Friday, March 29, 2019

Important Gigs in My Life # 7 The Go Betweens - Kingston Polytechnic - May 1st 1986


Writing a series like this, which encompasses almost forty years of music, moments, memories, emotions and most of all people can feel like revisiting all my memory lanes. Definitely the case with this one. Two terms into my first year at university. Something of a Brideshead Revisited moment in my life. I lived in a block in Fifers Lane the university accommodation for new students at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

I'd made a special set of friends. The friends you make in the first year at university are some of the most special ones after all. The one you forge bonds with over ideas, literature, politics and reactions to the people around you as you really become yourself. For better or for worse.

The Go Betweens were definitely part of that process for me. We had The Smiths. We had R.E.M. Prefab Sprout. Aztec Camera. Lloyd Cole. The Triffids. And the Go Betweens. They were nowhere in the wider scheme of things. Not even a blip on the lower reaches of singles and albums charts but discerning critics knew. And so did we. They were as good a band as any in the world in that point in time.



They were playing Kingston Polytechnic over Easter during the break between second and third terms. I guess we discovered so from the gigs pages of the weekly music papers. Definitely NME rather than Melody Maker for me by this point in time. My parents lived just across the river in Teddington, every bit the idyllic family home, just across the road from Bushy Park and Hampton Court where I used to take girls that I fancied, imagining our eyes would meet as we lost ourselves in the maze.

Ben and Sue, North London friends, (there's a whole book to be written about the difference between North and South London and what it means when you meet people at university), came down to the gig. Sue I suspected might have had a bit of a thing for me. She didn't get the Hampton Court treatment.


We went to the gig with my sister and her best friend. A sign this truly had hipster approval.It cost £1.00. Seriously. One pound. One moment of the whole thing stood out in memory. Hey it is over thirty years ago. The moment we walked into the hall to see the band in all their glory with the lights full on playing their soundcheck.

It's something that sticks out in terms of all the things I've seen. Brilliant light, brilliant band, brilliant sound. They were playing Head Full of Steam I think. At the end of it Lindy Morrison the band's fabulous, and fabulously tall drummer got up from her stool and stretched her wonderfully loose limbs.

I wish I could tell you more. But more than that is lost to time. I know they were great. But these are all the memories I have left. But I was there. And it cost a quid I tell you.

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