Tag Archives: 1970’s

Saturday Nights

Posted on by Steve Higgins

My book, Floating in Space, is set in the Manchester of the late seventies. There were no smartphones, no internet and no wireless networks. In fact, ‘wireless’ was an old fashioned word for the radio. I’m tempted to say that things moved at a slower pace then but that’s not true. Things just moved at a different pace. In 2025 you hear a lot about pubs closing down but back in 1977, pubs were far from closing down; at the weekend they were the place to be! That was where my friends and I met up, drank beer, listened to music and chatted up the ladies. Saturdays were the focus of our week back then but these days I’m actually not that keen on going out on a Saturday. I much prefer a weekday night out; things are a little quieter and there are fewer drunken idiots.

Having said that, Liz and I went into St Annes last Saturday to see our friends, Ray and Dean, perform as the Boogie Brothers at the Pier Inn. The Pier Inn is only a few years old and it’s a rather small little pub. The night we went in it was a hot and muggy evening and even with the door open it was hot in there so we decided to take a break and pop into Wetherspoons which we expected to be much cooler and it was. It did strike me though that most of the clientele in both those pubs were pretty similar to my own age group. OK there were a few young people but most people out that night were in my particular age bracket. Where do young people go these days on a Saturday night?

Back in 1977 Saturday nights were the culmination of the weekend for my twenty-one year old self. I always preferred it to Friday nights because things were more relaxed, there was no rushing home from work, no rushing to get your tea down your neck so you can get changed, then leg it out for the bus. Saturday, you could take your time and leisurely work up to things. Sometimes I would go out shopping and buy myself something new to wear for that evening, a shirt, or perhaps even a new pair of trousers. Then later I would have a long relaxed soak in the bath and dress unhurriedly in my room to the tune of my favourite music. In 1977 my favourite album was Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and as I dressed I would mimic Nigel Olsson’s measured and rhythmic drumming to ‘The Ballad of Danny Bailey’, or ‘Candle in the Wind’.

These days I just pop into the bathroom, have a shave and a shower and throw on one of a number of short sleeved shirts that I tend to favour. Still, even back in 1977 I could sometimes get bored with the usual pubs and bars in Manchester. I remember one boozy night in which my friend Chris and I decided to go out on the train somewhere. We ended up in Nantwich if I remember correctly. We took our tent and put it up somewhere in a field or a park and proceeded to spent the night drinking in a local pub.

The next morning we woke in our tent which had partially collapsed around us. We staggered up and packed everything away and thought about making our way to the railway station. As we walked into the town various people hailed us ‘Hi Steve!’ ‘Hi Chris!’

We dropped into the local pub and the barman greeted us like old friends. ‘Great night last night wasn’t it?’ he said.  I guess it must have been.

Here are a few facts about Saturday compiled after a quick search of the internet.

Saturday is named after Saturn, the Roman God of agriculture.

Saturday is the 6th day of the week in western culture although in some places the first day of the week is considered to be Sunday, making Saturday the last day of the week.

In Hinduism, Saturday is dedicated to the planet Saturn and is considered a day for spiritual cleansing and fasting. Devotees may visit temples and perform special rituals on this day, or abstain from certain foods and activities as a form of penance.

In the UK, Saturday is the busiest shopping day of the week. Many people use this day to do their weekly grocery shopping and high streets and shopping centres are often crowded with shoppers. One of my hard and fast rules is to never go shopping on a Saturday. Tuesday works better for me, it’s much quieter.

Time for a music break. I was going to go with Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting by Elton John but to be honest, as much as I like Elton, that song really isn’t my cup of tea these days. Here’s something much more enjoyable, Saturday Night at the Movies by the Drifters.

Talking about movies, Saturday Night Fever was a film released in 1977 starring John Travolta. Travolta plays Tony, a young man who spends his weekends drinking and dancing at a local disco. I haven’t seen the film for years until I watched it recently and was surprised to be reminded that, apart from the disco dancing interludes and the music of the Bee Gees, it is actually a gritty and dark film.

Here’s what I wrote in my book Floating in Space about Saturday nights;

“There was something about Saturday nights in Manchester. Some quality of security, of expectancy, a feeling that the night and the future were going to be good. A feeling that you might just meet some gorgeous girl and that even if you didn’t, it didn’t really matter because there was always the excitement of the people, the music, the drink, and everything else that made up the evening. And then there was always the expectancy of the next night, and the next, and on and on into the future. The past building up inside you like a great data bank, reminding you, reassuring you, like a light burning in some empty room in the corner of your mind.”

The Playground as it is today

Back in the late 70s, my friends and I used to go to a bar in Manchester called the Playground. We loved it in there. Inside the Playground, flickering multi-coloured spotlights rotated across the red carpeted room which, on Fridays and Saturdays, was generally packed. It had a small dance floor sunk low like a pit where people up on the raised bar level could look down at the gyrating girls and where also, on week day lunchtimes, a topless dancer appeared at the stroke of one o’clock to translate the soul and disco music of the time into pulsating physical motion, the eyes of jaded office workers glued to her as she did so.

There was a paltry fifty pence charge to get in, the solitary bouncer was silent but not unpleasant and the DJ, who always began the night with ‘Love’s Theme’ by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, played alternate sessions of rock, disco, and chart music. We were all mad about Jenny, the barmaid. She was lovely. She had a kind of round, open face framed by thick blonde hair and her skin was a creamy white. She served us Worthington ‘E’ and we melted into the hubbub of people on their Saturday night out while the music of the seventies drifted through us.

Yes, we had a lot of fun nights in the Playground until one night we turned up and the place was closed. We went somewhere else that night and for some reason it remained closed for a long while. Perhaps the owners had gone bust or their lease had expired. Eventually it was refurbished and opened under another name but it was never the same again. Even so, every time I walk down Oxford Road, I always stop for a moment and remember those long gone nights in the Playground.

What shall I do this Saturday night? Get dressed up and go into town?

Actually, I think I might just order a takeaway and watch television!

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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My White Jacket and my 70’s Pop Star Heroes

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I really loved that white jacket although now I come to think about it, I only ever wore it once. Oh well, before we get to it, let’s take a quick look at some of my 70’s pop star heroes.

