This old playground rhyme popped into my head the other day for some reason

Hi Ho, Hi Ho
It’s off to school we go
With a bucket and spade
And a hand grenade
Hi Ho, Hi Ho

We used to sing that at my Primary School, along with this ditty

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire
Put the teachers up on the top
Put Greenie* in the middle
And burn the bloody lot

Nasty little buggers weren’t we? Every school had songs like that too, I don’t know if they still do but I imagine if kids sang them now the teachers would probably call the police or have them carted off for counseling.

There were quite a few, um, “alternative” versions of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” too, some of which might have been inspired by Wings’ hit with the old nursery rhyme in 1972. We all liked this a lot at the time and had no idea that it was supposed to be terrible and this Paul McCartney bloke had some reputation he was ruining with it. I still think it sounds quite nice actually.

Download: Mary Had A Little Lamb – Wings (mp3)

*Mr. Greene, our headmaster

You wouldn’t think a record as inane and fluffy as “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” would have painful associations for anyone, but I do. When I was young some kids at my school used to taunt me about my one-parent status by singing “Where’s your papa gone? Where’s your papa gone? Far, far away” at me, and even over 35 years later I can’t hear it without having flashbacks to that and feeling a little twinge of how upset it made me at the time. The little bastards.

Still, the sight of lead singer Sally Carr in her trademark hot pants helps to ease the pain somewhat.

Download: Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep – Middle of the Road (mp3)

Looking at this school photo of myself from 1973 it occurred to me that this was taken around the same time that Simone Palmey asked me out which makes me wonder what was it that attracted her. Do you think it was my long, flowing Donny Osmond locks? If I’d had that gap in my teeth fixed I could have been on the cover of Disco 45.

Not everyone was a fan of my hair though, I still remember my teacher Mr. Grant handing me the prints of that photo and shaking his head in old fogey disdain at my girly look. My Grandmother hated it too, I was staying with her one day back then and she took me to an old fashioned barbershop in Shepherd’s Bush Market to get it chopped off without telling my parents. The barber jokingly said “we don’t do girls!” when we walked in and then gave me a very severe short back and sides with the clippers. When my Dad came to pick me up later that day he screamed at my Grandmother “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIS HAIR!!!!”

The other thing about the photo that occurred to me is that horrible t-shirt I’m wearing, it may have been the height of children’s fashion in 1973 but no amount of retro cool nostalgia could make it look good today — my sister had one exactly the same in pink too. I would have hoped that on school photo day my Mum would have put me in something a little less groovy, didn’t she know I’d be looking at this picture 35 years later?

If you’d like a soundtrack to this photo, this romantic little number was top of the charts about when it was taken.

Download: Skweeze Me Pleeze Me – Slade (mp3)

I can’t remember how and when I found out how babies were made but I distinctly remember not knowing. When I was very young there was a rumour going around my Primary School that the older sister of a friend of mine was on something called “the Pill” and while I had no idea what “the Pill” was I gathered it was something a bit scandalous and to do with having a baby. So my innocent mind put 2 and 2 together and came up with 3: for a while I actually thought a girl got pregnant by taking a pill. But back then the thought of just kissing a girl scared me out of my short trousers – I’d run a mile when they started playing kiss chase – so God knows how I’d have reacted to the idea that grown ups did, you know, that.

While I knew nothing of the intimate details of love I did actually have my first official “girlfriend” at the age of 10, though to be honest she was the one who asked me out. Her name was Simone Palmley (Simone sounds so exotic now, but we pronounced it See-mon because we were a bit common), a girl at my school who I was told fancied me rotten and one day she came up to me in the playground and asked me out. Now Simone was a nice-looking girl who also happened to be famous among the boys at school for being rather, um….well-developed for her age (“Blimey, she’s got bigger ones than me!” my mum said after she met her), so you’d think my reply would have been “Phwooooaar yes!” but instead I think I turned bright red and was so tongue-tied I had to be bullied into saying yes by her mates.

But at that age girls are scary creatures, they mature faster than us boys and are into things like clothes and make-up and kissing (yuck!) while we’re still snotty oiks with pea shooters who’d rather be playing football. Simone was especially scary to a nervous Nellie like me, she looked so damn womanly, the dark-haired, curvy siren of the school playground who seemed 10 going on 26. I never knew what to do with myself (or her) when she was around, during that summer when we were officially “going out” (which mostly involved going swimming at the local baths together) I could barely work up the courage to hold her hand and think I only kissed her twice, both times a hurried peck on the lips. Is 10 too young for furtive gropings or snogging sessions on the back row of the pictures? It was for me, but kids these days are probably indulging in three-ways at that age.

