Cancer 30

In my last post I talked about the family which changed my life. In this post I am going to talk about somene who had a profound influence on me, an influence that began when I was a teenager and has lasted to this day.

Andy Barlow was a year ahead of me at school. I didn’t really know him when we are young even though we lived in the same village. It wasn’t until we started catching the school bus at the same bus stop that I started to get to know him vaguely, and it wasn’t until I was about 14 when I started to hang around on the rec in the evening, classic adolescent style, and he was there as well (I think he encouraged me to go). It was at this point he began to be my mentor.

Up to that point I had not really been interested in music. My exposure was largely through Top of The Pops, which my sister enjoyed watching. I got to know many of the pop songs of the early to mid 1970s with little thought to their (often poor) quality. I was a slow learner. I was only just getting over treehouses, dens and damming streams. I still had my shed in our field – though that was an ideal place for a disconsolate teenager to get away from his parents and I kept it for years. But that is another story.

Going to the rec was a key stage in transitioning from childhood friends to adolescent friends, from childhood activities to adolescent activities, from not being interested in girls to being slightly more interested in girls, from not knowing Andy to knowing Andy.

Andy was interested in music, not just any old music, but punk. He talked about the groups and their music, he sang their songs, he went to gigs. It wasn’t long before I was heading to his house to listen to the latest single or album by somebody or other and I really enjoyed it. I took it in, and the thing about punk was that it was not just about the music, it was about the attitude, anarchy in the UK, Clash City Rockers, protesting about the government (No Maggie Thatcher aint no Government), protesting about the way things were, wanting change, often for change’s sake; not really knowing what to replace things with. It was about disorder, dressing to upset people, chaos – though I think those of us from villages probably didn’t really understand the city mentality that drove a lot of what punk stood for.

I started going to gigs with Andy. I was still at school so I had my paper round money (£1.70 a week for an hour a day six days a week) and what I could scrounge from my parents to get to Derby or Nottingham to see bands. My first gig was the Buzzcocks. It was so exciting, learning to pogo (if you have to learn that dance), spit flying around; but I think my political conscious started with my next gig, The Clash. This was a tour to coincide with their second album, Give ’em Enough Rope. This band meant something. They were angry. They knew society was flawed and wanted to change it. They had ideas. I was transformed.

While we went to many gigs one of the most important was Stiff Little Fingers’ first tour of the UK, timed to coincide with their first album, Inflammable Material (Perhaps the best punk album ever?). Andy and I couldn’t get in to the Ajanta (a rather seedy but brilliant venue). It was packed. People were climbing in through the toilets. We hung around the side door and the group arrived in a car. We informed them of our predicament and they invited us in. We sat with them in the dressing room until they went on, and somehow we were pushed into the main theatre. That was a group that understood society’s problems. They were from Belfast during the worst part of the Troubles.

There was a lot of entertainment at that time, good groups, poor groups, drinking beer. Forming a punk group of our own, playing a few gigs. I even got a job with the same firm as Andy when I left school. That meant I could afford gigs and beer (the 18 yr drinking age limit didn’t really apply then). Good times.

We all grow up, we have good times and bad, we drift apart, and within a few years Andy and I rarely saw each other. We went our own ways. He stayed in the building trade, I did what I did. I do remember saying to him as we listened to music in his house that my main ambition in life was to write a book. I managed that.

The punk that Andy helped me become is still within me. I am still unhappy with society. I still want to change things. I still want to do things differently to the way other people do them. This has applied across my life and I am not sure I would have been able to do this as effectively without that early important mentor of mine, Andy Barlow.