Showing posts with label gillian hall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gillian hall. Show all posts

6 Oct 2022

Snapshots from 1983 (Featuring Johnny Rotten, Billy Bragg and Lorrie Millington)

Johnny Rotten and Billy Bragg (28 October 1983)
 
 
I. 
 
Despite the cynical brilliance of 'This Is Not a Love Song' [1], it's probably fair to say that I listened more to Killing Joke and the Dead Kennedys in 1983 than to Public Image Ltd., and that Jaz Coleman and Jello Biafra suddenly seemed more interesting characters than Johnny Rotten.
 
Nevertheless, when PiL played live on The Tube [2] in October 1983, I felt obliged to watch out of love and loyalty for all that Rotten had meant to me:
 
"PiL opened their short set with 'This Is Not a Love Song' and closed it with 'Flowers of Romance'. In between, they offered a kind of honky-tonk version of 'Anarchy in the UK'. 
      Rotten lived up to his name and probably deserved to be booed or bottled off stage. But very funny as he patted the front row punks on their spiky heads and even spat for the camera. Whilst he made little effort to actually perform, it was hard to tell if his apathy (and professed sickness) was real or just part of the act. Ultimately, this is more punk cabaret than punk rock and Rotten seems only too aware that the gig is up and his day is almost over. Nevertheless, he still looked good and I want that electric blue raincoat he was wearing!" [3] 
 
 
II. 
 
Nine days later, and I went to see my pal Billy Bragg playing at a tiny club in the centre of Leeds: 
 
"Arrived at Tiffany's. My name was supposed to be on the door, but wasn't, so had to talk my way in by insisting I was from a London record company; I think they call this blagging
      Once inside and having got a drink from the bar, I went to say hello to Billy pre-set. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me and insisted I give him my new address so that he could send me a copy of photo he had taken up in Newcastle when he and Rotten were guesting on The Tube [4]. He also filled me in on the latest Charisma gossip and news of Lee Ellen [5].
      Unfortunately, Billy's set didn't go smoothly - he managed to twice break strings on his guitar. Fortunately, the small crowd (and it was very small) were clearly fans and so supportive; they requested (and were given) autographs after the show. So much for punk doing away with the idea of stars! But then Billy isn't really a punk, more a Clash-influenced folk singer. Hard not to like him though - he's always been friendly to me (and he's a fellow Essex boy)." [6]    
           
 
III.
 
Twelve days after this, having missed the chance to see them at the Rainbow on Boxing Day in 1978, I thought I would take the opportunity to finally see Public Image Limited play live (at Leeds University) - though it would again require talking my way into the gig, as I didn't have a ticket and Lee Ellen insisted there was no guest list: 

"Decided to go to the Faversham [7] for a drink prior to the gig. To my delight, Lorrie [8] walked in soon after I arrived, looking fabulously sexy in black leather trousers, a big black jumper, and dark glasses. Amazing hair and make-up too. We sat down and she popped some pills given to her, she said, by her doctor. 
      It was decided that, rather than wait for the people she was supposed to be meeting, she'd come with me to the PiL gig. As we were leaving, who should walk in but Miss Hall [9]. She appeared not to see me, however. But then she's so far up herself these days, that's not surprising.
      Managed to get myself and L. into gig without any problem, despite not having tickets; I told the people on the door I was Malcolm McLaren and that Lorrie was Vivienne Westwood. If you're going to lie or bluff then it's always best to lie big and bluff with confidence. People might still know you're bullshitting them, but they'll admire your audacity (that's the theory anyway).
      The support band weren't bad; the singer was young and had style as well as energy. As for PiL, well, it was great to hear songs with which one is so familiar played live - 'Low Life', 'Memories', 'Poptones', 'Chant', and - of course - 'Public Image' (with which they opened). Rotten looked great too; young and still amazingly charismatic. He told those who spat that they were out of date. The band finished with 'Anarchy in the UK'. The crowd went wild, but I just stepped aside and felt a bit sad to be honest.
      'If you want more, you'll have to beg', said Rotten. And they did. So they got a two-song encore consisting of 'This is Not a Love Song' and 'Attack'. And that was that. If Rotten left the stage with gob in his hair, I couldn't help feeling that the audience left with collective (metaphorical) egg on face. As I said after his appearance on The Tube, Rotten is offering us punk cabaret now (or even punk pantomime) - particularly with his jokey cover version of 'Anarchy'. But then perhaps he always was ...
      Shared some chips with Lorrie afterwards and said our goodnights. She agreed to come over on Sunday. She's a strange girl, but I like her a lot. Duck! Duck! Duck!" [10]              
 
