I want to take you back to your youth, which for me was the mid-70s and the delicate matter of marrying your passion for every form of rock with, well, your actual passion, which for me was early trouser stirrings for girls. You remember what it was like for boys. Anyone and everyone who so much as smiled as you was dwelt on and obsessed about for days. Sometimes it was torture. You were desperate to find a girl who wanted to listen to you Rory Gallagher or Jethro Tull records. All love was usually unrequited and got over rather quickly. You tried to kid yourself that this overwhelming, disturbing, sheer lust was love. This evolved into a highly attuned radar for what we called at the time (we being ‘the rock lads’) hippy girls, which in our fevered minds meant they were up for a bit of free love, which was certainly on our agenda in every waking hour. Nonsense of course.I can’t express enough how gauche and naive we were. These were the days where, if you found a Page 3 newspaper in a hedge, it was drooled over for days. We had all the gear but absolutely no idea. Though we tried to pass ourselves off as gentlemen of great sophistication, largely because we owned Gentle Giant albums. It was that bad.Anyway, I was in the 5th year when a new girl came to the school, a year below, doubtless looking to make new friends and be popular. Now when I say what I’m about to say, it is with my 15-year-old head on. I thought she was absolutely gorgeous. So beautiful that it blew my mind and other parts of me. She was an archetypal hippy girl, looking like The Lady Of Shalott in John William Waterhouse’s famous painting. Long braided fair hair, a flowery hair band, silver & turquoise jewellery and out of school wore flowing, layered dresses like Stevie Nicks. I was unable to even speak to her. I was a mere mortal and this was an angel. Out of my league. We rock lads would talk about her all the time and you know how awfully biological and detailed teenage boys can be.
I know this is some shade of stupid, but the way our minds worked, was if we could 'prove' we liked cool, obscure bands, it would entice her into our company. So we showed off everything from Wild Turkey, to Colosseum, to my favourites, If, like we were rock peacocks. All to no effect obviously. Someone even thought a Pearls Before Swine record would do the trick. Wrong. In fact, I later learned, she liked T.Rex, who were too pop and mainstream for our pompously refined tastes.Anyway, she was always distant, naturally, not being part of our highly evolved musical nerding. Life sped past us and we were soon in 6th form. She followed a year behind us. By then we were a less pathetic and over-focused about her and she faded somewhat into the background. Shallow? Oh yes. I went to college in 1979 and in 1981 moved in with Dawn. So to celebrate we had a party, as you do. And we invited a load of people including a guy, I forget his name now, he was older than us by maybe 5 years, which is a lot when you’re 20, who’d just been around for a while, a student probably, he was good-looking, in a slim-hipped rockstar sort of way and wore a necklace, which I thought very cool. I remember he liked T.Rex and thought that was an unusual choice for his age group.So the expensive - £14 per week! - flat was full of people when this lad turned up with the aforementioned hippy girl on his arm. I was shocked and could hardly believe it. She had moved from Stockton to Newcastle to go to the University, though still wore the same type of clothes, even though it was unfashionable in the early 80s. She was nice enough, a bit quiet and unsubstantial perhaps, but who am I to judge? She was nice and very polite, even with a few drinks in her. I don’t know how it happened but they stayed over, sleeping on the floor and were gone in the morning by the time we got up. And I never saw her or him again and thought nothing of it. We had discovered mushrooms grew in the nearby field and that was us gone from the planet for a year. Life moved on.I paid no thought to her and him as the years went by until the late 80s when we were selling Dawn’s homemade hippy clothing (and occasionally doing rather well) in the Newcastle Polytechnic foyer when I was approached by Dickie. I never knew his second name. As is the way of such things, he was always just Dickie. He was from Derby I think and had been in the 1979 intake with me. Now 10 years later, he was working there. We were older and more gnarly.
We got talking and I happened to mention the party in ‘81 which he’d come to as well. ‘Did I know that <name> had been arrested recently’? he said, referring to the rock star lad. ‘What for?’, I ask. ‘Assaulting his wife,’ Dickie said. ‘Not the hippy lass?’ Dickie confirmed it was indeed her. As it turned out, it was an awful case of coercive control as we would know it now. I won’t go into the details, but it was as horrible as you can imagine. In fact, I hope you can’t imagine it.I was shocked and saddened. To think this had happened to that innocent 4th form obsession of all our dreams. In our naive heads, she had it all and life was easy. Little did we know what was to come. I never heard anything else, so I really hope life got much better and happier for her.
She’ll be 62 now. Seems scarcely believable. I hope she looks back fondly on our puppy dog panting, drooling, and gatefold Badger albums, though we were probably just annoying and embarrassing.
My mid-70s youth...
