This extract is from the first chapter of Just Backdated, set in Skipton, the North Yorkshire town where I was raised. It is 1964 and I am about to leave a school I hated. The thought of becoming a music writer hasn’t yet occurred to me.
At boarding school in York, the only subject in which I progressed was English and by the time I was 16 – the year my dad took me to see The Beatles in Bradford – I’d decided I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. To my immense relief, I left York a year later, pushed out by a headmaster who thought that playing the guitar and listening to The Beatles and Rolling Stones marked me down as disruptive and unlikely to pass any A-levels. He was probably right.
I applied for a job on the local weekly paper, Skipton’s Craven Herald & Pioneer, went for an interview and started work there in September 1964, spending the next three and a half years as a trainee reporter. I made many friends locally, some of them still friends today. Until I discovered the pleasures of the pub, I sat in the nearest coffee bar, drank coke and played my favourite records on the jukebox. I snogged girls, some of whom welcomed exploratory incursions into the mysteries of their underwear. I did a stint as a DJ at a local bar. I lived at home, walked to work at the CH&P offices every morning, and most days mum had lunch waiting for me after the ten-minute stroll back to our house.
Meanwhile, I swopped my acoustic guitar, 1962’s Christmas present, for a solid electric, a red Futurama III, and played in two local groups, The Pandas, formed by myself and three Skipton friends, and Sandra & The Montanas, a slightly more professional outfit based in nearby Cross Hills that gigged throughout the West Riding, often in Working Men’s Clubs. Both covered songs from the Beat Boom, but neither aspired to progress beyond the local circuit, let alone write their own material. When The Montanas opted to replace me with a keyboard player who owned his own PA system I accepted my fate and swopped my Futurama for a Hofner violin bass like Paul’s for no good reason than that I fancied owning a guitar like one played by a Beatle and this was the cheapest.
It was to come in handy. The climax to my casual career as a musician came when I was asked to dep for the absent bass player in The Black Sheep, by common consent Skipton’s top band, a six-piece that specialised in soul and R&B with a few Stones songs like ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ thrown in for good measure. Their speciality was a note-for-note reproduction of Geno Washington & The Ram Jam Band’s Hand Clappin’ Foot Stompin’ Funky-Butt Live! LP, a record I still own, and a slew of Stax and Atlantic hits like ‘Knock On Wood’ and ‘In The Midnight Hour’. First of all, though, I needed to learn The Black Sheep’s repertoire and to this end spent an afternoon in the company of Richard Preston, esteemed not only as the best guitarist in Skipton but the owner of the best guitar in town, an orange Gretsch Tennessean, which he brought to our house. He taught me the bass lines to the songs and I practised them for hours.
The gig was the joint 21st birthday party of two friends of mine, one of them the son of my dad’s solicitor who in the fullness of time would become my lawyer too; still is for that matter. It took place in a marquee at his home in Grassington, up in the Dales. What made it all the more motivating was that many of my local friends would be there, among them girls I wanted to impress. I did, too, and one of them stepped out with me for a while afterwards.
Nevertheless, I was coming to the realisation that for all my enthusiasm I didn’t have what it took to become a real musician. I could learn the guitar chords to songs, lead parts, fills and even bass lines by rote but that was all. I couldn’t improvise. I was tone deaf and couldn’t sing for toffee. I didn’t have a musical ear which I believe is in the genes, and cannot come simply from practice. But none of this has ever stopped from me loving guitars, treating them as special, objects of desire, and, back in 1968, dreaming of the day when I could afford a Fender or a Gibson.
*
Every Friday I went on a day-release course at Bradford Technical College to learn the tradecraft of journalism, how to subedit copy quickly, how to reduce 500 words of copy to 300 and not lose its meaning, how to interview, how to enliven dull press releases, how copyright, criminal courts and government worked. I learned to proof read, write shorthand and type, and there was an English course that took me past A-level standard, the set text Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger, so I absorbed alienation and anguish. It was drilled into me that the pinnacle of journalism was to work on Fleet Street in London.
I reported from Skipton Magistrates’ Court where miscreants were fined for shoplifting, fighting or driving carelessly, and I made passing acquaintance with the town’s ne’er-do-wells and the lawyers who defended them. I visited the police station each morning and took down details of crimes committed in the last 24 hours, thefts of cars, break-ins and sheep rustling. I reported on council meetings where decisions were made to grant planning permissions, repair roads or relocate bus stops. I reported on the diamond wedding celebrations of elderly couples who were photographed holding their telegrams from the Queen. Little knowing what the future held, I reported on a concert in nearby Ilkley by the classical guitarist John Williams, my first ever music review.
