1986 Singles # 47 The Woodentops

 

Looking back I found myself between terms one and two of my first year at university. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say I found the three people I'd been looking for since I was 14. People who liked the same things as I liked. Fancied themselves and their opinons rotten, 

For six months we had an absolute wail of a time. Nineteen and twenty year olds have probably never been happier. Or drunk more snakebite and black at the Student Bar before stumbling back and listening to What's Going On together, . It was the Brideshead Revisited university  experience that everyone longs for . We had all watched the celebrated Granada TV production which had just been televised and captured the British imagination. Sebastian and Charles. Aloysius and Nanny Hawkins. Catholicism, Anthony Blanche and bloody huge country estates. We were Socialists but thought we were due greatness. It was certainly there in our psyches, whether we acknowledged it or not.

. But our version of the Brideshead experience was different, It had Trotskyism, Post Structuralism, Filofaxes Thatcherism, The Miner's Strike, The Sloan Rangers Handbook, The Young Ones, The NME Penguin Classics James Brown and Talking Heads and more stirred into the mix. It was a truly beautiful rites of passage. Then gradually over the next six months our beautiful  alliance unraveled.

But not before The Queen Is Dead came out and we listened to it together. Every generation reclaims The Smiths . On 16th June 1986 to be precise it happened to us. The day it came out. I wasn't completely there emotionally. My heart was no longer in the corridor in Fifer's Lane but on campus five miles down the road, In Waveney Terrace to be precise. On the pillow where my Malaysian honey lay her sweet bobbed head under a poster where she'd written out the words to Manic Monday in different coloured crayons. I stood no chance as soon as I saw it, I'm sorry but Gramsci and Walter Benjamin just couldn't compete with that.

But Morrissey, Marr, Rourke and Joyce could. So I was there in Rod's room when he returned from Backs Records on the day of its release with a copy of The Queen is Dead. And we were rightly slain. I'll get back to The Smiths with a full review later on in this rundown and give the full picture of what it felt like to be young and too cool for school to such a glorious dawn. To be smitten by The Smiths,

But first a little known Rock & Roll detail, a  highly pertinent factoid. Giant the first album by The Woodentops came out the same day as The Queen Is Dead and it's pretty great too. Cool BBC children's television evoking band name, dark tribal rhythms, groovy vibes and tones. It's not catalogued as one of the greatest or even perhaps the greatest album ever made. The Queen Is Dead is. But Giant is  revered and remembered and played by the cognoscenti . The Rock & Roll snobs with too many records. People like me.