Number One Birthday Blues

I am eleven years old and two terrible things have happened. Firstly, my grandad has died. The day before my birthday. He had cancer. He was a quiet, sweet man from the Valleys. He'd been a miner, a gas fitter, a builder. He once fell off a cooling tower and survived. He saw some serious action in the war and would never speak about it. Medals were hidden and memorials avoided. He was a doting grandfather who came from a time when doting was hard. Secondly, and more relevantly, Eurovision-winning pop bastards Bucks Fizz were top of the charts. I wasn't at this point aware that " The Land of Make Believe " was a subtle dig at Thatcherism. That's because it's so subtle it's barely credible. Perhaps " Boom Bang a Bang " is about Louis Althusser's comprehension of the visible and invisible state . Either way, I'm 11 and I'm living in a house with a father who has lost both his parents to cancer in less than two and a half years. Anyway, t...

I am ten years old, and a recently murdered Beatle is top of the Pops. The Beatles were not part of my childhood till this point. My parents were young enough to have been huge fans, but they were soul kids and their small record collection was mostly Motown and Stax etc. Radio didn’t play them much and their films were never on. It was as though, having dominated the Sixties, it was time to move on. The Fab Four were the Covid of their day. The only exposure to the Beatles I had up until this point was the occasional rendition of Yellow Submarine by one of our guitar-wielding primary school teachers at the end of the day. At school, we had been given a project to report on something in the news and draw a picture. Being nine years old, the boys got very excited at the chance to draw a bearded rock star being assassinated in New York. On realising this, our teacher removed the drawing element of the task. I stuck with writing about John Lennon’s murder. I put something like “an...

  I am nine years old and the Pretenders are number one. Both these things will never happen again. Moving into the eighties, the main thing I remember was this glut of new fonts everywhere. Everything seemed to have a futuristic look or at least look like a load of letters that had just been in the freezer too long.   The most important thing that happened to me at the age of 9 was seeing Llanddewi Brefi for the first time. We went on a holiday and my dad became convinced that we must escape the terrible concrete jungle and become self sufficient rural home owners. It took a few years but he got his way. But all that’s for later. Back to 1980. Thursday nights were a ritual in our house. Top of the Pops was a must but you had to get Tomorrow’s World out of the way first. I put much of my disliking and not understanding science down to wanting Judith Hann to stop fucking about with talking bins or whatever so I could settle down with some nice escapist pop music. My d...

  (HIT ME WITH YOUR RHYTHM STICKERS) I am eight, Ian Dury is number one . I was recently telling a friend that looking back I realised more that I was an unhappy child than someone who had had an unhappy childhood. I didn’t fit in. I found comfort in books and films and pop music from an early age. But then, not long before my eighth birthday, Death entered my world. He didn’t come to Pemberley . He came to my beloved grandmother, Nanny Cuckoo. My Dad had been gone all day. He’d left early even though he didn’t work Saturdays. Mum didn’t seem to know where he was, just out. But he’d left a present for me and one for my sister. My sister had some sort of doll, and I had a football sticker book. This was just before Thatcher came into power and traditional gender roles were still in vogue, even in my parents socialist/republican/broke household. I didn’t know anything about football except it was what my friends now did at playtime. There'd been a World Cup that summer and my...

There are two schools of thought about Paul McCartney. The first, and by some distance the most widely acknowledged, is that as one of the most important songwriters of the 20 th century, a former Beatle no less, he should be afforded some grace and kindness when reflecting on the less significant of his works. The other, espoused by my friend Hairy Dennis, is that, because he was one of the main conspirators of 9/11 and also responsible for The Frog Chorus , his time in the Fab Four need not concern us and that Macca should be treated as cultural vermin. Obviously, Hairy Dennis doesn’t exist. I’ve invented him as a means of disguising the fact I didn’t know how to start this piece. We can’t all be Joan Didion , capturing the heat and wind of the Californian mountains to introduce a piece about a suburban murder whilst simultaneously illustrating the gap between the emerging counter-culture and the equivalent lie of the American Dream. Where would we be then, eh? We wouldn’t have ...