FastCounter by LinkExchange

CHRIS RICHARDS

GLAISDALE SCHOOL 6

HOW IT WAS, 1973 - 1978

Click above for 70s images!

PAGES

1 2 3 4 5 6

[ Sign my Guestbook] - [Read my Guestbook ]
[Guestbook by TheGuestBook.com]

Mick Ronson with Les Paul, 1973

BOWIE & RONSON

The sight of David Bowie, with his orange feather duster hairdo, was one of the great pop spectacles of 1972. Although painfully thin, with crooked teeth and different coloured eyes, he penned classics such as 'Life on Mars' 'Space Oddity' and 'John I'm only Dancing' making him the hottest property of the early 1970s. 'Jean Genie' even sounded like a Nottingham accent when Bowie and Ronson, with downturned contorted mouths, sang 'Jean Genehh'. The tone of Ronson's blonde Gibson Les Paul guitar was enough to make me take up the instrument in 1973. Being painfully shy and anti-social to the extreme and with no brothers and sisters to fight with, I retreated to my unheated bedroom to practise chords on my cheap Kay guitar, purchased from Woolworths. Meanwhile, Simon and Richard Button and a kid called Kevin Maltby had formed a school band called 'Trash'. An older kid with glasses called David Whitlam often played at assembly, I remember a rendition of 'Albatross' (by Fleetwood Mac) being played to a pin-drop silent assembly hall. Other stage heroes included the girl duo of Alison Hennesey and Julia Dring, who strummed along to Abba's 'Fernando' like double vision Mary Hopkin clones.

1976 - and the blazing hot summer, when even ties were discarded, although the shirt collar had to be pulled out and worn over the top of the blazer. I heard laughter by the music room wall in the lads playground, and glanced across to see figures scuttling across the wall next to a dusty grass area, from one end to to other, shielding their faces, while a bigger youth aimed a cricket ball at their heads. I asked another lad what it was and he replied 'It's cricket-chicken yer twat' 'They tek turns te run across and he lobs the ball at 'em'. I laughed at the sheer adolescent lunacy of this concept. One first year was already holding a bruised kneecap, teeth gritted in the summer sunshine as he sat down by the edge of the playground, flared trouser rolled up to reveal a possible fractured right leg.

Along Beechdale Road on the way home a German Shepherd pup always reared up on the gate and scared the life out of us. One day I came prepared. 'Hey - Toffo dog', I cried, as I chewed up about 4 Mint Toffos and spat them into my hand. As it made a leap for the gate, its head dipped to one side as it saw and then smelt the brown caramel treat and it suddenly started wagging its tail and sniffing at the air with its long muzzle. I held out my hand and then jammed the sticky toffee underneath the canine's front teeth in a quick sweeping action. We got hysterical as the dog fell to the ground and tried to get the soft toffee from its palatte. It was on its back, legs kicking, head rolling from side to side, teeth bared as it tried to free the equivalent of Araldite from its vicious incisors, with a muffled huff and a metallic retch. As we ran off towards Beechdale Library, we wondered whether Toffo Dog would be at the gate tomorrow.

As we sat down in Mr Matthew's Maths lesson, it was often the ritual to see what was in the desk you had just occupied. Often the wooden lid had been secured with a knob of chewing gum, which took a sharp upward blow from the back of the hand to free, revealing chewed up paper, sweet wrappers and discarded fountain pen cartridges. Suddenly there was a clattering of chairs as the Head, white-haired Jack Aram came into the classroom and we all stood up in ritualistic fashion. Beckoning us to sit down, he carried on talking to 'Noddy' Matthews before leaving the room, brushing at his smart grey suit with his fingertips.

We were often the last to leave the sweat-soaked PE changing rooms, but this time Mr Short had gone out and left us to finish getting dressed. Phil, a powerfully built black youth, was half dressed, topless, with Afro hairdo, trousers and platform shoes on, doing pull-ups on the heating pipes that ran at ceiling level, to show his strength, and we all counted him as he got to 20, 25. Suddenly he winked and brought his bullnosed clown shoe upwards in a violent jerking action, smashing the plastic cover on the fluorescent light fitting, and then booted it again just for good measure, but this time with an exaggerated splintering sound. We got dressed quickly in hysterics as we heard Shorty padding down the corridor, and Phil slipped the broken pieces of plastic into his pocket, the light now flashing like a disco strobe and buzzing like a half-dead Dalek.

