But It Wasn’t Quite Like That Bloody hell, I’m old. If I get through the next three months, I hit 70. The age my grandparents saw as the terminus. Three score years and ten, as It Was Writ. ‘Good night, Gran....see you in the morning...’ I used to say in that Cleethorpes house: ‘God willing’, she always replied. She knew, for fifteen straight years, that she was outstaying the Lord’s welcome. She never saw it, obviously, as beating some performance target out of sight; she just saw it through a veil of guilt: she knew she should be somewhere else but was, somehow, still hanging around cooking up the tripe and onions for her Senior Service, Jamesons and Bowls playing husband. Which is nothing to do with what I’m thinking, though it relates. One of the problems with still living beyond the middle 50s is that you start to see your own history re-created by those in their thirties and forties: you see TV programmes on the 1960s, as an example, and get bloody cross. Last night I watched something on ‘fashion and rock’ and just couldn’t understand how they focused on Arthur Brown, always a peripheral figure; or how the stars of the middle 60s were, according to the programme, the Small Faces – a group I loved by the way – but ignored The Who, the group that soldered the idea of ‘Mod’ into my generation’s world. The other night is was a biography of Cilla Black, someone universally detested by everyone I knew. And, with the admittedly unfair power of hindsight, we were absolutely right: a voice that veered between an attempt at the romantic, all sighs and softness, and a veritable screech, all fake and horrible. A singer who destroyed Burt Bacharach’s songs; a singer who had the temerity and the sheer nerve to annihilate one of the very greatest 60s songs, ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’. My Gran was still around in her 70s, but she thought she should have left the stage. But, right now, there are lots of us still here at that age who might soldier on with a portfolio of medication but remain mentally spot-on. We know, folks, that Cilla never wore jeans like that, they didn’t exist. We know, folks, that Arthur Brown was a bit of a clown and ‘Fire’ was no better as a single than something by Dave Dee, Dozy, Mick and Titch. Why, in heaven’s name, don’t you just ask us? Wouldn’t it be better if your programmes reflected a truth? And that old sods like me wouldn’t be sitting there muttering, ‘but it wasn’t quite like that....’
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 20:14:14 +0000
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