David Cassidy

I wasn’t so much a fan of David Cassidy, I just wanted to look like him. I always thought he was a pretty cool dude and although I didn’t rush out and buy his music I always kind of liked him. Cassidy was an unexpected superstar, the son of actor Jack Cassidy who crops up frequently in classic Columbo episodes.

image courtesy wikipedia

David began working as an actor and musician and was signed up by Universal studios in 1969. He worked on many TV shows of the time like Ironside and Bonanza until he was signed up for a part in a show called ‘The Partridge family‘. Cassidy and the show became a runaway hit and ten albums produced during the show’s run sold over a million copies each. David became a teen idol and his personal concerts were sell outs but a Cassidy mania, not unlike that experienced by the Beatles years earlier, caused numerous problems and culminated in a stampede at White City stadium where many people were injured and one girl fan sadly died.
In later years Cassidy was still singing and writing and appeared in many stage shows and musicals. You might even have seen him in a TV version of his life story, ‘The David Cassidy Story’.

On November 18, 2017, Cassidy was admitted to hospital with acute liver and kidney failure. He became critically ill and was put into a medically induced coma. He came out of the coma two days later in a critical but stable condition. Doctors hoped that Cassidy would survive until a liver became available for transplant, but he died of liver failure on November 21, 2017, at the age of 67.

According to Wikipedia, his daughter, Katie Cassidy, reported that his final words were “So much wasted time.”

Gary Glitter

Gary Glitter’s first big hit, back in the early seventies was ‘Rock n’ Roll’ parts 1 and 2, a double-sided single which on part 2 was mainly instrumental with group chants of ‘rock n roll’. Glitter followed this up with a string of hits throughout the early seventies with singles like ‘I’m the leader of the gang’, ‘I love you love me love’, ‘Do you wanna touch me?’ and ‘Hello hello, I’m back again’. His career faded afterwards but in the early 90’s his records were discovered by a new generation of record buyers and many modern artists have acknowledged that he was an inspiration to them in earlier years.

Back in 1976 my brother and I went to London to see him in concert. I’m pretty certain it was some sort of farewell concert but Gary soon made the first of many comebacks.

The late 1990’s saw his image become fatally destroyed by his arrest and conviction in 1999 for possession of child pornography. Some years later, in 2006, Glitter faced criminal charges and deportation from Vietnam after a court found him guilty of obscene acts with minors. Glitter was deported back to Britain and placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for life. These convictions turned Glitter from being one of the best-loved stars in British pop history, into a hated and loathed figure.

On 5 February 2015, Glitter was convicted of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault and one of having sex with a girl under the age of 13. On 27 February 2015, Glitter was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

On 3 February 2023, Glitter was released on licence after serving half of his sentence but on 13 March 2023, he was recalled to prison for breaching his licence conditions by allegedly viewing downloaded images of children.

David Bowie

Bowie is one of those stars who kept on making music throughout the years and constantly reinvented himself. One of the first tracks of his I ever bought was Life on Mars and a great early hit was Space Oddity. One of my personal favourites was The Laughing Gnome, originally released in 1967 in which Bowie sings with a ‘Gnome’ which was actually a speeded up vocal track.

Later Bowie created the character Ziggy Stardust and became one of the stars of the glam rock era. He changed style again with Young Americans, released in 1976. It was a big hit and even topped the US soul charts. In the 1980’s he had a hit with Under Pressure, a collaboration with Queen.

He also had numerous roles in the cinema playing an alien in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth and various others.

Bowie died while living in New York. He had contracted liver cancer and died on the 10th of January 2016.

Cliff Richard

Cliff’s career began in the 1960s and has continued almost to the present day. In the 1970s he had twice sung the UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest and had his own TV show on the BBC.

I can’t say that I was ever a big fan of Cliff however in the late 70’s and 80s he had a string of excellent hits that I really loved, songs that included Devil Woman, Miss You Nights, Carrie and Wired for Sound.

Cliff was involved in controversy in the late 1990’s when he complained that radio stations were not playing his records and he went as far as releasing a dance version of one of his songs under a different name to prove his point. The record was popular but radio stations stopped playing it when Cliff was revealed as the singer.

In 2014, Cliff’s property was searched in relation to allegations which arose from the Jimmy Saville investigation known as Operation Yewtree. The allegations were unfounded but Cliff was unhappy that they were broadcast on the BBC news and later sued both the South Yorkshire Police and the BBC receiving substantial damages.

According to Wikipedia, Cliff is the third top selling artist in the UK behind Elvis Presley and the Beatles.  John Lennon apparently said of Cliff that before Cliff and the Shadows, there had been nothing worth listening to in British music.

Elton John

In 1967 Reg Dwight answered an advertisement in the New Musical Express. Liberty Records had placed the ad as they were looking for musical talent and when Reg arrived at Liberty’s offices, he was given a sheaf of lyrics written by Bernie Taupin and so Reg promptly began writing music to Bernie’s words. When Reg decided to perform his new songs, he decided to use a different name and so Reg became Elton John.

1973 was probably my first record buying year. Up until then I really had little interest in music. The Beatles had pretty much passed me by and I was more interested in TV and film music rather than the pop charts. For Christmas 1972 my brother and I received a shared present, a new stereo record player. Of course, having a record player meant that I needed something to play on it. That’s when I discovered Elton.

I bought lots of Elton’s records throughout the 70s but I lost interest in his music in his later years.

In 2001 Elton released the album Songs from the West Coast. The album was received warmly by the media and I remember hearing many great reviews saying how Elton had returned to his piano based roots and so on. On Wikipedia I see that the album was recorded on analogue tape as Elton felt that gave the sound a warmer feel. OK I thought, sounds like a good time to try some of Elton’s latest music. While I was waiting to pay for the CD in HMV I noticed another album of Elton’s, Made in England, in the reduced section so I grabbed that while I was there.

Anyway, Songs from the West Coast was a total disappointment for me and not only that, I thought the whole thing had a tinny sound to it, not a warm one.

