Birthday No. 1 Blues #16 - Jack Your Body

I am sixteen years old and Jack Your Body is number 1.

Top of the Pops has never felt more like a televised version of Radio Free Europe than at this point. There is no house music in Ceredigion. Dance culture round our way meant one of three things. Firstly the traditional twmpath scene of Young Farmers and WI events. Then there was the fortnightly disco in Tregaron, a truly terrible occasion whereby some local idiot with a PA and some lights would encourage drunken hillmen to brush the silage from their wellies, hit the floor and spill local piss on their piano ties to the sound of Wake Me Up Before You Go Go. Finally there was Aberystwyth.

Aber. So good they shortened its name. Nearest fucking town. 18 miles. Two nightclubs. Straight out of Road House the pair of them. You would not be hearing house music there. You’d hear breaking glass, jaws and ambulances but you would not be becoming familiarised with the latest strain of urban American electronica.

Not that I could frequent these places yet.

I can’t say that being 16 was much fun. Firstly there was school where my complete inability to concentrate on anything after about 2 mins had become ruinous. I entered every lesson determined this would be the one where Henry Jones wouldn’t actually send me to sleep with his recital of Shylock’s most memorable lines, but would instead fire me with the enthusiasm for Shakespeare that would illuminate the rest of my life. Maybe Ceri Davies would stop saying SOHCATOA or whatever it was and I would finally understand that this was a geometric acronym and not that island that blew up a hundred years ago. But it was not to be. School was just not for me. I got nothing from it. Later I would see that Tregaron would finish bottom or near as dammit of school league tables year after year. I felt partly vindicated. But I can’t fully blame the teachers. I had issues of my own.

My parents believed me to be a potential high achiever. They thought I was lazy. Words like “slapdash” and “daydreaming” stained my school reports along with classic phrases like “Well, at least he turns up.” Anyway, it was O-Level time and now I really was for it. Every exam was a nightmare. A combination of pressure, knowing you were going to fail and the largely inadequate nature of the teaching I was getting led to me getting my results and my parents letting me know with some pretty choice language how they felt about my failing.

I took to the hills for a long summer day of just sitting and wishing I had enough about me to end it all. I wrote about this feeling many years later in a short story called My Country Eyes. Eventually, I guessed correctly that my parents would be angrier with me for any suicide attempts than they were about me ballsing my exams up, so I came home and hid pretty much till I passed enough resits to get into sixth form.

When I think about 1987, I think about a song that changed my life. Sadly, Mr Hurley, it wasn’t Jack Your Body though I appreciated the instruction. True Faith by New Order was one of those pieces of art that plunged me deep into a whole new feeling, a desire to explore past what was easily accessible. I wasn’t suddenly a pretentious adolescent for luckily my home life kept me painfully grounded but suddenly I was hearing The Smiths and The Cure and Jesus and Mary Chain with fresh ears, my own ears. I was staying up and watching cult films on BBC2. All this stuff would attack me, devour me and haunt me as it does many a young man at that age. This was the late eighties and I would have to pick a tribe. I was an indie kid now. Top of the Pops began it’s slow disappearance from my life…


Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 – 10

Final Ranking of Birthday no. 1 –  N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week – Real Wild Child - Iggy Pop

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