Gig 006/007/008/009/010 Strapps / The Sensational Alex Harvey Band / Gentle Giant / Charlie / Electric Light Orchestra

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 house to listen to records if the parents happened to be out. Some of the contemporary records we enjoyed were: Bob Dylan, Desire; Steely Dan, The Royal Scam; The Front Line (Virgin reggae sampler); The Blue Oyster Cult, On Your Feet or On Your Knees (Live); Osibisa, Welcome Home; Eddie & the Hot Rods, Live at the Marquee (ep); Derek & Clive Live. Generally we tried to avoid more than one of us buying the same record, thus maximising our listening pleasure while minimising cost. This was never discussed – I think it may be considered a form of anarcho-syndicalism.

Punk was out there but hard to access. There had been articles in the NME about the CBGBs scene in New York and some rascals in London called the Sex Pistols. On 19 May 1976 I heard John Peel play Judy is a Punk by the Ramones. The show had featured some very cool tunes by Nils Lofgren, Kevin Coyne and the Mighty Diamonds, but the Ramones were so starkly different, fast, unadorned, noisy, tuneful. And over so quickly. My moped allowed me to visit Sunshine Records in Oxford, where the album sleeves were stacked on wooden racks and hippies gave you what I considered to be a judgemental once-over on entry. They had the Ramones’ album, plus records by the Stooges and the MC5, but all on import and thus too expensive. I bought an album called Flamingo by the Flamin’ Groovies, and a cracking single called Shake Some Action. Rob and I liked Dr Feelgood and Eddie & the Hot Rods, that was as close to punk as we could get, at least for a while.

The moped also allowed me to go to gigs with my friends. The choice was limited and we weren’t always that enthusiastic about the acts, but we went anyway, just the idea of going to a gig seemed exciting. Strapps at Oxford Polytechnic is a good case in point. I think we went because it was free, part of a promotion by Marlboro to get students hooked on cigarettes. Strapps were rubbish, a lumpen tuneless approximation of hard rock with dire lyrics about what they imagined to be transgressive sex, involving S&M imagery and titles such as Schoolgirl Funk. (References to sex with under-age girls was commonplace in the world of rock, and conferred a sort of Jack-the-lad bad-boy status on any number of witless dorks.) It was more On the Buses than Jean Genet, and it was bloody awful, I think my friends agreed.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band was something else altogether, I think we were all dead keen to see this one. The SAHB had been going for years, and Alex himself even longer. They’d just started to enjoy chart success with a theatrical take on the Tom Jones standard Delilah. Even up in the gods Alex’s charisma shone through, an effective splicing of pirate captain and Glaswegian hard man, Zal Cleminson and Chris Glen complementing him with a clownish technicolor take on the Clockwork Orange look. The fictional Vambo gang updated H. Kingsley Long’s novel No Mean City, the definitive vision of Glasgow for several generations. They put on a great show, Alex at one point bursting through a (polystyrene) brick wall, and bravely finished with the about-to-be-released Boston Tea Party. That was a real gig.

Then there was Gentle Giant, a lesser light in the prog firmament. My abiding memory of this gig is that we had tickets for the balcony but managed to sneak into the stalls as there were plenty of free seats. We subsequently pulled this trick a few times. Despite my growing reservations about whether it was ok to like prog, Gentle Giant put on a hugely enjoyable show; they were just dead good at what they did, had melodic moments among the virtuosity, engaged with the audience and weren’t up themselves like some of their contemporaries.

Charlie were one of several groups given the big media push just before punk who became hopelessly unfashionable overnight. We’d seen them on OGWT and while they weren’t all that it was a gig and it was cheap. They weren’t as hopeless as Strapps and while their sexual politics were similarly primitive, they contained an element of self-deprecation – they never had a UK hit but their big tune was Fantasy Girls which is about achieving relief through the use of porn mags. The gig was barely half-full. They were competent, which is really the worst thing you can say about any live act. 

ELO was another one we went to just because we could, I don’t remember anyone being a huge fan. They’d had a few hits but this was before they became a massive chart act in the late 70s. We were up in the gods and from the gig I don’t remember much other than a big freak-out on orchestral instruments for the closing Roll Over Beethoven, the cellist doing a duckwalk. I think this may have been the first time we went round the back of the theatre to the stage door to get autographs, written on album sleeves lifted from the display in the foyer. Jeff Lynne seemed like an affable bloke, I imagine he went on to do ok for himself.