I also reported on potholing tragedies in which young men died underground when unexpected rainfall flooded the caverns they were exploring. These headline-grabbing stories attracted the attention of the national press which brought me into contact with reporters from national daily newspapers, usually from offices in Manchester, who arrived in the Dales wearing suits and ties and shiny shoes most unsuitable for trudging over the soggy moors where the Cave Rescue Organisation, among them friends of mine, did their work. In my wellies, sweater and anorak, I sniggered at these daily reporters. It was my first indication that I didn’t want to join them.
Like everyone else on the course, I sailed through my journalism exams – there was a 90% pass rate so if you failed you were in the wrong job – and graduated to the Telegraph & Argus, the evening paper read by my dad, published in Bradford, commuting daily from Skipton by car, a Ford Escort I was bought on my 19th birthday. This was a big step up, a far more serious platform for my calling. The reporters’ room reeked of cigarette smoke, cheap perfume and deadline anxiety. At its centre was a large table at which we sat facing one another, manual typewriters clicking away amid piles of copy and carbon paper and overflowing ashtrays. Alongside one wall were phone booths to make calls away from the noise of the typing and people shouting. Downstairs in the basement huge printing presses started rumbling around noon and continued until late afternoon. It was exciting, at first anyway, a living thing, even if today’s paper wrapped tomorrow’s fish and chips.
I worked shifts, sometimes late into the evening, calling the police, fire and ambulance on the hour until 2am and, when necessary, heading out into the night with a photographer to cover an accident or a fire. Once I had to knock on a door and request a photograph of a motorcycle crash victim from a grieving family; perhaps in shock, perhaps needing company, they welcomed me into their home and spoke at length about the teenage son who lay in a mortuary.
All the while, humming away in the background, my first love was pop music, by 1968 morphing into rock. I had never missed Ready Steady Go! on TV. I switched from NME to Melody Maker. I saw Steam Packet at the Troutbeck in Ilkley, little knowing that their back-up singer, Rod Stewart, would one day become a star. Margaret, my first real girlfriend, the daughter of a Skipton publican, and I danced to ‘Eve Of Destruction’ at the Cow And Calf disco, up the road from the Troutbeck, where ultra violet lighting illuminated her white bra. On Saturday nights we went to Leeds Locarno or the Penny Farthing club in Bradford where we danced to Tamla Motown records, our favourites ‘Walk Away Renee’ by The Four Tops and ‘It Takes Two’ by Marvin Gare and Kim Weston.
Not many of my T&A colleagues shared my fondness for pop and I didn’t talk about it much at work, but through a chance conversation I discovered that the chief subeditor, Leon Hickman, was a music lover too. Together we approached the editor of the paper and suggested that the T&A might attract younger readers if half a page a week was devoted to a pop column, perhaps a review of a Bradford concert by a noted group, maybe some record reviews, or news of a local band’s tilt at success. To our delight he agreed. We called it The Swing Section and I began to write about music regularly for the first time.
The first pop star I ever met was Sandie Shaw. In January 1969, Sandie and her then husband, the clothes designer Jeff Banks, produced a fashion line for Grattons, a big mail order company whose warehouse was in Bradford, and when Sandie visited to promote the clothes I was sent along to write about her, along with Sally Brown, another reporter whose knowledge of dress design was far greater than mine, and a photographer. After Sally talked to her about clothes, I cleared up the issue of her singing bare foot. “I do wear shoes most of the time,” she told me. “I just don’t sing in them.” The story I wrote was simply used to caption a photograph of her with some of the local girls who worked in the warehouse. Sandie was very tall and slim with legs that went on forever, and she wore a minidress that revealed far more thigh than was the norm in Bradford. I thought she was a very exotic creature indeed, like a gazelle or big cat. I was besotted.
I wrote off to record companies in London requesting review copies of records but the response was patchy. The first LP I ever reviewed was Shine On Brightly by Procol Harum. I reviewed local shows by Marmalade, Joe Cocker and The Move, speaking briefly to Roy Wood. On the phone from one of those booths in the reporters’ room I interviewed the guitarist Jimmy Page who told me about a new group he’d formed called Led Zeppelin, and John Paul Jones, the bass player, came on the line too. Jimmy told me they wouldn’t release singles or appear on TV. “We’re not like Herman’s Hermits,” he said. I wrote about how big groups often ignored Bradford when they toured the UK. I organised a beat group contest at the Penny Farthing and the winners were given an audition by Polydor Records. It wasn’t much but it was a start.
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