Birthday No. 1 Blues #14 - I Want to Know What Love Is - Foreigner

 I am fourteen years old and Foreigner are Top of the Pops. 

I have been living in Wales, proper Wales, actual sheep shit in the wintry air, slate roof, Cymraeg-speaking, terrifyingly rural Wales for about three months. Our house is 250 years old and the roof is falling apart. The television signal is intermittent and one of the channels is in a language that, right now, is completely alien to me. My dad regularly uses the phrase "character-building". My mum doesnt.

It has not been the making of me. I am miserable and even pop music, at last, is starting to bore me. 

By early 1985 the pop video has become all important to the success of a pop song. Certain visual cliches have emerged, especially in the last few months. Shots of unbearably earnest rock bands pretending to record their parts in the studio with a producer at the point of exhaustion, drumkits inexplicably located upon mountain tops, impossibly attractive women struggling to sleep in artfully lit apartments and most crucially, shots of poor (preferably black) people keeping their humanity amidst the undignified situation of their efforts to work shit jobs and/or starving.

This combination is dynamite. Foreigner pull it all off with a song that features a big gospel choir at the end (another must if you can) clearly delighted that a rich white rock band have co-opted their suffering for MTV rotation.

Even at 14, I knew this stuff was just bullshit. I had become a proper miserable little bastard. And who could blame me?

Rewind three months. 

November 5, 1984. It’s a Monday. Or a Dydd Llun as I’m about to learn. The previous evening my dad has been showing me how to chop kindling. Kindling ffs. We’ve moved to the Stone Age. I hate it here. 

My sister and I are stood outside the village shop, detached from the other kids, huddling from the rain and everyone else. Mutes in any language; refusing to betray our strangeness by speaking. A clapped-out fifties coach, no doubt designed with daytrips to Aberystwyth in mind, coughed and spluttered through driving rain to pick us up.

The journey to Tregaron only took fifteen minutes or so, the mechanical asthmatic dipping with the road in and out of the tired looking valley, the fields bleak and the fences warped and heavy with ripped wool. Occasionally a leafless branch would reach out from the roadside and crack its dead knuckles against my window as if to threaten me. The bus struggled with the last steep hill and sighed as it came to a halt outside the uninviting concrete school.

Still the word kept coming forward. “Size.”

 “Size.” Maybe it was “Sighs.” 

We followed the other children through a little door into a corridor typical of any school on a Monday morning, jostling shoulders and bobbing heads, locker doors being banged shut, the hormonal drone of teenage chatter relating weekend gossip. I located a teacher who pointed us to the secretary’s office up a little staircase. The secretary, a thin but kind-faced woman who looked a little bit like Gladys Pugh in Hi-De-Hi, led us back downstairs which had suddenly and magically cleared in the interim. We were led down a corridor so thin it may have been designed with only the secretary in mind. Stopping outside a classroom, the secretary led my sister in. There was a brief moment of noise, and then silence as the door closed again behind her. 

Then it was my turn. The secretary explained to me that there were lots of English children at the school now, and that each year group in the school had a form for these children, one for Welsh speakers and one for children who needed extra help with their lessons. Rhyd, Bont and Llan. 

We were making our way into Rhyd 3. The third year for English kids. It was chaos. The room was packed and the teacher was struggling to make himself heard as he opened his register. The secretary told him my name. The teacher looked at me and said, “We’ve got 42 in here now. You’ll have to go to a different class. Take him to Bont.”

Any relief felt at not immediately being categorised as someone with learning difficulties evaporated in the instance I entered another class on the far side of the school. The secretary was clearly explaining the situation to the new teacher, a Miss Jenkins. Miss Jenkins seemed nice enough, told me to grab a seat and smiled. It was the last smile I’d see for a while. The room was suddenly filled with hateful grimaces from the other children. The teacher took the register; I noticed they didn’t do it by surname like in London, but by first name.

 “Llyr. Rhydian. Bedwyr. Angharad. Sioned.”

These names sounded like some mad spell designed to raise the dead. Soon everyone was on their feet and I followed blindly, guided by this new magic to the school hall for morning assembly. Ours was the last form in, no doubt my fault. A hymn sheet was stuffed in my hand by a child the size of Snowdon as I entered. The headmaster took to the stage, dressed in his graduation gown. At the moment he reached the lectern, he nodded to the pianist to cease her playing. There was silence save for the frantic panic of my heart trying to jump free from my chest and return to England. 

The headmaster began to speak. He spoke almost entirely in Welsh – there was little doubt in my terrified mind he was instructing the other children that both I and my sister would be stoned to death in the quadrangle this afternoon and that this feature would replace the swimming gala. 

Another nod from the head and the pianist resumed her work, accompanied on percussion by the flapping of a hundred hymn sheets being unfurled. I glanced at the sheet. Laminated anagrams. My eyes traced the letters across the page but I couldn’t work out what was going on. 

“Efengyl tangnefedd. O rhed dros y byd.” 

I felt a few hundred burning eyes melting holes in the back of my head. Even the teachers who flanked the hall seemed to be shooting me glances of contempt. No point in me trying to sing along, not even worth lip synching. My eyes carefully navigated the hall until I saw my sister, suddenly looking much smaller, staring at her own hymn sheet and listening to her own homesick heart. 

For the first time in my life I was a foreigner. It was unnerving. I needed some things in my life to stay the same and all I had was Top of the Pops. And then came Band Aid. And then came Christmas. And then came Foreigner with their bullshit song.

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 – 10

Final Ranking of Birthday no. 1 –  N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week – 1999 by Prince.