Happy New Year...

Who would have thought it? 2026. It still seems futuristic doesn’t it? My head is still in 1976 which is, quite incredibly, 50 years ago. Who knows where the time goes?

In those days, New Year was a severely drunken experience, raging on the streets and in the pubs of Stockton and rather thrillingly involved kissing women I didn’t even know who were nearby at midnight.

These days, not so much.

When we lived in central Edinburgh, just down from George Street, we saw the street party up close, though some years the weather was so bad, with rain and gales, that it was cancelled. But when it went ahead, they closed off all the roads around Princes Street as 40 thousand people packed the streets for the fireworks. We got quite blase about fireworks living in the centre of town, the 10,000 that were launched in 7-minutes every year made all other fireworks pale in comparison as great waterfalls of colour framed against the castle illuminated the sky poured into the night sky.

It’s not like that here. We just hope there actually aren’t any at the bells because the bangs scare the cat witless and I’m sure we’re not alone in that. We were in bed by five past midnight as usual. Times change, eh.

As we move into the new year, I do wonder what the future holds. You just never know what joys and tragedies await. One thing I hope happens is that I win my case for medical negligence against my doctor for not spotting my symptoms were classic pre-stroke three days before I had a stroke. It’s pretty unanswerable really. When you’ve got double vision, balance issues, confusion and crossed eyes and are told it’s an earwax issue, of course you don’t want to believe it’s not something more serious but I’m not unreasonable in suggesting a brief search of google would have told him these were at the very least classic signs that I was having a TIA. He could have sent me for clot-busting drugs but he didn’t and as a result our lives have been turned upside down and severely limited. All through one man’s negligence. How much is being able-bodied worth? I reckon that’ll be £100,000 please, bubba and cheap at the price too. You’re not heavily insured for no reason, son.

Change is a bit scary. Moving house especially so. It’s all rather discombobulating but also quite exciting because things will all be new. Even so, I think we’re keen for this move to be our last and are taking the opportunity to divest ourselves of decades of junk, including orders forms from 35 years ago and 4 laptops from the last 20 years. I don’t know why we hold on to so much stuff, is it a way to try and control life? I always feel like we’ll lose something of ourselves if we throw things away but of course, once they’re gone, I barely give them a second thought. Only the human ego thinks these things are significant. We come, stay a while and then go. That’s it. 

T-shirt-wise this year will hopefully see our retirement from the coalface, though we’ll have to sell the house first and then find somewhere else to live. Who knows how long that’ll take? In the meantime, we’re making a few subtle changes to better tell our story across these last 23+ years with a new tagline ‘the future is in the past’ along with a bit of a redesign. Nothing too radical, just enough to keep things fresh. I’m also going to introduce a rock history weekly feature to highlight things that happened, or I’ve done, in the same week 50 or 40 or however many years ago. I don’t think we’ve made enough of our celebration of the great, good and obscure of our eras. I mean where else are you going to get a Spencer Davis Group t-shirt!

Lastly, I’d like to take the chance to thank the many, many people who write to me with recollections, stories, experiences and war stories in celebration of the great old days of gigs, festivals, records and record shops, as well as jukeboxes in pubs. I love to read them and it’s made me realise we all had such similar experiences back in the day. We thought it was all so unique and new but we were all going through it and it was just a phase…I guess it’s all just a phase. 

Take care of yourselves and try to have a good time, all the time.

Johnny