When we were at school and allowed to play records over the school speakers as you can imagine I was one of the people charged with doing so, simply because I was one of the most keen. It seemed exciting and vaguely glamorous to me and it just wasn't to many others.
Anyway, obviously I operated a strict policy about what I’d play. No chart music whatsoever, unless it was heavy rock and prog, as that was prioritised. In fact only a handful of us were interested anyway. Music not being as obsessed about by most kids or indeed any. So it was the domain of what was defined as ‘the rock lads.’
Now, this is the mid-70s and we were all badly conditioned hair and platform shoes with segs in - the more the better. We all tried to tie our tie in a daft way, to protest the very concept of a tie. I perfected a way of tying it so it was a big, wide and fat knot with almost no tail so it looked vaguely deformed. Teachers would stop me and say ‘do your tie up properly, boy’ and that got you credibility.
But one thing above all else was desirous for us ‘rock lads’, not the new Tull album or playing Whole Lotta Love and sniggering at the ‘orgasmic’ breakdown, no, it was to make the deputy head annoyed with music so loud and agitating that he’d cover his ears and shout ‘turn that noise off!’. In fairness though he was a professional bastard charged with exercising discipline to keep an unruly school in order. But by the 5th Year, we had stopped being intimidated by him after a boy who was for some reason called Pugsley (something to do with the Addams Family) who was 16 going on 35 with a full beard and a substantial girth that was unusual at the time, decided to stand up to him, initially in a shouting match and then in a fight that got him expelled, but which we thought was possibly the best thing that had happened in our life. Better even than the 2nd Year French teacher getting hit over the head with a 12 inch black dildo which even we thought was going too far. Poor woman. She understandably left and I hope she wasn’t traumatised for long. It was a really rough school, looking back, though we didn’t think so at the time, thinking ourselves superior to Hardwick Secondary Modern who I seem to recall went on strike. The pupils that is. They were all scary feral kids. We were just hairy daft lads who took our life lessons from Monty Python records.
Anyway, Pugsley decided he was being picked on and wasn’t having it anymore and punched the deputy head(I wish I could recall his name because it was one of those nominative determinative names like Mr Cane or Mr Punching) and it would have been a weighty punch. Of course, at the time, teachers could hit children with impunity, so the deputy head, not taking kindly to this rebellious lad, cracked him one back, an adult punching a boy. But that just made Pugsley charge him head first and wind him, knocking him over, pinning him to the floor and mocking him with comedy punches while we cheered him on. The deputy head got hold of him by the wrists and wrestling and shaking him, eventually got back in control and threw Pugsley out. Since that moment he lost most of his power over us and he knew it. His blustering and shouting was just laughed at.
The challenge was to pique his temper with great music. It’d have been easy to do it with The Faust Tapes or Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music but we wanted to do it with music we loved. In fairness he tolerated Sabbath regularly and even the first Motorhead single. But we did get him. What do you think made him storm into the hall shouting ‘turn that noise off now!’? The cover actually resembled his expression. In The Court Of The Crimson King, an album everyone loved and seemed like it was 'ours' and only we understood. More specifically 21st Century Schizoid man. He just hated it with the ‘robot’ voice and the difficult rhythms.
It made no sense to him and was played at a brain agitating frequency. Of course, going forward, we would drop the needle on the track and play 10 second snatches of it as acts of deliberate provocation, like the silly kids we were. He was probably only about 45, but seemed impossibly aged to us. The thing is, though our year controlled the music, we took it all so seriously that we inculcated the year below into the artform, so that ‘our’ music would continue. Going as far as educating some lads (it was always lads) in the process of putting records on and filing records to play. Going as far as writing a list of recommended songs from commonly presented albums to play. Yes we were nerds before anyone had heard of the concept. But we were 'the rock lads' and felt superior because of that.
We never had any more grief from the deputy head but he must’ve been glad when we left for 6th form college and once again took over record playing there.. I’m sure he partly played up to his fuddy duddy attitude to the modern world, going as far as calling Yamaha bikes Yamahammer, which is actually a better name. He’d be nearly a hundred now, if he was still alive. It was for a few months such a big thing in our lives but now I can see it was just a short phase in his life. All a long time ago now. A long, long time...
