Illustration by Fr John Bagnall
Huddling at the Bus Station early on a Friday morning in November, waiting for the scholars bus to English Martyrs school in Leadgate. The cold Consett wind blowing around our navy blue mini skirted legs; we plunged our freezing hands into our blazer pockets. Yet my friend Mary and I, both aged fourteen, were keen to share our new found love for someone we’d seen on Top of the Pops the evening before.
Both enamoured by his piano playing, lyrics, the soulful tune, poetic rhymes and powerful message in the words he sang; we could hardly contain our enthusiasm.
However, not everyone in our friendship group at the bus stand agreed with us that day, but we refused to be perturbed by peer pressure.
There was a myriad of eclectic music in the charts to enjoy in 1970 and we all certainly did that. In fact, most Friday evenings we made our way down to St Mary’s Youth Club in Blackhill, loving dancing under the fluorescent disco lights to ‘Black Night’ by Deep Purple, ‘Ride a White Swan’ by T.Rex and ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath. So this person’s style was a complete contrast.
Yet to give Mary and I our due we were willing to move out of the pack momentarily to celebrate this new artist. So much so we were planning on going to Lancasters in Middle Street – we knew it as Shakespeare Street – on Saturday to buy the single.
The next day clutching our new purchase we wasted no time and turning the corner into Albert Road we made our way to the top house in Alexandra Street, where I was able to borrow my Auntie Rose’s record player. We plugged it in upstairs in the spare bedroom then settled ourselves on the mauve candlewick bedspread, listening to the single over and over again, singing along to the A side.
Thus began our love affair with all things Gilbert O’Sullivan. By the time his first album came out we were already primed to buy it.
Entitled ‘Himself’ we both purchased a copy and proudly displayed it in our bedrooms.
Still on board the following year, we embraced his new image and a second album which showed him sporting a hairy chest under a dark red shirt, with a new longer hairstyle.
Our new favourite song became ‘Alone Again Naturally’ which was a melancholy ballad with pensive vulnerable images and was so different to everything thing else we were listening to at the time.
Yet I’m guessing as with all teenagers we change and move on and although I still admired his nostalgic lyrics, I was being drawn slowly to Marc Bolan’s and T.Rex’s new number one single ‘Get It On’ in the summer of 1971.
All too soon it was time to leave school and Mary and I parted ways, her to begin her nursing training and me to continue my education after St Bede’s.
Over the next few years I reverted to my earlier rock influences and embraced Free, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, favouring Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ as one of my favourite songs – which it still is – only second to Free’s ‘All Right Now’
I don’t see Mary often, but when I do we still relive those days and chat warmly about our teenage crush. Last time we bumped into each other in Consett, fifty four years after that first November day, she said,
‘Lorraine, why don’t you write a story about those times?!’
So I did, and here it is Mary,
‘Nothing Rhymed’, just for you! X
