Every gig I ever went to

Todd Rundgren’s Utopia 25 January 1977 Oxford Polytechnic I didn’t know too much about Todd Rundgren but a number of my friends were dead keen to see this gig. One of us had bought Ra, the most recent album by Utopia, and we sat around in bedrooms trying to get to grips with it. Hmmmm. ‘Ra, holy synthesiser’ went the opening song. Around this time I’m increasingly convinced that punk is the thing, and Todd isn’t making it easy to dispel prejudices about the old farts of prog. Mind you I wasn’t that impressed with the Sex Pistols debut single Anarchy in the UK: it sounded a bit like a comedy record, nowhere near as good as The Damned’s New Rose. Conventionally stodgy multi-tracked rock guitars, sluggish rhythm, too long. Only the vocal set it apart, and that reminded me of the sort of pantomime cockney which (real cockney) Steve Marriott had done much more convincingly 10 years earlier. Captain Sensible described Anarchy as ‘Bad Company fronted by Old Man Steptoe’, and I can’t improve o...

Van der Graaf Generator 19 November 1976 Oxford New Theatre ‘Theeeese   daaaaays   IIIII   mainlyjusttalktoplantsanddogs, Aaaaall   huuuuuumaaaan   contactseemspainful,risky,odd’ Thus begins Meurglys III (The Songwriters Guild), a 21-minute song about the narrator’s titular guitar, which is his only friend. ‘Meurglys III, he’s my friend, the only one that I can trust […] I suppose he’ll have to do.’ It takes up most of side 2 of World Record, the 1976 album by Van der Graaf Generator. Not the most accessible tune, the verse appears to be in 22/8 time, or 4 bars of waltz followed by one 10-beat bar, if that’s possible. About 5 minutes in it switches to a mawkish lament in slow 4/4, followed by a melodic but increasing dissonant instrumental section, then a descending sequence which seems to be another 22/8 section but this time it’s a bar of 6, two 5s, then another 6 (which might be a quick 12 in a different rhythm altogether). An abrupt stop then we’re into a fa...

Dr Feelgood / The George Hatcher Band 24 October 1976 Reading Top Rank The Tyla Gang / The Stranglers / The Vibrators 15 November 1976 Oxford Polytechnic Loudon Wainwright III ?? November Oxford Polytechnic The Dr Feelgood gig in Oxford was so good I had to see them again a few weeks later. This should have been even better, since unlike the all-seated New Theatre the Top Rank was standing only. A neo-brutalist slab opposite Reading Station, once inside it was a pretty decent venue with a sprung dancefloor and a balcony. We piled down the front and stayed there, close enough to touch Lee Brilleaux and be sprayed by sweat as Wilko Johnson skittered across the stage. In the event a lesson was learned here: the set was more or less the same as the Oxford one – if I hadn’t seen it before I might have been similarly blown away, since I had it lacked the element of surprise. The same moves, the same craziness, they had the show down to a tee as you might expect, which made what had seemed cr...

Steve Hillage ?? October 1976 Oxford Polytechnic Autumn 1976, I still don’t really know what punk is but I’m reading in the NME about the Clash, the Damned, Patti Smith, Television, the Stranglers. I’m looking for something edgy, transgressive, disruptive. Steve Hillage is playing at the Poly. I didn’t know much about Steve except he was once in Gong, hippies singing in French about flying teapots and electric cheese and the like, more recently shading into noodly jazz-fusion – that was the version I’d seen at Reading. Steve had tunes with names like Lunar Musick Suite and Electrick Gypsies and had just released his first solo album ‘L’, or ‘Bloody L’ as I prefer to call it. The vibe was very different to the Graham Parker gig in the same venue just a week or so earlier. Everyone sat cross-legged on the floor, there was a lot of hair and Afghan coats, and… what’s that smell? No not that smell, I know what patchouli oil smells like, the smoky smell. Incense? Ok, now I can see some Laura...

