5449

I think I have mentioned that Lowestoft is some way from London. 120 miles doesn't seem far, but it might as well be light years rather than miles.

Lowestoft was as remote from the pulsing centre of once-swinging London with it's niteclubs, hotspots and fancy dan music scene as we were from New York or Los Angeles.

A music scene was something that happened somewhere else.

I am prepping for an interview that me, as a sunscriber to a podcast, gets on their borthday, so I have been thinking about stuff to say and show. So, much of this stuff is at the forefront of my mind.

I must have heard the Yardbrds on the radio at some point, must have been their "For Your Love" single from the previous decade, so imagine my surprise to find the band were now employed as the entertainment on a pleasure boat I used to see moored alongside the Haven Bridge in Great Yarmouth.

I thought this for years.

And then, one time I noticed it wasn't the Yardbirds, it was the Yarebirds. As the river was the Yare.

How silly I was.

But then, rock and roll or even pop, pop, pop musik never came to our town.

Exept when the Radio 1 roadshow came, which I do seem to remember it did. And yes, checking the internet it seems that Paul Burnett came to Oulton Broad on 11th August 1975 at Nicholas Everitt Park. I don't think I went, as we would have been on holiday with friends in Billericay, where we really did know someone called Richard.

I digress.

Keith Chegwin also came to Oulton Broad, the same venue for one of their outside broadcasts. It was winter. It had been snowing. He got pelted with snowballs live on air. We had to get our entertainment somehow.

I don't remember bands coming to play in our town, there was just the South Pier, a concrete box on concrete legs that had terminal concrete cancer, but it would survive into the 90s. Also, on TV there was little other music either, unless you were a nightowl and stayed up to watch Old Grey Whistle Test. There were variety shows, but you were more likely to see a fading star of the 60s, crooning. Abba or the Brotherhood of Man were acceptable on Seaside Special, sometimes the "raunchy" Boney M.

So, where is this going?

Well, I have written about pop music and me and my friend's fascination with the charts, but I had no idea how records got into the charts, how they were created, marketed and sent into orbit to be a hit.

In the autumn of 1978, I was allowed to travel to London, ON MY OWN, and be metby family friend, "Joyce", a French teacher living in Leytonstone, and daughter of "Aunt Nelly and Uncle Walter" from Bolton.

Joyce had come to visit a couple of times, and said I could go and stay with her, be shown round London before she drove her ancinet Ford Anglia up the A11 to Lowestoft for a stay.

SO, on the day, both my parents were at work, so I had two pounds for a taxi fare to get me to Oulton Broad South to pick up the DMU to Ipswich, where I would change trains (and need to get a ticket) for the express to London.

I mean, this was exciting stuff. Up to that point, I hadn't been allowed out of their sight, so to undertake a three hour journey on public transport and if all went to plan, Joyce would meet me at Liverpool Station. All arranged on the phone before the internet of course, quite what would have happened had she not have been there, I don't know.

Anyway, it all went well. Joyce met me off the train as planned, and she took my on the Underground to Knightsbridge to look round Harrods and to buy a pound of sausages. Looking round Harrods took two hours, I had never seen anything like it. The sausages cost £1.75 I seem to remember, we made them last two meals and the food court had the fine displays of produce which made the visit worthwhile.

Joyce had a small flat off Leytonstone High Road, and from time to time Joyce would leave me to my own devices, so I watched TV. In London they had a different TV station, so had different shows, and had Seasame Street, which I had never heard of before, but had many of the Muppets on it.

Another show was some kind of news magazine show, London's version of Look East or About Anglia but with fewer farmers featured, and on the edition I saw, they ended the show, or its how I remembered, with a new record, Lucky Number by Lene Lovich.

Lene was unlike any pop singer I had seen before. She had odd make up, I seem to remember, though the video for the song shows here with no make up. But she had long pigtails, a dress which you could call Gothic before its time, and the song, well, like no pop song I had heard. And the chorus had four notes, well, screamed.

I liked it.

If was different.

And amazingly, it became a hit. It reached the chart, and I had heard it before it had been released. I urged it to greater heights in the chart.

That was her high point, a follow up, Say When, was also a hit, but not as big, and so she slowly went back into the shadows out of which she had briefly emerged. But I learn she was considered for the lead in Breaking Glass, wrote the hit "Supernature" for Cerrone,

"What at the time seemed a bit outre, even gauche was, by the early Eighties, adopted whole or in part by rafts of aspiring bands. Where once Lovich was likened to Patti Smith for lack of even vaguely comparable new wave female singers, she now had her own ‘school’ of followers – although many people have no idea she was there first. With chart success now behind her, Lene drew attention to the fact in 1982 with bittersweet relish:

“It’s always been very spiritually uplifting when other people mention me because it makes me feel I do exist in this music business which, as far as I can see, is often totally anti-music. Girls are still not expected to do anything — except maybe dress up — and they’re always suspected of ulterior motives. Plus there is always a tendency to remove the ones who are ‘different’. Yet — that’s the only way to progress, and it’s not an aim on your part to be ‘different’… you can’t do otherwise.”

https://www.stevepafford.com/lenelovich/