This diary entry covers most of what I did in the summer holidays, watching TV, drawing my diary, visiting Steve in Bristol and buying comics (check out how many comics you could buy for a quid in 1977). Meanwhile the band's taking a rest because Nick's living the high life in Lowestoft. How the other half lived.
Another arcane selection of Records For The Day. Alongside what were most likely my first ever hearings of Life In The Fast Lane and Nobody Does It Better, we have some songs that posterity hasn't had a lot of time for: Watching You Grow by Spartacus (nothing on Youtube for this one), I Can't Stop The Rain by David Ruffin, Why Do Fools Fall In Love by Summer Wine and Vitamin U by Smokey Robinson? Me neither.
Because there's been interest in using some of my childhood diary
spreads in a BBC TV show called the Peoples History Of Pop - my Records
For The Day caught the eye of a researcher - I've dug a few more out and
put them up here on the My 1970s Diary. (I kept the Picture Diary from
1974 to 1978 but to date have only found a couple of volumes from 1977).
Here we see the first of many pieces I've produced influenced by Jim Steranko's pioneering graphic novel Chandler: Red Tide, which I'd clearly just bought. I went on to produce an entire comic of my own, Mr Hawk, in the same format, once I got to art college.
The Records For The Day are, as always, intriguing. Quite why I chose three Bee Gees records is unclear, could it be that the promotion for Saturday Night Fever was kicking in? And Mike Nesmith's Navajo Trail is just one of many tunes that I must Google on Youtube*, having not heard them in the intervening decades.
Yes, doesn't Starsky have an unusually brown face in this picture? I've long struggled with colour, it would seem. And this was the day I bought BC: Life Is A Fifty Pence Paperback. How many other books must have to change their title every time they're reprinted?
Records For The Day: That's What Friends Are For by Deniece Williams and People In Love by 10CC.
Because there's been interest in using some of my childhood diary
spreads in a BBC TV show called the Peoples History Of Pop - my Records
For The Day caught the eye of a researcher - I've dug a few more out and
put them up here on the My 1970s Diary. (I kept the Picture Diary from
1974 to 1978 but to date have only found a couple of volumes from 1977).
A very special night at The Monkhouse Comedy Club in Leicester, in June 1989 when Frank Skinner came to town, and brought all his mates with him.
The Great Stan and The Nice People were fellow comedians at a comedy club that Frank was running in Tamworth in Staffs, so they came over as a job lot. Quite how good they all were I can't report as, tragically, I had a really bad gig and went off in a sulk. I'm sure my fellow Leicester regulars Norman The Skiver, Alan Seaman and Cathi Rae, had a better night.
The Monkhouse was run and co-compered by Alan Seaman and myself, monthly from 1987 - 89, upstairs at The Magazine pub on Newarke Street in Leicester (don't look for it, it's not there any more) and featured appearances by a number of acts who went on to great things. And all at 2 quid a ticket.
Tiger-Hawke was a comic strip I drew sporadically, but never finished, in my teens. Sadly I seem to have parted with all the original artwork at the time, and had no way of copying or printing it, so this would be all that survives. The story I refer to in this entry, Albergo Trento, was an adventure set on the school trip to Italy we'd gone on the previous year. I cannot imagine what it looked or read like, but I can be pretty sure it fizzled out after half a dozen pages. This is a tradition I have continued for the subsequent four decades. See this page on Peoples History Of Pop.
The Records For The Day were I've Been Saved by Elkie Brooks (which hasn't been, in my memory at least) and Me And The Elephant by Gene Cotton which, maybe appropriately, I still remember.
Looking at the big header on this spread of my diary I thought maybe I'd gone big on celebrating my sister's birthday, but no that's in August. And my own 10th birthday was before I started doing a diary, so what could I commemorating with such emphasis? Radio 1. Honestly, the tenth anniversary of the start of Radio 1 was so big a deal I gave it a big headline? That's how interesting my teenage life was.
Loving the TV line-up, and the pop records I've made my "RFTD" (Record For The Day). Yes, I think we have my childhood totally summed up there. Flowers In The Rain by The Move, fair enough, but who remembers Stranger In The Dark by Stella Parton?
My diary's a positive whirlwind of royalty imagery in the Jubilee summer, isn't it? Here we find me describing, in between hopeless poems and delusional self portraiture, the horseshoe shaped archway I was designing to commemorate the Jubilee by hanging it over my bedroom door for, I can only guess, no-one to see. Oh, look, I've just found a photo of the very arch I describe in this diary. Yes, it still exists, in a cupboard, in my childhood home:
It's decorated with hundreds of tiny comic characters and panels from some of my favourite strips of the time - Barry Smith's Conan, Gil Kane's Spider-Man and Neal Adams Vision featuring prominently, alongside a Queen logo and a celebration of our school rock band which was, by that stage, called Walter Tottle And The Expanding Liberals With A Member Of The Royal Family, The Corgis and a Shaggy Dog. Why oh why were we not more successful?
Records For The Day were an interesting mix. Sure we all remember The Muppet Show and ELP, but Hollywood by Rufus?
