Birthday No. 1 Blues - #13 - Pipes of Peace - Paul McCartney

I am thirteen years old and, for the second time in my life, Paul McCartney is Top of the Pops.

It says a lot about this country that you can stick an ex-Beatle in an average at best song, make a sentimental video set in the apocryphal footballing truce Christmas World War One story, and watch the money roll right on in. The First World War, Beatles and Christmas. If that story hadn’t already been invented, someone would have by now. Probably Richard Curtis. Hugh Grant playing the grandad of John Lennon saying “What’s “whoopsie in German” as he gets slide tackled by the grandfather of one of the blokes from Kraftwerk, etc.

Pipes of Peace isn’t even the worst thing McCartney would do in 1984.

For my thirteenth birthday, I am given a Walkman and a record voucher to buy a cassette album to go into said Walkman. It’s not a proper actual Walkman of course because my parents are fucking broke. It’s some Bush or Alba thing but I don’t notice this because I’m Charlie Bucket levels of grateful. The album I buy is Touch by Eurythmics, the musical equivalent of that Toni Collette film where a weird looking kid gets decapitated and the story falls apart at that exact moment. Side 1 is hits, side 2 is unlistenable. I waste the batteries fast forwarding side 2.

Nuclear war continues to terrify me (see previous entry). The telly isn’t helping. ITV continually advertise a forthcoming US film called The Day After, BBC show a drama called Threads which I am not allowed to record and watch later and even kids films are getting in on the act. I go to see War Games and it’s terrifying and brilliant and because I am 13, I fail to question any of the massive plot holes in the film and when I watch it again many years later, I am almost saddened there isn’t a bit where Matthew Broderick gets vaporised, thus sparing us the Republican teen fantasy of Ferris Bueller’s A Future Maga Asshole, Guarantee It.

My record collection continues to grow and the quality control is still nowhere to be seen. Scritti Politti rub shoulders with Hazell Dean, Frankie Goes to Hollywood with Queen. Eagle eyed readers will notice a gayish quality to at least three of those artists and well, if I was having a gay stage, it was purely musical. This was 1984 and my own body clock, having just struck thirteen, was caught in the no-man’s land of early adolescence. Toys seemed suddenly childish. Girls seemed to have gained importance in some unspecified and abstract way. I had a paper round. I spent my money on records and going to the cinema. The main transformation in my circumstances was going to come that autumn, a geographical one.

As mentioned in previous posts, our parents had the idea of moving us from a cramped little rented maisonette in southeast London to a semi-derelict cottage in the middle of Wales. 250 miles to the west and at least 30 years in the past. If I thought old Macca looked cold, miming along to his song, dressed as some poor Tommy for a pop video then I’d seen nothing yet. We were moving to Wales at the start of what turned out to be the coldest winter for nearly 40 years. With dead end jobs to endure and only the prospect of instant nuclear immolation to look forward to, why not give being The Wilderness Family a go. What could go wrong?

Sti

 

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 – 4

Final Ranking of Birthday no. 1 –  N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week – Islands in the Stream – Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.

 

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