Your Mother Wouldn't Like it

Birmingham, Joy Division and my Dad

I had secured my place at university by January 1980 but I wouldn’t start till October. What was I to do with this window of opportunity?

My parents thought I should travel. Maybe get a job. Neither appealed. I didn’t want to work for The Man. I wanted to go and live in London and do all the things I had read about in the NME …the New Musical Express. I would often buy it at the newsagent at the suburban train station on my journey to school. Thursday was the day. Sometimes it wouldn’t be there early so I’d dawdle till it arrived and catch a slightly later train. By 8.30am I had read all of it - or all the bits of interest to me. Which meant Punk.

Before that, in the mid-70s I hadn’t known much about music. I didn’t have a record player and only a tiny radio. I worked in the school tuck shop, where we didn’t get paid as such but were given a ‘gift’ at the end of each term. Mr Wright (head of tuck shop, stationery and table tennis and also a brilliant maths teacher) would ask my parents what I might like. That’s how I came to own a cassette player. Initially I had only one tape, that my Dad had bought me - by one of his favourites, Scott Joplin, the jazz pianist. Not really my style but it’s one of the few I have kept even now, to remember him by.

One Saturday evening, I was enthralled watching Joy Division playing, ‘She’s Lost Control’…

My Dad came in, looked at Ian Curtis, dancing his dance and staring his stare, and said ‘that boy’s not well’. Oh Dad, I thought, how uncool…

Just after getting the tape-player, I had spent an entire morning going to the Big Town to choose a musicassette, as they were sort of known but not really; more like ‘pre-recorded cassette’ as opposed to a blank one onto which you would ‘rip’ your friends’ records. I didn’t know what to choose in the shop. I could only afford one. My big brother liked Slade, so I bought one of theirs that he didn’t have. It was the soundtrack of ‘Slade in Flame’, one of the few movies where a band does acting and the story stands up and the music is good (as it turned out. I bought it without having heard it). My other brother had a cassette by Yes. I didn’t know much about them but I had heard the cool boys at school mention them, along with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. One boy had written ‘Jethro Tull’ on his rough book. Late one night they played their whole album ‘Too Young to Die, Too Old to Rock ’n’Roll’ on BBC2, so I recorded it onto a cassette, holding the microphone near the telly.

I heard people talking about Capital Radio. Each afternoon, Roger Scott would unveil a top ten, based on people’s phone-in votes. They were mostly current singles but not necessarily. ‘Yesterday’ by The Beatles was a fixture for a while. That led me to ‘Mummy’s Chart’ on a Monday, again based on a phone-in vote, hosted by Nicky Horne, in his 9 -11pm slot where his ‘Your Mother Wouldn’t Like it’ show resided during the rest of the week. I discovered him just at that interesting juncture when Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘Rumours’ by Fleetwood Mac were never out of the listeners’ chart but The Damned were there as well, somehow (soon to be joined by The Clash, The Stranglers and The Jam). Hearing Nicky Horne play ‘New Rose’ was a pivotal moment but I also happily listened to his interviews with the likes of David Bowie and Lynyrd Skynyrd (When Nicky asked about a track on their latest album, they didn’t understand. ‘Oh you mean a cut’.)

One night he played ‘God Save The Queen’ by the Sex Pistols. Wow. This was the real thing (though not The Real Thing) and I could feel the force. I no longer felt the need to be cowed by the cool boys and their dedication to the old ‘dinosaurs’ of rock.

If Nicky Horne was my gateway drug, then I was soon main-lining on John Peel on BBC Radio 1 from 10pm till midnight, my new bedtime. I revelled in his embrace of punk, dovetailing with his championing of reggae and so much else besides, including the spoken word of Ivor Cutler. And every Christmas my fingers were poised over ‘play’ and ‘record’ on my cassette machine as he announced the annual Festive Fifty - all chosen by listeners. This is where I first heard Stiff Little Fingers’ ‘Alternative Ulster’ and ‘Suspect Device’, as well as ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division. Peel always talked about ‘LPs’ rather than ‘albums’. I have been upbraided on the stage of the Comedy Store for using this arcane term, but ’album’ still sounds a little pompous to me. At that time it was all about singles, though you could be forgiven for making an EP.

To fill what was left of my ‘gap year’, I applied to work for Community Service Volunteers, now called Volunteering Matters. I went to their office in scary King’s Cross and told them I wanted a placement in London. No, they said, that’s too close to where you live. Didn’t they realise that Surrey was another country entirely?

So I ended up in Birmingham, driving a 3-tonne truck around, collecting second-hand furniture, doing emergency and/or cut-price removals. But I did get to see lots of the bands that Peel and others played - Sham 69, The Clash, Mikey Dread, Martha & The Muffins, Psychedelic Furs, The Members, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Iggy Pop, Secret Affair, Stiff Little Fingers, Magazine, The Cure, Bauhaus, The Au Pairs, UB40 (days after their double A-side debut single, ‘King/Food For Thought’, was released) and even Def Leppard (for research purposes: I had never seen people head-banging in real life) at venues including Digbeth Civic Hall, the Top Rank, the Cedar Club, Romeo’s & Juliet’s, the Barrel Organ and Birmingham Odeon.

But one I missed was on May 2nd, 1980 at Birmingham University. My fellow volunteer and I weren’t sure we would be allowed into a student union gig. It was Joy Division’s last ever concert.

My father had been right about their lead singer. He wasn’t well. At the age of 23 he took his own life. May he rest in peace. Here is Atmosphere.