Tag Archives: 1977

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!

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Writing and What Happened in 1977

Posted on by Steve Higgins

1977 was a different world. There was no internet and there were no mobile phones. The only phones were landlines and they were big and heavy with great rotary dials with which you had to laboriously dial a number. As more people wanted telephones they needed more numbers and so numbers got longer and longer. 061, the dialling code for Manchester became 0161 and the code for London which was 01 became two new codes 071 and 081

I should tell you that I’m actually quite interested in telephones, especially those big heavy ones with a dial. I used to collect them and in fact I have quite a few; my two favourites are an old Bakelite phone from the 1940s and a Trimphone from the 1970s. The Trimphone was a new style telephone created by BT. It was a wedge-shaped light phone and the handset fitted neatly across the dial. Although it’s a phone I’ve always associated with the 1970’s, it was actually first introduced in 1965 and had a warbling ring tone instead of the traditional bell. The original versions had a green dial which lit up in the dark although this was discontinued due to concerns about radiation as the phosphorous which gave off the green glow was energised by a small tube of tritium gas which was mildly radioactive. Personally, I wouldn’t have thought anything could be ‘mildly’ radioactive but happily my two trimphones do not glow in the dark.

Anyway, time for a 1970’s telephone anecdote:

Once in 1977 I had a bit of a crush on a girl named Anne. I was a bus driver and my conductor had gone out with Anne a few times before moving on to someone else. I asked my friend Des for her number and I called her up one evening. I didn’t have a phone so I had to use a call box. I dialled the number and the phone rang for quite a while and finally someone answered.

‘Can I speak to Anne’ I asked.

‘Anne?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Anne. Tell her it’s Steve.’

‘Steve?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Steve.’

‘Just a minute.’

I could hear someone in the background asking who is it? And someone saying it’s for Anne and I had the feeling then that Des was playing a trick on me but hopefully the girl, whoever she was, had gone to fetch Anne.

A vintage bakelite telephone bought in France

I waited for quite a while and soon the pips went on the phone and I had to put more money in. I was still hanging on when the pips went again and in went my last coin. After what seemed like ages Anne came to the phone. I told her I didn’t have any money left so I quickly asked her out, she agreed and we set a place to meet, just before the phone finally cut off. When I finally went out with Anne, she told me that the phone wasn’t hers, it was her auntie’s phone and her auntie lived around the corner so Anne’s cousin had to nip round to Anne’s house, tell her there was a phone call and bring her back to the phone!

I remember telling Des about it and he laughed his head off. ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was her Auntie’s phone, you twit?’ I said.  Des just laughed even more.

Anne was the template for the character of Anne in my book Floating in Space. Floating was set in the year 1977 and as I mentioned earlier there was no internet, there were no mobile phones and wireless was an old-fashioned name for the radio. What else happened in 1977?

Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the USA and he had won the election the previous year, taking office on January 20th, 1977. He was a peanut farmer who defeated President Gerald Ford who had served as President after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974. As I write this, Carter is currently the oldest living former President.

In the UK the Prime Minister was Jim Callaghan. According to Wikipedia, he was the only Prime Minister to have held all the four main offices of state; Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and of course, Prime Minister.

A previous Prime Minister, Anthony Eden died in 1977.

Today’s blog is my 578th post over here on WordPress. It’s my 578th time of reaching out and showing readers a little of my work and hoping it might stimulate a few of you to click the links above and perhaps buy a copy of one of my books.

Creativity is important to everyone and my creative outlet is here in these weekly pages. For others it might be painting or photography. It might be working on a car or motorbike or even a little woodwork or home improvement. Creativity can take many forms, even making a post on Facebook can be creative. If you are on holiday and take a picture of a sunset and make it into a post, that is creativity. You can even take it further, crop the picture, add a filter to the image. Add a quote, Oscar Wilde is always good for one and so is Noel Coward or the big daddy of the written word; Shakespeare. The more you add the more creative you are. You can even write more on the post, another sentence, another paragraph, even another page. Soon you are on the way to a chapter, then more chapters and in time you will find that you have written a book. You’ve become a writer which, let’s face it, is a big achievement but then you need to write more, you need more pages, more chapters and more ideas.

Some people might write more than 578 posts, others may fall by the wayside after a mere eight, after all we all have things to do, jobs, work, life. All of that gets in the way.