A few months later I noticed Made in England lying unplayed on a shelf so I popped it into my car to give it an airing. I’m so glad I did because Made in England is the album that to me, sounds much like his classic 70’s stuff with some outstanding tracks. A fabulous album, just as good as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Since then, Elton has been part of the first same sex UK marriage when he married his long time partner David Furnish and has seen his life story made into the 2019 film Rocketman starring Taron Egerton as Elton which includes a good many of Elton’s hits.

His latest album, Who Believes in Angels was released this year.

Marc Bolan

Bolan was a pop singer of the 1970s and is credited with beginning the glam rock movement by appearing on Top of the Pops, the BBC’s flagship music programme, with his group T Rex performing the single Hot Love wearing glitter make up on his face. The single was a number one hit and was followed up with my favourite Bolan/T Rex track, Get it On which spent 4 weeks at number one. Bolan and T Rex had numerous hits including Ride a White Swan, Telegram Sam, Metal Guru, Children of the Revolution and Solid Gold Easy Action. Bolan was great friends with David Bowie and Marc’s producer Tony Visconti later went on to work with Bowie.

In 1977 Bolan was involved with his girlfriend Gloria Jones. They went out to a nightclub in London, both had been drinking and Gloria was at the wheel of her mini when they crashed in south London. Gloria was injured but Marc was sadly killed. A shrine at the spot where they crashed is maintained by the T Rex Action Group.

David Essex

David Essex was another performer who made his name in the early seventies although in his youth he had ideas of becoming a footballer. He played the lead in the stage musical Godspell and then went on to star in the film ‘That’ll be the Day’. I remember seeing his album in a record shop and thinking what a cool dude he looked dressed in a white suit. The album was Rock On and the single went to number 3 in the UK charts in 1973. The next year David released one of my all-time favourite tracks Gonna make you a Star which went all the way up to number 1. He also appeared on the double album Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds and went on to star in many musicals such as ‘Godspell’ and Evita. In 2011, he joined the cast of TV soap ‘EastEnders’.

He is still writing, recording and performing today.

The White Jacket

When I saw David Essex singing ‘Rock On’ wearing a white suit on ‘Top of the Pops’ for the first time, I thought he was the epitome of seventies cool and it occurred to me that one way to transform my gangling self-conscious self into something better might be to get that very same white suit. I couldn’t afford a suit at the time so I settled for a jacket, a white jacket, and I well remember admiring myself in the mirror before my first Saturday night out wearing it, sometime back in 1973.

The first problem I encountered with the jacket came on the bus into town. I sat on the back seat and in those days, the back seats of our local buses were a little notorious for being dusty and grimy as they were over the engine and absorbed all the engine fumes. Also there were people who put their feet up on the seats leaving marks to which people like me (the twerp in the white suit) were highly susceptible. Another thing is that all my life I have been cursed with being clumsy and once I had met up with my friends I somehow managed to spill beer all down my sleeve. Anyway, the night went on, more or less successfully. I certainly remember having a good time although the white jacket failed in its primary function; that of attracting gorgeous girls.

Later on, we stopped at the kebab shop and somehow a sizeable portion of chilli sauce managed to attach itself to my jacket. Rather than feeling like David Essex, I felt a little like Alec Guinness in the film The Man In The White Suit‘, wanting to get away from everyone! I never wore the stained jacket again and it lingered sadly in the back of my wardrobe smelling of kebab, chilli sauce, beer and diesel fumes until my Mum, on a major clean up splurge, decided to throw it out.

Of course, it could have been worse: I could have gone out wearing jeans, a white t-shirt and a red jacket trying to look like James Dean. (Actually, that was another night!)

It’s only fair to mention that this post is a hugely updated version of one that I first published 10 years ago in 2015.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

 

 

 

 

A Brief History of the Disco Era (with a little help from Google)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I do love my music. At home when there is nothing much on the TV I like to flip through the recommendations that come my way on Spotify. In my car I listen to CDs. I have always told myself that my precious CDs were too good to be dragged about in my car so I lovingly copied them to writeable CD discs, carefully, in most cases editing out the tracks I didn’t like. I’d be my own invisible DJ making up new CD albums with a track from here, another from there and so on. Lately, I haven’t done that so much and seeing that I don’t play my CDs much at home, I decided not to copy them just to bring the original CDs themselves into my car.

The other day after a particularly bad day at work, a day that was busy, where things didn’t go so well and I was just wanting to forget about things and release all the stress that had built up, I searched for something new, some music that I hadn’t played for a while that would relax me. I chose a CD that was a 1970’s disco collection.

I cranked my motor up, turned up the volume and as I turned onto the M6 motorway heading for home, my mind went back to a better time, a younger, easy going more relaxed time. I went back to the disco era.

So when did the disco era start and what was the first disco record?

Looking on Google to answer that question gives up various results by numerous authors and music writers but the answers are invariably just the opinions of those same writers. One answer was Rock the Boat by the Hues Corporation, another was She’s a Winner by the Intruders. (Never heard of it.) It might even have been that disco classic, Never can Say Goodbye by Gloria Gaynor. When it comes down to it, there is no definitive answer.

A lot of disco music comes from the soul tracks of the early seventies by groups like the O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes and the Trammps. Later, traditional pop bands tried to emulate those soul groups and the resulting soul/pop sound that became disco began emerging in the early 1970s in US urban night clubs and discotheques.

Here’s another random disco fact: the word discotheque is a French word meaning a library of discs. Discotheque was used in France to describe a nightclub where playing records had replaced a live band in the 1940s during the Nazi occupation. Modern Discotheques are where disco music began and something else that I noticed on Google were comments about the disco clubs of the seventies, the most famous one must have been the Studio 54 club in New York.  Another google result mentioned that Seventies Disco was born on Valentine’s Day 1970, when David Manusco opened The Loft in New York City.

Anyway, that’s enough of Google for a while so here are some personal memories.

The record I probably most associate with disco is The Hustle, by a group called Van McCoy. I have a feeling they were just one hit wonders but I might be wrong. The Hustle seemed to me to be the perfect disco record at the time. Great tune, a great dance beat and just really well put together. Looking back at the track today in 2021, it’s still good but it’s not the work of musical genius I once thought it was.

