We now do requests. Oh yes. For reasons that will become much clearer early next year, I’ve been spending time sifting through my dim and very distant past in order to put together a history of the Norwich music scene. My partner in sifting, although he doesn’t realise it yet, is a lovely man called Push.

Push manned the Orbit desk at The Maker before my time, was the Editor of Muzik magazine during my time, and is wholly responsible for providing the stepping stones I needed to become a music journalist in the first place. Without him, my life would have been very different. I don’t say it enough, but I think he knows. Thanks Push.

He was dragged up in the sticks, Swaffham to be precise, and hit the bright lights of Norwich as a teenager in the late Seventies, just before punk began to wander its way up the A11. It could be a long and tiring journey in those days, especially when the horses had to be rested near Thetford for the night.

We were talking the other day about where it all started for Norwich, musically. I know a man who could tell me all I need to know about the Fifties and Sixties, the one about when The Beatles played in Prince Of Wales Road and all that, but I’m much more interested in how things developed for the homegrown bands. During the late Seventies, a couple of things happened that we think proved pivitol.

1) Nick Raynes, former tour manager to likes of The Teardrop Expoldes, arrived at the University of East Anglia as Entertainments Officer. The Lower Common Room is legend among anyone who even remotely liked music in Norwich, with a who’s who line-up passing across its stage. All thanks to Mr Raynes.

2) I was a too young remember this, but Push wasn’t. Apparently, Ace Records on Lower Goat Lane was the record shop of choice. It was stuffed full of US imports, lots of soul records, and as such was frequented by the more discerning customer. There was a small section of records, with no browser (the only thing called browsers in those days were the bits of card or plastic that separated the different sections in record racks). It was this small section that Push poured over, watching it grow over the summer of 1977 until it had taken over the whole shop.

And it was this combination, we think, that planted the musical seeds in a hundred heads of both UEA students and City soul boys alike. Let’s form a band. And boy, did they form bands.

Popular Voice, pictured here, I know very little about. They were certainly one of the more accomplished bands, musically. During the early Eighties record labels would sign pretty much anything that string a note or two together, makes you wonder why Popular Voice didn’t crack it. Sure I’ll find out sooner rather later.

Push got quite excited when he discovered I had a single by them. Here it is then Push, the b-side as requested will be forthcoming.

More hear…
- The BBC website is often a thing to behold and their Peel archive is quite handy, if not a little frustrating. you’ll find Popular Voice recorded a Peel session in Maida Vale 4 on 28 June 1982. Four tracks, but can you listen to them. Nope. Really, what is the point?
- Push pointed me in the direction of The Norwich Music wiki, it is a fine thing to behold. Behold for yourself here.

When I was 12 or 13, growing up Norwich, there were two things on my mind – Norwich City Football Club and live music.

I won’t bore you with tales of footballing woe, which continue to this day, but the live music thing… Me and Cuz cut our teeth live on Altered Images at the UEA in 1981 and that was that really.

They were the loudest thing we’d ever heard. We were quite literally deaf for days afterwards. Might have had something to do with being inches from the PA, heck, we had no idea what a PA was until that night. It was a life-changing night. After that, anything that waved a guitar in Norwich (and plenty that waved them at distance once Cuz passed his driving test and was behind the wheel of his much-loved Hillman Minx), and we were there.

Quite how we found ourselves knee-deep in the local music scene I can’t quite remember. We were just up for anything that made a noise. UEA was the venue of choice, but The Jacquard, Pennies, The Arts Centre, The Gala, The UEA Barn and The Studio Theatre were all regular haunts.

At the time, Norwich was in the spotlight thanks to The Farmer’s Boys. They were snaffled up by EMI and came within a whisker of being on Top Of The Pops, peaking at no.41. Seems daft now, but it was stupidly exciting at a time when the charts actually meant something.

It did the Norwich music scene no harm and there was no shortage of local bands to like. Gee Mr Tracey, The Fire Hydrant Men, The Higsons, Popular Voice, 18 Yellow Roses, Serious Drinking… there’s a great A-Z here, courtesy of Mr Pete Roberts, if you fancy a rummage.

Listening back now, I can still hear the appeal of The Farmer’s Boys. There’s something of Morrissey about Baz’s voice. Funny how I never noticed it before.

‘I Think I Need Help’, pictured above, was their debut single. It was released on The Higsons’ Waap Records, which was run out of the magnificent Backs Records, a true great among the record shops Norwich seemed awash with during the Eighties.

I served my time behind the counter of Andy’s in Lower Goat Lane from 1984 until 1989. I started working there while I was doing my O Levels. Exam in the morning? I worked in the afternoon. It was the world’s greatest job for a 16-year-old boy. I loved every last second of it.