Perhaps it’s time to get back to 1977:

On the 16th August 1977 at 6am, it was time for Elvis Presley to get some sleep. Night and day were reversed in Elvis’ world. He spent most of the night awake doing all the things he wanted to do. If he wanted to see a film at the cinema, he paid the cinema to run a film for him and his friends at night. He ate and played games at night, like the racketball he played with his step brothers and friends before going to bed that morning.

His fiancée, Ginger Alden was with him and Elvis who had trouble sleeping, took his usual assortment of sleeping pills before turning in. Sometime around 9am, Elvis awoke and told Ginger he was going to the bathroom. His bathroom was huge and he had made it into a truly personal and private place. In the bathroom was a circular shower. One wall was mirrored and fringed with those lightbulbs that one sees on the dressing table of a stage or film star and Elvis’ toilet things were clustered around the basin. The room was carpeted in purple and as well as a circular shower there was a couch and a TV set.

Elvis may have been sat on a chair reading The Shroud of Turin by Ian Wilson or he may have been using the toilet however, sometime during the morning he keeled over and fell face down to the floor wearing only a pair of blue cotton pyjamas. Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll had died.

A few months before Elvis died, my friend Chris and I decided to pack in our jobs and travel to Spain and look for work there. His sister had already made the trip and assured Chris that there was a big British contingent and plenty of jobs available in bars and restaurants. Accommodation was readily available too. Chris and I hitchhiked to London where we caught the boat train to Paris. We wandered about in Paris trying to get a ride further south but after waiting for days trying to get a lift, we caught the train down to Spain.

We had a big reunion in a place called Lloret de Mar with Chris’ sister. Two Scots guys fixed us up with a pension, a small place to live and we met them later in the bar and bought them drinks as a thank you. After a while I became a little fed up of buying them drinks, yes, they’d helped us get a place to stay but that didn’t mean I was committed to providing them with free beer for the rest of my life.

I’m not sure they appreciated being told that and afterwards even though Chris got on with them pretty well, I didn’t. The incident contributed towards a certain unpopularity on my part in the local community but at least it kept the cadgers from mythering me. Still, other newcomers to Lloret were pretty popular, they had money in their pockets and the local Brits didn’t.

Quite a few notable people died in 1977. Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Wernher von Braun, Roberto Rossellini, Marc Bolan and of course, Elvis Presley.

I stayed in Lloret for two weeks and it was fun. Every night was like a Saturday night but after two weeks I realised I didn’t just want Saturday nights. Sometimes I wanted a normal Tuesday night watching TV. Sometimes I wanted a Sunday night and my mother’s Sunday dinner and sometimes I wanted a rainy Thursday afternoon. After a few weeks in the sun I left Chris in Lloret, hitchhiked north through France and finally back to Manchester.

We didn’t have a telephone at home so I couldn’t call to say I was on my way back. I always remember knocking on the door of our house. Mum opened the door and said ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be gone for six months. ‘It didn’t work out Mum,’ I told her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do. I threw your old bed out!’

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Floating In Space

Posted on by Steve Higgins

In my book ‘Floating in Space,’ available now as a paperback or a kindle e-book from amazon.co.uk, all the action takes place in Manchester in the north west of England in 1977. All the venues are authentic, all actual Manchester pubs or bars. here’s an excerpt about a bar called the ‘Playground’ which used to be on Oxford Road.

Saturday night was in a lot of ways the culmination of the weekend. 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 still 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’.

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 ‘get off’ with 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.

playground

The Playground in 2015. Photo by the author.

The main venue that night, and on many other Saturday nights like it, was the ‘Playground’, a small disco bar on Oxford Rd in the town centre. 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.

My friend ‘Matty’ Edwards and I used to meet up in the Salisbury, by Oxford Rd station, have a few pints and a bit of a natter to any Regal Insurance cronies who we might find there, then make the short walk to the Playground. 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 ‘Loves Theme’ by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, played alternate sessions of rock, disco, and chart music.  We were both 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.

Matty was tall, he had lazy, rather hayfevered eyes, and a biggish nose over thin lips. His brown hair was short and untidy and he was smart, but had a sort of ‘middle of the road’ taste in clothes.

“Jenny’s looking gorgeous tonight” he told me over his pint of Worthington’s.

We were propped up at the bar at a convenient spot where we could eye up any possible female talent, and cast a fond eye over Jenny’s appealing form.

