Something we never appreciated at the time was the fact some of our teachers were maybe just 8-10 years older than us. They just seemed old to us but of course they weren’t that culturally different to, especially when we were 17 or 18.
It seemed a bit odd to us that our form teacher, who can’t on reflection have been more than 30 but probably less, decided to take a group of us to gigs at Newcastle City Hall in the school minibus to see Eric Clapton and also Barclay James Harvest.
He even let us drink in the mini-bus, helping himself to a can as he drove. Different days. These days I think it’d be called reckless behaviour but we thought nothing of it. I remember how odd it felt seeing him in normal clothes.
When we all brought in albums to play at lunchtime, which was a daily occurrence, he’d always say something like “what have you got today, Nicholson?” and inspect the album after taking the registration. “Any good?” he’d ask and I’d give him a critique. He did this to all our gang. I didn’t realise it at the time but his attention was very validating. Most just thought we were daft lads who liked pop music but he knew better and took our passion seriously. That really felt good.
This was in contrast to our deputy head with whom we had a long running battle over music. He can’t have been much into his forties but he seemed part of an ancient regime and we were dedicated to winding him up as much as possible. Now I think he played up to it a bit. For example, he called Yamaha “Yammerhammer” as if to prove how out of touch he was.
We always knew that we could play 21st Century Schizoid Man and drive him especially crazy. He really hated that track. “It sounds like robots singing, turn it off” he’d say, hands over his ears
The other way we’d goad him was by playing Judge Dread records which were regarded as ‘dirty’ but were actually very tame stuff e.g. “Jack and Jill went up the hill, Jill came down with half a crown, and it wasn’t for carrying water.”
He thought this kind of stuff was degenerate. Anything that even hinted at sex was scowled at.
Ironically, some things passed him by totally, like the Oedipal theme to The Doors ‘The End’. He did object to the now probably racist Bwana Dick from the Mothers Fillmore East album. And you might as well have taken your pants off when listening to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ “Obscene caterwauling" he called it.
But in fairness he never tried to prevent us from playing music at lunchtime, no matter how annoying he found it, but he used the threat that he might, very judiciously, knowing how much it meant to us. And it went on for three whole years until we left. He must have been happy not to have to hear Gentle Giant every day because apparently we were the first and only ‘rock lads.’
