Birthday No. 1 Blues #11 - Bucks Fizz - The Land of Make Believe

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, these were sad times and Bucks Fizz weren't helping things. There are many reactions and ways out of grief, I would say with retrospect that instantly moving back into the childhood home where those much loved parents had brought you up, with all its ghosts and memories may not have been the smartest move in terms of healing. Especially if said move was a spectacular piece of downsizing in the process. Things were difficult. And got worse.

I started secondary school. And it was everything I feared it would be. I never had my head flushed down the toilet but I got roughed up most days by the kind of kids one imagine have since had successful careers in the Metropolitan Police. We had a brilliant form teacher in Mr. Wilson, a Geordie with a Solidarnosc badge and a keen interest in socialism. He made me captain of the football team, a disastrous attempt in building my confidence, resulting as it did in the rest of the team telling me to get injured early in the next match or get beaten up after it.

Reader, I limped off at half time.

Still, there was always pop music.

1982 is an amazing pop year. Quite apart from the records the 11 year old me wasn't yet being exposed to, your Temptations, your Hex Enduction Hours etc, there was Party Fears Two, Mama Used to Say, More than This, Aint No Pleasing You, Come on Eileen, All of my Heart etc. Kraftwerk had a fucking no.1 for Christ sake. It wasn't all bad, despite the Fame soundtrack coming out of my sister's room most summer evenings. Most weeks, Top of the Pops had something good. 

My team, Aston Villa, would become European champions and I enjoyed my first World Cup, falling in love with the wonderful, free-flowing, spectacular goal machine that was Brazil and falling out of love with the perm-headed ego machine of Kevin Keegan in the same month. It was a great summer.

Bucks Fizz would later go to the Falkland Islands, 1982's hottest tourist destination, with hilarious and disastrous consequences. We went to Pontin's, a holiday with extended family, in Camber Sands. My memories of it are vague, but one is my parents bemused reaction to the MC in the entertainment complex thing interrupting the Glamorous Granny/Sexy Toddler/Racist Uncle competition to announce the birth of Prince William, and the rapturous applause that came after it. 

This was Thatcher's Britain. We'd liberated the Falklands, we had a new bald baby parasite to celebrate and, in an early sign of the national diet crises to come, you could buy Ice Magic in the shops.

We never went to Pontin's again.

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 – 11

Final Ranking of Birthday no. 1 –  N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week - Kraftwerk, The Model