Fade To Black And White

A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to move my files of film negatives and, to my dismay, as soon as I picked up a file half of the pages slipped to the floor.

The "pages" were plastic sheets, each holding seven strips of negatives. Whilst these do not get used all that much, they are still the definitive version of my early photographs and for any publication work a fresh scan is needed at high resolution.

The problem was time. Isn't it always...? But in this case it was the effects of time on thin plastic sheets bought around 35 years ago. They had degraded to the point where the punched holes for the file's ring binders just ripped out. Indeed huge chunks of plastic were breaking free at every single touch. So I've had to buy a new supply of sleeves, choosing Kenro paper sleeves this time. Whilst I had the negatives out I thought I might run a few through the scanner again.

Each time I do this I'm amazed at the leap in the quality of reproduction. When I first scanned them onto a computer it was at the size of 320x240 pixels when the entire VDU screen could squeeze no more than 800x600 pixels altogether. Photo screen savers were as yet unknown so I didn't think at the time to try scanning any larger. These days I can scan a 35mm negative up to tens of thousands of pixels. My current screen size is 1680x1050 and for reproduction a scan of over 5000 pixels is required for a sharp image. I'm amazed at people who think they can take a small image off the web and resize it, thinking that the "hidden details" will adjust the sharpness as they go along. Nooooooo!

This image was taken in 1971 from the interior of a cave on the beach outside the harbour wall at Polperro in Cornwall. Not an easy topic for a light meter to cope with...

Moving north into Devon in the same year, here is a shot taken from the top of Clovelly's main street which descends down to the beach at a gradient that taxes the back coming up and the knees going down! This was not a sunny day...!

1972 and that's me on the right on stage with the band Spiral somewhere in Oldham. At the time I was working in a photographic studio and was necessarily in trendy mode...

The year after I was working for myself and the hair had grown a bit again, before it all fell out a few years after... I'd never fit into those dark green velvet trousers these days either...

Also from 1973. Spiral it's fair to say, was not a top-earning band... When we didn't have a gig we would go out for last orders at a pub in Failsworth (between Oldham and Manchester) and as it was on a cul-de-sac, we would park near this house. It was always in darkness, unless the inhabitants only occupied the rear of the place, and we always used to joke it was haunted. We called it Terror Towers or something similarly ridiculous that would appeal to a teenage mind after a pint of Watneys Red...

In 1974 my parents moved to Blackpool to take over a small hotel on Trafalgar Road, which runs between the Promenade and Lytham Road, close to The Manchester pub. I stayed on in Rochdale for a while and came over to Blackpool for free food at weekends... This was the view of the Pleasure Beach from the South Pier in 1974. Not only is this pre-Big One roller coaster and Ocean Boulevard, it's before the Space Tower was built or the Avalanche. The old Aztec frontage to the River Caves can be seen extreme left. In front of the Big Dipper with its old spherical finial is a simple roundabout ride, dating back to the late 50s or early 60s, of space rockets that could be raised or lowered by means of a joystick in each rocket.

Circa 1976-78 this shot from the Central Pier shows Blackpool's previous sea wall and the slade used for vehicle access to the beach. The pedestrian footbridge is very new and Lewis's and Woolworth's stores bookend the Tower. Visitors are enjoying a lively sea and the beach food carts and caravans sit waiting for the tide to go out.

From the pedestrian footbridge we can look along the Promenade roadway, looking north. This was taken on August Bank Holiday Monday, 1978. The Vauxhall car in front of the bus is brand new as the T-registration only came out on the first of that month. The bus is single-decker 571 and on it's way to Manchester Square. There's a healthy crowd of visitors on the Promenade and the roadway has two lanes of traffic in each direction with room for a central refuge for crossing pedestrians.

1976 and Brush tramcar 638 turns off the Promenade to return to the Rigby Road depot along Lytham Road. A car driver is hoping the tram will let him scoot in front once the pedestrians have cleared the way. At this time no other town in England had had street trams for over twenty years and many visiting drivers had sudden panic moments as they realised that Blackpool's trams were not going to swerve away from their antics...

In 1977 riding the Grand National roller coaster meant bouncing out of your seats and holding a handrail on the back of the seat in front of you. Restraints of any kind were not thought necessary. Just to make sure however, as the coaster trains neared the top of the lift hill a recorded voice politely said: "Please... do not stand up..."

A Musical Career

New Year's Eve. I'm looking back on around 39 years of making music to entertain the public. So next year I can do the 40th year tour!

