager and finding my friends. But also of being monumentally bored. Out in Maghull still but working up the nerve to leave there and come, well, well here actually.”
Here’s the story.
By late November 1972, when this terrace at the top of the city was still part of its building and I’d first arrived to start my job in the Liverpool Corporation housing sub-office that was in the public hall at Netherfield Heights then, quite a lot of the important events of my 1970s had already happened, including seeing David Bowie. So let’s go back through some of them before the story returns here, for what would turn out to be a year or so that’s gone on to influence the whole of the rest of my life.
Before then I’d mostly been busy growing up.
Gratefully expelled from my Catholic school at the end of Chapter 4 I’d then gone through a year of early mornings and two bus rides to get to Wigan Tech and do my A-levels…
No, let’s stop that and start again.
Here's the same story but in a version that begins now rather than back in the 1970s, I'll explain.
I woke up early this morning on what I'd decided would be a writing day, two days after sitting up on that hill, with a thought. That before going any further with this book's writing I need to acknowledge the plain fact that I'm writing it now, in 2023. With the knowledge I have now and about what interests me now. I know how the things I'm writing about have turned out, and know these will include some I won't want to revisit. I’ve already mentioned the poor relationship with my mother. And some other events, whole periods of time and yes people are well gone and will be staying gone. Not that I'm only going to write about good times and nice people. Some of the tougher times and more disagreeable people have been the most interesting to me, and remain so. But other times and people? Just gone and won't be catalogued in here like this is some kind of therapeutic diary. It's not. It's a think back through the things I've enjoyed and the times and people I've learned from. All written from the perspective of now. And presented, for this chapter at least, in the order these principal memories of the early 1970s have occurred to me. So that will be: David Bowie; On The Road; Benledi Street; Casual clothes; Pat and Diana, and Wigan.
David Bowie And The Spiders From Mars
I’ve always preferred records to gigs. Even in these past few years of my classical preference when I’ve gone to a few concerts at the Philharmonic Hall for the experience of a full orchestra and whole symphonies. But even there soon reverted to records and the radio so I can just listen to the best bits. I couldn’t do that in the early 70s as the radio was mostly poor, all Edison Lighthouse and Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep. And I couldn’t afford records until I’d started working anyway. So gigs were the cheap and plentiful alternative. I went to loads and remember I used to have a list of them. But this was the best, easily.
I’d seen David Bowie before, on his own and well down the bill on some package tour, singing his Space Oddity hit. After which there was more or less silence until a friend turned up one day with Hunky Dory. So good that a whole group of us eighteen year olds turned up one June evening in 1972 at the Liverpool Stadium looking like versions of him on the cover. All long hair, soft focus, satin and velvet. When out walked Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. All, well you know what they looked like, nothing like us.
And yes it did get all breathtakingly exciting, Better Hang On To Yourself and Suffragette City, But the long moment of it all that changed me, for good, was the first one. The look of them, obviously, but also the song, Five Years. Long single pulse drum intro while shadowy figures are strapping on guitars and taking their places, then lights blaze…And…
“Pushing through the market square
So many mothers sighing
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in”
A do it now, time really matters, there’s not much of it left song I’d never heard before that moment. That stayed after all the rock’n’roll excitement and is still in me now. Time really matters, there’s not much of it left, do it today.
Which is also in the second memory of round about then.
On The Road
Atticus in Clarence Street was the first bookshop I’d ever been to where you could get coffee. Only instant and you made it yourself but it encouraged you to sit down, how I’ve judged good bookshops ever since, because no one reads standing up do they? So that day I sat down with my drink and the couple of books I wanted to look through. And started reading one of them, On The Road. A mess of a book by this Jack Kerouac I knew nothing about. But all read and finished twelve hours later, with the dawn coming up and after a night of headphones, the first two Bruce Springsteen LPs on repeat, bought second hand from Probe downstairs that same day. So I must have had at least a supermarket job by now to have the money. That day and night I first read this then wrote it down, inside the front cover of the book:
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”.
More spiders, more urgency, and do it now. Time for a proper job.
Benledi Street
I’m not sure or much bothered about the order of things in this chapter, except I know this one happened a few months after David Bowie. I know that because summer 1972 was when I took my A-levels and failed English Literature. Meaning I didn’t get into university for the only subject I really wanted to study, so went and got a job while I thought about applying for anything else. The first job was terrible, walking round being a filing clerk at a DHSS office on Wavertree High Street. So I left after six weeks and found somewhere much better. Up that hill in Everton some of the time, and down the hill at Benledi Street, just off Scotland Road, the rest of it. Working in the only lightly organised chaos of two Corporation rent offices. An example of the “only lightly organised” happening on my first day, and which I’ve remembered ever since as the day I completed my growing up. The day the eighteen year old new starter from Maghull gets stuck out in the public hall there at Benledi Street, watched by all the Rent Officers from behind their protective screens, to “adjust” the rent books of everyone coming in. Changing all the rental amounts from weekly to fortnightly. Which is confusing anyway, to the many who aren’t entirely sure but go away thinking they might have just had their rents halved. But more than confusing to something like half the local population, who know for sure that this occasion has also been picked to put their rents up. Which is what’s happened to all the tenants in the newer properties, mostly the tower blocks up the hill, which are mostly lived in for historical and sectarian reasons by Protestants. While “them Catholics,” as I’m soon told, down the hill in the mostly older properties, have been left undisturbed. People are enraged and, since it’s me doing the putting up, it’s me they’re taking it out on. Culminating in the most enraged woman of them all, and for the only time in my life so far, slapping me backwards and forwards across the face with a wet fish.