 

 
Notes
 
[1] The single 'This Is Not a Love Song was released by Public Image Limited in 1983: click here to listen and watch the official video on YouTube.
      The song became the band's biggest commercial hit, peaking at No. 5 in the UK Singles Chart. A live version can be found on the album Live in Tokyo (Virgin Records, 1983) and a re-recorded version on the band's fourth studio album This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get (Virgin Records, 1984).
 
[2] The Tube was a live music show broadcast from a studio in Newcastle, which ran for five years on Channel 4 (from November 1982 to April 1987). In that time it featured many bands and a host of presenters, including, most famously, Jools Holland and Paula Yates.
 
[3] Entry from the Von Hell Diaries (Friday 28 October, 1983). To watch PiL's three-song performance on The Tube, click here.
 
[4] Billy did, in fact, send me the photo and it's reproduced at the top of this post. I hadn't known he was also on The Tube the same night as Rotten - had only seen the latter's performance.     
 
[5] Charisma Records was an independent label based at 90, Wardour Street, above the Marquee Club. Charisma marketed Billy's first release, a seven track mini-album entitled Life's a Riot With Spy Versus Spy (Utility, 1983). Perhaps the best-known track - 'A New England' - can be played (in a newly remastered version) by clicking here
      Lee Ellen Newman was the Charisma Press Officer whom I adored then and still adore now.   
 
[6] Entry from the Von Hell Diaries (Sunday 6 November, 1983).
 
[7] The Faversham is a well known venue in Leeds (est. in 1947). In the 1980s it was a popular place for punks, goths and students to meet or hang out.  
 
[8] Lorrie Millington - artist-model-dancer-writer and a well-known face on the Leeds scene at the time. I have written about her in several earlier posts; see here, for example.   
 
[9] Gillian Hall - ex-girlfriend; see the recently published post which included an extract from the Von Hell Diaries dated 3 October 1982: click here.  
 
[10] Entry from the Von Hell Diaries (Friday 18 November, 1983). It might be noted that the last line refers to the fact that Duck was my pet name for Lorrie (because she danced like one). The photo of myself and Miss Millington was taken shortly after events discussed here.
 
 

3 Oct 2022

The Von Hell Diaries: 3 October 1982

Jazz and Kirk from the Pandemonium Series 
by Gillian Hall (October 1982)
 
 
Between 1980-89, I faithfully kept a diary; a full page of A4 written every day for ten years. 
 
The entry below - written exactly forty years ago - has been slightly edited for the purposes of this post, but it still gives a good indication of my life at this time; the friends, the feelings, the music, the late-night snacks, etc.   

 
Sunday 3 October 1982
 
Woke up at midday, which is pretty late even by my standards, but I had been up until 4am talking with Kirk [1] and eating cheese on toast after we got home from another Saturday spent dancing the night away at the Phono [2]. Told Kirk I didn't think much of his new sidekick Jim, a first year student to whom punk is simply an escapist bit of fun. Eventually, of course, K. will tire of J. and we needn't have him tagging along and following us around. 
      After breakfast, I chatted with Hess [3], whom I do like, despite the fact he's a Stranglers fan. Thought about doing some work, but listened to the Buzzcocks instead. Then Gillian [4] came over looking awful - as if she had flu or something. Decided to go back to her place. Things still tense between us following our bust-up over her ex-boyfriend Rick. When Kirk came over later on he and Gill spoke about their paranormal experiences, whilst I sat in sceptical (almost scornful) silence. Gill then decided she wanted to try out a new camera, so Kirk and I posed on the wasteland at the back of Pandemonium [5], watched by stray dogs and laughed at by the local children. 
      Gill went home. Kirk and I then discovered we were locked out. Fortunately, he was able to climb up a drain pipe and get in to the house through an upstairs window. Later, I returned to Gill's. As her room still smelt of Rick, I insisted on spraying an air freshner, which didn't amuse her. I think we both realised that things were over between us; she expressed her hope we could still be friends (and perhaps part-time lovers) [6].
      Went home with tears in my eyes and sought solace in music and sleep (after yet another slice of cheese on toast; you have to eat, even with a broken heart).  
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Kirk Field was my closest friend and partner in crime throughout my student years in Leeds; see the posts entitled 'Punk Friends Reunited' (9 April 2019) and 'Autobiographical Fragment: This is the Nine O'Clock News from the BBC' (20 August 2020). 

