thirty-seven

Most of my work at Target was done in the mornings. The first thing I had to do was sort out the orders that had arrived in the post and pass the paperwork through to Angela in the office for filing. Once that was done (and the rush hour madness had subsided) I'd take the van out.

About once a week I'd pick up boxes of new brochures from the printers, filling the van with the dizzy smell of fresh ink. But most mornings were spent taking boxes of envelopes to and from the stuffers (as I affectionately referred to them) and making various deliveries to small businesses on the new industrial estates.

In the afternoons I ate polo mints and cheese-flavour puffs, thought up lyrics (the stock book strategically open on the desk, pen poised over a half-completed entry) and read the papers - the Daily Mirror, Melody Maker and, on Fridays, The Westing Chronicle.

Each week in the second section of the Chronicle there was half a page (imaginatively titled 'Down Memory Lane') that featured old photographs. They were mainly of ancient football teams - rows of faces frozen above folded arms and knobbly knees, doubtless staring out at some Edwardian boffin shrouded beneath the black hood of a camera the size of a small cupboard, waiting for the flash of gunpowder that would allow them to draw breath, reach up and scratch their flea-bitten FA Cup ears.

In addition to the pre-war team groups, the paper often featured old pictures of the town - horse drawn carts, rattling with milk churns, wending their way down foggy, gas-lit streets and the like. One week, the 'Down Memory Lane' page featured a picture of The Regal (the old club in the centre of Westing which closed down when I was in the last year of primary school, demolished to make way for a multi-storey car park and a bingo hall). It reminded me of what dad had told us that evening we supported Blue Murder at Westing College - that him and mum had once been to see The Small Faces play there. And one quiet lunchtime I decided to go to the library and check to see if the gig had been reported in old copies of the paper, and to find out what other bands had played in the town.

Back in the sixties, before they built the motorway and the bypasses, bands touring the country along the network of narrow A roads, like all travellers then, had no option but to pass through Westing. The town still bears the legacy of those times - numerous pubs and inns crowding the town centre and strewn out along the now quiet, countrified roads. Although many of those pubs have become derelict or have been turned into tea rooms, craft shops and private homes, some of them are still open, though none are so busy as they were in the sixties.

Back then, before the motorway was open, the inns were full every night with travelling salesmen, goods drivers and anyone else who happened to be making the slow journey from north to south, or east to west by Anglia, Sunbeam or Riley. And that included showbiz celebrities with names heard regularly on the radio and faces that appeared daily in national papers. Of course, in the normal order of things, no self-respecting superstar would ever have chosen to perform in a place like Westing with it's single shabby club-cum-theatre and uncultured, parochial audiences. However, having been forced to stop there by disorganised managers and/or the distance and darkness that separated them from other more attractive towns, bands would often grudgingly 'play Westing.' Of course, it was 'easier' for well-known bands to play one-off dates at small venues in those days. There were no complicated light shows to set up. No theatrical stage sets to build. No dry ice or dancers. None of the backing tapes, racks of digital effects and other complex electronic gadgetry of which Tony is so fond. In those days, all bands did (give or take the odd Cry Baby wah-wah pedal and psychedelic slide show) was to plug in their guitars and play.

Even so, I still found it hard to imagine some sixties legend strutting their stuff at The Regal. It wasn't that I didn't believe dad when he told me that him and mum had been to see The Small Faces play there (as hard as it was to imagine mum in a miniskirt queuing up to get their autographs). But I wanted to find some evidence.

I guess I felt a bit like archaeologists' must feel - the fact that they know from a reliable source that beyond doubt there is a Roman town buried beneath a field does nothing to stifle their investigative urge to dig down in the soil until they locate a coin or a piece of pot for themselves. Accordingly, I needed to see an old photograph or advertisement that would allow me to personally authenticate the presence of some mythical sixties pop giant in my town.

Having done my third year history project on the post-war development of Westing town centre (about the only piece of work I actually enjoyed at school), I knew just where to 'dig' to verify Dad's story. In the library they keep old issue of the Westing Chronicle on microfiche in a back room; long wooden drawers full of spool after spool of strips of blue film. Anyone who belonged to the library could look at the microfilms for free on a machine called 'the viewer.' The machine, which was similar to a slide projector, magnified each tiny blue page onto a hooded, illuminated screen about double the size of a TV screen. So long as no one else was using the machine and you had a valid library card (like the one I'd stolen from my brother's bedroom), you could collect the key to the back room from one of the ladies who sat among the encyclopaedias on the second floor of the library, hook up the spool of your choice and whiz through any copy of the paper since February, Eighteen Eighty Six.

Even these days the Westing Chronicle is a comfortably predictable read, but back in the late sixties it hardly seemed to change from week to week, with the same advertisements and features and variations on the same stories appearing in the same places in every edition. Among the succession of gardening tips, funerals and weddings and the results of football matches, parish council votes and Town's Women's Guild cake baking contests, each week half a column on the bottom right hand side of page fourteen was dedicated to Rock at the Regal. And I spent a full afternoon spooling through the page fourteens of every microfiche copy of the Chronicle from November 1965 to March 1969, revelling in all the bands that had played at the Regal during that time - The Pretty Things, Amen Corner, The Move, Julie Driscoll and dozens of other more obscure groups (the names of which I've forgotten and probably no one remembers).

