What sort of totally horrible pop music was playing on the radio when you were a teenager?
So teenage years eh? That would be from the mid seventies to the early eighties. Goodness! That covers a multitude of sins.I became a teenager in 1975 - right at the heart of the British “Rollermania” thing.If you don’t know the Bay City Rollers then you’re lucky - they were the cheesiest manufactured boy band ever to be invented. Their music was everywhere and every single teenage girl seemed to have a poster on their bedroom wall. They wore the most ridiculous outfits; Calf length “oxford bag” trousers trimmed in tartan with tight “skinny” tops and tartan scarves.I fucking hated them.Here you go - The tartan teens from Edinburgh, listen and weep:We had utterly horrible nonsense like The Wurzels; “I’ve got a brand new combine harvester.” and Telly Savalis with “If” - but they were passing horrors.There for a few months and then gone. No the really truly awful stuff was from people who kept releasing nasty cheesy, derivative, awful music and who somehow were popular enough that people kept buying it. This crap was all over, everywhere, all the fucking time.How about The Brotherhood of Man? Another manufactured band who won the 1976 Eurovision Song Contest with “Save All Your Kisses For Me”. Truly truly awful. Watch the little “birdy dance” they do. If that doesn’t make you throw up in your mouth a little you’re a harder person than me. After this they were all over the place for year after year until thankfully they began to fade away in the early eighties.The horror:And then….along came the evil that is Boney M.Apparently one of the biggest selling musical acts of all time, I can only think that back then everyone was either hypnotised into buying their music or was on some kind of weird mind altering drug that made their music bearable.This guy still haunts my nightmares.Now this is at a time where we’ve got people like David Bowie breaking through. Punk and New Wave is taking off and mega stadium acts who can actually play music are around. We had all sorts of great music bubbling in the background and yet the music that was on the radio was the cheesiest crap you could ever play to your lowest common denominator Auntie, pissed on a couple of glasses of Rose wine dancing to Baccara at the office Christmas party.Dear Nineteen Seventies you were just wrong. You had no taste and no class - you deserved this guy.
Which artist/group do you regret not seeing perform live in concert? Did you just miss out on the chance to do so and does that irk you?
I missed seeing Pink Floyd (PF) when they were performing the Wall back in 1981. I regret not going as I never had a chance to see Waters play with PF before Waters split from the band. I would have had to miss part of finals week in university, and at that time I was a marginal student at best, so I couldn’t afford to miss my tests. I was a huge Floyd fan at the time, and had listened to all their albums and was pretty familiar with most of their songs. The Dark Side of the Moon is still one of my favorites with the songs ‘Money’ and ‘Time’.I did make up for it a little bit with seeing a number of concerts through a promotions job I had where I had people working at Lake Compounce (the oldest operating amusement park in N. America, though 1 year they were only open for a day) > Moody Blues, The Beach Boys, Aerosmith, The Almond Brothers, Santana, Milli Vanilli (before they were found out to be fakes), Cher, New Kids on the Block (kind of early Back Street Boys boy band type), Heart, Jimmy Buffet, Steve Miller Band, Blue Oyster Cult, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Neil Young.I missed the Doobie Brothers, Bad Company, White Snake, Pat Benatar (saw in Springfield, MA), Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (saw in Washington DC), Hall & Oates, Cheap Trick (saw in Springfield, MA), Sting, REO Speedwagon, Robert Palmer, Crosby Stills & Nash and Frank Sinatra. There were other performers, but those are the ones I would have liked to have seen in Bristol. I was living nearby in Plainville, CT.