There’s no place like home, but where is home for someone who moves around?
I didn’t want to move to Brightlingsea. I had finally got a group of friends in Royston who shared my interests in books, music and RPGs. Also I was at a school that really suited me (very disciplined, low disruption and very academically focussed). For a long time I thought of Royston as home and was incredibly grateful to Graham’s parents for letting me spend part of the school holidays there. Living there from the ages of 4 to 15 years old imprinted that as an impression of life on my brain. Just big enough to have book and record stores. A large heath nearby and a town that was pretty self sufficient.
Brightlingsea seemed stuck in a time warp when I got there. Musically and culturally it seemed to be at least two years behind the times. Mods and ska were still the thing when musically the word had moved on to the New Romantics. I have already talked about how Colne High was a failing school.
Apart from three years at university (and with Cambridge that only means 26 weeks a year) I lived in Brightlingsea until 1994. It has many wonderful features, quiet, calm and a close community. It was not good for teenagers and I do not understand how the level of drug use and underage alcohol consumption was not noticed and stopped. I did get a group of mates who have stayed friends to this day, you could not ask for better mates than Dave, John and Neil.
I moved to London for work and that was a real eye opener. Multi cultural, vibrant, exciting. Visits to London night clubs, the ability to get takeaway food almost at will, the museums, galleries and theatres. There was also the poverty. Working in post 16 education I saw students desperately trying to make a life for themselves despite parents that had abandoned or abused them. The majority had parents who were unemployed and no one in their families had been to university.
So where is home? Everyone I knew in Royston has scattered. Brightlingsea is a nice place but none of my friends live in the village anymore and the place is culturally a million miles from me. London is ok – but it has never felt like home. Too big and impersonal.
The thing is I want a village/ town with the facilities and sensibilities of a multi-cultural city. Well that doesn’t exist, to my knowledge. Home is Royston, but Royston in the 70s not Royston now.
Anyway this was out in the first year I lived in Brightlingsea and was having trouble adjusting. It is pretty bonkers. Party Fears Two.
They say that if you tell someone your favourite music they should be able to estimate your age, in most cases. This is the kind of track that marks me out as a teenager in the early 1980s. Bauhaus have not had one of those groups careers that has been marked out by endless reunion tours, heavy airplay on Magic FM or frequent appearances on 80s revival shows. This track was not even their most successful, that was a cover of Ziggy Stardust.
There was someone in our sixth form who was a fan – in fact she had incredible taste. Bowie, Echo & the Bunnymen and other indie music. She was one of the cool people though so I never spoke to her about it.
In fact, our school, Colne High, was in a terrible state when we moved to Brightlingsea. The headmaster, Mac, was a keen sailor like my Dad so we got to know a lot about it. No doubt these days it would have got an Ofsted grade 4 and been put in special measures. Mac had decided it was so far gone he would not be able to deal with the students who had been there for years, he would work on the new admissions and every year it would improve.
Our sixth form year had 31 just students, out of a total of over 300 who completed fifth form (year 11). The sixth form had a large open common room where we could spend our free lessons. There were 20 lessons a week and we only had to be in proper class for 11 (there was one lesson of PE on top of that, no one cared if we did not turn up for that). No one really cared about what we did, occasionally the deputy head would wander through to check we were not playing cards, which appeared to be the only rule. We were not meant to go off site, but we did when we felt like it, no one ever got in trouble.
I mean literally no trouble. In our final year, on the last day before Christmas holidays, we put on masks and forced our way into our physics teacher’s tutor room and covered him in silly string. About a dozen people all doing it in front of his pupils. He was chosen due to his habit of teaching us and at the same time staring out of the window at classes of 13 and 14 year old girls doing PE. There was no punishment. The Head Boy (Darren) got a bollocking, which was really unfair as he was one of the few that did not take part and how would he have stopped us. Fair play to him, he did not grass anyone up.
A new teacher, Mr Locke, even solved our card problem. We lacked any extra-curricular activities to put on our UCCA forms (UCAS is a merger of UCCA and PCAS for polytechnics) so he set up a bridge club that we enthusiastically joined. Now games of brag in the common room could be quickly hidden as bridge practice. Mr Locke had the last laugh though, Neil, John, Dave and I still play Bridge together nearly 40 years later, in the same partnerships established back then.
Amazingly some of us went to university, but there was lot of wasted potential in the school. Mac died while I was there from a brain haemorrhage. He never got to complete his plan for improvement. That fell to his successor, but I was gone by then.
The Bard of Barking. Billy Bragg is an amazing guy. I love his song A13 set to the music of Route 66, but it is a bit of a novelty from an artist who has said a lot of important things.
He released a compilation of his early material called Back to Basics, the most famous track is Between the Wars, a sad reaction to the tribulations of the working class under Thatcher (that at the time I was blissfully unaware of).
It Says Here is my favourite track. The fact that nearly 40 years later it remains just as relevant is really a terrible inditement.
“Where they offer you a feature, On stockings and suspenders
Next to a call for stiffer penalties for, Sex offenders”
The Daily Star actually was calling for action on paedophiles on the opposite page to a countdown to the Olsen twins being “legal”.
“It says, here, That this year’s prince is born”
My former mentor at Grant Thornton told me in 1988 that Royal stories often seem to be timed to counteract bad news for government. It applies to other people in our celebrity obsessed culture now. Ignore Royal stories, celebrity gossip or whether Boris having his, fifth, sixth or is it seventh? Child.
“And it says, herethat we can only stop the rot
With a large dose of law and orderand a touch of the short sharp shock”
Read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Every catastrophe is followed by the need for more free markets, less worker rights, less social support systems. The fact that the Tory government have done this since 2010 has left the UK badly underprepared for the 2020 pandemic. Be ready, they will try to remove rights and freedoms after the pandemic ends, as well as punishing the poorest and most vulnerable.
40 years ago Not the 9 O’Clock News (a satirical sketch show) did a short sketch about it, it is less than a minute long, the point still applies:
“If this does not reflect your view you should understand
That those who own the papers also own this land”
Murdoch and the other media billionaires use their media outlets to support their views. Of course they believe in a small state, they will be ok. Support the bastions of independence – in the UK that is the BBC (the fact that left and right, leavers and remainers, thought it was biased against them shows that it is probably, mostly, ok) and Private Eye, which exposes government failures, local and national and international, whatever the politics of the ruling party.
Independent journalism is vital to a free country. Our rulers must know they are subject to the rules that apply to society and should treat the population with respect.
“Could it be an infringementof the freedom of the press
To print pictures of women in states of undress?”
One we have finally moved on from. I am male and back in the 1980s did not have any problem with topless female nudes in newspapers. Older and more informed, I can understand how that objectification contributed to a culture where women felt uncomfortable, there remain many more issues in this area to deal with. One small step forward.
It is really hard to pick the best track for the Smith as I like two so close to equally it just depends on my mood. I could write about Panic, in particular how it such a good commentary on what was happening to music in 1986. That would be so easy. However…..
On most days this track is my favourite that they did. My brother, Mike, liked the Smiths way before me and he liked them a hell of a lot more. Not that there was ever any danger of him considering meat as murder. I’ll talk about Morrissey another time, even though by 1992, when this was finally released as a single to promote Best 2, there was already disturbing stuff about him.
In June 1992 I came back from Kos – the second time the lads had been there (though we were without Dave who was now with the woman he would marry, Rose). Five days back at work and I was made redundant. I was the most senior of the non-managerial staff, so most expensive. The two weeks I had been away had been used by certain people at the firm to claim credit for a load of work I had done (I only found this out months later – I never suspected it as it was people who I thought were my friends), making it look like I was very unproductive. I spent the second half of 1992 going on interviews and doing any bits of local work I could get.
The interviews were a weird bunch as I just tried for anything that I was qualified for in a crap job market. One engineering firm I went to were interviewing 14 people in one day, while still trying to do work. They wanted me to break tons of ethical rules and assist with some very dubious VAT practices. In the first of a long line of telling employers I did not want their job I told them that they should work on their shortlisting and only interview unqualified accountants. If you work for years and sweat blood to get the qualification no one would blow it for £13,500 a year.
I went for one at a golf club outside Colchester. I knew that Dave and John would love it if I got that. I went full on Cambridge posh for this one but didn’t get it. My lack of knowledge about golf really did not help.
I was working with an Ipswich recruitment agency, but they had trouble getting me interviews there. I always suspected that Grant Thornton had been bad mouthing me around town. I had no proof, though some of my former peers at the firm, including the secretary of the Senior Partner, suggested I would be better off in Colchester or Chelmsford. The job at Russell Davies disappeared immediately and it would not be good for Grant Thornton if I was their main audit contact.
I picked fruit. I worked in The Swan pub one evening a week. I babysat. I delivered the Yellow Pages (a business telephone directory), that was backbreaking. Two trips to Weeley to get the 900 copies in the car (in a Fiesta 450 Yellow Pages is a lot), unpacking the first load in the garage, followed by delivering them in Brightlingsea at 10p per book. I would park in the middle of a road and carry a bag full up and down, then move on to another road. I did it in 3 days, no minimum wage then as it worked out to less than £3 an hour.
I listened to this song a lot in that period – it is a miserable song about suicide. Little did I realise this was nowhere near the worst recession that I would live through.
I know it is a bit Buzzfeed but why not. Ten great non-fiction books you can read in Lockdown. I’m not being paid by anyone, these are just good books. Not a lot of feelgood stuff though.
Barbarians at the Gate by John Helyar
The 1988 takeover of RJR Nabisco. It reads like a thriller with incredible twists and turns. It is still relevant today for its financial engineering and how companies can be gutted to make them attractive.
True Blue by Dan Topolski
Recommending this burns me. A year Cambridge were mean to win the Boat Race. A mutiny at Oxford and they are in pieces. This is the coach’s story.
No Logo by Naomi Klein
Background to what is going on in the world. If you like it or are scared by it read the Shock Doctrine and her other books.
Muscle by Sam Fussell
A book about how exercise, and body building, can be really addictive. It was a salutary warning to me (not for body building, just getting that exercise burn).
Bloggs 19 by Tony Thompson
The deaths at Rettendon have been immortalised on film and in book form. This was the first book about it. The film Essex Boys was based on this version.
The New Lords of the Rings or the Great Olympic Scandal by Andrew Jennings
Two books that showed the huge amount of corruption in the Olympics and world athletics. A bit old but the reporting is still relevant.
K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs
Everest is easy compared to K2. The message of this is do not climb K2 (the second highest mountain on Earth). It is a disaster story, but with heroism too.
Disaster: The Rise and Fall of the News on Sunday by Chris Horrie & Peter Chippendale
It was a wonderful aim. To have a mass market tabloid to rival the Sun but be progressive and support the left. It was an absolutely horrendous catastrophe. It lost huge amounts of money and was hardly a blip on the newspaper landscape. How it went wrong remains incredibly illuminating.
The Art of Captaincy by Mike Brearley
The best sports book ever, mainly because Mike Brearley is probably the smartest sportsman to write a book. One of England’s most successful captains his lessons go way beyond cricket, or the era he was involved in.
Boo Hoo by Ernest Malmstein
The first dot.com boom left many wrecks and a lot of people losing their savings. I like books about business disasters, this is another. What is stunning is that none of the lessons of the first dot.com boom were really learned. Just look at WeWork in 2019/20.
My Mum likes The Shadows. My Dad likes the Shadows. We had a Shadows LP when I was a kid. They were originally backed Cliff Richard and were part of the fallow period between the birth of Rock and Roll and the arrival of the Beatles, like the Everly Brothers. The Shadows were safe with their synchronised steps around the stage and melodic guitar music, lacking a sex symbol lead singer.
My Dad likes guitar omusic. We went on holiday to Pevensey on the South Coast in 1976. My Dad, brother, Step Mother (Anne) and two Step sisters (Alison and Frances), a very modern family arrangement at the time. We stayed in tents, luckily the weather was good. It on this holiday that I discovered the Men From the Ministry on the radio – a great comedy and I got a transistor radio for my birthday so I could listen to it whenever I could.
(Michael, Frances, Alison and me – 1976).
As a special treat we went to an end of pier show in Hastings. A British seaside tradition, these would be a variety show with various different acts, magicians, jugglers and a head liner. I had no idea who Los Reals De Paraguay were, but I now know they had been a staple of TV variety shows during the early 70s. We were really impressed by them and bought one of their LPs after the show.
The show’s headliner was Cilla Black. She was in the career slump that happened after her music career ended and before her TV career on ITV started. Presenting stalwarts of Saturday night light entertainment such as Surprise, Surprise and Blind Date. So, my first gig was Cilla Black☹ Well Los Reals played first – so maybe it was them😊 Actually Cilla did some great music in the sixties, it’s just that she hosted some crap TV programs that spoils it.
The Shadows are very good heavy hangover listening though. Wonderful Land.
Some time after this track came out there was an article in one of the tabloid newspapers about which of three solo female singing newcomers would be the superstar that dominated the charts for the next twenty years. Taylor Dayne was ruled out for being an anonymous dance artist and Tiffany for not having her own material. Debbie Gibson was the global superstar in waiting. Now Ms Gibson had a reasonable career for a few years, but I can’t help but believe that Tiffany has had the last laugh. Remembered only for this cover version, it is still played often and she regularly has a gig on 80s nostalgia shows.
Some time after this came out there was an article in one of the tabloid newspapers about which of three solo female singing newcomers would be the superstar that dominated the charts for the next twenty years. Taylor Dayne was ruled out for being an anonymous dance artist and Tiffany for not having her own material. Debbie Gibson was the global superstar in waiting. Now Ms Gibson had a reasonable career for a few years, but I can’t help but believe that Tiffany has had the last laugh. Remembered only for this cover version, it is still played often and she regularly has a gig on 80s nostalgia shows.
I’m dedicating this to my friends Nikki. I didn’t meet her until 6 years later, but she hates this track so much……….
This was released just after I started working at Grant Thornton in Ipswich. Somehow I had left university without a job lined up (though my mate Neil was in the same position and he enjoyed a year on benefits) and my father, quite rightly, told me to get a job or get out.
There was no scientific research, I just thought that I was good with numbers and applied to be a chartered accountant at several firms. For some reason there were few large firms in Colchester and they were all based in Ipswich. I had left it late and most firms had finished hiring. I had an interview at Grant Thornton, where the partner Andrew Strickland was unavailable at the last minute and I had a “chat” with one of the managers, Steve Law. It did not go well (I later was told he was one of the last people the firm had hired who had not gone to university and had an issue with all the graduates, exacerbated by me having been to Cambridge). I was called back in to see Andrew a week later. I went with little optimism. I realised that things were going to go better when he spent most of the time asking about Cambridge and talking about his time at Trinity College. Score one for the old school tie.
Four trainees started on 1st September 1987. Dawn, Lesley, Heather and me. I was the only male and assigned to be mentored by the only female audit senior (later realising that was because she really did not get on well with women). Work has an incredible shock. Working 9am to 5.30pm. The expectation to study for at least 15 hours a week outside that. The non-stop necessity for overtime, Saturday work (usually to do stocktakes at the firm’s clients – a hated job always delegated to the most junior staff). The fact we got only 20 days holiday a year (three of which had to be taken at Christmas and then we had to work one of them!). All for £350 a month, net. Now it was 1987, but this was still low. From the point of view of the firm it was generous as up until fairly recently trainees were not even paid. They did pay for our exam course and we had six weeks of study leave a year, we had to attend a training centre, failure to attend was grounds for termination.
After a week’s induction in the office there was a week doing fieldwork. In my case adding up pages and pages of figures at Penguin Pools in Chelmsford. They got charged £24 an hour for me. Even if they only charged me out for 30 weeks a year this was far more than I cost and far, far more than I was worth.
Finally, we got sent down to the National Training Centre at Bradenham Manor, near High Wycombe, for a two week course on double entry book-keeping. Now double entry does not mean that you keep two set of books, one for you and one for the taxman, as some people think. It means that each entry is recorded as a debit and a credit, so netting to zero – thus the phrase “balance the books”.
Putting 30 recent graduates in a hothouse education environment with a bar on site had potential for chaos. The only rule was that you had to be in class at 9am, no matter how hungover you were. The trainers were not proper teachers, they were people who had been in our seats three years earlier, who were now, for whatever reason, in the doghouse with the offices where they worked. The posting to Bradenham was a message saying find another job, your career is over with us. Some relationships died there too as people ended up in the wrong bedrooms at night.
Luckily, the double entry book-keeping came easy to me, despite the standard of teaching being terrible. It is incredibly logical and once you get it you can pretty much work out how to deal with anything in accounting terms (until you start dealing with investments and long term issues). Unfortunately, one of my fellow trainees from Ipswich never got the concept and had to memorise every possible transaction☹
Our trainers allowed the radio to be on during the classes. This played a lot at the time.
I’m dedicating this to my friends Nikki. I didn’t meet her until 6 years later, but she hates this track so much……….
This was released just after I started working at Grant Thornton in Ipswich. Somehow I had left university without a job lined up (though my mate Neil was in the same position and he enjoyed a year on benefits) and my father, quite rightly, told me to get a job or get out.
There was no scientific research, I just thought that I was good with numbers and applied to be a chartered accountant at several firms. For some reason there were few large firms in Colchester and they were all based in Ipswich. I had left it late and most firms had finished hiring. I had an interview at Grant Thornton, where the partner Andrew Strickland was unavailable at the last minute and I had a “chat” with one of the managers, Steve Law. It did not go well (I later was told he was one of the last people the firm had hired who had not gone to university and had an issue with all the graduates, exacerbated by me having been to Cambridge). I was called back in to see Andrew a week later. I went with little optimism. I realised that things were going to go better when he spent most of the time asking about Cambridge and talking about his time at Trinity College. Score one for the old school tie.
Four trainees started on 1st September 1987. Dawn, Lesley, Heather and me. I was the only male and assigned to be mentored by the only female audit senior (later realising that was because she really did not get on well with women). Work has an incredible shock. Working 9am to 5.30pm. The expectation to study for at least 15 hours a week outside that. The non-stop necessity for overtime, Saturday work (usually to do stocktakes at the firm’s clients – a hated job always delegated to the most junior staff). The fact we got only 20 days holiday a year (three of which had to be taken at Christmas and then we had to work one of them!). All for £350 a month, net. Now it was 1987, but this was still low. From the point of view of the firm it was generous as up until fairly recently trainees were not even paid. They did pay for our exam course and we had six weeks of study leave a year, we had to attend a training centre, failure to attend was grounds for termination.
After a week’s induction in the office there was a week doing fieldwork. In my case adding up pages and pages of figures at Penguin Pools in Chelmsford. They got charged £24 an hour for me. Even if they only charged me out for 30 weeks a year this was far more than I cost and far, far more than I was worth.
Finally, we got sent down to the National Training Centre at Bradenham Manor, near High Wycombe, for a two week course on double entry book-keeping. Now double entry does not mean that you keep two set of books, one for you and one for the taxman, as some people think. It means that each entry is recorded as a debit and a credit, so netting to zero – thus the phrase “balance the books”.
Putting 30 recent graduates in a hothouse education environment with a bar on site had potential for chaos. The only rule was that you had to be in class at 9am, no matter how hungover you were. The trainers were not proper teachers, they were people who had been in our seats three years earlier, who were now, for whatever reason, in the doghouse with the offices where they worked. The posting to Bradenham was a message saying find another job, your career is over with us. Some relationships died there too as people ended up in the wrong bedrooms at night.
Luckily, the double entry book-keeping came easy to me, despite the standard of teaching being terrible. It is incredibly logical and once you get it you can pretty much work out how to deal with anything in accounting terms (until you start dealing with investments and long term issues). Unfortunately, one of my fellow trainees from Ipswich never got the concept and had to memorise every possible transaction☹
Our trainers allowed the radio to be on during the classes. This played a lot at the time.
My love for Alan Moore’s work will crop up a few times here. He is the sage of Northampton and one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. An average cartoonist in the 70s he focussed on writing as the decade went on and into the 80s. He wrote for 2000AD (Skizz, Halo Jones, DR & Quinch, Time Twisters) as well as Warrior (V For Vendetta and Marvelman) and Marvel UK (Captain Britain, Nightraven and the Special Executive). His genius was immediately noticeable to me – even his short stories in 2000AD were so far above the standard normal in comics, it was staggering.
He was spotted by DC Comics and started writing Swamp Thing. It was 1983 and in a world without the internet or access to a comic shop I had no idea that he added another gig to his portfolio. One Saturday morning, when the family did not go to Colchester, I disconsolately went to see what was available in the village’s two newsagents. In Maskells (now sadly replaced by a Ladbrokes) I browsed through the American comics on the shelf. In those days random American comics turned up at irregular intervals in the UK.
I found this and realised Moore had moved up in the world (and I had missed the first two issues he had written). It was not the only comic I bought that day, but it was by far the best.