Back in the mid seventies I used to occasionally visit the discos of Manchester, places like Pips, Saturdays, Rotters, Fagins and a dozen other clubs I can hardly remember. There was a club called Sands in Stretford which was always packed to the seams but the disco I remember the most was one I wrote about in Floating in Space, it was called Genevieve’s.

Genevieve’s was in Longsight, which was a pretty rough area of Manchester and one of the hazards of the place was that if you went there in your car, you never found it in quite the same shape as how you left it, if you found it at all.

I remember one long ago Saturday night. My friends and I had to queue up for about ten minutes to get inside but we took that as a good sign. After all, a queue meant the club was busy. A group of grizzly bouncers scrutinised us and under their intense gaze we paid the entrance fee then went on inside. We were met by the warm fireside glow of soft lighting and the loud, pulsating beat of disco music. Coloured spot lights flashed over the four dance floors, in the hub of which sat the DJ, turning slowly around in a revolving booth.

There were five bars. Two small corner bars, two long bars, and a circular bar at the far end of the club. It really was a well set out place. We headed for one of the corner bars and my mate asked “bitter Steve?” I nodded and he called out to the barmaid.

A small army of bouncers was wandering around the club and as we waited for our drinks an argument broke out at one of the slot machines. Without any questions two burly bouncers grabbed the offender and propelled him expertly to the door. Another hooligan tried to come to the rescue by jumping on the back of one of the bouncers but a third bow-tied, black suited gorilla punched him solidly in the side, twisted his arm up his back and quickly removed him also. It was the sort of place where they didn’t stand any messing and the beer tasted like 3 parts water to one part beer and your feet stuck to the floor as you walked around. No one to my knowledge ever decided to complain to the management.

Genevieve’s attracted all sorts of people. There were smartly dressed, obviously wealthy people, peeling off rolls of bills to pay for whiskies and gins and other spirits. There were many attractive, well dressed girls. The younger girls drank halves of lager, sat in groups, and danced in groups to the Motown music of the sixties. They would drop their handbags onto the floor as they converged together for the formation dance routines for ‘Jimmy Mack’ and ‘Third Finger Left Hand’.

There were groups of lads too, who held cigarette packets and lighters in their hands, or placed them down in front of them on the tables while they drank, talked and eyed up the girls.

I spent a lot of my young life in that club. Despite the watered down drinks and the frequent fights, my friends and I had a lot of fun there until one day it either closed down or we found a better place to go.

The track that really reminds me of that club was Bus Stop by the Fatback Band. It had a strong disco beat and lyrics that just seemed to consist of ‘Bus stop!’ ‘Do the Bus stop!’ ‘Are you ready? Do the Bus Stop!’

In 1977 John Travolta appeared in the ultimate disco film ‘Night Fever’ and Travolta danced away to the music of the Bee Gees and tracks like ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and the title track ‘Night Fever’. I don’t ever remember there being dancers like that in any club I ever visited but what the heck, it was still a good film.

It wasn’t enough to buy the records and dance to disco records in clubs, you had to look the part too. I had a stack of shirts with ‘penny round’ collars and matching fat ties and quite a few pairs of flared trousers. Oh, and don’t forget the 1970’s platform shoes. I must have looked about seven foot tall back in those days.

Disco came to an abrupt end in 1979 in the USA where there seemed to be an outcry against the genre. Many music fans apparently felt that the music industry had been taken over by disco and many artists who had begun to produce disco music themselves, people such as Rod Stewart, were accused of selling out. In the UK and most of Europe, disco music morphed seamlessly into new electronic music. Artists like Michael Jackson took dance music to a new level and his album Thriller which spawned a number of hit singles became one of the best selling albums of the 1980’s.

What was the last ever disco single? The easy answer is that there wasn’t one. Dance music continued into the eighties and from there to the present day. Groups like Shalamar and Colonel Abrams just carried on producing dance tracks but if I had to put my finger on any one track as being the last of the disco era, I’d vote for I’m Coming Out by Diana Ross, released in 1980 when flared trousers were making way for drainpipes and when ties and shirt collars were thinning down.

What was your favourite disco track?

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The Men in White Suits

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Alec Guiness.

In case you haven’t seen it, and I can’t imagine for a moment that you haven’t, The Man in the White Suit was a British comedy film made by Ealing Studios in 1951. The film starred Alec Guinness as Sydney Stratton, a scientist and researcher specialising in man-made fabrics. His dream is to discover an everlasting fibre that never wears out. He is dismissed from numerous jobs because of his demands for ever more expensive facilities. Circumstances occur where he becomes an unpaid researcher at the hi-tech Stratton Mill where he finally discovers his new fibre. Sydney is over the moon as he wears his prototype indestructible suit for the first time. His new cloth is about to be revealed to the world but panic sets in; will this mean the end of the industry? After all, surely there will only be one lot of cloth to be made as it never wears out? Both union and senior executives in the textile industry unite to prevent the fabric coming out to the public domain but mill owner’s daughter Daphne Birnley, played by the husky voiced Joan Greenwood, strives to help Sydney to pursue his dream.

At the end of the film an angry mob who have pursued Sydney are united in laughter when the fabric becomes unstable and Sydney’s white suit falls apart.

One of the highlights of the film is the sound effect we hear whenever Sydney’s research apparatus is revealed. It is a rhythmic burbling sing-song sound that becomes a sort of musical motif for Sydney Stratton. At the end of the film he goes on his way and looking at his notebook has a thought, has he realised what was wrong? The burbling sound fades in as Sydney walks away.

Paul Sinha. (Picture courtesy Daily Express)

Paul Sinha.

I don’t know about you but weekday afternoons just wouldn’t be the same without the Chase. The Chase is a TV quiz show where four contestants try to build up a prize fund then play against the ‘Chaser‘, a seasoned quizzer, to take home that fund in the Final Chase. Sometimes the contestants win, sometimes not. Mark Labbett is the perhaps the most well-known chaser. He is known as the ‘Beast’ and is a former schoolmaster who had a success on the TV show ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’. Anyway, my personal favourite is the Sinnerman, Paul Sinha. Paul began a stand up comedy career in London while he was a junior doctor. He has appeared on his own radio show and as a quizzer competed in University Challenge, Mastermind, and Brain of Britain. Paul joined the Chase in 2011 as the fourth Chaser. His nicknames include the ‘Sinnerman‘ and ‘Sarcasm in a Suit’. He is a smiling, witty and erudite competitor and always wears his trademark white suit.

David Essex.

David Essex was a performer who made his name in the early seventies although in his youth he had ideas of becoming a footballer. He played the lead in the stage musical Godspell and then went on to star in the film ‘That’ll be the Day’. I remember seeing his album in a record shop and thinking what a cool dude he looked in his white suit. The album was ‘Rock On’ and the single of the same name went to number 3 in the UK charts in 1973.

The next year David released one of my all-time favourite tracks ‘Gonna make you a Star’ which went all the way up to number 1. He also appeared on the double album ‘Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds’ and went on to star in the musical ‘Evita’. In 2011, he joined the cast of TV soap ‘EastEnders’.

 

Steve Higgins.

When I saw David Essex singing ‘Rock On’ wearing a white suit on ‘Top of the Pops’ for the first time, I thought he was the epitome of seventies cool and it occurred to me that one way to transform my gangling self-conscious self into something better might be to get that very same white suit. I couldn’t afford a suit at the time so I settled for a jacket, a white jacket, and I well remember admiring myself in the mirror before my first Saturday night out wearing it, sometime back in 1973.

The first problem I encountered with the jacket came on the bus into town. I sat on the back seat and in those days, the back seats of our local buses were a little notorious for being dusty and grimy as they were over the engine and absorbed all the engine fumes. Also there were people who put their feet up on the seats leaving marks to which people like me (the twerp in the white suit) were highly susceptible. Another thing is that all my life I have been cursed with being clumsy and once I had met up with my friends I somehow managed to spill beer all down my sleeve. Anyway, the night went on, more or less successfully. I certainly remember having a good time although the white jacket failed in its primary function; that of attracting gorgeous girls. Later on we stopped at the kebab shop and somehow a sizeable portion of chilli sauce managed to attach itself to my jacket. Rather than feeling like David Essex, I felt a little like Alec Guinness in the aforementioned ‘Man In The White Suit‘, wanting to get away from everyone! I never wore the stained jacket again and it lingered sadly in the back of my wardrobe smelling of kebab, chilli sauce, beer and diesel fumes until my Mum, on a major clean up splurge, decided to throw it out.

Of course, it could have been worse: I could have gone out wearing jeans, a white t-shirt and a red jacket and tried to look like James Dean! (Actually, that was another night!)

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Marketing, Social Media and the 1970’s.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I read a lot about promotions and marketing, all in pursuit of selling my book, Floating in Space, to the unsuspecting public. Many marketeers recommend giving away free copies as a way of driving sales forward. Other marketeers are not so certain. A book is a product of many long hours, even years of hard work and for some, giving it away for free is not an option. For a registered tight wad like me that is something I go along with wholeheartedly.

Another reason is that at the moment I only have one book to sell. It’s not like having a trilogy or a series of books, where giving the first one of the series away will drive sales of the other books. Having said all this, I did run a giveaway lasting for three days in the hope that some new reviews might drive sales up but sales seemed to just run at their normal rate.

Reviews are important to an author. Quite a few readers have given me good reviews on Facebook but where I need them are on my amazon page where the buyers go to look directly at my book.  I suppose not being the pushy type works against me but I have recently added my book to Goodreads where readers with a Facebook profile can log on there and add a review. There are links on my Goodreads author page straight to amazon.

Dear me, bet Charles Dickens never had this trouble!

One of the nice aspects of Floating in Space is that because it has been born out of my past, as well as my imagination, reading it is a rather nice nostalgic experience for me, drawn back into the world of my youth, Manchester in the late 1970’s. Reading the book I can once again soak up the atmosphere of Manchester City Centre and remember those late afternoons and early evenings drinking in pubs like the Salisbury after a day in the office, or evenings playing snooker and pool after a shift going up and down the roads of Manchester as a bus conductor. Sometimes I can almost feel the polished wood of the bar in the working men’s club I used to frequent and even smell the cigarette smoke of the smokers, now a long gone sensation in British pubs. The past is inside all of us and I’m sure many people could do what I have done and take their past life, mix it up with a dash of imagination and some humour and write it all into a book.

So how easy is it to write a book like this? Well, not that easy, I can tell you. However, my book started life as a series of essays about my life in the late seventies. I started to compare the worlds of insurance and accounting and the world of passenger transport. Accounting wasn’t that easy in the seventies. Everything was added up by hand and entered into huge ledgers. There was the rough ledger where all the rough entries and working out and cash balancing was done and then it was all entered neatly into the big blue main ledger.

I am sure that today it’s a much easier process with software that does all the additions and calculations for you. One job that really used to tax me was arranging fire insurance for the offices rented by our tenants. They paid a percentage based on their office space. So for instance, if they rented 50% of the available space, they paid 50% of the insurance. There again, there were other tenants who rented a small office on the ground floor that measured 12 by 8. Now, try converting that into a percentage!

Coming back to the present day, here’s another set of maths questions. If I have 4,619 followers on Twitter, (correct at the time of writing although according to Twitter analytics, I get an average of 4 new followers per day so please make the necessary adjustments when you read this) why then don’t I get that figure following my blog? After all, all my Twitter posts lead, directly or indirectly, to this website. I recently had my Twitter page analysed by one of those writers’ sites that offer stuff like that. This is what they said.

