Every gig I ever went to

Dire Straits Oxford Polytechnic 2 July 1978 The Motors Oxford College of Further Education 7 July 1978   The Clash and Bowie was quite enough excitement for one week but a gig’s a gig so Saturday night I went to the Poly to see those no-hopers Dire Straits, for whom excitement wasn’t really a selling point. Not that I didn’t like them, I’d seem them earlier in the year (Gig 048) and thought they were pretty good in an undemonstrative way, perfectly enjoyable, obviously never going to make it big. They just didn’t fit anywhere in 1978; for a start the guitarist/singer was an old balding bloke who looked like a teacher (I checked, he was 28 and yes he was – or had been – a teacher) and didn’t seem remotely charismatic nor particularly cross about anything. But boy could he play guitar, eloquent cascades of melody defining the songs, in which the vocal line was semi-spoken rather than sung. He evoked JJ Cale, Clapton, Ry Cooder, maybe the more lyrical blues guys such as BB King. Alrea...

David Bowie London Earls Court 1 July 1978   Blimey, Tuesday was The Clash, Friday was David Bowie, I was on a roll here. I’d last seen Bowie almost exactly five years earlier, since which time he’d released six albums, at least three of which were mind-blowingly innovative, and collaborated on the two albums which launched and defined Iggy Pop’s solo career. Fey and otherworldly as he may have been, he knew how to put in a shift. If anything the punk revolution enhanced his standing, even if the Gumby tendency probably considered him a bit of a poof. He moved in different air, did his own thing and the rest of us could only gawp; notwithstanding the likes of Ultravox, Magazine or Siouxsie and the Banshees, his influence would remain largely unacknowledged for another couple of years, after which those excitable new romantics just couldn’t contain themselves any longer.   Talking of whom, I imagine most if not all of those who were to become the Blitz kids attended Bowie’s Lon...

The Clash/The Specials Aylesbury Friars 28 June 1978   Everyone raved about The Clash. The press adulation was off the scale, they had amphetamine intensity and political militancy, no question they were the big punk act once the Sex Pistols had imploded; personally I just didn’t think they were all that. Their one album at this time had its moments, notably those where they sounded a bit like Dr Feelgood e.g. Janie Jones, and their take on Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves was charming if a little ham-fisted, but I found much of it rather plodding, back-of-a-fag-packet lyrical agitprop welded to predictable chords. Perhaps they weren’t taking enough speed. That said, the subsequent single Complete Control (produced by Lee Perry, not that you’d know) was a cracking record, as was Clash City Rockers, and White Man in Hammersmith Palais, released a couple of weeks before this gig, was something else again. Lyrically it was streets ahead of their contemporaries, a rumination on betr...

The Flamin’ Groovies/Radio Birdman Oxford College of Further Education 10 June 1978 For a couple of years I’d been a big fan of the Flamin’ Groovies, notably their early 70s punk-anticipating garage rock albums Flamingo and Teenage Head. More recently they had undergone something of a makeover, re-emerging in 1976 with new anglophile singer Chris Wilson, the outstanding single Shake Some Action and an album of the same title, which referenced more classic sources such the Beatles, the Stones, the Byrds, the Pretty Things, and hummed with a deliciously warm, valve-y jangle. It’s hard to imagine now but, the recent past being so much more old-fashioned than the distant past, the Beatles and Stones were largely considered hopelessly démodé at the time, disdained by punks and prog-heads, ignored by almost everyone else. Glen Matlock was allegedly thrown out of the Sex Pistols for liking the Beatles; clearly the likes of Paul Weller, Squeeze and Generation X were huge Beatles fans, but the...

The Pirates Oxford College of Further Education 2 May 1978 The Lurkers Oxford Cape of Good Hope 11 May 1978 The Pirates were a right bunch of old lags, having originally been Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and scoring hits in the pre-Beatles era, notably British rock’n’roll classic Shakin’ All Over. In the wake of Dr Feelgood a number of rocking r’n’b groups had appeared and maybe the Pirates felt they had a point to prove to the upstarts, anyway they’d been playing the London pub circuit for a couple of years to wildly enthusiastic responses and reviews. This was another gig I was dead keen to see. The house lights go down to the sound of thunderclaps and a storm at sea, three figures take their places on the darkened stage, a piercing guitar intro and the stage lights illuminate three 30-something blokes dressed as, well, pirates, ripping into a ludicrously pumped-up reading of old chestnut Please Don’t Touch. They play for an hour and never let up, and it’s preposterous in the way that...

Carnival Against The Nazis – X-Ray Spex, The Clash, Steel Pulse, TRB Victoria Park, Hackney, London 30 April 1978 Let’s talk about racism, because you really need an old white bloke spouting off about this important issue. Actually someone should have talked to me about racism back in the 70s but no one did, not really, I had to figure it out for myself and to be honest I didn’t really know what racism was, which is strange because I was a witness to it almost every day. At the time of this event the National Front were gaining in acceptance and influence, the Black & White Minstrel Show was still on prime time tv, racist epithets were common currency: it was no big deal to hear such language, on television, at work, on the street and among some members of my family. If I had a pound for every time I heard the expression ‘Enoch was right’, well I wouldn’t be rich but could certainly have afforded a better motorbike. (I should stress that, while they were hardly campaigners against ...

Wreckless Eric / The Tourists Oxford College of Further Education 8 April 1978 Since I’d last seen him Wreckless Eric had become moderately well-known, acquired a proper group and released an album. He was still a scruffy little guy with a nasal estuarine voice, scrubbing away on the same Woolworths Top Twenty guitar I’d seen him play last time round. At one point he broke a string and swopped the the cheapo guitar for a rather beautiful red Rickenbacker, which I would have thought was perverse if there hadn’t been a whiff of contrivance about it. Opening act were The Tourists, a competent and unobjectionable power pop act, whose singer looked like a new-wave Julie Andrews. A little later she and one of the guitarists would make the smart move of ditching the group and go on to massive success as Eurhythmics, but no one could have imagined this at the time. To be honest I spent most of the evening trying to cop off with someone so I don’t remember much more than this.