Even though I'd never even heard of most of those bands, it was still really interesting reading the reviews (not least of all because the reporter who was writing them seemed to be getting more and more stoned from month to month). I started to get a bit carried away, winding the little handle that moved the microfiche forward faster and faster, until somehow in my exuberance I managed to jam the spool on page 11 of the Chronicle of April 20th 1967. I was just debating whether I should switch the machine off with the film still stuck in it or go and ask for some assistance from the rather severe looking lady who sat at the reference desk next door, when a headline on the screen caught my eye - Disturbance at Westingshire College.

Three students have been suspended from Westingshire College of Further Education following a disturbance at a concert held in the main hall on Wednesday night, during which glasses and bottles were thrown.

The three men aged between eighteen and twenty, all of whom are believed to be studying full time at the college, were arrested after hurling pints of beer at a group from London known as the Pink Floyd, who perform a brand of so-called Psychedelic music that is currently fashionable in certain London clubs.

The incident has prompted renewed calls from the MP for Westingshire South, The Rt Hon Selwyn Hardright-Woolhead, for the banning of this type of performance, which started last summer at art schools in London and is now spreading throughout the provinces.

Mr Hardright-Woolhead believes that the intense noise levels and the strange moving shapes and lights projected at psychedelic shows effects the mental stability of certain individuals making them liable to behave in an uncontrolled and antisocial manner akin to schizophrenia.

Mr Hardright-Woolhead has also expressed concern that the psychedelic movement, which promotes the use of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. and Mescaline, may be being used by radical political groups to brainwash young people into becoming involved with revolutionary activities.

The claim was made after drug taking paraphernalia and radical literature supporting the communist regime in Vietnam were found following a raid at the home of a local artist who is known to have lectured at the college.

I was stunned. Not by the paranoia of the authorities back in the sixties, but by the fact that the Floyd had played a gig in Westing. When you consider what the Floyd became - an immense supergroup selling out stadiums world-wide with multi-million pound shows and producing albums that stayed in the charts for decades - it's hard to imagine them dodging beer bottles in the main hall at the college. Still, by my reckoning when Floyd played there, their first single Arnold Lane had only just been released, and although they were the darlings of the Roundhouse and the rest of the London underground, few kids in the provinces had probably ever heard of them.

The fact that a supergroup had played locally was exciting enough, but it took a while for the real significance of my discovery to sink in. We had played the same venue as Pink Floyd. I had played on the same stage as the Mandrax Man, himself, the Crazy Diamond, Syd Barret. It was staggering. It was (to use the appropriate sixties parlance) enough to blow your mind! It made me wish (and not for the first time) that I'd been born twenty years earlier. Imagine that: watching The Rolling Stones with Brian Jones; The Who with Keith Moon; The Yardbirds and Cream with Clapton when he really was God (rather than just some sad, old middle of the road muso); Jim Morrison, the Lizard King; Hendrix, for fuck's sake, Jimi fucking Hendrix, live at the Westing Regal. Shit, those were the days.

It's strange (and it's a shame) that all the rock stars I really admire are dead. I don't know whether this is because when rock stars die they are elevated to a kind of supernatural status, memories of them cloaked forevermore in the mythical aura of angels and all that shit. Or whether bands these days genuinely don't have the same kind of charisma. It sometimes seems that way. The music industry, these days, seems far too facile, too controlled, too contrived for any great spirit to survive its machinations unstifled. I don't know. Maybe it's always been that way. Maybe age does give things an unwarranted aura of significance. Maybe I carefully dust off my old Elvis seventy-eights the way the moneyed classes now arrange fresh flowers in the chamber pots the poor once crapped in. I don't know. What I do know is that if you want to see any big time rock stars these days you won't see them in Westing (unless you stand on the hard-shoulder of the motorway and wave at them in their limos and luxury coaches as they whiz up to Bristol or Birmingham).

Although people in Manchester and Liverpool will tell you different, if you really want to see decent bands, the place to go was and is London, the city paved with gold discs, the music Mecca of the free world. When I was eighteen, I used to buy the Melody Maker every Wednesday morning, hide in the storeroom and trawl through the London gig listings. And every week, without fail, I could pick out at least a dozen bands I'd like to see - everything from obscure indie bands I'd heard in session on the Peel show through to huge perennial blues legends like BB King and Buddy Guy.

Unfortunately, being stuck way out in Westing and not earning a great deal, I could hardly ever afford to travel to gigs at the Hammersmith Odeon, the Mean Fiddler or the Marquee. Occasionally, when temptation got the better of me, I would ignore my bank balance and the bills piling up on my bedside table, cast caution to the cash-point and indulge myself in the musical high spots of Swindon and Exeter. Over the years I saw some OK bands there (generally as they made their way slowly up or rapidly down the roller-coaster ride of fame and fashionability). But it wasn't the same as seeing them in London.