1985 Singles # 43 The Farmer's Boys

 

'When you're young, you don't especially think of yourself as being young. You're just alive and everything's interesting and you don't think of things in terms of age because you're not conscious of it.'

Richard Hell

Everything of course is a 'journey' these days, but I actually find it an invaluable metaphor as a portal here in accessing myself as a nineteen year old in the act of self-construction in preparation for leaving the family nest and heading out into the big world.

Objectively you might think that nineteen is not so young but actually I was callow, innocent, slightly clueless (but working on it in the only way I knew how)..  Essentially happy. Protected and guided by loving parents I took a year out and went off for the invaluable gap year experience of Switzerland and Casa Locarno. I was terribly disorganised and haphazard in my decision making and have a focused and clear sighted mother particularly to thank that I'd got my applications and paperwork sufficiently in place to have a University place at UEA ahead of me when I headed off to my big adventure in Switzerland. I had just arrived at the Casa forty years ago from today. It's extraordinary looking back exactly how youthful I was.. 

I'd chosen to study The University of East Anglia for sketchy barely thought through reasons. I knew I was interested in writing and UEA famously had a Creative Writing course. Established by Malcolm Bradbury just over a decade previously with Ian McEwan famously as his sole student in its vnguard year. I fancied a bit of that. I was reading a lot. Making my way through Graham Greene. Camus, Sartre, Herman Hesse. Errm Agatha Chrsitie.

Now every further education establishment worth its salt offers a creative writing course but its worth remembering that that was a different time. A different world. A simpler one Before The Internet. Before the whole idea of 'fact checking' and the so called 'free speech drive'. 1984 and Brave New World were just books. Not templates for control, surveillance and living. 

  

Norwich had a thriving music scene which was anotehr major attraction to me. Like all major British cities Post Punk. Or at least it did when I applied for UEA. I had a fantsay within my head of forming a Rock & Roll band along the lines of The Smiths, The Velvet Undergroud and R.E.M. and began to write bad lyrics and imagine scenarios f myself at a mic in croeded student union buildings. 

  But whatever had been happening in Nowich was dying on the vine by the time I got in to UEA. The Higsons had disbanded and The Farmers Boys were on their last legs, despite the fact that they had signed to EMI. For some bands leaving their Independent label for a major often proved to be their death knell rather than their moment of fruition and harvest.

Farmers Boys had been a dizzy, Norfolk response to Orange Juice. By 1985 they had run out of energy like the Duracell' less drumming bunny. Their last single was competent but sparkless by comparison with The Smiths who were the British Independent Guitar band in ascendancy. This song picked up towards the end but not enough to break the Top 100 of the singles charts. It's not a classic like some of their early songs. They disbanded shortly afterwards.