Actually, I didn’t like moving round much – that’s the one where you spend an afternoon in the backroom moving the vinyl, from right to left, round the floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves to make room for new stock), but I did like hoovering at the end of the day. There was something very satisfying about that. Most of all I loved the people I worked with. They were to a man and woman the funniest, kindest, most lovable people I’ve ever met. Even the awkward sods – and there were a few – never failed to make me honk laughing.

I never ceased to marvel that I actually got paid to hang out, laugh far too much and smoke fags while reading a paper on the loo, and all in a huge shop full of records. We often did whatever it was we did in silence because no one could decide what to play. I once put on The Beastie Boys’ ‘License To Ill’ only to be told to ‘turn that shit off’ by a passing regional manager. He reasoned we were here to sell records not drive the customers away. CBS’ biggest selling album of all-time then. Happy about that.

Payday was quite something. We all had a cubbyhole in the back room where we’d stash records we wanted to buy. The bosses weren’t daft. They’d hand over your wages just before slapping down the staff purchases book. At which point we’d hand back a good chunk of our wages. We were paid in records, basically.

Andy’s is a clothes shop now. I make a point to walk past it when I’m in town. Every time, something inside yells at the injustice of it all. Andy’s is why I am who I am. These days, what’s a young person to do? What’s the coolest Saturday job in the world now?

More hear…
- There’s an unofficial website, which is here.

I used to live next door but one to Phil Oakey. It’s a story I often forget, but I’ve been waiting to write that line for a while. He wasn’t very neighbourly. It was 1988, The Human League were quite famous. He’d nod, and Joanne would smile occassionally, we’d just stare a lot, so I guess his non-neighbourly-ness was understandable.

I was in the first year of a Fine Art degree at Psalter Lane in Sheffield. Me and Whil rented the downstairs of a house on the corner of Gisbourne Road and Ecclesall Road South, just down the hill from college. Phil and Jo, as we never called them, lived two doors down on Ecclesall Road South.

We moved up to Sheffield from Norfolk in the back of horsebox. It belonged to Whil’s uncle and was one of the lorry types, clearly very much in use for moving horses, and quite recently too as it was full of straw bales. We travelled, with all our worldly possessions (bag of clothes, radio/cassette, duvet, black and white TV), in the back for some reason, perhaps it was the allure of standing straw bales on their end and trying to surf them as we rattled towards South Yorkshire.

We stopped off in Nottinghamshire, somewhere or other, to visit more of Whil’s relatives. I appreciate this tale is getting a bit off-piste, and I really must check, but I recall this relative was an old friend of Christine Keeler, who in 1961 had a fairly low-key affair with with a guy called John Profumo… who was the Secretary of State for War in Macmillan’s government. Show me a man who wouldn’t want a job title like that – isn’t it called Secretary of State for Defence these days?

Anyway, back on track… slightly. Our house in Sheffield was odd, but then when has student accommodation ever been anything else? We shared it with total strangers called Kev and Bella (jolly nice people as it turned out, luckily). We had one frontdoor, they lived upstairs, we lived down. The place we moved to after Gisbourne Road was next door to a, erm, ‘massage parlour’, and their fire exit was a wooden hatch that opened into our flat. Not a problem when you’re a student, I guess. It also had a room in it that was locked. We were told the previous tenant had left his stuff and was going to come collect it at some point. Can’t remember if he did. Must ask Whil.

So, Phil and Jo’s house wasn’t the sort of place you’d expect mega pop stars to live in. there was very little sign of opulence, but in the drive there was a Jag and more than several big motorbikes – five or six. The most remarkable thing about it was the front room, which was clearly visible from the road. In it was a giant teddy bear, giant, almost as high as the room, and across the back wall, arranged in a line like some sort of mission control, there were four TVs.

There was no Sky, which was perhaps lucky for Phil, because the TVs were all on at the same time, each tuned to one of the four available channels. We thought it was terribly impressive, the very height of pop starness. Boy, were we were naive fools.

What? Oh, music, yes. Almost forgot. In the days when proper remixes were coming from a sprinkle of US cities, from New York and Detroit, Martin Rushent (have I mentioned him before? I have? Oh) was leading the charge in the UK. ‘Dare’ had been a massive hit for The Human League in 1981, and in a cynical bid by Virgin to exploit the success and fast, ‘Love And Dancing’ appeared the following year.

It was a revelation, stripping out much of the vocals and adding rafts of effects and tricks, Rushent says the mixes, essentially all his own hard work, were a result of not having time to do ‘proper’ B-sides. Inspired by Grandmaster Flash, he’d add effects and chop and splice tape till his eyes bled and his fingers ached, or until he’d finished, whichever came first. He’d then serve them up to Virgin as B-sides. When he had half a dozen he’d almost done the whole album… so he finished the job and the spectacular ‘Love And Dancing’ was the result.

