Mick Hucknall out of Simply Red

Mick Hucknall can belt out a tune; that's a given. However, if the whole singing thing hadn't worked for the lad, then a career as a professional footballer was surely on the cards. Just the few cameo appearances he made for Fulchester Utd back in the late eighties/early nineties were enough to guarantee him a place in any right-thinking* manager's starting lineup.

But long before Fulchester and Simply Red and even before he used to get mistaken for Sideshow Bob, Hucknall was in a punk band. Judging by this early demo of Holding Back the Years, a very soulful punk band.

And here's the polished version from Picture Book, just a handful of years later, when horn sections and shooting atmospheric videos in Whitby were de rigeur.

* Never one to be labelled right-thinking, Tommy Brown, Fulchester Utd's manager, used to write a regular column in the match day programme. This from 2 April 1990, ahead of their match against arch rivals Grimthorpe City.

'As team manager my job has not been an easy one. I've been sacked, slandered in the gutter press, I've suffered a fatal heart attack, been kidnapped and taken to Mars, undergone a sex change operation and travelled back through time to caveman days. But that's football. You don't take a job on like this and expect to have an easy time of it. Of course at the end of the day my job is to get results. Football is about winning, and when the final whistle goes if there's no silverware in the chopping cabinet, it will be my head on the trophy block. That's what this game of ours is all about.'

Stuck in the middle

  I was crate digging long before the record collecting hipster who coined the term was born. When record emporiums were knocking out chart singles at 40p, I used to slide down to my local market on a Saturday morning and trawl through the boxes and boxes of ex-jukebox singles. Here, for 25p, was a world of 45s that had been playing in pubs on their record machines before they were usurped by the latest batch of single releases; out with the old, in with the new.

  The fact that they didn't have middles was of no concern. Adaptors could be bought for tuppence each and came in all shapes and sizes.

  It being a Sunday, having started something of a tradition this time last week, I've tried to commit to canvas a few of these small but perfectly formed appendages.
  And, just for good measure, I've chucked in a couple of videos. The first one was what Gerry Rafferty had in mind when he wrote Stuck in the Middle with You. It's followed by Quentin Tarantino's now infamous interpretation of same.

Quarry St. kids in leather take Hamburg

Creole was sharp but his guitar was acoustic, go Johnny go, use your electric

A proper fairy tale

Although Elvis did meet The Beatles (in August 1965, many years after John was in Hamburg), this photograph is a fake. But it makes you smile doesn't it? Talking about fake photographs, a friend of mine is currently researching the Cotttingley Fairies: now that's an enchanting story. But not content with just turning it into a three minute folk song, PP Woodlands has plans to to take a full blown musical production of 'Away with the Fairies' to the West End later this year. I'm there.

Goodbye Gary Glitter, hello Generation X

Apparently you can still buy cassette tapes. Who knew? I thought they'd gone the same way as typewriter ribbons and telex machines. I really can't remember when I last saw the remnants of a jettisoned C90 fluttering in the wind, stuck in a hedge by the side of the A1.


I've still got a box of tapes which, in all honesty,  will probably never get played again. Many of them have still got Dymo labels stuck on the front heralding things like The Saints (John Peel Session) and Rory Gallagher In Concert. The Saints would have been from the same night Peel played Television's Marquee Moon for the first time and Rory Gallagher would almost certainly have been coming from the Paris Theatre 'in London's West End',

Apart from a few made by BASF and Philips the majority of cassettes sitting in my garage will be TDK. I don't even have to look: between 1972 and 1992 I must have pumped enough money into the TDK corporation to buy a small yacht. And then some.

The D90 was my tape of choice. It was cheap and cheerful. Just look at the picture above. It's a thing of beauty isn't it? And It didn't snap if your deck (we always referred to them as decks) rewound tapes a tad  too fast and you could record over stuff again and again. So when  punk came along I was a bit like the BBC: I had to wipe existing stock purely because of room. Goodbye Garry Glitter, hello Generation X.