After completely overturning everything we thought that we knew about Swamp Thing, writing a story about interspecies sex and a journey to hell, he embarked on a 14 month story called American Gothic. It reinterpreted horror tropes through a modern American eye. For instance, the Werewolf story was linked with a woman’s monthly menstrual cycle and called The Curse. One story was set in the Deep South (not a subject I really knew much about then) and used Strange Fruit as part of the story. It was for the Zombie reinterpretation part of the arc.
The strange fruit are the bodies of the dead slaves hanging from the trees. Billie Holliday’s voice is haunting.
For all my relatives who though that comics were rubbish and not worth the time? Alan Moore has a graphic novel on the Time Magazine best 100 novels of the 20th Century. It was also turned into a mammoth movie – Watchmen.
It was many years later that I learnt about the Jim Crow – reading about them in Grant Morrison’s Invisibles. Who said comics aren’t educational? The Jim Crow laws were the American South’s replacement for pre Civil War racism and slavery, that Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others fought against. Go and watch Selma. Jim Crow was one of the Invisibles who debuted in the second volume Apocalipstick, it is a bit dated now but it is more than worth reading.
The Golden Age of European techno passed me by originally. I was still only listening to the music that I had listened to since I was teenager – rock, new wave, new romantic, heavy metal, etc. Then there was the 1991 holiday in Kos where the techno hits that had passed me by were on heavy rotation.
One of them was Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic, a Belgian group. When I came back from Kos I wanted to collect all the tracks that reminded me of the holiday. It was always tremendously difficult to find singles that had finished their chart runs. There would be unsold copies in shops, but these would diminish over time (the only exceptions that I found were the Virgin Megastore and HMV on Oxford Street, but they were not places that I visited often). My favourite independent store, Compact Music, was particularly not good for this – it was far bigger on albums.
The upshot of this was that I had to buy plenty of albums to get the tracks I was looking for, and I had no patience so I bought them as soon as I could. This was after spending a lot of money on the holiday while we were away. I spent nearly £50 a day (given you could get a main meal for about £6 and breakfast for £3 it shows what I spent on beers and souvenirs and a round for 5 of us was about £3). This actually led to a situation just before payday in June where I was so broke I could not even buy a round of beers (though neither could Dave or Andy) – for the first time since school we pooled our money to get a round. This was when we were trying to work out whether we could get away again later that summer. Our plans for a cheap week in Greece ended up as a week at Andy’s parents’ farm in Wales – I decided that was not what I was looking for and bowed out.
I bought the Technotronic album and completed my acquisition list (bar Bizz Nizz). Surprisingly the album is actually really good, not just the singles and filler. This is my favourite track by Technotronic. Tough.
The oldest song on the list. When I was young I only read science fiction or fantasy. Slowly I added horror (big thanks to John Bonney). When I was 14 I started playing Dungeons and Dragons with John Bonney, Graham Wright, Paul Ashby, Alan Curtis and Martin Walker.
I discovered Cthulhu when I read an A4 tabletop book called the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction. HP Lovecraft was out of print, but I frequented every second-hand bookstall and shop that I could find anywhere. I consumed Lovecraft’s stilted prose about elder beings, the best that mankind could expect being indifference from these powerful beings. There was a section on them in Dungeons and Dragons supplement called Deities and Demigods (there was in the first edition – copyright put a stop to it in later editions, I still have that first edition), later there was a roleplaying game called Call of the Cthulhu, many people rate it as the best role playing game ever. I’ll write more about RPGs another time.
I was interested in the inter war period and started reading novels set in that period, starting with Dorothy Sayers (like Agatha Christie, but a far better writer). Of course, the world that is depicted in popular fiction about the Jazz Age is sanitised. It was a great time to be rich, but most people were crushingly poor and lacked basic needs like adequate food or accommodation.
It is for that reason I have a difficult relationship with this period in history. The gilded Jazz Age of fiction would be an amazing to live in. Country Houses, parties, Jazz and a life of leisure. The reality turned into the Great Depression and was stuck in the middle of two devastating wars (though I subscribe to the view that there was one World War that started in 1905 and finished in 1989 – fighting never stopped between the major powers or their proxies in that period).
It was around then that I saw the Blues Brothers for the first time and it featured Cab Calloway. Later, at university, I saw the Cotton Club. I like the music from this period but really don’t know it well enough. This is from 1931
Two versions – an old one and the Blues Brothers version.
Five Miles Out 