Every gig I've Ever Seen #51 Tolpuddle Martyrs

Battersea Park. July 29^th. 1985

A gig to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Can you imagine that happening now?! Another day of music. Free in a London Park!

Wandered off to see Jimmy Page playing on a small stage with Roy Harper. THE Jimmy Page. THE Roy Harper. Roy had sung “Have a Cigar” for Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin wrote “Hats Off To Roy” about him. The songs were OK but I didn’t quite get it. Usual feeling of “big brother music”. Now, though, I think albums like “Stormcock” are amazing. Sigh, youth. Roy looked a bit untogether on stage. I’d seen them recently interviewed on the Old Grey Whistle Test, halfway up a mountain in Wales. Roy was a bit shot in those days and they came over as very defensive. Was he mad? I’ve got video of Roy playing Stonehenge Festival that same year, which says a lot about him. No rock star he, living in a rock star pad.

John Sebastian. He was at Woodstock and his whole act and performance was the same, pretty much. He’s ripped to the tits in Woodstock but if you see footage from other festivals of the time he acts the same way. All tie-die and goofy. “ Do You Believe in Magic?” and “Daydream”. I didn’t mind but it seemed, well, a bit sad. What do you do after something like Woodstock? Still, you didn’t see Woodstock legends every day of the week and at least we knew the words!

Christy Moore was amazing. He was the Guv’nor of folk in the 80s. Big powerful voice, beautiful guitar playing. He did one song about all the young Irish men who’ve come to London over the decades for gold and end up drinking on the streets of Camden and can’t go home to Ireland. Lost souls. I saw the London Irish in a different light after that song. Proper folk music.

Paul Butterfield Blues band were sixties Rock Legends. Like an American John Mayall’s Blues Breakers. The hub of serious white blues. His guitar was dirty and loud. It had a presence that the British pub rock I’d heard didn’t have. Maybe it was Civil Rights or the Draft and Vietnam or the assassinations of King and the Kennedys, but American Sixties guitar was an altogether angrier beast. The Stooges and MC5 couldn’t have come from Chipping Sodbury.

Alan Price did the one about Simon’s amazing, dancing bear. He was in the Animals and gets all the royalties from their biggest hit, “House of The Rising Sun”, much to his bandmates’ chagrin.

A nice day out. Once the GLC was scrapped these gigs stopped.

 

Every gig I've Ever Seen #50 Jobs for a Change Festival

Battersea Park. July 7^th 1985

Third day in a row of live music after having seen Jonathan Richman and Broooce. Another GLC Jobs For a Change Festival. Big event. Usual stalls and collecting buckets. This was about the time of Red Wedge where people like Paul Weller did a UK tour drumming up support amongst young voters to go and vote Labour and kick the Tories out. Labour MPs actually spoke at these gigs. Mobilise the Yoof. ‘Cept they didn’t really. People did genuinely have conversations about the overthrow of Capitalism and the righteousness of Socialism though. South Africa was the other big grievance. Apart from a bit of Glastonbury you don’t see such activism attached to music festivals now. Or anything really. Have we really won the war? iTwats.

We stayed by one of the 4 stages for most of the day. The Beat Farmers were jokey RnB. The Men They Couldn’t Hang were nu-country. Wreckless Eric seemed very bitter. He did a song about AIDS, which was the big News story of the day. Government adverts with collapsing tomb stones warning of the perils of unprotected sex. It was still seen mainly as a gay plague. The gist of Eric’s song was that he wished someone he knew would get AIDS and die. Nasty. He looked a bit pissed too. Bit of Boot Hill Foot-Tappers and Hank Wangford, which was pleasant enough. I wouldn’t cross the road to hear them now. Saw some of The Pogues moighty craic thing but it seemed lost in an open space. You have to be in the mood as well.

By this time we were knackered. 3 days in a row. I ended up walking to Waterloo with sister Leah and her friend Louise to get the last train back to Andover. We missed it and sat on a milk-train for hours before it set off. Didn’t get any sleep and got a cold. I rang in sick the next day. That week’s NME covered all the gigs I’d been to, on one page.