I got the brushes out yesterday and tried to recreate a bit of my past. I hope you don't mind, but I substituted the TDK moniker for my own. And it's Richard, before you ask.

The boy with the coat hanger on his head

Lord Snooty is as old as the comic in which he resided. So if The Beano started life in 1938, and he was roughly ten years of age, I'd say Snooty must be well into his eighties by now. Same goes for coat hanger head. I think his name was Thomas and, so the story goes, he had his own spin off series in the forties.

He's pictured here kicking a tin can around with the rest of the gang*. The sound it made, of course, was 'CLUNK!'. However, there's no footage of him heading it. Well, he couldn't, could he?


* The gang seemed to comprise a fat lad (there was always a fat lad in a gang), a pair of pyjama clad twins, a posh girl, a girl of colour and a Jack the Lad character who always had his sleeves rolled up. And, of course, our top hatted hero. As an avid reader I remember they all used to say 'Grrr!' quite a lot.

Organic

Piano stool

Red chair

Ever wondered how Pete Townshend stumbled across one of rock and roll's most iconic of intros? Baba O'Riley, side one track one from Who's Next, has, probably, the most recognisable of any opening motif recorded in the last fifty years - sounding like a cross between a carousel fairground ride and a musical box.

It actually comes from a bit of kit not dissimilar to the mighty Wurlitzer found in the ballroom at the top of Blackpool Tower: the Lowery Berkshire Deluxe Organ TBO-1, to give it it's full name, probably took up more room than it's contemporary Hammond, coming as it did with a vast array of arrangements and novelty sounds that could keep John Shuttleworth in material for the rest of his career.

In 1971 Townshend discovered that if you played about with the Marimba Repeat tab, it made a noise something like this:

And with a bit of tweaking and by hooking it up to one of those new fangled synthesiser things that were all the rage it suddenly took on a life of its own. Here it is many years later, in 2000 to be precise, with Pete, Rog and John joined by Nigel Kennedy at The Royal Albert Hall:

Je Suis Charlie

RCA

Depending on your age, and your musical compass, the RCA Victor label will either mean Elvis, Perry Como and Clodagh Rogers, or, most likely, The Sweet, Bowie and Lou Reed.
  Regular readers know that my love affair with their classic green and white paper sleeve goes back to a time when men wore hats, women wore hairnets and children played in the street dodging Ford Cortinas and white dog poo.


And then through the seventies RCA did the whole rebrand thing and before you could say Eight Track Cartridge we were surrounded by rainbows and flowers. But, alas, labels and sleeves have gone the same way as 4 Star petrol and phone boxes. However, these miniature canvasses, painted by my friend Tony and now hanging in my music room, will serve as a memory to a time when the pound in your pocket could buy you two singles (sometimes three) and Steve Priest could still get into a pair of 30 inch waist trousers.

About His Person

Simon Armitage: Chief Inspector of the Poetry Police

To paraphrase Pete Townshend, I take inspiration for my songwriting anyway, anyhow, anywhere I can. In the case of About His Person (No Gold or Silver), I quite shamelessly nicked someone else's words. When I say nicked, I borrowed Simon Armitage's poem About His Person. But not before I tried to get hold of Simon to ask if I could use his prose and that I wouldn't be recording it or putting it on my next million seller album: I would just be playing it in front of polite middle class folk/acoustic club audiences in my little part of the world.

The reply I received from his management company was so draconian (they wanted me to sign copyright contracts, disclaimer clauses and everything), I sort of gave up on the idea. Until earlier this week, when I spent a couple of days on it and turned it into, I think, a dark but poignant little ditty that leaves the listener asking questions; just like the poem, really.

But, as I say, I can't share the finished product with you: I wouldn't want the Poetry Police kicking my door in during one of their dawn raids.

However, I can share this little film with you. And, no, it's not my handwriting, nor is it my music.