Desperate measures and new tax frontiers: Toby Neal on politics
The band arrived, the school was deserted, the band went back. Somewhere along the line someone had got their wires crossed.
I'm pretty sure the band were either Pink Fairies or Squidd - probably the latter, as from memory they had made the long journey to Dawley from Bristol, and Squidd were a Bristol band.
They had, or, clearly, had not, been booked for the school disco by one of the pupils.
Word went round that they wanted their money for the abortive gig at our school. What happened next I never found out.
I couldn't hum you any of the greatest hits of Pink Fairies or Squidd, but then I was never in the cool set or in-crowd. I mention the incident merely out of nostalgia for those long-forgotten bands of yesteryear, from the 1970s days when teenagers, boys anyway, wanted to be in a rock group rather than become influencers or YouTube stars.
During a clear-out I came across a New Musical Express "encyclopaedia of rock" which featured fashionable bands of the time which few people now have ever heard of.
The NME was one of those self-styled liberal and progressive publications which in reality had all the tolerance of the Taliban when it came to musical tastes, and its sexist coverage of some female artists would cause outrage today.
