Day 20. The crash of the anvil at the nightclub school. (20/1/19)

Soundtrack: Visage's second album 'The Anvil', at this moment, specifically 'The Damned Don't Cry')

I was never a mod.

That may come as something of a surprise to a lot of people who know me now but not then. There may be some who decide this is a good time to delete me from the Facebook lists. There may be puzzlement: my allegiance to four piece guitar bands playing Beatles influenced pop, my predilection for a wardrobe consisting almost entirely of Pretty Green, Fred Perry and Ben Sherman, the love of Madness expressed on New Year's Eve during their 'welcoming in 2019 BBC gig' (and let's be honest, from 'Our House' on, their run of singles is as good as The Kinks'. That's high praise): my pretty much absolute devotion to the works and fashion ideals of Paul Weller? All these must surely indicate what I was in the years 79-82?

No. Unfortunately not. In 79 I was apathetic, in '80, for some reason, virulently as anti-mod as possible. I was a split soul. I was discovering The Bunnymen, The Teardrops, Wah!, the great scouse pop classicists. And, while I was a massive admirer of The Jam's Sound Affects and Weller's embracing of psychedelic shirts, in '80 I was dismissive of the mod revival as being filled with posers.

I was into something far more real, far more alternative: under the sway of The Face, my attitude as I moved from 16 to 17 to 18, from '80 to '81 and '82, and discovered drinking and pub jukeboxes was that of a 'futurist', a 'new romantic'. I've honestly no idea how I managed to reconcile one side of the music I was listening to (the Cope/McCulloch/Wylie axis) with the other (the extremely plinky plonky first Depeche Mode album) but I allowed them to co-exist.

That can't have worked, can it? I mean, we were all far more tribal than that. If you were listening to Spandau Ballet you couldn't be listening to The Specials. And I was listening to Spandau Ballet. (In fairness, Chant Number One? Still sounds bloody marvellous)

I was never the frilly shirts and the make up though. I was the wing collar shirts, bow ties, trench coats. I was never Steve Strange, I was Midge Ure.

None of this is making me sound good, is it? I could rearrange my past, reinvent myself as somebody cooler and more credible than I was. It'd be a lie. A nice lie, a lie that does nobody any harm but still a lie.

I was synthesisers. Drum machines and programmed beats. Except for the bits that were guitars. I was cool, calculated posing except for the bits that were... no they were posing as well. But it was a different kind of posing. It was, I believed at the time, a more glamorous posing.

It was a posing that was going to last forever. It was the sound of the future, it was the sound that was going to endure forever because nothing could be more new, more now than this.

Think it lasted six months.

But those six months are the reason I didn't see The Specials live, didn't see the 'Projected Passion' version of Dexys but did see Classic Nouveaux. And Our Daughter's Wedding.

You had to have sides. And I'd chosen my side. Even if more of the other side was bleeding in than I realised at the time. You had to have your tribe.

I was thinking this in the car earlier. I was driving into town for a meeting, listening to Quadrophenia. I was having a meeting about a musical that isn't necessarily filled with the sort of songs that are usually in musicals and I've long argued that Quadrophenia and Tommy aren't your standard musicals but still work. I've also argued for years that neither contain anything resembling an actual story, we just believe they do because people have spent so long telling us they do. Mostly Pete Townshend.

And I remembered one of the lads in fifth year coming into school the morning after The Who had completed a long rumoured, long anticipated appearance on Kenny Everett's ITV show, complaining that The Who were now 'rockers'. I argued that The Who had always been 'rockers', that their music had nothing to do with anything else he listened to.

I'm fairly sure that I've a long list of absolutely knobhead arguments that exist purely because:

a) I open my mouth before I think
b) I like the cut and thrust of debate
c) I'm a bit of a smart arse

I was, of course, wrong. The Who were mods. The Who helped define what mod was, because it was the attitude more than the music. The music was flexible, to an extent. The attitude, the look, the lifestyle, were paramount. It meant something to people. It was a code.

Whereas the new romantic lifestyle was nothing but an empty gesture.

I'm very good at being wrong with my initial judgements.

The music I would have defended vigorously at the time sounds ridiculously dated and shallow now. The music I didn't get at first sounds fabulous.

I've always said that the music you discover when you're 16 stays with you for life. Turns out it's not all of it, some of the music you ignore at the time becomes far more important.

Hey, if you want consistency, reliability and a view that is correct and remains correct, you're in the wrong place.

(Soundtrack: turns off 'The Anvil' which now sounds like what it is, an album with a few highlight singles and a lot of fairly vacuous filler and just a little bit dated, puts on Secret Affair's 'My World' which carries the same thrilling rush that it did when I was 16. Tries to figure out the point he was making with all this, decides it's probably 'if it's good, it's good, why did you need a bloody label?')