No-not a firm of accountants, but the French and German teachers who took me in the mid-1970s. Mrs Raju sounded like a brand of spaghetti sauce, and was a tall, skinny, shy, slightly Indian-looking teacher who took French, along with the stoutly-built, pipe smoking Frenchman Mr Carre, who also taught German. Having a German mother myself, this was the perfect teenage excuse for serious under-achievement in the subject, and when Mrs Sowerby came along to teach me, I was 'the pupil from hell'. Once she asked us to translate 'They are enjoying themselves' and she collapsed into fits of giggles. Somebody had written out, in German - 'They are enjoying each other'. But I am afraid that listening to Mrs Sowerbys pigeon English was too much like being at home, so she didnt really click with the 14 year old adolescent brooding nightmare that was Chris Richards!

At the side of a narrow corridor next to the Tech Drawing lab were the lads toilets. However, the doors to the traps, khazis, or shithouses as they were known had a small gap underneath. By getting down on hands and knees you could see who was in there by the presence of boots and flared trousers round the ankles, and play tricks. A good one was to get hold of the trouser bottoms under the door and pull the pupil off the toilet seat. Or lighted paper was another good one to shove under the door. After a kid in my year called 'Salty' had eaten planted Ex-Lax laxative chocolate, he definitely needed a visit to Trap 2!

It was rumoured that I would be getting a Philips tape recorder for Christmas that year. However I knew roughly where my parents had hidden the presents. All illusions of Santa Claus had been shattered in 1968, when my dad had stumbled drunkenly into my room at 2am to place the pillowcase over the end of the bed, and stubbed his toe. The next day I embarrassed my aunties and uncles by saying - 'You know Santa, Dad. Well he sounds just like you, cos when he banged his toe on the edge of the bed and said 'Bollocks' it was just like you Dad.' Anyway - back to 73 - my parents were out and the baby sitter downstairs, and I crept into Mum and Dads room to look for my tape recorder in the top of their wardrobe. Cascades of hardcore porno books came showering down on me, probably obtained from workmates at Raleigh Industries, and I picked out the best one, put the others back and scuttled back to bed. Sod the tape recorder, I thought. 'Jesus, does it really look like that?' I whispered as I flipped through the well-thumbed oil-stained pages with a torch under the sheets. What a shame I swapped it for a Slade album just after Christmas.

Before modern technology such as email, cellphones, home PCs and the Internet, all that Glaisdale could offer in the late seventies in the way of technology was a video recording of a TV programme, to be replayed in a room above the Art room just next to the staffroom. Mr Tomkinson, the English master, would sit us down in chairs which had a wooden board which pivoted on the arm, for writing on. Placing a square cassette into the huge Phillips top-loading video recorder and pressing a few buttons on the SABA colour TV, Tomcat would take his seat at the side and we would watch a shaky tape of some classic English play or series, which often mashed up halfway through and had to be aborted. However, we couldnt have it too loud because of the proximity of the Sick Room just at the side. This is where Nurse Nitty Nora would comb through feather cuts with purple antiseptic water, looking for headlice, often passed on in a large school such as Glaisdale.

In another act of plain anti-parent defiance, I decided to abandon any ideas of a career in Art & Design and go for an interview at Raleigh Industries in the spring of 1978, following both grandfather and father into this hell-hole of a place. I had heard that this was just a glorified assembly plant but I thought I'd have a look round. Passing through Gate 4 on my own, with my Paul Weller centre parting, dressed in cream Marshall Ward jacket with massive lapels, shirt, trousers and tie, I sat at a table and was interviewed by a man in a suit, while machinery whined noisily around me, and carry-all drivers shunted their electric trolleys down Faraday Road. I was asked a question which I disagreed with and so spat back at the interviewer, eventually storming out throught the gates and arriving home with a feeling of relief, just as Mum dished up the teatime liver and onions. I never got the job as Raleigh apprentice, but at school the next day Carl Smith cynically christenened me a 'Raleigh Robot Reject.'

PUNK GARAGE

1976, and Keith Dudley and I were playing table tennis in my Dads garage at 31 Ainsley Road, Radford, when he whipped out his Philips tape recorder and put on a cassette of the Sex Pistols 'Never Mind the Bollocks'. As Keith pushed the green BASF C120 tape into the machine, Steve Jones' rapier-like guitar slashed across my 14 year old brain like a Glaswegian street-gang razor, and 'Holiday in the Sun' emitted forth from the tiny speaker, with pre-Liam Gallagher vocals like I'd never heard, spat rather than sang, with an arrogant defiance that was backed up by an appearance by the group on the Bill Grundy Show, where copious swear words were aired on national TV for the first time, and dozens of suburban TV sets were kicked in by anxious fathers. It was a welcome break from Tangerine Dream, Wishbone Ash, Genesis, and all the other pompous prog-rock bands that seemed to favour musicianship over raw power and energy. By the time 1977 came, there was no stopping Ian Dury and his Blockheads, Elvis Costello, The Clash, The Jam, The Ramones, the Lurkers, 999, Stranglers, Buzzcocks, X Ray Spex, Talking Heads, and Irelands Undertones, who boasted a parka-clad lead singer that looked like he'd been smashed in the face with a frying pan and had his lips cut off. Boasting the same tremulant vibrator-voice as Johnny Rotten, Feargal Sharkey penned the mighty 'Teenage Kicks' and was an unlikely pin-up. Britain ruled the world of punk in 1977, which sat side by side with disco in the hit parade..

