What was it like in the 60's and 70's?

 

5 miles away was Santa Pod Raceway and as kids we used to cut across the fields and woods to sneak in the back-way to avoid paying, this was our small patch of America in the heart of rural England where we could immerse ourselves in Americana listening to Beach Boys and Jefferson Airplane over the Tanoy, while gawping at hot rods and top-fuel dragsters pumping the smell of Nitromethane into the air, where visiting celebrities like Don Garlits would show us how it was really done, shaving several seconds off our local boys best times down the strip. That love of drag racing was often the trigger for making like-minded friends at school and later at work (one of my work friends, Steve Horn, later went on to work for Santa Pod Raceway as a timing marshal and driver of the "house" jet car), but that came later, after (in 1968) I moved up to High School.

 

High School was a whole new world, being 10 miles away it started with a 45 minute bus ride where we would pick up kids from other villages en-route and the conversation always centred around music and cars and we would read NME and Sounds for the latest news and release (Melody Maker was ignored for being "too jazz & blues") and swap albums and singles with each other (cassettes hadn't been invented yet, though I did have a portable ¼ reel-to-real tape machine for producing mix-tapes, splicing the sound effects from Moody Blues and Floyd between the tracks... and of course the dragster noise from Simon & Garfunkel's 'Baby Driver'). These were the days before HMV and Virgin meagre stores, so Bedford's record shops also sold hi-fi and musical instruments, so after school we would trawl these shops looking for anything interesting that we'd read about in the music mags or heard on the late-night radio. I remember in the early 70s one of these shops' window display was Van der Graaf Generator's 'At Least We Can Do Is Wave At Each Other' - occupying the whole shop front with a real Van der Graff generator and cotton-wool clouds adding to the 3D cardboard cut-out of the album cover itself - this display mesmerised me so much I had to buy the album with money saved from my lunch-money.

 

The school playground at lunch time was a nest of small cliques of kids into various forms of music, this was divided mainly into two main groups - the skinheads into reggae, Motown and R&B and the Freaks and Rockers into head-music, heavy music and Prog Rock (yes, we did call it that in 1970-73); the cool kids had Zappa, Beefheart, Crimson and White Noise, the teenie-boppers were into Glam Rock, while me and my friends hovered between them, liking all music that came our way, from The Beatles to the Move, from Hendrix to Zappa, from Bowie to Bolan, from Hawkwind to Amon Duul, and of course The Moodies to Floyd, our eclecticism allowed us to be tolerated by both camps, albeit begrudgingly at times when I inadvertently mentioned "Electric Warrior" to the cool kids.

 

London was 45 miles away by train, and that was the real Mecca of music for us, but at 14 years old getting there was an expedition (we did take one trip just to visit the Virgin import shop in Marble Arch - just about the only source of Krautrock at the time). In 1972 I saw Pink Floyd at Wembley Pool performing The Dark Side Of The Moon - hours spent listening to Meddle and Ummagumma hadn't prepared me for that - it blew me away. Later "expeditions" to London were to buy albums and Sci-Fi books from the many record & book stores around Soho, Totenham Court Road and Oxford Street. Carnaby Street was crass commercialised shadow of its former self by 1973, but still we'd visit the head shops looking for hippy clothes, loons and scoop-neck shirts and being approached by weirdo's asking if we "wanted to score"...

 

Reading through the posts in this thread has reminded me of one source "deleted" music that was available to us - that was a warehouse type store just off Oxford Street that sold American Imports - these were bin-end remainders that hadn't sold in the US so were shipped over en-mass to the UK and sold a ridiculously cheap prices. These were instantly recognisable for being made of really thick cardboard and usually having one corner of the sleeve clipped off or a ¼" hole stamped through the corner - if I recall correctly my entire Bo Hansson collection and first Philip Glass albums were from this store, as was Tim Blake's Crystal Machine (though I think I perhaps bought that in a similar store in Edinburgh much later).

 

1974/5 began my obsession with The Enid - I followed them around the home-counties, bought everything they released and joined The Enid Appreciation Society - I was at their make-or-break gigs at the Round House and The Hammersmith Odean, but still the best gigs of theirs I attended were at smaller venues and college Student Union bars in Bedford, Cranfield, Northampton and Leicester.

 

By 1975 we had transport, my friend Steve bought a huge 6 cylinder Vauxhall Cresta off my Dad and that was our taxi out of the sticks and into music venues further afield, with Friar's Club in Aylesbury being our main port of call - here we saw Peter Gabriel on his first solo tour.