A few years later I found out that quite a few others had gone where I feared to tread and my Simone had seemingly been out with half the boys in my year at Secondary School. Little was I to know then but this was to become the defining characteristic of my future experience with the ladies: kicking myself over golden opportunities missed because I was such a pathetic twerp and wistful thoughts of “if I knew then what I know now”.

Download: Girls – Moments and Whatnauts (mp3)

This seems like a very “school playground” record to me, I can’t really explain why but it’s probably just because it was a hit in 1974 when I was, you know, a kid at school.

I recently came across these wonderful photos (lots more at the link) taken at the Riverside School in Thamesmead between 1976 and ’78. I don’t have many photos of myself from that era so it’s like discovering a lost window into my own past, the nostalgic glow coming off these is almost blinding.

It’s easy to develop a rosy and cozy, jumpers-for-goalposts view of your schooldays but there’s a reason most kids hate it when grown-ups tell them it’s the best years of their lives, when you’re actually there it seems a long way from heaven. I bet that behind the awkward smiles and nylon shirts in these photos are a few kids whose lives are being made miserable by the casual cruelty kids can inflict on one another, either verbally or physically. Along with a happy one who can’t wait for home time so he can go to the record shop and buy the new Jam single there’s another who’s dreading it because he knows some piggy-eyed thug of a bully will be waiting for them outside the school gates to knick their bus fare or do something worse.

Download: I Was A Pre-Pubescent – Jilted John (mp3)

The school I went to I went to had a bad reputation (the local legend was that all new kids had their head stuffed down the toilet, not true as it turned out) and, though I did OK, wasn’t exactly a temple to academic excellence. A lot of kids left at 16 to get jobs with the gas board or digging up roads for the Council and by the time I got to the Upper Sixth there were only two of us left taking A-Levels. We also had our fair share of “problem” boys given to outbursts of violence like beating up one of the Prefects so badly he ended up in the hospital or shooting someone in the playground with an air gun. Of course there were also the sadistic, ex-army PE teachers who took great delight in picking on the fat, the skinny, and the asthmatic — cross-country running in freezing rain isn’t much fun at the best of times without one of those bastards coming up and literally kicking you in the behind to make you run faster — and sneered at the note from your mother excusing you from games as a sign of your pathetic weakness.

Download: Baggy Trousers – Madness (mp3)

Don’t get me wrong, on balance I did like school, especially the Sixth Form where we didn’t have to wear uniforms and were allowed to smoke in the Common Room, and it was probably an idyllic sanctuary compared to some these days, at least nobody got murdered over their mobile phone. The only drugs we had at school were cigarettes and the illicit trade was in wank mags (my mate Gary’s Dad owned a newssagent and he’d come to school with a sports bag full of Penthouse and Men Only) which seems so innocent now. These days they’re probably smoking crack behind the bike sheds and watching hard-core porn on their video iPods.

There wasn’t any ceremony when I left in 1980, I just walked out of the gate after my last exam (A-Level English, I passed) and that was it, school was over. No fuss, no goodbyes, nothing official, out the door and I was gone. I can’t remember how I felt that day apart from sweet relief that my exams were over, you’d think it would have been some big emotional event but all I remember is that it was a sunny day — the first day of the rest of my life.

Download: If The Kids Are United – Sham 69 (mp3)

We never had any of these creatures at my school though. Girls, I believe they were called.

Download: More Songs About Chocolate and Girls – The Undertones (mp3)

I was never the sort of kid who was interested in planes or trains or automobiles, but even I got a kick out of seeing Concorde. It started commercial flights in 1976 and used to fly over our school one afternoon every week on its way from Heathrow to Bahrain. For a while that was the only route it flew out of England so spotting it was something of an event. We were usually in the playground on our way to the next lesson when it came over, everyone would excitedly look up when we heard its roaring engines and kids inside would rush over to their classroom windows to try and catch a glimpse.

What made Concorde so great was that it was (at least partly) British. It started flying during the dark days of the 1970s when the country was falling apart and we had little to be proud of except our “glorious” past, but here was this gorgeous, futuristic thing we helped design and build — easily the most beautiful passenger plane ever created. With it’s sleek, sexy lines and thrusting nose it was like the E-Type of aircraft, an object that stirred the loins of national pride. The fact that the Americans wouldn’t allow it to land at their airports made our pride swell even more, they said it was because of noise pollution but we thought they were just jealous because they hadn’t built the world’s first supersonic airliner themselves.

