Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 2 days ago and current, but nothing has been published for 12 months.
I am sixteen years old and Jack Your Body is number 1. Top of the Pops has never felt more like a televised version of Radio Free Europe than at this point. There is no house music in Ceredigion. Dance culture round our way meant one of three things. Firstly the traditional twmpath scene of Young Farmers and WI events. Then there was the fortnightly disco in Tregaron, a truly terrible occasion…
Everything is wet. The moment you step outside you experience the first instalment of drowning. Sleet, mist, snow, fog, drizzle. Take your pick. Always something watery in the weather. But mainly there is the rain, the insistent, persistent, consistent rattle of water on the hood of your coat, the flimsy window of your bedroom, the windscreen of the bus, the driving of it in the gale force wind…
I am fourteen years old and Foreigner are Top of the Pops. I have been living in Wales, proper Wales, actual sheep shit in the wintry air, slate roof, Cymraeg-speaking, terrifyingly rural Wales for about three months. Our house is 250 years old and the roof is falling apart. The television signal is intermittent and one of the channels is in a language that, right now, is completely alien to me.…
I am thirteen years old and, for the second time in my life, Paul McCartney is Top of the Pops . It says a lot about this country that you can stick an ex-Beatle in an average at best song, make a sentimental video set in the apocryphal footballing truce Christmas World War One story, and watch the money roll right on in. The First World War, Beatles and Christmas. If that story hadn’t already…
I am twelve and Phil Collins is number one in the charts. Hard really to explain the Phil Collins phenomenon to anyone younger than 45. He’s the drummer in a prog rock band who becomes the singer when the singer quits to make mental music on his own . Collins decides to drag his band in a more commercial direction and then decides he can get even more commercial by doing stuff on his own.…
I am eleven years old and two terrible things have happened. Firstly, my grandad has died. The day before my birthday. He had cancer. He was a quiet, sweet man from the Valleys. He'd been a miner, a gas fitter, a builder. He once fell off a cooling tower and survived. He saw some serious action in the war and would never speak about it. Medals were hidden and memorials avoided. He was a doting…
I am ten years old, and a recently murdered Beatle is top of the Pops. The Beatles were not part of my childhood till this point. My parents were young enough to have been huge fans, but they were soul kids and their small record collection was mostly Motown and Stax etc. Radio didn’t play them much and their films were never on. It was as though, having dominated the Sixties, it was time to move…
I am nine years old and the Pretenders are number one. Both these things will never happen again. Moving into the eighties, the main thing I remember was this glut of new fonts everywhere. Everything seemed to have a futuristic look or at least look like a load of letters that had just been in the freezer too long. The most important thing that happened to me at the age of 9 was seeing Llanddewi…
(HIT ME WITH YOUR RHYTHM STICKERS) I am eight, Ian Dury is number one . I was recently telling a friend that looking back I realised more that I was an unhappy child than someone who had had an unhappy childhood. I didn’t fit in. I found comfort in books and films and pop music from an early age. But then, not long before my eighth birthday, Death entered my world. He didn’t come to Pemberley . He…
There are two schools of thought about Paul McCartney. The first, and by some distance the most widely acknowledged, is that as one of the most important songwriters of the 20 th century, a former Beatle no less, he should be afforded some grace and kindness when reflecting on the less significant of his works. The other, espoused by my friend Hairy Dennis, is that, because he was one of the main…