[2] Le Phonographique - or the Phono, as it was known - was a punky-gothic nightclub located underneath the Merrion Centre in Leeds, frequented by an assortment of spiky-haired youths who liked to dress in black and go heavy with the eyeliner. I spent many happy nights there in the period 1981-84 and it was where I met the artist, model, dancer and writer Lorrie Millington: click here.     
 
[3] Mark Morris was nicknamed Hess, after Rudolf Hess, not due to any Nazi sympathies, but because he had a tiny room resembling a prison cell in the house he shared with me, Kirk, and a hippie from Cambridge called Jonathan Ashman.
 
[4] Gillian Hall, girlfriend (1981-82): see the posts 'To Hull and Back (In Memory of Gillian Hall)' (28 March 2022) and 'The Bats Have Left the Bell Tower: Reflections on Graveyard Poetry and Post-Punk Goth' (10 March 2021); the photo credited to Kirk Field is of myself and Miss Hall staging a tender moment.
 
[5] Pandemonium was the name given to the large Victorian house in Kirkstall, Leeds, that Kirk, Hess, Jonathan Ashman and myself shared from the autumn of 1982 until the summer of 1983. The front door of the house had a brass knocker in the form of a goblin - intended to signify Kirk's love of magic mushrooms - and above that a golden cupid wearing a blindfold, indicating it was a house of ill repute (in our imagination at least). 
      One of the (now faded) photos of myself and Kirk taken by Gillian is reproduced at the top of this post.
 
[6] What would now be known, of course, as a friend with benefits - a term first used by Alanis Morissette in her song 'Head Over Feet' (1995).      


And from the soundtrack of my life, here's a track by the Buzzcocks which pretty much sums up how I was feeling in October 1982 thanks to the detriorating relationship with Gillian: 'Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)' ... Click here to watch them performing the single on Top of the Pops (September 1978) - two-and-a-half minutes of punk-pop genius.


28 Mar 2022

To Hull and Back (In Memory of Gillian Hall)

Lucy Beaumont / Michelle Dewberry
 
 
I. 
 
Lucy Beaumont and Michelle Dewberry are the two women I love most on British television. The former is a comedian and writer, who once worked on the meat counter at ASDA; the latter, a businesswoman and broadcaster, who once worked on the tills at Kwik Save. 

Both are blonde: both are beautiful: both are smart, sexy, and successful - so what's not to love? 
 
However, the thing that makes them particularly attractive - for me at least - is the fact that they share a distinctive English accent, both coming as they do from the fabled city of Hull ...
 
 
II. 
 
Now, I know that Hull - or Kingston upon Hull to give it its royal name - is not everybody's favourite place on earth; Philip Larkin once described it as a fish-smelling dump full of drunken dullards. But even he came to recognise its charms eventually, including, perhaps, its cream-coloured telephone boxes [1].
 
I know also that not everyone finds the Hull accent with its amusing vowel sounds - including the letter 'o', which sounds as if it should have an umlaut over it - as alluring as I do, but there you gö [2]
 
I suppose, when I think about it, the reason I like to listen to Lucy Beaumont and Michelle Dewberry on the telly, is because their accent triggers a certain romantic nostalgia, reminding me of lost love and times gone by. 
 
Reminding me, that is to say, of Gillain, the beautiful young punk and self-styled scorpion goddess from Hull [3], with whom I was romantically involved back in the early 1980s and who introduced me to the delights of coition, as well as Humberside.
 
 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Philip Larkin moved to Hull in 1955 to take up the post of head librarian at the university. He soon began expressing his negative feelings for the city and its people in letters written to friends: 'I'm settling down in Hull all right. Every day I sink a little further.' 
      However, he gradually found things to like about Hull, where he lived and worked for thirty years, producing most of his greatest poetry, including 'Here', which opens his collection The Whitsun Weddings (Faber and Faber, 1964): click here to read online. 
      Readers interested in the Larkin/Hull love/hate relationship might enjoy Stephen Walsh's article in The Guardian (30 May 2017): click here.
 
