Willy De Ville’s death (and Pete Makowski’s RBP blog entry thereon) sent me scuttling back to my diary to see if i could find my tickets and/or diary entry about seeing Mink De Ville gig at The Venue. I couldn’t.
However I did stumble on a list from the middle of 1977 (reproduced below) of all the gigs I’d attended since moving down to London (from Edinburgh) in June 76.
Intriguing? It certainly is to me. I have no recollection of seeing, for example, Brett Marvin & The Blimps, The Tooting Frooties or The Smirks. No serious worries there, though. They were probably just eminently fogettable gigs.
Rather more alarming is the presence of Chris De Burgh in the list. What possessed me? I can only imagine I was being a good friend and accompanying a chum who didn’t want to go alone. I’m intensely grateful to have no memory of that gig. They do say that the brain has an in-built mechanism which can erase memories which are too traumatic to live with – car crashes, child abuse, Chris De Burgh gigs.
But Elvis Costello twice? Why have I no recollection of either of those shows? Could they have been down my local (Hope and Anchor, Islington) which was usually to crowded and noisy to get any real sense of what the band was up to above the shouting and clinking of glasses. That’s certainly where I saw The Count Bishops, and I vividly remember bopping frantically to London’s very own surf-punks The Barracudas there! (Hi Jeremy)
Or maybe it was at Dingwalls in Camden Lock where I can remember frequently being unable to see bands unless I was right at the front. I have a particular memory of walking out of a David Lindley gig there because I just had no idea of what was going on down the other end of the room. I was mightily annoyed too, because I love Lindley.
Hang on, though, looking at one of those Costello entries, I see it follows the names of Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Wreckless Eric and Ian Dury, which means it was the Stiff tour, and I saw it at The Lyceum. Dury was fabulous, Eric was fun, Edmunds and Lowe were efficient and, er, Costello I still can’t quite remember.
And Riff Raff! This means I saw the pre-legendary Billy Bragg and didn’t realise it. Surely I should have sensed that I was in the presence of genius?
Let me stress that these lapses of memory are not drug or drink induced. I’ve never been big on either of those intoxicants. It’s just that my memory has never been very good, which is one of the reasons I’ve kept diaries all these years.
On the whole, though, I’m encouraged to find that my good (and extremely eclectic) taste does seem to be timeless. To have gone from the cosmic Kraut rock of Klaus Schulze at the Planetarium to ragtime genius Leon Redbone, and from Motorhead (twice) and jazz fiddle legend Stephane Grappelli, suggests I’ve always been, if nothing else, open-minded. Of those last four, only the Motorhead gigs have been erased from the memory bank, but I do have a general recollection of thinking they were the only really exciting band in England at the time.
My love of the pre-punk artists I had grown up with shines through in my attendance at gigs by Spirit, Gene Clark, Thunderbyrd and Chris Hillman, The Kinks, Iggy, Dylan, Lou Reed, but I’m more smugly self- impressed by my choice of contemporary artists. Modern Lovers! The Ramones! Tom Petty! The Rubinoos. Mink De Ville! Television! The Only Ones! Wreckless Eric! Those were indeed golden days, every bit as rich and enthralling as the 60s. By comparison the 80s, to me, was a dead zone. I still need only to hear the words Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran to be plunged into a despair which makes me forget that the best 80s artists were actually rather wonderful. They just never got really famous.
The last third of the list is a trifle misleading because I’d taken a job in the press office at CBS Records so, as well as still attending gigs for my own pleasure, I was also obliged to attend company gigs, which explains (and hopefully excuses) my attendance at shows by Al Di Meola, Weeather Report and John McLaughlin, not to mention Grand Hotel and Cafe Jacques.
In this period it was not uncommon for me to see three gigs a day. There would be a lunchtime CBS showcase (usually at Ronnie Scott’s), and a major evening gig (Hammy Odeon, Lyceum etc) and then on to some dingy basement dive to see anybody who was prepared to play at that time of night.
And, um, that’s it. Has anyone else out there kept a similar log?
11 Responses to JOHNNY’S DIARY : WHAT DID YOU DO IN 1977 DADDY?
Many is the time I wished I’d kept diaries during my years on MM, if only to record all the hundreds of shows I saw, especially when I was in New York between 1973 and 1977. I recall at least one three-in-a-nighter there – Johnny Cash in the Felt Forum, Chicago upstairs in the Garden straight afterwards and finally Patti Smith at the Bottom Line.
