Billy Bragg - 'The Saturday Boy'
Not a 'true story' as such as I didn't know Nobby Snide until coming on the Zone, and though I had met the OBL once back in '76, the 'story' (such as it is) is pure fiction. However, all the stuff about Guy Norris records, BB playing at The Cliffs, the 29 bus and Southend scenes are all in the memory banks...
"This track is for an old friend of mine who feels that your Emperor plays stuff that is too personal, rather than political, as he would like to hear on Radio Retro FM247. Well, this is a public service announcement from The Emperor. This show is dedicated to bringing back the memories associated with the songs and like my footy chum should know, the personal can be political too... but in the meantime, I'll just have to carry on 'conforming to the middle class,' as he might put it...that's possibly me, possibly you and possibly most people I know these days. Here on Radio Retro, we’re broadcasting to anyone irrespective of their class, colour or creed. Even Col Ewe fans can enjoy this station. Anyway, this East London geezer was spared the delights of Dagenham Ford's assembly line by dint of being able to write songs, many of them political, but my favourite is a decidedly personal one, which takes me back to growing up further east in Essex way back when..."
Shrimpero dusted off his twenty-five year old copy of 'Brewing Up With Billy Bragg,' and looked again at the pop art drawings on the cover. He thought what an important year that was... the last year of industrial action as we knew it, the Brighton bomb, Malcolm Allison briefly managing Southend United with Bobby Moore... and was immediately taken home, back to when he first saw the Ol' Blue Lady again after losing touch in the late seventies. He whipped out the tape he was doing for the 'almost live' broadcast and replaced it with a crisp, virginal cassette, one which he had to crack open the cellophane for as he didn't want this particular broadcast to be besmirched by any material left on it from a previous outing...
"Hey, OBL, hope you don't mind me being in touch this way. It's just that I couldn't leave without saying goodbye properly...and this is about the best way I know. So, sit back and enjoy this personal broadcast with love from me to you. It will of course focus on the past, but I hope that it will hint at a better future for us, 'cos like McNasty once told me, "loving someone means being able to let go of them"..."
Shrimpero placed the record arm and needle over the LP and remembered to slow down the speed to 33.3 rpm on his old turntable. He released the pause button on the music centre's cassette deck just before the intro to 'The Saturday Boy,' remembering when he'd taken the twenty-something Blue Lady along to The Cliffs Pavillion in Westcliff to see 'The Bard of Barking.' He remembered Billy Bragg introducing this one "for anyone who ever went to Guy Norris record shops" and how he never stopped musing on those aching lyrics, 'I never understood my failings then and I hide my humble hopes now...looking back, she made us want her, a girl not old enough to shave her legs...'
"So, I'll kick off the show with this one. It actually came out in 1984, but whenever I hear it, I'm transported back to 1971 and the time I'd just moved from Carlton Avenue to the top of your road. You lived on the way to the 29 bus route and I used to pass your house and look up at your room just in case you saw me. I always wanted to impress you, even then...we were only ten but like the song goes, 'you were always on my mind...' Anyway, I remember being armed with ten orange Guy Norris vouchers that I managed to accumulate from trips to my uncle's...they would give you one of these vouchers if you bought a single and three if you bought an album. I couldn't afford an album from my pocket money, but my uncle was into all this Velvet Underground stuff which I thought was weird at the time and he used to palm me off with the vouchers he'd got from buying their albums. That summer, the summer of '71, when I'd moved into Kenilworth Gardens, the 'Cyprus Avenue' of Leigh-on-Sea, I'd walk down the drive of dreams, your Wellstead Gardens, the road that never changes year on year in my memory. I love it that way, it remains a constant truth in my memories I have of our home town...
...and then I'd pass the brook, near those tennis courts at the back of Clatterfield Gardens and head towards Fairfax Drive, where the bus stop was. It was when one-man buses came in and they were blue Southend Corporation ones. You had to put the right change in a slot to the right of where you got on and the ticket would print out copies of the coinage you put in. Sometimes I only put two pee in when the journey to Southend cost three pee, so you'd have to bluff it if the inspector got on to check your ticket. That bus journey took me past our favourite place, the world-famous Roots Hall, but I stayed on to get off at Vic Circus and walk from the underpass up to Guy Norris, where they'd have a parade of album covers in their window. I had my ten vouchers, pristine in my canvas shoulder-bag, and remember trading them in for T. Rex's 'Get It On,' which is what I was hoping I'd be able to do with you one day. Anyway, my gift is someone else's song and this one's for you..."
Shrimpero swapped the cassettes once again and intoned into the portable cassette player's condenser mike, "So therein lies the tale of an adolescent melancholic, the stuff that dreams are made of which maybe return to haunt the odd listener out there every now and then. But if you're listening, Lord Football, rest assured this Saturday boy will put the game before the girl any day of the week..."
OK, hope it gives you an idea of what I mean, but please don't think you have to follow any 'rules' here (except what we have to abide by on the Zone anyway). Reviews of gigs are welcome... just keen to get other people's experiences of what thoughts music can evoke as I (by necessity) monopolised the IABD thread somewhat. Cheers, guys, over to you...
