No Longer A Young Man's Game

Bill spots one of his grandchildren

in the audience.

Did you realise that Bill Haley was older when he recorded 'Rock Around The Clock' than all four members of The Beatles were when that band split?

It's a pretty shocking (in the literal sense) that the man regarded as the father of rock and roll was thirty when he walked into a recording studio to record what is regarded by many people as the genre's first hit.

If you're in you mid forties like me you grew up in rock and pop music's original golden age. The first record I remember hearing on the radio was Hello Goodbye (I was 7) although my late grandmother used to tell stories about me standing on her back doorstep when I was 3 strumming a tennis racket to I Want To Hold Your Hand.

All the leading rock musicians were younger than footballers which was my other obsession. Unlike a lot of my friends I didn't have an older brother so I relied on my older cousins for my initial musical experiences, listening to the fab four, Rolling Stones and Motown. Then when I started going round my mates houses I would borrow albums from their older brothers, that's how I got into Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Yes and ELP.

My parents weren't really into pop music, my mum had been a Johnny Ray fan in the fifties and my Dad was an amateur operetta singer in his youth so his taste was more Mario Lanza. We had one of those big PYE radiograms but the arm that held the stylus (sorry for the lack of technical awareness) wasn't set-up right and for years I was unaware that Help! by The Beatles actually had a verse before John started singing the line "When I was younger..."

Once I started earning pocket money (around 11 or 12) it became a ritual that every other Friday my Dad would take my brother and me down to Woolco, this was Woolworth's big superstore that sold everything from sweets to suites. Woolworths were different from W.H.Smith's in that the record you wanted didn't have to be in the chart, I think also the size of the store helped it was if all the albums they couldn't shift elsewhere got put there.

In 1972 I was part of a five a-side football team that won the South-West heats of a national competition, the prize was to take part in the nationals in Birmingham. Eight of us piled into a mini bus but unfortunately only one of us had brought any entertainment, my best friend bought his tape recording of T.Rex singing Metal Guru, he'd left the arm of the record player in the off position which meant the record played over and over and over, and that's what the C-90 tape consisted of, Metal Guru, then the sound of the needle lifting and the arm returning to its starting position before the whole thing began again - for ninety sodding minutes!

For Christmas 1972 my main present was a Sanyo radio/tape recorder which as well as having an in-built mic also had a portable one with a jack lead - the days of taping Top Of The Pops off the television had begun! I was also given a tape editing kit, which was cheap and cheerful but it provided hours of harmless fun, cutting and splicing - this was something that would get me into a bit of trouble a couple of years later, but that's another story.

When I was 13 I discovered John Peel which rather bizarrely was the same age I went to my first concert, Paul McCartney and Wings at the Bournemouth Winter Gardens. My earliest memory of John Peel is a poster in Sounds advertising the world premiere of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells on his programme - I stuck the poster on my bedroom wall with blu-tac where it remained until Debbie Harry came along four years later. I used to record Peely's shows, something I continued to do on and off until I was 19 or 20 - I still have some of them up in the loft - I guess I'm reluctant to part with an integral part of my growing up. Prior to Peel my radio listening habits were Dave Lee Travis, Alan Freeman, Radio Luxemburg (Fab 208!) and when we visited my grandparents in Essex I would listen to Radio Caroline or Radio London - my real name is the same as a former Radio London DJ which used to give me a kick.

I can only remember two things from that Wings concert, the fact that nearly everybody was under 16 and a girl and the lights and special effects for Live and Let Die.

For my fourteenth birthday I was given my first record player, it was a Rigonda which I think is Russian. It was practical, rather than sexy, to look at but boy were the two speakers powerful, forget turning it up to eleven - you couldn't get past number six without permission from the MOD. Peel of course opened my ears to weird stuff from Hawkwind, Beefheart and much later to The Smiths, The Cure, Cabaret Volataire, Cocteau Twins and of course The Fall.

Anyway, concerts, and back in the Seventies Bournemouth was on most groups tour itinerary:Bowie, Queen (on the same bill), Black Sabbath, The Kinks, Status Quo, Uriah Heep, Roxy Music and Thin Lizzy among others all played at the Winter Gardens. When punk arrived in late 1976 the old theatre was considered to be too grand for gobbing teenagers so they played at the Maison Royale and Chelsea Village, the latter being a converted underground car park. Then when the Poole Arts Centre (now the Lighthouse Centre and the largest arts centre outside of London) was opened in 1979 groups began to play there rather than Bournemouth.

Just as films in the Seventies were often shown in bizarre combinations, (I saw Carrie supported by Woody Allen's Love and Death) so there were some headline/support acts that just didn't seem right - Steve Harley was supported by Sailor (whose hit Glass of Champagne is featured in the Twiggy M & S advert). It was the night that 'Come Up And See Me' went to Number One but before Steve and the boys took to the stage we had to endure an hour of Sailor's songs about prostitutes, getting drunk in France and other lewd tales - hardly suitable for an audience most of whom were under 16.