Followers are generally people who just want you to follow them back. There’s no love there or loyalty.
Put it this way. 
Say you had a coffee shop and 2 people walked in:
person a) who is an ardent coffee fan and
person b) who came in basically to get out of the rain.
Who are you most likely to get a sale out of and be able to convince to join your email list to send them more coffee ideas?
Clearly person a) – they already love coffee right?
Person b) – harder work to convince them to do anything. Not impossible but definitely more work.
You need a bunch of person a)’s Steve.
The 2nd thing you may be doing ‘wrong’ is HOW you are going about trying to funnel those blog views. Let me give you some generic advice.
With all due respect nobody is interested in you. 
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that nobody is interested in any of us (so don’t take it personally!)  : )
People are interested in what YOU can do for THEM.

I have to admit, that’s a pretty shrewd assessment of Twitter. Everyone who is on there, with the exception of those who just want to Tweet to their friends about their social life, is out there to sell something, just, as my Twitter reviewer pointed out, as I am. I want people to read my blog and then perhaps think, “hey, this isn’t bad, wonder if its worth buying Steve’s book?” Bingo!

Just one last thought. There was no social media in 1977, the year in which Floating in Space is set but imagine if we tried to do the sort of things then that we do now on Facebook?  Suppose we went for a meal and wanted to share the experience with friends. We had to take a big bulky camera, take a picture of our meal, take the film to Boots or Max Spielmann or wherever, have the film developed, have the prints made and then get copies and send them out in the mail to your friends. By mail of course I mean mail, the Royal Mail, put the picture in an envelope, get a stamp and actually send it after adding a brief message for your followers -I mean friends- such as ‘this looks yummy!’

Social media was hard work in the 1970’s!

If you liked this post, why not try my book, Floating in Space? Click the links at the top of the page for more information.

What Happened to my White Jacket and my 70’s Pop Star Heroes?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

David Cassidy

image courtesy wikipedia

image courtesy wikipedia

I wasn’t so much a fan of David Cassidy, I just wanted to look like him. I always thought he was a pretty cool dude and although I didn’t rush out and buy his music I always kind of liked him.( You can click here to see what happened when I went for a David Cassidy haircut!) Cassidy was an unexpected superstar, the son of actor Jack Cassidy who crops up frequently in classic Columbo episodes.

David began working as an actor and musician and was signed up by Universal studios in 1969. He worked on many TV shows of the time like Ironside and Bonanza until he was signed up for a part in a show called ‘The Partridge family’. Cassidy and the show became a runaway hit and ten albums produced during the show’s run sold over a million copies each. David became a teen idol and his personal concerts were sell outs but a Cassidy mania, not unlike that experienced by the Beatles years earlier, caused numerous problems and culminated in a stampede at White City stadium where many people were injured and one girl fan sadly died.
Today Cassidy is still singing and writing and has appeared in many stage shows and musicals. You might even have seen him in a TV version of his life story, ‘The David Cassidy Story’.

Gary Glitter
Gary Glitter’s first big hit, back in the early seventies was ‘Rock n’ Roll’ parts 1 and 2, a double-sided single which on part 2 was mainly instrumental with group chants of ‘rock n roll’. Glitter followed this up with a string of hits throughout the early seventies with singles like ‘I’m the leader of the gang’, ‘I love you love me love’, ‘Do you wanna touch me?’ and ‘Hello hello, I’m back again’. His career faded afterwards but in the early 90’s his records were discovered by a new generation of record buyers and many modern artists have acknowledged that he was an inspiration to them in earlier years.

The late 1990’s saw his image become fatally destroyed by his arrest and conviction in 1999 for possession of child pornography. Some years later, in 2006, Glitter faced criminal charges and deportation from Vietnam after a court found him guilty of obscene acts with minors. Glitter was deported back to Britain and placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for life. These convictions turned Glitter from being one of the best-loved stars in British pop history, into a hated and reviled figure. As much as I like the glam music of the seventies, I actually feel bad today playing Gary Glitter’s music.

blogpicheroes

David Essex.
David Essex was another performer who made his name in the early seventies. I remember seeing his album in a record shop and thinking what a cool dude he looked. The album was ‘Rock On’ and the single went to number 3 in the UK charts in 1973. The next year David released one of my all-time favourite tracks ‘Gonna make you a Star’ which went all the way up to number 1. He also appeared on the double album ‘Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds’ and went on to star in many musicals such as ‘Godspell’ and ‘Evita’. In 2011, he joined the cast of TV soap ‘EastEnders’.

david-essex-rock-on-cbsThe White Jacket
David Essex sang ‘Rock On’ wearing a white suit on ‘Top of the Pops’ and as I have said above, I thought he was a real cool guy and it seemed that one way to transform my gangling self-conscious self into somebody ‘cool’ might be to get that very same white suit. I couldn’t afford a suit at the time so I settled for a jacket, a white jacket and I well remember admiring myself in the mirror before my first Saturday night out wearing it sometime back in 1973.

The first problem came on the bus into town. I sat on the back seat and in those days, the back seats of our local buses were a little notorious for being dusty and grimy as they were over the engine and absorbed all the engine fumes and also there were people who put their feet up on the seats leaving marks to which people like me (the twerp in the white suit) were highly susceptible. Another thing too is that all my life I have been cursed with being clumsy and once I had met up with my friends I managed to spill beer all down my sleeve. Anyway, the night went on, more or less successfully. I certainly remember having a good time although the white jacket failed in its primary function, that of attracting gorgeous girls. Later on we stopped at the kebab shop and somehow I managed to land a sizeable portion of chilli sauce down my front. Rather than feeling like David Essex, I felt a little like Alec Guinness in that film ‘The Man In The White Suit’, wanting to get away from everyone! I never wore the stained jacket again and it lingered sadly in the back of my wardrobe until my Mum decided my room was cluttered up enough and threw it out.

Of course, it could have been worse, I could have gone out wearing jeans, a white t-shirt and a red jacket and tried to look like James Dean! (Actually, that was another night!)

If you liked this blog, why not buy my book? Click the picture below to go straight to my Amazon page!

Floating in Space

 

A Comedy Sketch, Hitchhiking and an American Contact.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Funny how certain things can jog your memory and bring back stuff that happened to you years ago. Not long ago I wrote a blog about Monty Python and afterwards did a search on you tube looking for my favourite Monty Python sketches. One of the ones I came across was a sketch called ‘the visitors’. You must remember it if you’ve ever watched Monty Python: A romantic night in for a couple then someone knocks at the door. It’s Eric Idle who says “Remember me, at the pub, three years ago?”

