Skip to content

Identity

Identity
John Nicholson|

I've talked to you many times of my school years and how I didn't realise I went to a rough school, I just took all the violence from pupils and teachers for granted.The fact a gym teacher went out with a 4th year girl was normal. but in the process of doing that, I realised that the music people liked told you what they were like.

For example maths students all loved complex prog rock. King Crimson or Gentle Giant, that sort of thing. All the bullies liked Slade and you wouldn't catch them listening to Genesis, that'd be too wet. Hard girls liked the Bay City Rollers. In our year they were christened the 'slag bags' and would take food out of the slop buckets or just off your plate, which strikes me now as a sign of deprivation.

Arty types like me veered from extreme prog to heavy rock. Being a diverse sort was my grouping. More delicate souls from very middle-class homes like folk music and any variety that you could do country dancing to.

Then there were the kids who could read music and had a piano since they were four. They knew about classical music but could also be found on the fringes of prog rock because of the classical elements

Another group was the soul crowd. The lads in this section were always the most popular with girls and weren’t inhibited to dance. They usually went to ‘smoothie’ pubs and wore fashionable clothes.

And then there was everyone else who didn’t really align with any group to whom it was all just music. We were certainly judged by the music we obsessed over and it was seen and I thought too that it was a way to judge their character. And I held this to be true until I was 18 when I met Dawn who loved Zeppelin, Genesis, Todd, TYA as well as soul, funk and disco. Identified as in the rock generation but was culturally much more broad, making a mockery of my notions of identity which I clung to so assiduously. 

 

Back to blog