I don’t like the vertical format. I don’t enjoy Instagram since they dropped the square format and went vertical. The squares were reassuring somehow, clunky and slightly ridiculous. I could have gone on forever, putting fragments of my life into squares.
Life is a business of constant adjustment. If you can’t adjust you won’t survive. But of course you won’t - no one makes it out alive, which is the unpalatable, inconvenient, and not-spoken-about truth - but without an ability to adjust, the process, the progression through it will be so much harder.
When I was nineteen I went to Dubrovnik which was in Yugoslavia. I’d never been out of the British Isles before. The furthest I’d ever been was Scotland - I decided to hitchhike to the Orkneys and got as far as Kinross, just north of Edinburgh and Dunfermline. It was cold and wet, and the Southern Lowlands were as grim and inhospitable as the people were vibrant and welcoming.
Dubrovnik on the other hand was something else - it was hot with deep blue skies - I thought I could fall in love with here, and fall in love here too. Hardly surprising - in those days I could fall in love anywhere, and at the drop of a hat. Which I think is where the expression hang on to your hats comes from.
Hang on to your hats boys - Eric’s falling in love again!
Dubrovnik is a medieval fortified city, a glittering gemstone on the Adriatic coast. I walked all around the top of the city walls, marveling at the brilliance of everything.
It was a shock, years later, to see it on the TV under attack, shells smashing into those city walls and into the buildings. I wondered what kind of people would want to do this to such a beautiful place. Suddenly there was Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia,. Yugoslavia didn’t exist anymore. The world adjusted itself.
I don’t know how this world can keep on adjusting itself. Adjustment involves acceptance - it’s built into it. The atrocities of the past few years are completely and utterly unacceptable. There are no possible adjustments to be made.
I think human beings are designed to make small adjustments. In my life I’d adjusted from two TV channels to hundreds of the bloody things. There was the BBC and there was ITV - Independant Television. ITV had adverts - Persil Washes Whiter And It Shows…Opal Fruits, Made To Make Your Mouth Water…Hot Chocolate Drinking Chocolate Hot Chocolate Drinking Chocolate…Domestos - Kills All Known Germs - DEAD…The Esso Sign Means Happy Motoring - Call At The Esso Sign… A wealth of banality. As my mother might have said: it’s no wonder we grew up warped.
I witnessed the advent of BBC2 except that I didn’t, because we couldn’t afford to rent a TV with something called 625 Lines that would enable us to watch this new arts based channel. So I missed Colour Me Pop and didn’t quite know what the groovy kids at school, the ones with the well-off parents, were talking about.
I was there for the introduction of colour TV, except that again I wasn’t - I think I glimpsed it through the windows of a TV showroom, but the first time I actually watched it was in a hotel room in 1977 on the first tour I did as a fleeting pop star. Colour TV - next thing they’d be sending a man to the moon! Oh - they’d already done that.
I remember the heyday of pirate radio - Radio London and Radio Caroline broadcasting from ships anchored in international waters on the North Sea. Where we lived the South Downs tended to block the signal from Radio Caroline so I listened to Radio London. I listened to it incessantly on the old Bakelite radio in the kitchen, and later on my grandmothers old Cossor transistor radio. Sometimes the records sounded better on the radio than they did in real life on the record player.
Pirate radio was a world apart from the official British broadcasting choices controlled by the BBC:
Home Service - clipped pronunciation of the famous BBC accent, all gravitas, world news and The Archers.
The Light Programme which was thoroughly depressing - mornings taken up with Housewives Choice - Max Bygraves, Doris Day - sickly stuff to help the busy housewife through her morning chores, with an interlude for Mrs Dales Diary, a driveling radio soap, fifteen minutes of snooty upper Themiddle class vowel sounds… afternoons filled with the strains of Victor Sylvester & his Orchestra who made Glenn Miller sound marginally less depressing than Glenn Miller.
And for something a bit more highbrow the Third Progamme, hours and hours of classical music introduced by men and women with plummy accents.