More hear…
- The ‘Love And Dancing’ album is still very much available, get it from Amazon on CD or download for about a fiver. There’s a rather nice remaster from 2002 of the original ‘Dare’ album bagged up with ‘Love And Dancing’, for a bargain £7.99. Download that here.

At the risk of alienating everyone, I’ve found myself back in 1982… yet again. It’s like therapy, I will get over it. It’s curious to discover how much music I can listen to again comes from 1982. But I digress.

And at the risk of a digress on top of a digress, this track is a good example of why sites like rippingvinyl.co.uk exist. It’s a cracking tune, not a classic granted, but there must be rafts of stuff like this gathering dust on shelves. The point of this site originally (and of course I’ve digressed) was to dust down music that doesn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of being heard ever again. The Leisure Process’ back cat is long deleted, can’t buy a sausage by them anymore, except from collector sites (see ‘More Hear…’ section below).

It doesn’t seem right somehow when labels spend time scratching their collective arse and wondering how to make money when they’re sat on piles of tunes that stand no chance of making any money because they’re no longer available. If any label bosses would like to talk to me about how they could turn dusty tracks into cash, I have some ideas, natch, but I guess arse scratching and shoulder shrugging is probably easier.

Anyway, disgress over. I’m enjoying the current eighties electro throwbacks (Little Boots, La Roux, etc), because I was there as a newly turned teen first time round. It’s going to get quite odd over the next few years as the 30th anniversaries start to come thick and fast – how about The Human League’s ‘Dare’, released 30 years ago in October 2011?

Which brings me to Leisure Process. I was nothing if not a trainspotter in my early teens, and I had a favourite producer. Yup. I came to recognise the genius that is Martin Rushent after falling for his Altered Images remixes. I recall this mix catching my ear on Peel one night. It’s stuck with me and a few years ago I found the 12-inch in a shop for a couple of quid.

It’s funny how people remember Peel as an indie champion, I always saw him as a champion of good music who happened to be tucked away in a late-night hidey-hole. Always thought the joy of the radio DJ was they could just play the music without offering up an opinion. If they hated it, three minutes and it’s gone. I still wince at some of the bands I championed, in print, at The Maker.

Anyway, Leisure Process, as you can see, are a man with a saxophone and another man. The other man is singer Ross Middleton who arrived from Scottish new wavers Positive Noise, while the saxaphone man is Gary Barnacle, the go-to sax player during the eighties (and no, Hazel O’Conner didn’t go to him for ‘Will You’, that was Wesley Magoogan). A renowned session player, Barnacle has enjoyed a pretty successful career, even redeeming credibility lost by his association with Level 42 by popping up on no less than three albums by The Clash.

More hear…
- As we mentioned up top, everything is long deleted, but there’s still stuff knocking around, pretty cheap, on collector sites like discogs.com and eil.com.

1982. There’s a theme developing here. Indulge me, I’ll get over it soon and move on. Still, you can see why ‘Ashes To Ashes’ was set in 1982. ABC, Tears For Fears, Blondie, Madness, Fun Boy Three, Soft Cell, The Jam, Motorhead… would be nice to have seen a few more leftfield choices, like The Associates.

They were a much darker and more abrasive band than the charts were used to, and it was their commercial success, which began with ‘Party Fears Two’ (pictured above), that proved to be their undoing. Of course, no one could have known at the time, but they just don’t make bands like The Associates anymore. In Billy MacKenzie they had a unique talent. Doherty is perhaps the closest we come to the same kind of flawed genius, except Billy had more talent in his little fingernail. Listen to the incomparable ‘Sulk’ album if you’re in any doubt. ‘Largely conceived in an amphetamine induced frenzy’, is how the Wikipedia entry not so delicately puts it. You can understand why the band began to unravel from then on.

Following the death of his mother, MacKenzie tragically committed suicide in 1997, aged just 39. He had been suffering from clinical depression. His magnificent solo album, ‘Beyond The Sun’, album still gets a regular outing at rippingvinyl towers. His distinctive voice remains unique, he should have been a massive, massive star. Long may his music live on.

footnote: ‘Ashes To Ashes’ Season Two finale has just aired in the UK – as the big set piece kicks off we are (finally) treated to The Associates with a bit of ‘Club Country’. Magnificent stuff and light years apart from anything else on the show. I can sleep easy now.

More hear…

- At the time of his death, pretty much the entire Associates back cat had been deleted, not an expression you hear too much these days. Since then, his estate has worked to ensure his music isn’t forgotten and almost everything has been re-released.

We’d recommend…
- ‘Singles’ (2002), buy
– ‘The Glamour Chase’ / ‘Perhaps’ (1988, released in 2002, with ‘Perhaps’ as a bonus) buy
- ‘Sulk’ (1982 – rare as hen’s teeth, hence the price) buy
- ‘Beyond the Sun’ (1997) buy