That sketch always makes me laugh and watching it set off this thought;

A lot of years ago (well, not that many really) when I was eighteen or nineteen I was not happy with my office job and like a lot of young people yearned to travel the world. One day my friend Chris and I decided to do just that. We packed our jobs in and set off with a view to travelling through France and on to Spain where we planned to get work in the thriving, so we were told, ex pat community of Lloret De mar.

The week before I left for France, my souped up mini cooper blew up and the former owner of the car made me a paltry offer to buy it back. I accepted in something of a rush and left for France with much less funding than anticipated. In France we started off happily travelling about but things didn’t go so well on the hitch hiking front so we jumped on a train to Spain and arrived some days later in Lloret.hitching

I remember lying on a beach when we were approached by two Scots guys who said they would sort us a room out, a Spanish pension, in return for a few beers in the pub later that night.

They sorted the room out for us and later, we went down to the rather un-Spanish Moby Dick pub. Chris and I were separated in the pub and got chatting to different people. The Scots guys came over and I bought them a round. Then later I bought them another. The third time I thought they had been thanked enough and sent them on their way. When I found Chris he also had bought them a couple of rounds so clearly they had been well rewarded. Not that they thought so. Anyway, after a couple of weeks I got tired of fending off the constant cadgers, of spending my time either lying in the sun or drinking in the same pub with the same people and I left to hitch my way back to France.

In France I met up with an American guy who like me had worked in insurance and like me had sold his car and resigned from his job to travel in Europe. We spent a few weeks together hitch hiking and travelling in France. He of course had pretty substantial funds as his car had not blown up just before he was due to travel! When we arrived somewhere new he would book into a hotel and I would go and find a field or a park and put up my little tent then we would meet up for a glass of beer. It was clear to me he was dining well and I of course wasn’t. I must have ponged a little though after all those weeks on the road and I have to say I wouldn’t have minded using his shower but the offer never came. After a while we parted company.

Not so long ago I found my old notebook from those days and written neatly in there are his name and address and phone number in the USA. The Americans are such friendly outgoing people. I’ve always wanted to visit the USA. Wonder what he’d say if I turned up on his doorstep. Remember me? Steve Higgins? France, 1978? Any chance of using your shower?

If you liked this post, why not try my novel, Floating In Space? Click on the links at the top of the page for more information or click here to go to my amazon page.

 

Malta, and why you should never drink with eight pub landlords.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I left home when I was nineteen and went to share a house in Burnage with my friend Brian. Brian was a regular at a pub which I think was called the Farmers Arms, anyway; whatever it was called, he mentioned that a pub holiday to Malta had been arranged but someone had dropped out and there was a spot for me on the trip. It turned out there were eight pub regulars going, including me, and eight pub landlords.

My Mum was a little apprehensive at the time because since I had become a busman my social life and intake of alcohol had escalated hugely. Now I was playing snooker at the club after the early shift, out late after a late shift and out on my rest days too, but she was happy eight responsible landlords were going along to keep me ‘in check’ as she put it.

malta-map1We rented two apartments in Malta, one for the pub regulars and one for the pub landlords and on the first night at the resort the landlords invited us over to their apartment for a drink and it appeared to me as we entered their place that we were walking into a well-stocked brewery. Perhaps they were intending to open a bar or some such establishment in Malta because the place was stacked with booze. At the end of the night as we staggered back to our place the landlords called out, “Make sure you invite us over to your place!” Yes, a pity about the poor Maltese postal service. Can’t understand how that invitation was never delivered!

Later on towards the end of the week which turned out to be one long alcoholic soiree, we ended up in some Maltese bar after an evening spent visiting the ‘Gut’, a fairly appropriate name for the Maltese red light district. The numerous ‘ladies of the night’ there had a habit of grabbing a man’s crotch presumably to check if he had the equipment necessary to enter into a transaction with them. Strangely, when they tried the same tactic on our wallets they found us less co-operative.

I sat myself at the bar ready for a relaxing night drinking and chatting and towards the end of the night the manager locked the bar up while we were still drinking. Clearly a Maltese lock in. Every time we ordered a drink from then on the manager said in fractured English, “I let you stay after time, you buy me drink.”

OK, seemed like a reasonable arrangement to me so every drink we bought we added ‘one for yourself’ to the manager. He had a tall glass with some ice and lemon and topped it up every time from a bottle of what appeared to be whisky.

One of the landlords who had the physique normally associated with a sumo wrestler seemed to be pretty interested in this arrangement. He came and sat near me at the bar and asked what the drink was.

“You no like.” said the barman. “Cheap whisky.”

“I like cheap whisky.” said the landlord.

“No, I get you good whisky, cheap whisky for me.”

“Pop us a drop in that glass, I’ll have a taste.”

“Not good whisky, you no like.”

My friend the landlord however had other ideas and with a swiftness and grace which I wouldn’t have thought he possessed, he flipped himself up and over the bar, grabbed the manager’s glass and took a big swig of the amber liquid. I can only guess that this impromptu taste test was something of a failure as he then sprayed the offending drink all over the bar!

The drink was probably cold tea or some other unacceptable non-alcoholic beverage, but either way, what happened then was that this small bar turned into a scene from a John Wayne film with accusations and glasses flying, tables and chairs overturned and a bunch of Mancunians turned out onto the streets well before their usual drinking up time.

When I returned from that holiday I popped into my Mum’s with some Maltese confectionery or something and Mum looked at me and said “Hope you behaved yourself young man.”

“What? Of course I did.” I replied.

“Good job those landlords were there to keep an eye on you!”

Dear me, If only she knew!

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The CIA and Life through a Purple Lens.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Photographic_lenses_front_viewMany years ago when I was a bus conductor it was pretty easy to spot the fare fiddlers. They would never look directly at you. As I strolled down the bus asking for ‘any more fares please’ I knew who had paid and who hadn’t, after all, I had usually just watched them get on the bus. One scruffy guy got on one day and went straight down the bus, sat down and set a fixed gaze out of the window. Ok, I was chatting to other passengers at the time but I still knew he was new to the bus and I wanted his money.