Those pirates, they had to go - they were threatening the very fabric of the British establishment by broadcasting their druggy, subversive muck across our great nation. And, of course, they weren’t paying any taxes.
The BBC was moribund, but in 1967 there was a shake-up:
- the Home Service became BBC Radio Four - exactly the same as it was - gravitas, world news, the shipping forecast, Archers…
- the Third Programme became BBC Radio Three - still pretty much the same but with occasional half hour forays into the world of free jazz end electronic music;
- the Light Programme became BBC Radio Two, with possibly even more easy listening syrup than before.
And there was a real treat for us youngsters - a brand new station dedicated to this new pop music thing. Ships were boarded, pirate radio was overturned, the DJs offered contracts they couldn’t really refuse, and suddenly there was BBC Radio One.
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| Tony Blackburn launches Radio One, September 1967 |
I tuned in at seven o’clock on September 30th 1967. It sounded a lot like pirate radio - they’d even re-purposed the Wonderful Radio London jingle, but the BBC didn’t understand the frequencies of pop, it all sounded a bit thin, and they overdid it with the jingles and pizzazz - they were trying too hard in all the wrong places.
The BBC had a thing called needle time, and there was a limit to how much needle time there could be - they were only allowed to play a certain amount of gramophone records. The rest of the time was allocated to the demented blatherings of the DJs and bands of live musicians playing cover versions of the records that couldn’t be played. The Alabama Hayriders coveried country songs, we had the Joe Loss Orchestra, Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers; and occasionally the Dream Police and Happy Magazine who took care of the trendy, psychedelic end of things. All this on weekday mornings on the Jimmy Young Show which was aimed, for the most part, at housewives because us teenyboppers were at school (though some of us were playing truant).
Jimmy Young was older than my dad - daytime Radio One was a bit of a bust.
This catastrophic change in pop music listening possibilities was a big adjustment for thirteen year old me. I’d made adjustments before - we moved house just before my fourth birthday - I didn’t realise how traumatic this was until years later. I adjusted to different schools, different journeys, new teachers, modern buses, train carriages without compartments… Much the same as everyone else I imagine, though perhaps the arrival of flat-fronted double decker buses with sliding doors and the stairs at the front didn’t freak everyone else out as much as it did me - a major minor adjustment for a ten year old.
You get older, the adjustments get bigger and more profound - personal adjustments, world adjustments, tragedies and losses - adjustments to acceptances.
I got used to be sixty, to being older. I adjusted, I’ve accepted it. Just about. But I’m seventy now - no I’m not, I’m seventy-one. I’m getting tired of these constant adjustments.
I’ve developed a method for dealing with getting out of my car and walking to where I’ve got to go without making a spectacle of myself: I kick the door open with my foot, I put the foot flat on the ground, I take my time, I get out of the car slowly and with purpose, raise myself to my full five foot five inches (I should verify that - they say you lose height as you get older). I look around, check out the scene, kid myself that anyone watching is thinking what a cool older guy I am, but what I’m really doing is straightening up and steadying myself so I won’t make a complete fool of myself when I close the car door, let go of it and set off on foot to wherever in the world I’m going.
Occasionally, in motorway services, rest areas and so on, a minibus or splitter van might pull up - the door slides open, beer cans and sandwich wrappers tumble out, followed by a pasty collection of youths in groovy clothing who hobble off in the dirsction of the facilites, doubled up like seventy year olds. That’s a band on tour.
I don’t want to be like them, so I adjust.
Here’s a video of Lady Of The Manor, the latest single off my new album, England Screaming, due out on November 21st on Tapete Records:
And some tour dates:
2025
November
21 LONDON The Lexington (with band) tickets
23 CHICHESTER The Havana tickets
December
04 BRIGHTON The Prince Albert (with band) tickets
13 GLANDFORD near Holt, Norfolk Bishop & Miller Auction House
2026
February
26 READING Face Bar tickets
27 TAMWORTH No 18 Coffee House tickets
28 COVENTRY Just Dropped In tickets
April
18 STADE Hanse-Song Festival
