Remembering the day-oh

Thirty years ago you took O-Levels, Den was yet to serve divorce papers on Angie, you had no Neighbours and Freddie Starr was (allegedly) eating hamsters. Oh, and I went to the best gig ever.

Friday, the 11th of July, 1986. I was 19, and I had big hair. I also owned a very nice grey leather jacket, which I was paying for in weekly instalments to the lady over the road with the catalogue. The world was my oyster, although fish fingers were more my level of sophistication.

I had yet to try lasagne, had no idea why anyone would want a frothy coffee, and lived at home with my parents, who were distinctly unimpressed with my taste in music. Or possibly the volume.

What else was a teenage lad to do? Computers barely existed (IBM were just releasing the ‘PC Convertible’, a concept so radical no-one had thought of calling it a ‘laptop’ yet), mobile phones were the size of a brick, price of a house, and only did what their name suggested, and there are only so many games of Monopoly you can play with your brother. Especially when he cheats.

So music it was. Loud. Rock. And predominantly Queen. “A Kind Of Magic” had recently been released, and “One Vision” was my favourite song ever (and still is, in fact).

When ‘The Magic Tour’ was announced, me and my mates got tickets (£14.50!), and on the big day hopped in the car and drove to Wembley. We queued for ages, but at least got some free samples of a new chocolate bar, which – as my leather jacket had pockets – I got to carry. Did I mention it was rather warm? Yes, that worked well.

Legging it down the pitch, we got fairly close to the front and sat on the ground, as thrilled to be there as everyone else, chatting and reading reviews of the previous gig in the paper. The support bands were pretty decent; some new bunch of Australians called INXS, The Alarm, Status Quo – good stuff.

Then the long wait as it started to get dark. The tension built, and the opening of One Vision thundered out of the speakers before Freddie and the band exploded onto the stage. I was as happy as I’ve ever been. The whole concert was amazing. Even when it rained, we were so crammed in that only your head got wet. No-one cared, carried away by the excitement of it all.

Hits, hits, more hits. Flawless performances. Fabulous sound, amazing lights, giant inflatable cartoon characters of the band from the album cover floating away into the night (imagine a 40 foot Brian May landing in your garden).

Good friends, great time, no-one blocking your view with a brightly-lit phone screen. OK, the 2 hour queue to get out of the car park wasn’t great, but hey.

The leather jacket and (unfortunately) the big hair are long gone, but the memory isn’t. It was, and still is, the greatest gig I’ve ever been to.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 22nd of July 2016, where it was retitled as "Recalling a day fit for Queen".

Of course, it was the following day's gig that's featured on the live album and video, although later DVD versions at least had "my" gig on there too. Sadly, Mercury's response to rumours that the band was about to split up; "We're going to stay together until we f**ing well die" turned out to be all too true just five years later.

I don't play Queen albums as much as I used to, but to be fair I don't play any albums as much as I used to. When one does make it into the CD player, I do find myself wondering why I don't do it more often. Rock/pop perfection.

(CD A:Z: Murray Gold's Doctor Who Series 8 TV Soundtrack. Orchestralicious.)

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog