In And Out – 18th September 1983

In and out lifestyle, it becomes a bore
It’s boring doing the same things, I won’t anymore
In and out, repeat, repeat, clock the card
In and out, clocked in, trying too hard

5th May 2023 – Despite never having worked a day in my life I already was aware of the realities of the rat race. I’ve spent many years clocking in and out since then and admittedly, I do still hate that.

Vince – 15th September 1983

Vince is a brain
An anarchist punk
So in the election he stood SDP
They won’t let him have an anarchist party
It’s too much brains for him you see
Vince the prince of the SDP
You won

4th May 2023 – Vince was the class clown and sure enough after finishing high school, he became a children’s entertainer ie. a clown! The school decided that they would perform elections for fun, though I’m not sure if there was actually any duty to carry out once elected. Vince applied, with all our support but was denied having an anarchist party so chose SDP instead. They were a third party to attempt to balance Labour and Conservative in British politics. They never faired much in government but Vince won our school election by a landslide. The cult of personality.
Vince was also a drummer and he would be a member of my first real attempted band with Rupert and Jeremy along with a younger kid who wanted to be part of it and said we could practice at his house one afternoon. He lived way out in the countryside and my mum dropped us all off with drums and guitars only to find out the kid wasn’t even home. As my mum had already left we were thankfully invited in by the kid’s parents and banged around making a dreadful noise for a few hours before the kid turned up about 10 minutes before my mum was due to pick us up. Our one and only practice was good fun but showed us we completely lacked any kind of musical ability.

New York – 10th September 1983

Let’s all go to the big, big city
With dust and scum, all things pretty
We’ll get a jet and pollute the air
Cos in New York they just don’t care

1st May 2023 – Not sure what I had against New York at the time. I think it was just an example of a city to use and had been used by the Sex Pistols as a song too.
Still living in the countryside I knew that cities were where things were happening and I felt desperately that I wanted to experience it. At the same time, I also knew that the countryside had very few eyes to discover the shenanigans of us bored teenagers.
In the next couple of years, I started to go to London infrequently for gigs and record shopping and always returned home blowing out chunks of black snot.
When I finally did end up in a big city, Sydney, it was the perfect balance between urban and rural. I still feel very lucky to have had that opportunity.

White Socks – 5th September 1983

I’m in a gang, gang of the white socks
We fight the gangs who wear pink frocks
We hate the red socks, the green and blue
So join the whites and we won’t mess with you

30th Apr 2023 – In our first week back at school, my final year, the whole school was told that boys were not allowed to wear white socks, they were not part of the uniform. Of course, most of us preferred white socks and when we questioned teachers further about it they insisted that it was because they believed that those wearing white socks were part of a gang. We had no idea where this was coming from and were pretty incredulous about it.