“You’re not wrong mate” I agreed. “I wouldn’t mind getting a grip of that myself.”

I caught Jenny’s eye and ordered two more pints of Worthington ‘E’. It wasn’t a great drink but we were tuned into now for the rest of the evening, and anyway, I hadn’t as yet developed any clearly defined tastes in beer. The first pint I ever ordered myself was a pint of mild, and that was because I had nervously entered a Cheshire country pub after a long cycle ride and hesitatingly asked for a pint of ‘beer’.

“A beer?” asked the barmaid.

“Yes,” I replied, “A pint, please.”

“A pint of what?”

I realised, uncomfortably, that something more was required. I had thought that ‘a pint of beer’ would have been enough, but what the barmaid wanted to know was did I want bitter, or mild, or lager even? My first tentative forays into the world of the alcoholic drink were with my friend Mike Larini and it was always he who had done the ordering. What did he ask for, I thought? I couldn’t remember but down the bar the faint voice of an old man asking for half of mild drifted along to me, and so I went on to drink mild. Later I changed to bitter, and even now I was currently considering another change as someone had given me the cheerful news that bitter ‘rots your guts’. Perhaps it had been that eternal pessimist Matty Edwards with his inside knowledge of beer. His father was a Didsbury publican, and Matty’s drink changed from pub to pub. Sometimes it was lager, sometimes bitter, but here, in the Playground, it was that now long departed brew, Worthington ‘E’.

I passed over Matty’s pint and we both took deep draughts. Worthington’s was never a great ale but it was good enough, and the first taste of a fresh pint is always the best.  I looked into the deep mahogany of the beer and thought about the things you can see through the bottom of a glass. Could I see Spain, there, in the distance? Could I really do it? Pack in my job and go to Spain in search of sun, sea, sand, and girls?

Somebody bumped into me from behind and a gruff voice said “sorry mate” and shouted up four pints of lager.

“Busy in here tonight” I said to Matty.

“Its Saturday night isn’t it? It’s always busy.”

“Yes, but it seems to be mostly lads. Was there a match on today or something?”

“Of course. City and United. Still, it was at Maine Rd so I wouldn’t have expected a load of hooligans in town.”

“Keep it down,” I said quietly. “You know what these football fans are like. Look at them the wrong way and they’ll have you.”

A girl in short black outfit caught my eye across the other side of the room and as Matty and I nattered on I would occasionally glance over and make eye contact. Matty soon noticed me and asked who I was eyeing up, and I told him and of course he had to gawp over at her despite me asking him to be discreet.

I thought about going over to chat to her but the usual fear crept up on me. What could I say? Suppose she wasn’t even interested in me? Sometimes I had found myself eyeing up someone I later found I wasn’t really interested in, it was just that the invisible thread that bound you across the room wasn’t all that easy to break. You would find yourself turning again to meet those same eyes, attracted to each other purely by the link that held you.

“Are you getting them in or what?” I said to Matty.

“Just waiting till Jenny comes this way.”

“Shout up the other barmaid. She’s over this side,” I told him, impatiently.

“You shout her up if you want. I want Jenny. Look at that; gorgeous.”

We spent a few moments discussing the merits of Jenny. Her eyes, her lips, her hair. She was lovely. Matty finally caught her attention and she filled up our pint pots. Matty bought her a drink and they exchanged some pleasantries before she moved on to the next customer. Matty came closer and quietly told me about the letter he was thinking of sending to her, telling her how he felt about her, but what did I think? Was it a good idea?

“What, a letter?” I shook my head. “No, why don’t you get her alone on a quiet night, give her some chat? Ask her out or something?”

“I don’t know. What about a card though, instead. I could send her a nice card asking for a date.”

Matty was as shy as I was in some ways, but his ideas of writing to a girl were always a mistake. If the girl did like him, and wanted to go out, then he would be actually asking her to ask him out. He would be transferring the responsibility of the whole thing on to her. No, we’re all shy to varying degrees, but things like this are a part of life that we have to face up to. We have to rise to the occasion and take on the challenge. Perhaps that sounds a bit dramatic but, getting involved with the opposite sex is a normal part of life, it’s just that anything new is hard at first, and all of us are conscious of our feelings, especially where sexuality is concerned.

Floating in Space is available from Amazon as a Kindle download or traditional paperback. Click the icon below or go to the links at the top of the page for videos and more information!