The Concorde project started in the 50s but to me it evoked the British “can do” forward thinking of the 1960s, that optimistic period when when we’d never had it so good and Harold Wilson was talking about the “white hot heat” of the technological revolution. It didn’t last of course, by the time Concorde was ready to fly the country was in the toilet and the oil crisis meant there wasn’t much demand for a petrol-hungry supersonic plane. So it was a bit of a white elephant that cost a boatload of money and ended up in limited service for the wealthy, but it was a magnificent white elephant and it was ours.

John Peel played some bizarre music on his show but “There Goes Concorde Again” by …And The Native Hipsters from 1980 must rank as the one of the most completely bonkers. This is nearly seven minutes of spoken word whimsy punctuated by tuneless electronic bleeps and bloops and the occasional clattering of typewriter keys. “Vocalist” Nanette Greenblatt sounds like some batty old cat lady who spends too much time indoors, watching the comings and goings of the world from behind her net curtains. You either love this or it will drive you from the room screaming. Me, I think it’s a lovely piece of peculiarly English eccentricity and never get tired of it no matter how many times she says “ooh look!” — which is a lot.

Surprisingly this was a big hit on the indie charts and I swear I remember Peel playing a parody version of it someone did about looking out of the window and seeing two Joy Division fans walk by carrying copies of “Unknown Pleasures” under their arms. Anyone else remember this or did I hallucinate the whole thing?

Download: There Goes Concorde Again – …And The Native Hipsters (mp3)

Summer officially arrived last week which is a good excuse to dig this old chestnut out. One of my favourite records from the famous “punk” summer of 1977 wasn’t “White Riot” or “God Save The Queen” but, I’m afraid to say (I’m not really), the sugary sweet “Oh Lori” by Alessi. It always reminds me of a camping trip our school took us on that summer which was memorable because we got to see our sexy young English teacher Miss Cowan in a bikini. Though we also discovered on the trip that she was having it off with our Maths teacher Mr. “Ziggy” Zbigniew which made him go right up in our estimation.

This was on the radio a lot that summer along with “Telephone Line” by ELO and “Peaches” by The Stranglers but with it’s breezy, sunny vibe this one sounds most like the soundtrack to a carefree teenage summer — though I spent a large part of that camping trip avoiding school bully Ian Smith who wanted to beat me up for some reason, so it wasn’t all that carefree. Wonder what that chubby twat is up to now. More importantly, I wonder what Miss Cowan is up to now.

Download: Oh Lori – Alessi (mp3)

I almost posted “Silly Games” by Janet Kay when I wrote about school discos the other week but it came out in 1979 and by then I was already hitting the pubs and clubs of London so I was a bit beyond forlorn nights pining over schoolgirls in dingy classrooms. Instead I was spending forlorn nights at nightclubs like The Best Disco In Town at the Lyceum Ballroom or chrome-plated meat markets in the suburbs with names like Tiffany’s and Cheeky Pete’s where I’d still be pining over girls but at least I could drink and smoke (two newly acquired habits). But this track is such a classic anthem of it’s time and place I felt I had to post it anyway.

Lovers Rock was an offshoot of Reggae that came out of South London in the 1970s which was more laid back and soulful than the seriously heavy roots sounds of bands like Culture, The Upsetters, and Burning Spear who were always banging on about Jah and Babylon over thick bassy riddims. That stuff was very hip with the Rastas and Punks around Ladbroke Grove but didn’t mean a whole lot to a Soul Boy from Fulham. I don’t know how big it was outside of London but round my way it was very popular indeed, at my school there was a conflict between the Soul Boys (who were mostly white) and the Reggae-loving West Indian kids about whose music was the best — a battle often fought over the Youth Center record player — but Lovers Rock was the one thing they both liked. More importantly, girls loved it and anything that could get you in with them was good.

“Silly Games” is about the most beautiful Lovers record ever made (that I’ve heard anyway) and was the biggest hit the genre produced, getting to No. 2 in the charts. Written and produced by Dennis Bovell (who went on to work with The Slits and Orange Juice) who was trying to emulate the sweet sound of Minnie Riperton and got Janet to record the song because she was able to hit the same really high notes as her. (at times on this she reaches notes only dogs can hear).

This is the long 12″ version with the spacey Dub section at the end that was compulsory on all Reggae 12″ singles at the time. Even after all these years it sounds as lovely as ever.

Download: Silly Games – Janet Kay (mp3)
Buy: “Reggae Love Songs” (album)