[2] Those who study this kind of thing refer to it as a metaphonic mutation. It means that whereas, for example, the word goat is pronounced ɡəʊt in standard English - and ɡoːt across most of Yorkshire - it becomes ɡɵːʔt̚ in and around Hull. 
      An example of the Hull accent can be found in the British Library's Accents and Dialects Collection: click here to listen to a working class teenage schoolgirl, named Jessica Hardcastle, speak about her family, friends and social life. 
      Readers might also find an article by Jasmine Andersson (23 Jan 2020) on the i News website of interest: click here
 
[3] As a matter of fact, Gillian was from Leven, rather than Hull; one of those isolate villages on the outskirts of the city, where lives are clarified by loneliness, as Larkin would say.  
 
  

16 Jun 2021

From the Archives ... On My Dealings with Channel 4

My application for a job as an Assistant Editor 
(Youth and Entertainments Features) at Channel 4
 
 
I.
 
My first dealings with Channel 4 were in the autumn of 1983, less than a year after the station started broadcasting. Rather naively, I believed that they fully intended to stick to their public service remit and provide a genuine alternative to the shit served up by the BBC and ITV. 
 
That is to say, provide 'a broad range of high quality and diverse programming which [...] demonstrates innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programmes; appeals to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society; exhibits a distinctive character.'

I was then collaborating with a spiky-haired student of Communications, Arts and Media called Gillian Hall on various projects and, encouraged by Alan Fountain - an independent producer hired by Channel 4 as a commissioning editor and mentor to new filmmakers - we submitted a proposal for a series that would be profoundly anti-Christian in nature and feature music, dance, witchcraft, sex-magick, and Satanic ritual.
 
In other words, we basically assembled ideas and images from all the usual suspects - from Aleister Crowley to Killing Joke (the album Fire Dances had just been released and I was under its spell all summer) - and visualised a kind of postmodern black mass with a post-punk soundtrack. It may well have been catastrophically bad had it ever been made - but it wouldn't have been Songs of Praise.

Alas, whilst initially intrigued by the proposal, Fountain lost his nerve somewhere along the line and Gillian and I were politely informed by letter that our Pagan TV show was not something that Channel 4 would be willing to commission, not least because many of the ideas that the show intended to explore were ones that the vast majority of people would find profoundly offensive.  
 
 
II.
 
Several years later, I again had dealings with Channel 4 - and again suffered the pain and disappointment of rejection (although these feelings were alleviated by the fact that I didn't give a shit).
 
Having failed to land a role as a presenter on the 24-hour cable and satellite TV channel the Music Box (a sort of naff pan-European version of MTV), Malcolm had advised me that I needed to be a 'little less Johnny Rotten and a little more Simon Le Bon'. With that in mind, I decided to apply for a job as an Assistant Editor (Youth and Entertainments Features) at Channel 4, which I had seen advertised in The Guardian
 
The ad for the post (reference number BH01) made clear that applicants should have 'definite opinions regarding youth programmes, journalism and the youth entertainment market in general'. 
 
Well, I definitely had opinions regarding these things; unfortunately, they were largely (if not entirely) negative and, Sex Pistol that I remained at heart, I basically just wanted to destroy everything and cause as much chaos as possible. (Of course, I didn't list this under career goals and ambitions on my CV, though I suspect that something of my underlying nihilism shone through the bullshit that I did write.)

Instead of the requested covering letter to accompany the CV, I sent the above poster which clearly illustrated who and what they would be getting if they hired me. The text on the poster, which paraphrased Zarathustra and referenced a favourite song by Bow Wow Wow reads: 

'If culture is, before all things, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people, then barbarism is surely a lack of style; or a chaotic jumble of all styles. Thus we postmoderns, we parodists of world history and plunderers of the past, are the new barbarians: we are the TV savages! We are that hybrid breed, without meaning, substance, or style: we are Youth!'
 
I don't remember if anyone ever bothered to reply: if they did, I don't have the letter or recall its contents. 
 
And that, pretty much, was the end of my dealings with Channel 4 - a short (and not particularly spectacular) history of failure and rejection (but no regrets).