Graham Parker & The Rumour 2 October 1976 Oxford Polytechnic I went to this gig with my pal Stuart. We had both left school that summer, had jobs and enjoyed a certain amount of independence, or as much as weekly pay packet of £15-odd would afford. This gig (plus disco!) cost 60p, so with a couple of non-alcoholic drinks the whole evening might have cost £1. I think maybe I went straight from football, Oxford United’s stadium (such as it was, RIP the Manor) being near the Poly – apparently we drew 1-1 with Tranmere Rovers, I have no recollection of that. Anyway we arrived at the gig while the soundcheck was still taking place, and while we were hanging around outside the hall Graham Parker came out and asked us where he could get a drink before the bar was open, so we obligingly showed him the vending machine in an adjoining room. He was a skinny little guy, very friendly if a bit nervy, sounded a bit cockney to us. Turned out he was born in Hackney but grew up in Surrey, ...

Manfred Mann’s Earthband / Racing Cars 23 September 1976 Oxford New Theatre Dr Feelgood / The George Hatcher Band 24 September 1976 Oxford New Theatre Hawkwind / Tiger 25 September 1976 Oxford New Theatre If I believed that sort of hocus-pocus I’d say it was the stars aligning or somesuch airy tosh, anyway in September 1976 I went to three gigs in consecutive days at the New Theatre and was in the front row for all of them. By the third night the security were giving me funny looks. The way it worked was we talk about a gig we want to see, someone agrees to queue up and buy tickets, and if the front row is available the job’s a good’un. Manfred Mann had a few big hits in the 60s and Manfred Mann’s Earthband was a proggish update of the earlier group. They’d had a couple of modest hits, most recently a version of Springsteen’s Blinded by the Light. This was another one where I don’t remember anyone being a big fan but it was a gig so we went and frankly I remember almost nothing about i...

Eddie & the Hot Rods 17 September 1976 London Marquee Eddie & the Hot Rods were great at Reading, their Live at the Marquee ep had been a massive favourite all summer, they were obviously about to break big but for the moment were still playing a monthly residency at the Marquee Club in Soho. Rob and I decided to go, and miraculously our parents didn’t seem to have a problem with that. I’d left school and had a job, I could do what I liked. Train to London, tube to Piccadilly, join a long queue in Wardour Street, bingo, we’re in. I still didn’t really know what punk was but the Hot Rods seemed a decent approximation inasmuch as they were young, had short-ish hair and played fast, short songs. They were from Southend and a bit like Dr Feelgood but younger and more snotty. In fact they were, at least at this time, a souped-up r’n’b act playing old rock’n’roll tunes and garage-punk numbers such as 96 Tears, plus their own songs which were patchy but showed promise. The venue was s...

Reading Festival 27-28-29 August 1976 Going to a, like, rock festival was hugely exciting, we talked about it for weeks. In 1976 there was really only one weekend-long festival and it was Reading, which fortunately for us was not far away. Preparations were fairly rudimentary, we just took some sleeping bags and, in an act of quite moronic optimism, a big piece of plastic sheeting to sleep under. It folded up quite small, and in any case probably wouldn’t even be necessary since Spring and Summer of that year had seen unbroken weeks of glorious sunshine, the ground was parched, there was a hosepipe ban etc. You already know how this story ends. Hardly anyone had a tent in those days, and if they did it was made of canvas with metal poles, and anyway the idea of any of our parents going camping was just ludicrous, camping was for boy scouts and cranks. Someone had the good idea of taking a sort of flagpole so we could find our turf on the vast campsite. We’d be fine. Friday morning we m...

Strapps Oxford Polytechnic 1 May 1976 The Sensational Alex Harvey Band Oxford New Theatre ?? May 1976 Gentle Giant Oxford New Theatre 10 May 1976 Charlie Oxford College of Further Education June 1976 Electric Light Orchestra / Steve Gibbons Band Oxford New Theatre 18 June 1976 In April 1976 I acquired a moped, a Honda SS50 with a flame-red tank. If anyone’s interested, it’s the model favoured by Honky and Finger in Mike Leigh’s genius TV film Nuts in May , which came out the same year. It was really a small motorbike with pedals which were served no function other than to make it technically a moped and thus legal for 16-year-olds to ride. It changed everything – now I could go, like, anywhere, any time I wanted. In fact all I wanted was to hang out with my friends in the town and go to gigs. During the scorcher Spring of 1976 we spent evenings kicking a football around the FE college playing field, hanging out, talking about and occasionally to girls, sometimes going to someone’s hous...