Rock and Roll Stories #56 - A very special 50th Anniversary!

 What were you doing 50 years ago? As I write this, it's ten past one on the 8th January 2026. Fifty years ago, I would have been a thirteen year old at Finchley Catholic High School. It was a Thursday. We most likely having the lunchtime register taken after lunchbreak. We'd all be in a sombre mood. It was the first week back after Christmas. Our form teacher Alison MacFarlane (Now Alison Shuttler) would no doubt be asking us to sit down and behave. I met her at a school reunion years later. We were officially the worst class in the history of the school. We won't go into why, but not only did we disgrace ourselves on a day out to Margate, but also on a religious retreat to Damascus House, which would have resulted in the perpetrators being expelled, but for the fact that 18 boy stood up and took responsibility for the damage. But fifty years ago, none of that had happened yet.

I wasn't into music. In fact I felt betrayed  by the music industry. This was the top ten

1. "Bohemian Rhapsody" - Queen
2. "Glass of Champagne" - Sailor
3. "Mamma Mia" - ABBA
4. "In Dulci Jubilo"/"On Horseback" - Mike Oldfield
5. "Art for Art's Sake" - 10cc
6. "Let's Twist Again"/"The Twist" - Chubby Checker
7. "Wide Eyed and Legless" - Andy Fairweather-Low
8. "King of the Cops" - Billy Howard
9. "Itchycoo Park" - The Small Faces
10. "Happy to Be on an Island in the Sun"  - Demis Roussos 

Of these, I actually only remember five songs. Itchycoo Park is  a classic, but it was a re-issue. I've always had a soft spot for the Small Faces. I wasn't really a 10cc fan. I've always thought they were very good musically, but they never really did it for me. But it's a passable song. The Chubby Checker songs are classics, but I don't recall this re-issue. I'd actually loved ABBA when they won Eurovision with Waterloo. You can't say Mamma Mia wasn't an absolute classic, but as a thirteen year old, it wasn't for me. Years later, I was amazed to learn that Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols wrote the intro to Pretty Vaacant when he was trying to play the riff! What is not to like, but back then.... And then the No1. Bohemian Rhapsody. Fifty years of this awful monstrosity! When Queen came out and released their first single "Seven Seas of Rye" I thought they were amazing. Then they released this. No record in the history of music more sums up everything I dislike about Rock and Roll. It has complete and utter nonsense lyrics. I can't stand Brian May's style of guitar riff and solo. I once met him and he was not pleasant, which I was actually pleased about, as it would have been awful to have realised he was a lovely bloke. I cannot stand pseudo operatic rock vocals. Being fair to Queen, their drummer and bassist can groove, just listen to "Another one bites the dust".  That song has always been a bit annoying to me. I wrote a song called "Run Down" for The False Dots a year before, which had the same riff. We stopped doing a perfectly good song when they released it, as I wasn't having anyone saying we'd nicked it off Queen. It is no surprise that such a good bassline was written by the bass player though!

It seemed like the sort of stuff I liked, T-Rex, Bowie (circa Rebel Rebel period) was in decline. It has all started to become a bit too clever. I'd watch TOTP and it was people I thought were Tw*ts like Jimmy Savile, introducing songs I didn't like. There is not a number one in the whole year that I liked. What I didn't realise was that I was standing on the edge of a cliff and I was about to fall off. I had no clue. The first inkling was in December 1976, when I saw the Sex Pistols on The Bill Grundy Show. I actually watched it with my Mum. No one had ever seen anything like it. I was fascinated and terrified of these strange people. My mum saw through the whole thing straight away. She realised Grundy was drunk and for her, it was his lecherous advances towards Souixsie from the Banshees that really made an impression. She saw a bunch of drunken teenagers being silly and a dirty old man trying to hit on what she perceived a vulnerable young girl. 

Of course, no one had actually heard the Pistols then. They didn't have a record out and I had no idea what punk rock was. I sort of assumed that, like Queen, it was all a charade and they were secretly intellectuals and rocket scientists. I mean, we all knew that thick yobbo's couldn't actually play music, didn't we? I genuinely felt that music wasn't really my thing. 

So what is the special anniversary? Well, 1976 was the last year of my life when music didn't matter. It was the last year that I didn't go to a gig. It was the last year that I felt my life was directionless, pointless and a waste of time. Being dyslexic, I was "a thicko" at school. I'd had the joy of remedial reading classes at Primary School. As for music, I was told I "didn't have a musical bone in my body" at school and by the Church Choir mistress. A cousin of mine kindly once offered to show me how to play "Yellow Submarine" on the guitar, but why would I want to play that? To me it was a load of old cobblers.

In fact, just about all of the music and bands I liked, were dismissed by people I knew as either "lightweight" (Syd Barratt era Pink Floyd, The Small Faces Lazy Sunday, T-Rex), Unsophisticated and repetitive (Ska music in its entirety) or worst of all untuneful and unmelodic (The Velvet Underground, Suzi Quattro - Can the Can). I would receive "worthy" advice to check out the likes of Cat Stevens to year 'proper song writing', Eric Clapton 'proper guitar playing', The Beatles 'Proper Pop Music'. And I did. I assumed I was subnormal, because I found most of it highly dull. I once made the mistake of telling a Beatles loving relative that "Live and Let Die" was Paul McCartney's best song. The term 'Pile in' hadn't been invented, but that was what happened. 1976 was the last year that I laboured under the belief that I was wrong and everyone else was right when it came to music. 

But there was something brewing. Lots of musical thicko's like me were getting thoroughly sick of it all. We had realised that what seemed to pass as proper music was as dull as dishwater. We were listening to our elder siblings old records and thinking "It didn't used to be this boring". I didn't know it at the time, but up and down the country, such people were finding each other, having furtive conversations in corners of pubs, clubs, school common rooms, playgrounds etc. People were getting together and playing, simple, tuneless music and finding that it sounded incredible! People were starting to discover these bands and thinking "This sounds great". I didn't know any of this. I was just sitting in the shed at the bottom of my garden, feeding my goldfish and thinking to myself "Surely there is more to life than all of this".

There was. But I hadn't got a clue, as Miss MacFarlane called that register. And here is what it lead to. This was the single we released last year. God Bless The False Dots. Without you, I don't think I'd be here.

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