Mention of the uniquely uncool Chris de Burgh brings back a very strange memory too. Many years ago I was in discussion with his management with a view to an official CdB book which, as it happened, came to pass and did quite well. However, along the way I was summoned to meet him and, because he was a tax-exile living in the Irish Republic, the meeting could only take place at Heathrow Airport, airside as they call it, because CdB couldn’t set foot on UK soil for fear of endangering his tax-exile status. The manager arranged for the meeting to take place when CdB was on his way from Dublin to Hong Kong via H’row so, armed with (first class) tickets to Hong Kong supplied by said manager, myself and the book’s designer headed out to Terminal 3, checked in to fly to HK (without any luggage other than briefcases) and met him in a VIP room airside. The meeting concluded, we were then obliged to change our minds about flying, inform customs we didn’t want to go to HK after all, head back to the check-in desk, collect unused tickets and drive back to London. Which we did. That was in 1986, or thereabouts. I think if we tried to pull the same trick today we’d end up spread-eagled in immigration with armed-to-the-teeth counter-terrorist cops at our throats.
The Barracudas !!!
Fresh from “The Pig Paper”
in Toronto….
must’ve been
one of their Very first gigs,
Johnny.
My God,I wish I kept a list of the gigs I went to.Unfortunately I did over indulge and never kept a diary.My memory used to be razor sharp but now I bumble along like a amnesiac goldfish.I have recently been looking through my old features to find stuff for RBP’s and have come across articles with artists I have no recollection ever meeting.Thank god for the internet and Google,I’d be well and truly f**ked without these when I go and interviews.
Johnny I have to say the entries I am most impressed with are Lemmy’s Motorhead,The Only Ones and the fabulous Lightening Raiders-a veritable Ladbroke Grove supergroup.
Long may you gig(and keep a record of it all)
Hey Gary,
I’m proud to say that The Barracudas became good friends with me and my wife Carol back in those heady days. I have fond memories of a meal in Tootsie’s hamburger joint in Holland Park where they teased the waitress mercilessly. She was a very pretty girl, so the band kept thinking up questions to ask about the various items on the menu, so they could call her over again and engage her in conversation. The poor girl was new to the place so she never knew the answers and always had to trot off to the kitchen and come back with the answer, only to be confronted with another daft question.
My proudest ‘Cuda connection, though, is that I alterted them to the Ba-ba-ra-ra-cu-cu-da-da advert on one of the Cruisin’ series of albums, which they lifted and used atthe start of one of theor songs – I Wish It Could Be 1965 Again, if I remember rightly.
Like The Sonics they were four great guys with three great chords.
Johnny B
Cool
Yeah, gigs…the 1st time I came to LDN I kept a list, I saw several dozen bands in 6 weeks incl some seminal shows. What a time. All time fave gig of the underground: Dear departed Nikki Sudden and his living pard Dave Kusworth drunk totally playing a set in some dump that was rock n roll beyond belief.
I wish I had kept a log, Johnny, or stuck my tickets in a scrapbook or something. There are some fabulous names there.
Don’t worry about your fading memory; I have a similar experience if I ever come across my NME scrapbooks and see some of the gigs I reviewed. Who he? Who they? etc. The same thing happened when I was going through my Cds the other day; I was surprised to find several Martin Stephenson and the Daintees Cds there as well as Waterboys and all sorts of other bands I’d forgotten ever liking.
As for Costello, I saw him at Dingwalls in the early ’80s and also can’t recall anything about his performance. Maybe it was because it was packed or maybe Costello didn’t play as much from my favourite LPs of his (My Aim Is True, Armed Forces) as I’d have liked.
Anyhow, thanks for posting up your list, it brought back lots of warm nostalgic memories for me, even though I didn’t go to my first gig until ’79.
Johnny, how do I get permission to publish an old interview of yours with Tom Waits?
Thanks, Paul
Johnny…have a question re: your list. Can you drop me a line? JoE
i remember seeing elvis costello opening for the very wonderful roogalator at the nashville and have no memory of of him at all. so, you’re not alone, johnny.
Ah, Fred my man. I was a Roogalator obsessive, right down to my yay yang. All aboard!!
DUH! I should’ve kept a list!! My entire social life in the 70s and half the 80s consisted of shows–working in the music bizz was one great big freebie. And yeah, I have tearsheets in my files about gigs I sure don’t remember. Kiss? Pavlov’s Dog? The Cars? OY!!
I’ve got a trunk full of diaries galore, and periodically I unearth some and save the good pages (trashing the really embarrassing episodes). If I come up with any goodies, I’ll post them on my blog here.
I gnash my teeth when I remember that as a teenager I went to Woodstock–one of those who bought tickets before it became the nation’s greatest free-for-all. I threw them out but kept the poster, which is a bit worse for wear from being in the boot and getting slightly rained on, but it’s going up on my wall (eventually).
Anyone remember No Dice? Whatever happened to them? They were a great band with a record label who had no clue as to how to market them.
Fortunately, I have many Willy DeVille memories, having seen him in several incarnations and having a friend who was in the band for a while. Willy was an artist you don’t forget.