There were kids who didn’t buy records and didn’t go to gigs and didn’t pore over Sounds and NME each week. They tended to look upon those of us who did, as a strange species, obsessed with things that were meaningless to them. Indeed, other lads decried our love as the obsession of nerds and over focused boys because they thought it made them look cool and ingratiated them in girl’s affections who didn’t want to make out to Tangerine Dream or Jethro Tull (which was almost all of them, at least publicly).
But the thing was, and it was a good lesson for life, not that I realised that, if you got one of these critics, male or female, on their own, they were a lot less hostile. Indeed, I knew many girls who, while not exactly as interested in who played guitar for the band Boxer as me, were very accepting of our focus, in fact found it quite attractive.
I later learned that this was because someone having a passion in life is a lot more interesting than those who don’t. And it didn’t really matter what the passion was, stamps, art, poetry, cooking or trains. Of course there were boys, they were almost always boys, who pursued a lone route through life and they were often hard to reach, to be found on the end of a Darlington railway station platform, noting down numbers.
Publicly we were easy meat. Easily identified with elaborately painted haversacks and armfuls of records or music papers. We were ripe for piss-taking and a way for the types who were critical to make themselves feel cool by contrast. But by the time we were all 16 or 17, the self-styled cool kids had somewhat fallen by the wayside. I don’t want to pretend we were more popular than we were, but we had found our niche to occupy and that’s quite an important thing at that age. Knowing your tribe is, I think, a great thing for a teenager. Feeling like you belong to a tribe is invaluable as you negotiate your way through those difficult years.
And by then, I could play Jethro Tull and Black Sabbath records with girlfriends and even learned to listen to their music too; progressive eh!
These days 50 years on, I see a different but similar version of ‘the rock lads’ at record fairs. Only it is a bit different. People like me had shaved the edges off my passions and became more open-minded but sometimes at fairs you see men who never compromised and are now searching for specific catalogue numbers of Beatles records and are often a bit dishevelled and waxy-smelling. There’s a point in life when you have to choose between a wider, more inclusive worldview or getting more and more obsessive. I understand why they followed the obsessive route and the security it offers, but I’m glad I went down a different road.
That said, I was talking with three collectors the other day about rare records on obscure labels and it was Dawn who laughed and said “you do realise that most people would think you’re quite mad?” “Ever was it thus.” I said “Ever was it thus.”