INTO THE DRINKERS WORLD '79

Apart from a few adolescent visits to the 'Nottingham Arms' in Radford, and the 'Raleigh Social Club' with my Dad in 1978 - I had never really ventured into the world of adult drinking until early 1979, when I had enrolled for the 2 year Art 'A' level course at Clarendon College (after my 'Raleigh Robot' rejection 2 stories earlier on this page). Of course the gateway to 'Alcohol Heaven' was still Denman Street, Radford, which took you (safely) all the way on foot from the Skills bus depot right up to Canning Circus and downhill past Hooleys and Baker & Plumbs to the Playhouse Bar, where all the trendy students hung out in 1979. I had heard of the Bier Kellar and Colemans Disco, but this was a collective of drama students and theatre people, smoking skinny roll-up funny fags and quoting excerpts from books, where huge Marshall Ward collars, long hair and flared trousers were passe. Paul Fillingham and myself once stopped off at Yates Wine Lodge on Long Row, upstairs with the tarts, violin and piano, and were asked 'Yer suppin' or what?' by a belligerent glass collector when we lounged on a bench seat without buying a drink. The next stop was often the Imperial 'Cooler Bar' on St James St, where bands such as Gaffa, Harry and the Atoms, Some Chicken, Colin Staples Breadline, the Cutouts and Loose House (with Jez Shillingford on sax and guitar) played punk/funk/rock in the low-ceilinged smoke haze. Teenage hands were stamped with black ink after 50p entrance so as to gain access to the seedy corridor toilet and the dynamic quartet of local band Gaffa - Wayne Evans, John Maslen, Clive (Myph) Smith and Mick Barratt played such classics as 'Different Story', 'The Russians Are Coming', 'Attitude Dancing', Hearts of Stone', Lovely Kid', 'Talking Shop', and 'Nazareth Said'. It was after one of these gigs that I had my first doner kebab. Fresh from the Turkish takeaway next to Briddocks newsagent on Parliament Street. The strips of shaved recycled lamb were mixed with a pitta bread which was slit, stuffed with cabbage and salad, and squirted with what I thought was tomato ketchup but what turned out to be extra hot jalepeno chilli sauce. As the junk food burger bomb hit teenage lager stomachs, it was not until morning that I felt the effects of this, as I struggled, at midday, to get out of bed and face the smell of the ritualistic dinnertime egg and chip fry-up that was drifting upstairs, as Dad pushed open the front door, hungry for his dinner after a Saturday morning stint at the Raleigh factory.

On the Ainsley Estate, the shops in the centre of Ainsley Road were - from the left: Les's greengrocers, another food store, and on the right, Lens Chinese Chippy and Harry Selvey's butchers on the extreme right. In the back of Selveys butchers, an old chokka, approaching retirement, chopped away at joints of meat on a crude wooden block, just out of sight, and the shelves were filled with packs of Paxo stuffing, in front of tiles with cow's heads on them, and the strange chilled smell of raw meat. Chinese Len next door had a rather large wife called Brenda, who took the silver VW Golf even to the papershop a few hundred yards away. Len served spicy Chinese curry as well as the fruited sultana version, and this was strong enough to blow you into the middle of Western Boulevard if you werent careful. His gas-powered green Frank Ford cooking range was about the only thing going in the strikes of the mid-1970s!! My mum would go into the food store next to Les's and go up behind someone who was buying ham. 'Slice it thin, she's expecting guests' she would say. In this strange shop, filled with Cresta pop, Curly Wurlys, Lemon and Lime Shandy Bass and Space Dust, neighbours would exchange the weekly gossip - who was pregnant, who had smacked who, and who was sleeping with 'so and so's' wife.

About 1976 - I got a great pair of powder-blue A-Line trousers, with about 4 buttons on the waistband, pockets halfway down the legs, and completely covering my shoes at the bottom. Mum said that she once saw a lad run for a bus and be tripped up by his ample flares, one leg having wrapped itself round the other, bringing him to a halt just outside Beechdale Road library. These did the rounds of youth club, family wedding and other such events, before being passed down to a poorer family on the estate about 1978. Expecting the youth of the household to take them on, I drew open my bedroom curtains one day and creased with laughter. The 55 year old father of the household was striding proudly down the road in my secondhand flares, teetering on the platform bullnosed boots I had also passed down!

all text ©2001 C W Richards

BACK I FORWARD

HOME