I was 12 when I got my first guitar and it was four years before I felt myself ready to sing in front of others. The first group was known as the Heywood Senior High School Folk Group... I know... We were never going to trouble the charts of 1970 against the likes of Marc Bolan - though The Beatles were sufficiently worried and disbanded shortly afterwards... I'm on stage with Bill Lloyd and yes, that's me with all that hair and yes, it really was all mine... These days I'd need extensions to even consider a comb-over...

We played folk music, both contemporary and traditional and we played local folk clubs and had a huge following amongst the 13 and 14-year-old girls at school...

The next year, Bill and I were joined by Barry Lord and we changed the name of the band to Anacreon. We added some three-part harmony to such staples as "Oh Sinner Man" and "Sun Arise", by heck we were really with it, man...

By 1972 I had left school and was approached to join a band as lead guitar. This was Spiral. We were young, keen, skint and so we stayed until I got married in 1976.

I dallied briefly with a band on the outskirts of Preston for a while. We never got round to doing any gigs and I sort of lost interest. Music took a back seat for a while as my daughter went through her childhood.

Then computers entered my life in the form of a Commodore 64. It had, for the time, a quite sophisticated music chip that few games took advantage of. By 1984 I was producing stuff like Sweet Georgia Brown, triple-tracked on an Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder that made it sound as though I had an orchestra of computers. It took ages to do this sort of thing, programming each note separately. I invented a programme to do either a "bum-cha, bum-cha" or a "bum-cha-cha" backing and then put melody lines on top. It took about a week's worth of programming to do the whole song! Forgive the hiss and the crackle of static electricity on old tape!

Then I bought a keyboard and gathered family members at weekends to sing old music hall and comedy songs. I gave them all word sheets with the bits they had to sing underlined. It meant I could get them to do things that sounded as though we'd have to spend ages rehearsing, straight off in one (well... ten...) takes - taking into account people making remarks, missing thir cue or simply belching at the wrong time... Singing went well with wine somehow... An example is The Old Bazaar In Cairo.

And then at Christmas, 2000 Creeping Bentgrass came together by chance, playing carols for the students at our workplace, Myerscough College. We agreed to carry on and are seen here as a foursome playing the Windows on Art Festival at Kendal on 8 September 2001.

Helen Fenton left and we carried on as a trio. The music, which had started out very folk-based, started to move towards 1960s pop and rock and roll! We released three CDs, see the band's website for details and more downloads.

Then this year Bob Snape dropped out to concentrate on his ceilidh band and we now carry on as a duo with myself and David Lancaster. The repertoire is currently expanding rapidly and creeping into the 70s, 80s, 90s and up to more modern songs. Our roots are in the 60s though and sixties music will always be the main feature of our act.

Doing the Sunnyside weekend with the other artists from the Billy Fury website was a highlight last year and we are thrilled to have been asked to headline on the Friday night for 2010 at the same event. It gives us a chance to give the regulars a feel for a Creeping Bentgrass gig - with a short set last year we had to cut out a lot of the music to get the jokes in!!!

We normally do around a dozen gigs a year. 2009 has seen us do getting on for 20 and next year is looking good already. As a belated Christmas (or New Year) present, here for the first time is our version of Billy Fury's Halfway to Paradise.

Spiral - Unsupergroup

I think I've now finished going through all the slides in my collection and putting them through the scanner. At least, all of my own. There are some of a great-uncle's still to go through but they are mostly scenics of Switzerland dating from the 1950s, with only a few of people I know.

But then as I was coming towards the last few slides, this turned up.

It shows me aged 18 or 19 and the band that I was in at the time - Spiral. It was taken at a time when band members of famous bands were starting to break away and form new bands which were dubbed supergroups. So amongst ourselves we used to refer to ourselves as Spiral - unsupergroup! From left to right are: me, Ian 'Oz' Rostron, who was Best Man at my wedding to Fran, John 'Johnny' Briggs and Gill Lovett.

Gill went off to Wrexham to university and we carried on as a threesome for a while until I got married and moved to Blackpool. They were good times. We didn't play nearly as many gigs as I do these days with Creeping Bentgrass but we used to spend most evenings together, rehearsing or writing and arranging new songs. Ian and Johnny were the songwriters. I contributed one or two but it was never my strong point.

Here we are in 1973 on stage, topping the bill at a memorable gig. I remember it particularly for a guitar string breaking and bizarrely whipping up to gash my cheek. We finished the song with blood running down my face and the other bands afterwards were amazed that we hadn't stopped. "You must be professional?" one bloke said to us. Ah... if only...

Happy days!