Every gig I ever went to

Be Bop Deluxe / Doctors of Madness Oxford Polytechnic Thursday 19 February 1976 Conventional wisdom would have it that by the mid-70s the UK in general and music in particular was in the doldrums, post-glam, pre-punk, all endless guitar solos, mass unemployment, garbage piling up, flock wallpaper, racist sitcoms und so weiter . In fact the garbage thing was just a few weeks in 1979 and mass unemployment came under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Casual and overt racism in the media had been endemic for a long time (thank God those dark days are behind us). Contemporary music wasn’t all bad, you had to know where to look, and at school debate raged over the relative merits of Lonnie Liston Smith and Van der Graaf Generator, but it’s true the imperial years of glam and prog were over and nothing had really taken their place. I’d seen Be Bop Deluxe on the OGWT and heard them on (David) Kid Jensen’s Radio 1 show. They were essentially guitarist and singer Bill Nelson’s project, occupying a...

The Who / Steve Gibbons Band London Wembley Empire Pool Friday 24 October 1975 One week later I was back at the same venue with my schoolmate Rob. For a while back then I loved The Who, and these days I struggle to explain why but here goes. In 1975 they seemed to be the last of the great British rock acts to retain any sort of vitality, the Beatles gone, the Stones past their best and the Kinks off the radar. The Who still seemed somehow edgy and dangerous, pushing the envelope with double concept mod odyssey Quadrophenia in 1973. Musically they were the opposite of the Stones’ studied lazy downhome groove; The Who were all clanging guitar, molegrip-on-the-scrotum vocals and filing-cabinet-thrown-down-a-flight-of-stairs drums, and they had that four distinct personalities thing which is appealing to the youth: Townshend the troubled creative powerhouse, taciturn Entwistle, chippy geezer Daltrey and certifiable nutter Moon. No one had a musical dynamic like The Who – more so than in an...

Roxy Music / The Sadistic Mika Band London Wembley Empire Pool Friday 17 October 1975 I went to this gig (I called them gigs by this time) with Nick, who I didn’t know too well but we were in the same year at school. He’d been into Roxy Music right from the start and never lapsed. I hope he still hasn’t. Roxy had burst into the public arena in three years earlier with Virginia Plain, a strange and brilliant record which featuring three chords and some ancient rock’n’roll riffage but sounded like it had dropped in from another planet. They had chart success but were still cool and mysterious, like Bowie an avant-garde act working in the mainstream. Though I couldn’t afford to buy many records, by 1975 my musical taste had expanded to include all sorts of weirdness. My friends and I would make tapes for each other, we listened to John Peel and Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s Saturday Rock Show, and on my parents’ radio I had discovered a shaky signal for Radio Caroline which played a lot of prog ...

David Bowie Oxford New Theatre Tuesday 26 May 1973 My classmate Mick said he had a spare ticket to see David Bowie, did I want it? By Spring 1973 David Bowie was the biggest thing since the Beatles, all his albums, including the early ones which had done nothing first time round, were high in the charts, he was all over the papers and he was on an endless UK tour playing towns such as Taunton and Bridlington. This was the fourth show at the New Theatre on the same tour, demand was such that dates just kept being added. On Monday 25 July he would play two Oxford shows on the same day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. Mick offered me a ticket for the last of the Oxford dates. Yes, I wanted it and my parents, who were just the kindest people, said I could go. Wow. Mick lived on the council estate adjoining our school. I’d been friends with him for a few months, like Richard he was a big music fan, his two older sisters had cool records which we used to sneak out of school at l...

Gary Glitter/Hello Oxford New Theatre Saturday 12 May 1973 It’s a warm Saturday evening, I’m 13 years of age and I’m standing in a queue outside the New Theatre in George Street, Oxford, with my friend Richard and a chap called Harvey, who is in the year above us at school. We’re going to see Gary Glitter in concert, and we don’t need to queue because we have numbered tickets for an all-seater venue, but I don’t know this because I’ve never been to a gig before, the protocol is foreign to me. Besides, it’s nice to let the excitement build, and be seen standing in line by other less fortunate characters who aren’t going to see Gary Glitter, the poor blighters. My parents, having driven me into town, have gone to the cinema while I’m at the concert. 1973 was shaping up quite well. If we had ever acknowledged such things, which we didn’t, I’d say that Richard was my best friend. We made each other laugh, and liked a lot of the same things, specifically music and… well that’s it really, ma...