If we’d had social media in the 70s, I doubt we’d have been sending naked pictures of ourselves, that would have terrified me, but can you imagine the debates about who was the best band?
We spent hours debating the merits of, say, Budgie over Uriah Heep. And we did it so seriously like it was really important to establish these things. Obviously such things are entirely subjective but I’m not sure we really accepted that. I think we thought it could actually be discerned by attention to the details.
People have asked me how I know all the obscure facts that I put into the quiz, well, it’s because of debates like this. We’d go through a band’s discography, analyzing it and the facts behind the band and the records. And we did this day after day for hours at a time. I still recall being at Russell's house, sitting on the floor with albums all over the place analysing Kraan Live’s merits against over live albums, including Kevin Coyne’s ‘In Living Black And White’ with Andy Summers on guitar before he was famous.
This is the sort of thing we’d do. For what it’s worth we concluded Kraan was superior. We would pass away the summer holidays doing this about all sorts of music that most people have forgotten or never knew. It’s why I know where live albums were recorded and which is Gong’s highest chart position (trick question; they never charted apart from the 59p version of Camembert Electrique when Virgin re-released it and it got to #5 but the charts disregarded it because it was a cheap release) Such things were important to know, or we thought so anyway
For example in this week’s quiz I asked in ‘1969, which group had the first-ever single released on the Atlantic label in the UK?’ And the reason I know it’s The Ace Kefford Stand is because I was collecting The Move related music in 1976 and acquired a copy. It’s how I know Dave Ball was their guitarist, future Procol Harem member but that their single features Jimmy Page.
And judging by all the people who get most questions right, I was not the only person nerding my way through the 70s about such matters. It was such a hot house of learning that only lasted about 4 years, maybe even less, then we discovered girls and alcohol, though I must say, the nerding continued with a new set of friends in the Stockton Arms pub over pints of Carling Black Label. I was amazed but delighted that others could talk about southern rock bands for 4 hours and 6 pints.
That’s why my knowledge tapers off for 80 music and is practically non-existent for the 90s but is encyclopaedic for the 70s and late 60s. It seems as if when you’re in your teens your brain is like a sponge and it has a capacity to absorb huge amounts of information and for it to be retained too, which is why I still know that Druid’s singer was called Dane Stevens and was often accused of being a Jon Anderson copyist. Did you know that? Entirely useless of course but it's just stuck in my brain.
I'm sure the breadth of this knowledge is because we didn't make genre distinctions really. Everything was pop or rock. Sometimes folk rock, occasionally blues but even artists like Freddie King and Magic Sam were still thought of as rock. It made life much more simple. The only time it caused problems was with bands like Slade and the Sweet who sounded quite rock to us but were also pop in that it was chart music. Take a band like Marmalade. Pop you’d think but then Reflections Of My Life sounds like CSNY. so there were difficulties simply because, stupidly, we thought of pop as a dirty word. I don’t even know why really or how it became established as a thing but it certainly did and quite profoundly too.
I suppose it was a tribal thing and we were searching for an identity and to be able to define ourselves against something. Looking back on it now, the whole group of us must have seemed rather over-focused and exotic. In fact, I know we did by the way teachers referred to us as a kind of single unit of knowledge. We weren’t all friends with each other really but were bound together by this thirst for musical knowledge, though it's true that I didn't have friends who didn’t have a like-mind.
So I think it’s more likely we’d be sending pictures of the bass player in Stray (Gary Giles) to win an argument than anything more risque.
