The school concert, a major performance by Walter Tottle and the Expanding Liberals by the sound of it, and of our pre-match nerves. And it seems to have gone rather well. Obviously we were robbed of the great success we deserved, but you'll find a video of our efforts elsewhere on this blog and, I'm sure you'll agree, we could've been contenders. In fact we were contenders, as today's gig was a talent contest.
There's a photo of us at this gig somewhere, remind me to dig it out sometime. Oh, here it is.
(Left to right: Kev Moore, Peter Scott, Steve Fletcher, Kev Sutherland, Nick Tyson. I'm sure Nick or my Mum will update me as to the identities of everyone else in the picture when they see this blog.)
Nifty artwork from my attempt at a Six Million Dollar Man strip, too. I seem to recall sending this off to Look-In and getting it back with some kind comments. I don't think I used to photocopy artwork in those days, just sent off the originals, so this one's lucky to have survived as long as it did (before I cut it up to stick in my diary, obviously).
Records For The Day are quaint, one from a movie and one not. One about being able to be anything that you wanted to be, one about someone who once cut a record but it didn't make it. What sort of crystal ball was I using?
Check out that Record For The Day. "Blog". Remember where you heard it first.
Now it might not have strictly been a record, being a song by our band Walter Tottle and the Expanding Liberals. And it may not have been For The Day since, unless we recorded it, which I very much doubt we did, it'd be lucky to be a record for much more than the during of our singing it. I imagine it's a fun song we made up while jamming, then promptly forgot. It certainly never became part of any performing set that I can recollect.
But could this be the first recorded use of the word Blog? The OED has its first recorded use as being in the 1990s, as an abbreviation of web-log. But we used it in 1977, and I recorded it in my diary. Does this mean I own it or something? How much can I claim?
To be honest, it was Nick's song (as the diary, or if you will web-log) notes, so anything that's coming our way copyright-wise, goes to him. (I see that we were going to be visited by school music teacher Mrs Borem, for whom we were to do a recording. We held the session in my back room where we began the tape recording and, before we could play a note, Nick said "This is for you, Mrs Blob". We collapsed in fits at this and probably never recovered. The name Mrs Blob stuck, and perhaps she is the origin of the name Blog?)
Elsewhere I see i'd written to Marvel comics complaining that, I dunno, they weren't as funny as they used to be? And I've drawn myself ski-ing, from a strip I was doing based on the school ski-ing trip from the previous year that had clearly left its mark on me. And emotional scenes with Jasmine and Tony who, I can reveal (spoiler alert) got married some years later. Happily ever after.
The Record For The Day, other than our own long-forgotten Blog, was the Muppets' Mahna Mahna (whose spelling I just had to look up, so I'm forgiven for getting it wrong having never seen it written down).
Nifty drawing of Lee Majors winking, though I say so myself. The rest of the images are by a caricaturist whose work I greatly admired, even though he was in the Daily Express (like I had the faintest idea what a right wing rag it was back then), Cole.
I can only suppose this is half term, for me to be lazing around midweek in February, rehearsing with the band and buying records - The Goodies' Nothing To Do With Us album, which was a favourite for years.
The Records For The Day are A Groovy Kind Of Love by Les Gray (late of Mud), and a track from the Goodies' album, I Wish I Had Something To Say.
Oh come on, I was trying. Experimenting with coloured pens, working from photo reference, and you can tell who it's supposed to be can't you? Can't you? It's Starsky out of Starsky and Hutch, very obviously. And for that sense of completeness, there's Hutch on the next page, on the front cover of Look-In. The Hutch painting's a tad better than mine, being my Arnaldo Putzu, the regular Look-In cover artist whose work adorns a great many of my diary pages at this time.
The most surprising details in this diary spread is the news that I came first in a cross country run at school. As far as I can recall, that was the last physical exercise I ever took.
Some nice Records For The Day, none too obscure, but none too naff. Mind you, Chicago had gone past their best by then hadn't they?
Until I started uploading these teenage diary pages very recently, nobody had seen them since they were written, and as far as I know nobody saw them at the time. Though this entry suggests I showed it around, and to grown ups, occasionally. I've joked that no-one reads my diary, and asked anyone in the future who does read it to sign in the box. Lo, just the following month, it's been signed by someone who appears to be called Clive Whitehall. I have no memory of a Clive Whitehall. Maybe my diary was read by a ghost?
The illustrations aren't showing any great improvement. You can see what I'm trying to do with my superhero figure drawing - that's The Sensational Sta-Lite you're looking at there, by the way - but paying any attention to learning what bodies actually look like clearly wasn't high on my agenda. Life drawing, kids, concentrate on your life drawing.
The Records For The Day suggest I also wasn't paying that close attention to the music I was hearing either. "Play That Don't Ya Know" by Black Cherry can only be Play That Funky Music White Boy, heard for the first time.
I can't find Steely Dan doing Haitian Divorce anywhere, so here's a covers band. It's what they would have wanted.
UPDATE: Clive Mitchell. It was family friend Clive Mitchell. Thanks Mum for filling me in with that detail.
I'm usually too embarrassed to find amusing the cringeworthy nonsense my fifteen year old self writes in these diaries, but even I was driven to laugh out loud at this pitch-perfect Alan Partridge impersonation from January 1977.
"Fore and aft the execution of my paper delivery, yea verily did we produce punk rock sweet to the ears, and did we truly satirise the songs of yore in style hilarious". I hope I was being ironic, but I fear this may be an example of #AccidentalPartridge 35 years ahead of its time.
The Records For The Day were hardly "punk rock sweet to the ears", coming from Mr Big and Al "listen to the production on that" Stewart.
In my teenage diary I show incredible dedication to completing a fully-detailed decorated diary, even when there is less than nothing to report. So it is that we see the TV I watched, and some nicely eclectic Records For The Day; we see the results of my desecration of my Look-In collection (I still have the shards left behind once I'd stripped the best pictures out of the comic strips); and we see me stripping odd little themed items across the days, as if I'm inserting features into a local radio show, in this case little boxes commemorating famous birthdays. Elvis and Nixon? Have I mentioned I was fifteen years old?
My Records For The Day are Mae, a track from a David Cassidy album that I have to this day, though haven't played for a while (I bought a turntable a few years ago, but it went back on a shelf not long afterwards); and Don't Be A Do-Badder from Robin And The Seven Hoods. Like I say, eclectic.