She’s hauled off by her friends, explaining “it’s not the lad’s fault” and we’re all soon sat down laughing together. The Wet Fish Incident having served as my formal initiation into the “doing something in housing” that’s shaped much of my life since that day.
It was also, of course, my Welcome Back to Liverpool ceremony. As there weren’t going to be many more boring days out in Maghull after an excitement like that.
Casual Clothes
Truth to tell life hadn’t been going all that well for me back home in Maghull since I’d got myself expelled from school eighteen months or so before the wet fish day. From being the “might even have a vocation to the priesthood” top of the class favourite child I’d fallen right down into a “not even a practising Catholic any more” moral degenerate. A fall marked one memorable day by my previously mild mannered dad’s furious ranting at me about my “casual clothes.”
For a good while my parents had been trying to dress me back to respectability by presenting me with clothes they didn’t ask me about. I remember the “very suitable sports jacket” and the “good smart mac”. Neither of which I would touch. Preferring instead the grandad vests and second-hand greatcoat both included in Joe’s rant and cited as clear evidence of my moral turpitude.
Which was funny, but mainly sad, and my days of living in the same house were clearly numbered now. Especially once I was also told “While you’re living in this house you’ll live by our rules.” Not for long though.
Pat and Diana
These were my first two girlfriends and Diana and I will be moving into a flat in Walton together before too long, so it’s just Pat I’m going to talk about for now, here in the early seventies.
I’d been a slow starter with even talking to girls, never mind going out with them. And I could blame this on my six years at an all-boys school, except the same tongue-tied shyness didn’t seem to have stopped many of the others talking enthusiastically and at every chance with the keen girls from the school nearby, who’d turn up every Friday at the same St George’s Maghull youth club as us lot. Where I’d mostly listen to the music and only get up and - in my way - dance to “The Harlem Shuffle,” because everybody did.
So I didn’t meet Pat until I went to a different youth club, also a Catholic one this, at St Anne’s in Ormskirk. And she was, well, one of the nicest and gentlest people I would ever meet. So we talked easily and not at all nervously from the summer evening when we first met, which would be early in the summer of 1971 I think, until a year and a bit later when I met Diana. After which Pat and I stayed friends for a few years, as you’ll be hearing. And as you can probably also tell I still feel a great tenderness for her, though we’ve been out of touch and whereabouts for decades now. Still Pat’s got two songs from those days, permanently reserved in my head, that always make me think of her. “First Girl I Loved” by the Incredible String Band and, even more so, “Girl From the North Country” by Bob Dylan:
“Please see for me she has a coat so warm, to keep her from the howling winds”
So if you ever read this Pat, hello.
Wigan
Out beyond Ormskirk on a bus through Skelmersdale, five mornings a week, there was Wigan. Where me and Paul and several of the others from school had gone to finish off our interrupted A-levels. And which I loved, for its being so very much somewhere else. Off the bus and past the Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls Factory to the Wigan Tech Spring Gardens Annexe, off Frog Lane. It was an adventure and the first really big thing I’d done in my life just because I wanted to.
As well as the college there would be excursions around there. Like Pat and I going to the Festival at Bickershaw one rainy, chaotic weekend. Sleeping bags in a huge communal tent and sitting up outside it in the middle of one of the nights watching Captain Beefheart. But mainly there was Wigan. A different life in a different town that got me on my way towards the independence of what will be turning up as the 1970s get towards their middle years.
Which will be next time, as that’s just about enough of a read for one blogpost for now.
Except to say that during the day this has taken to write I’ve walked along to the library and had a look at On The Road, my first in years. And it’s gone back to looking like a mess now. But it did its job, all in that one long day and night, in my 1970s.
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So funny...I don’t know where to start! The wet fish incident just got me! The seventies were clearly a very influential time in your life. How wonderful that you got to see Bowie in those early days. I listened to Five Years just now on Spotify...how technology in 2023 means no queuing up for gigs or tickets, nor waiting for the giro, or pay check at the end of the week to buy the latest LP. Now everything is instantaneous, but not always so thrilling as the days of listening to music in your bedroom or student flat! Waiting for the weekend to see a film months after it had come out in the states, or three years later on TV on Christmas Day if you were lucky. A fantastic read...as always! Keep em coming
This is an email from my lifelong school friend Barry Ward, who was also at St George’s for The Harlem Shuffle:
“ Brilliant Ronnie ! I’ve just read chapter 5.
I laughed out loud at your reference to St George’s youth club. Sometimes over the years I’ve asked people what was the first record they danced to, and invariably (and inexplicably to me) they can’t remember.
Well, like you ‘Harlem Shuffle’ was the one. Whoever played the records at that youth club had good taste. I can still recall the thrill of hearing Roadrunner and Get Ready played really LOUD for the first time.
We were encouraged to form a couple of lines to dance to Harlem Shuffle, and whilst none of us were capable of dancing whatsoever, we could shuffle from side to side in time with the beat.
Regarding Bowie, I’d also been to the Empire in 1969 when he was bottom of the bill on a package tour headlined by Humble Pie and performed Space Oddity. I didn’t go to the Stadium show in 1972 but in September of that year I saw him at the Top Rank and was blown away. Went out and bought the Ziggy Stardust album the next day.
Cheers
Barry