Vinylrichie’s Weblog

 People frequently come to the assumption that if you work in a record shop you must be pretty cool. They envisage that your record collection is bristling with untold gems and rarities that they could only dream of. One of the frequent questions I am asked is: ‘how many records do you have?’ The answer is quite bizarrely not as many as some who don’t work in a record shop. After all, if you live in a river you don’t need to buy water do you? The other question which I get asked often is: ‘What was the first ever gig you went to?’ Wide eyed with the expectation that I might say ‘The Pixies’ or Lou Reed, the customer waits with baited breath ready to marvel at my sublime, jealousy inducing answer. Indeed, the response I get is usually an open mouthed one as the answer is:

Barry Manilow at Wembley Arena. Word.

 I was thirteen I think, and had taken up the rebellious hobby of smoking to ingratiate myself with the cool and slightly harder kids. Unfortunately for me I just looked like a small child brandishing a cigarette, not the gangster/hustler I envisaged. The fact that I could barely inhale didn’t do the image any favours either but I tried. One thing they don’t put on cigarette packets are warnings such as: Smoking may cause you to attend crap concerts. If they did I may have stuck to sherbert dib-dabs and Panini football stickers but alas, the folly of youth.

One Sunday afternoon I’d finished dinner and got permission to go and play, er I mean look sophisticated and hang out with my friend Andrew. The world was our playground, anything was possible in the heady freedom of the day (except I had to be back at half four as Mum and her friend Sue were off to see the aforementioned crooner big-nosed Barry that evening and I was being babysat by my sisters as my dad was going to drive Mum and friend to Wembley) so we went round the corner to see what delights the underground car park could offer. Well ’street’. Now that I was away from the parents and any neighbours that might see me I could safely spark up a snout (I’m trying to avoid the use if the word fag for my american readers, I don’t want to appear that I’m all for burning homosexuals). Near the end of the second ciggie Andrew dared me to smoke the filter to be ‘well ‘ard’. Piece of piss I thought, what a simple request and he would look admiringly at his daring, maverick smoking friend with a new sense of awe. So I smoked about three lungfulls, which I properly inhaled to illustrate what a man I’d become. Then it was time to go home.

 At the bottom of the street where I lived, a short way from the car park, things started to go wrong. I felt dreadfully ill, all the energy was draining from me and I felt weak, dizzy and nauseous. I was alone as Andrew had gone home another way and as I literally collapsed and began to crawl towards my front door I wondered whether I was dying. I also feared being murdered by my parents so the options weren’t great. I made it to the door and feebly knocked and scratched until my mum opened the door. My face must have looked a picture, the colour gone and my lips blue as she asked:

‘What the hell have you been doing?’

‘Smoking’, I weakly replied – choosing to omit the filter bit. My lie stood up as my parents thought that I was a good boy who had done nothing in his life more drastic than stealing a piece of bubblegum at the age of five. Mum was under the impression that my first attempt at smoking had backfired somewhat and she rather gleefully, as the knowing adult, watched her son learn a valuable life lesson the hard way. Something was happening to me but I didn’t know what, but I was damned sure I should be near a toilet. I crawled up the stairs, seemingly as insurmountable as Mount Everest in my poor state. I made it, now being watched by my dad and sisters too, who found the pathetic poisoned brother show utterly hilarious. Ahhh, the love of one’s siblings. Then I spent quite a while projectile vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea, crawling from bedroom to toilet with great frequency wishing that I was actually dead. But worse was to follow.

About an hour later I started to feel better, the poison now out of my system but my display of illness had alarmed my parents. They were reluctant to leave me alone in case I died or something. But it seems they weren’t alarmed enough to cancel the evening at Wembley Arena with Bazza. My older sisters, less than bothered at the antics of their little squit of a brother, decided they weren’t going to look after me as there were more pressing engagements to attend to like singing into a hairbrush or coating every surface in the house with the sticky residue of hairspray before going out to a roller-disco or something (this was the eighties after all). They weren’t about to give up an evening of boy-baiting to make sure I was ok so, horror upon horror, I was informed that I would have to come to Barry Manilow and either sit in the car for two and a half hours with dad or see if there were any tickets left. Most of you would’ve chosen the first option. I didn’t.

Upon reaching the Wembley complex (finally, after dad got confused in the horrible ring road chaos which saw us repeatedly going past ‘World of Leather’) I was swept up in the sheer magic of this wonderful occasion; loads of mums sporting Manilow T-shirts and clutching glossy programmes, excitedly jabbering at each other in their post-menopausal frenzy. How could I sit in the car on a night like this? The anticipation of hearing ‘Mandy’, ‘Could It Be Magic’, ‘Down at the Copa (Copa-Cabana)’ and many many more of the tunes I’d had forced on me in my formative years by my mum was just too overwhelming. So dad went to the box office and returned clutching our tickets to heaven, and they were cheaper than my Mum paid for hers, much to her chagrin when it turned out that we were only two rows behind her and had just as clear a view of Barry’s nose as her. Mind you, you can see that from space to be honest.

The gig itself was so overwhelming that I remember very little of it, except that Manilow just told jokes throughtout the second half of the gig which was excruciating. But my new found love of gigs was born on this night. But I vowed to only go to cutting edge concerts which would reveal my discerning and sophisticated music taste. So three months later I went to see Billy Joel and got told off for dancing on the seats. My hedonism knew no bounds, the rock and roll lifestyle had me in it’s grasp. I even went and saw Sting during his jazzy period…..LET’S ROCK!

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This entry is dedicated to my Mum. 28/12/46 – 7/2/08. Wish you were here to read this and share the memories xxx