Let the magic unfold
For the last couple of months, I’ve been a big fan of the long-form content platform, Medium. In this age of the ever-shrinking attention span, I find it refreshing that there is both a place and clearly pent-up demand for well-crafted and thoughtful content. Every morning, I wake up to an email from Medium, sharing a hand-curated selection of recent posts, and I try to read at least 2 or 3 of them every day. What I like is that they introduce me to topics, perspectives and writing styles that I wouldn’t normally seek out. Just as Fox News and CNN serve up ever-polarizing and skewed perspectives of the world around us (for the record, I’m still a bleeding liberal – albeit slowly moving to left of center – but I often find CNN just as annoying as Fox News… enough with the point scoring, already.. can’t you two just play nicely?), it is all to easy to just wallow around in content that reflects your own beliefs and ideas, without ever letting yourself be challenged or forced to think for yourself.
So, now that I’ve got the informercial for Medium out of the way, I’d like to talk about a specific post that really resonated with me the other day. With it’s ‘oh so punk’ title of Jonny Pissed in a Pint, Janette Beckman shares some of her iconic images from the early days of the UK’s punk / new-wave scene, along with the stories behind the photos. What really pulled me into this piece was this introduction by Jonathan Schecter:
Wow.. there is something about Jonathan’s words that just gives me goosebumps. I grew up in a mining community in the north of England, coming of age in 1979. Just as computing started to take off around the late 70’s, which set me on the path to my first career in IT, the explosion of new musical forms and experimentation that was new wave / post-punk really triggered my love affair with music (particularly live music) which continues to this day. I say new wave / post-punk, because by the time that word of punk proper had reached the provinces, it was pretty much over. I’ve often wondered if I’d grown up in London, Liverpool or Manchester, whether I’d have been one of those faces you can see in the grainy photos of the day? Probably not, as punk was just too dirty and dangerous, and up until her death in May 1978, my mum had kept me on a pretty tight leash. Up until 1977, my musical tastes were either hand-me-downs from my brother John (who had, and still has, great taste, the way… thanks to him, I still have a deep love of all things Tamla, Motown, Atlantic & Stax), or the bands that my peers liked, and I just pretended that I liked them, too. As a kid with aspirations to go to University and be a scientist, and who carried his books in a leather briefcase instead of a canvas haversack, I already stood out as being ‘different’ at the awful comprehensive school that I was forced to attend after the 11-plus and grammar schools went away (in that part of the country, at least) in 1972. In the summer of 1977, I left Deincourt Comprehensive and made a conscientious decision to reinvent myself over the summer, before I move on to Tupton Hall Sixth Form. Looking back, my metamorphosis had probably started a few months earlier, when The Jam released their first single, In The City. The Jam were a gateway drug for me. They were the cleaner, sharper face of new wave, and the bridge between the soundtrack of my youth (The Who, The Kinks, Tamla) and the fast exploding world that I so wanted to be a part of. From the first time I heard them, I was a huge fan, and I continued to love them until they called it a day in 1982, going their separate ways. Take a look at the amazing bands that Stuart was able to book: The Cure (twice), Thompson Twins (local boys, about to make it big), Simple Minds, The Specials, The Pretenders, Angelic Upstarts, Def Leppard (this was done as a joke, I think) and Selecter. Absolutely bloody brilliant. Thanks, Stuart! In closing, thanks to Janette Beckman for being there, for capturing some amazing moments, and for sharing the stories behind the pictures. Until Apple brings out the iTimeTravel, I guess that triggers like these are as close as we’re going to get to revisiting key moments in our lives.
From The Jam, it was easy to branch out to explore the myriad of bands that seemed to appear at every corner, and almost on a daily basis. Other early enduring favorites were The Clash, Elvis Costello, The Skids and Talking Heads, but then in 1979, along came 2 Tone, spearheaded by my favorite live band ever, The Specials. Now I truly was “the right age, in the right proximity and in the proper mindset when a genre of music first makes it mark”. Thanks to Stuart Smith’s brilliant idea to take over Chesterfield’s disco-themed Fusion club on Thursday nights, and put on up and coming new wave bands, I got to see The Specials in a small and heavily overcrowded venue, when they were truly at their peak.I still have very fond memories of the stage invasion at the end of the very last encore, standing next to Jerry Dammers and just banging away on his Hammond organ (hmm.. sounds like something that Finbarr Suanders would say, doesn’t it?).