“Fares please”, I called. Nothing. So then I turned directly to him and asked “I don’t think I’ve had your fare mate?” He finally turned away from the window.

“Where are you going to?”

“Levenshulme” he said.

“Thirty five pence please.” The guy thought for a minute, reached into his pocket and pulled out a can of soup.

“Can I pay with this?” He asked. The answer was no. He was asked to leave. After all it was pea and ham soup, tomato might have been another matter.

Here’s an extract from my book ‘Floating In Space’ that deals with another odd ball passenger;

A harassed looking girl boarded in Stockport. There was something about her that I couldn’t put my finger on. She asked for a single to Manchester and did I require identification?

“Identification?” I asked.

“Only I don’t have my credentials on me at the moment. I’ve got to be careful.”

“Careful of what?”

“Well my boyfriend’s a nuclear arms salesman. I’m being watched by the CIA and God knows who else. MI5 have probably got the scent by now.”

“Right, we’ll keep a low profile then.”

“Probably best if you know what I mean.”

She was a Nutter.

“What was that all about?” asked Milligan, my driver, when I went back up to the front of the bus.

“Nutter” was all I had to say.

“That’s the 189 you see Stu. Used to be a hell of a lot of them on this route. Quietened down a lot lately, oh yes.”

The rest of the trip was pretty unremarkable. When we finally reached Albert Square in the city centre the nutter came storming towards me down the centre aisle and yelled at the top of her voice “If my boyfriend’s not a nuclear arms salesman then how did I get CIA Clearance?”

She charged through the open door and on into Manchester. An old chap behind her departing at a much slower and more sensible pace said, “Answer that one then!”

You can read more about life on the buses in Manchester in my book Floating In Space.

One final nutter to finish with; There used to be a guy who never boarded our bus but spent his time hurtling through the traffic on his bike cutting up cars and buses alike. How he was never ran over I do not know. My colleagues had dubbed him simply ‘the Levenshulme Nutter.’

One day, years later when I made been promoted from bus conducting to the lofty heights of bus driver, I was driving through Levenshulme on the 192 service when the Levenshulme nutter cut across me and I nearly ran him over. I stopped next to him at the traffic lights, opened my window to give him some abuse then, noticing his outsize spectacles with their purple lenses said, instead “I like your glasses!”

He popped the glasses up on his head and said “Yes, but it’s the man behind that counts!” And cycled away. I never saw him again.

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Arrested Development and the advent of the Internet

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As a child growing up in the 1960’s one of my favourite television programmes was Tomorrows World, a BBC show about technology and the future. I was acutely interested in science, science fiction and all things related to the future. The future was hi-technology, gleaming metal and plastic cities, hover cars, and space travel. The movie 2001 A Space Odyssey predicted manned missions to Mars, powerful computers, and lunar space stations. But, 2001 is now  thirteen years ago, so what happened? Why is 2014 not really that much different from 1968?

Movies like 2001, produced in 1968, were made in the sure knowledge that the incredible leaps in manned space flight made since 1960, and the technology that made it all possible, would continue. How wrong they were. When Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface of the Moon in 1969 the space race was over. It was a case of mission accomplished and the Apollo programme was cut short when Apollo 17 made the last manned trip to the Moon. To a great extent, space exploration, or at least manned space exploration stopped there. Space travel had become too expensive even for the Americans. The NASA space programme continued with Skylab and the development of the space shuttle, but none of those projects went further than orbiting the Earth, and that feat had been accomplished easily on the Mercury and Gemini programs.

Take a look at your kitchen and think to yourself how different is it from the kitchen of thirty years ago? Apart from advancements in electronics, probably in the form of your microwave and your freezer, the answer is not much. Step back further and look at your home. Are your living in a gleaming metal and plastic ‘future home’ or is it a modernised terraced house. Terraced houses are over a hundred years old but many people live in them happily today. Differently from our counterparts of a hundred years ago of course. Bathrooms have been added, and extensions with kitchens and indoor toilets, but terraced houses all the same.

Many writers and film makers have chosen to look at the future as a separate place altogether from the present and this has been their mistake. The future is the continuation of the past. Cities, homes, society itself is all an evolution of what has gone before.

Heathrow Airport was recently in the news because of protests about a possible new runway. New Runway? Why is a runway even necessary when the Harrier Jump jet has been taking off and landing vertically since the 1960’s? The answer is two words, arrested development. Perhaps VTOL has suffered, like Concorde, in not being American. There is no doubt in my mind that had Concorde been an American aircraft instead of an Anglo-French craft the skies above us would have been substantially populated with supersonic passenger aircraft. The United States is the land of opportunity, especially commercial opportunity. The space programme of course was also American but perhaps commercial exploitation in visiting the moon was limited. The great technological advances in the last thirty years have come in computer orientated technology that is full of commercial applications like, pc’s, laptops, tablet computers, mobile phones, and of course the internet.

Having a book published has been the dream of many people, including me but today, with the advent of internet technology, that dream is easy to realise. My Book, ‘Floating In Space’ is one that I have been working on, off and on, for thirty years. I found it, uncompleted on an old disc, reacquainted myself with it, finished it off and now you can read it as a kindle e-book available on amazon. There were no meetings with publishers, no discussions, no chats with an editor, no re-writes. It was just a case of upload the files, proof read then press a button and it’s live on-line.

That of course has its drawbacks. As a writer I have discovered a sort of word blindness when it comes to my own work. I’ve proof read my book a multitude of times but how many times have I come to put an extract on this blog only to find missed words and other errors. When the paperback proof version came (in the wrong size: I’d made it far too big!) more errors jumped out at me and my girlfriend Liz, a fully paid up member of the Grammar Police has pointed out so many punctuation issues I sometimes feel like taking it off the market. Anyway, the good thing is that in the digital world, errors can quickly be resolved. A quick update, press the save button and we are all sorted.

Lets see, where’s my ‘Writers and Artists yearbook’? Maybe its time to check out that list of publishers again!