Coventry Evening Telegraph Reunion 2014

Stop your messing around, 
Better think of your future, 
Time you straighten right out, 
Creating problems in town.  
The Specials

A few weeks back I attended a reunion of reporters from the Coventry Evening Telegraph where I had worked from 1986-88, initially as a news reporter and then, largely, as the pop columnist.

The last time I had been to a Coventry Evening Telegraph reunion was in 1989, when I had moved down to Fleet Street to work for the pop desk of the Daily Star (for a Coventry reporter, Annette Witheridge).

At that do, held at a curry house near The Strand, I enjoyed an amusing evening with Jon Steafel (now Deputy Editor of the Daily Mail), Mary Frances (who I believe went to edit a national women's magazine), her partner Dave Harding (also ex-CET) and a whole host of other former Coventry Evening Telegraph hacks whose identities are lost in the mists of time.

The 2014 reunion was of a slightly different generation: old friends Tracey Harrison, Alison Brace, Jayne Cole, Alastair Law, Adrian Lee, Roland Watson, Pete Walsh among others - and their partners.

I don't think I had seen Tracey since I left the Sunday Telegraph in 1997 (she was also working at Canary Wharf at the time, for Morgan at the Daily Mirror) and it was amazing to see her again.

Jayne Cole - who is long married to Pete Walsh - and I had not met since I left Coventry 1988, which is a hell of a long time.

She was a dazzling young photographer on the paper when I knew her. It was great to see her again and to talk.

Jayne had shared a house in Foleshill, Coventry, with Lorna Duckworth, now in Scotland (and not present at the reunion), a street away from the horrible hovel in which I lived with my young and very tolerant cat Tonto.

Alison Brace was also at the reunion.

I'd known Alison from when she did work experience at the Hull Daily Mail in 1985 (I believe) -  incredibly to me almost 30 years ago.

She joined the Coventry Evening Telegraph after I had left but I bumped into her again in the late 1990s at the Mail on Sunday, a watering hole for hacks in need of work from all over Fleet Street.

One of the characteristics of my youth is that I remember so little about it.

When I meet people from my yesteryears, they nearly always tell me things of which I have absolutely no recollection!

Sometimes I wonder if it was really the same guy. Or if I am inhabiting someone else's body.

The 2014 reunion was a very jolly event in a smart Indian restaurant in Covent Garden, London.

It was very good to see James Hardy again. He was not at the Coventry Evening Telegraph but is married to Tracey Harrison.

I recall that James and I suffered together under Lawson at the Sunday Telegraph, although, to be fair, he coped far better with the regime than I did.

It was good to see Alastair Law, who became pop columnist of the CET after I left, and Roland Watson (now Foreign Editor of The Times), who came after me to Coventry but I had met before on the Fleet Street merry-go-round.

It was a very pleasant evening and made me think of some of the people I had known from the Coventry Evening Telegraph days who were not there:

My dear friend Jason Tilley, a brilliant photographer, with whom I have kept in touch over the years.

This picture of Jason is one I snatched with his Nikon FM work camera which he had left lying around in a Coventry pub beer garden while he procured some Guinness.

Newspaper pictures were in black and white in those glorious days, and few could print monochrome as well as Jason.

Then there was the aforementioned Lorna Duckworth, a great friend with whom I have fallen out of touch and, sadly, have not heard from for years.

And Demetrios Mathieu - "Saviour of Us People" as I used to call him - who was not there, according to Pete, because it was raining. I feel sure there was more to it than that!

Nick Holdsworth, a remarkably direct individual, who has defected to Russia. I won't say what I called him in the Coventry days.

Jerry Vine, a.k.a. Radio Two presenter and BBC election coverage star Jeremy Vine, who used to write reviews and pop interview pieces for my pop column (he did it extremely well and was also a brilliant mimic and all-round good egg).

Ray Massey (Motoring Editor at the Daily Mail) who used to write the Peeping Tom gossip column at the Coventry Evening Telegraph.

I thought of Melanie Knight, another very good friend who used to sit opposite me in the newsroom.
 
Melanie, a very good tennis player from Lewes, shared a house with Tracey Harrison (in Hugh Road, Stoke, Coventry, I think).

I used to drop round there particularly during a lengthy period of homelessness one summer, when I was crashing on friends' floors or sleeping in my beloved white Fiat Uno. Very convenient for work it was.

I still occasionally hear from Melanie, who still lives near Coventry, in Kenilworth, but I guess I have not seen her for more than 20 years.

And Ant "Tony" Walton, a real character and mate in those days, who was mysteriously "let go" by the Coventry Evening Telegraph and now works as Night News Editor of the Daily Star.

I pictured Ant - or Tony as he is now known - returning to the CET building one night to give the drinks machine a good old kick for the camera! I have to admit I let him in. That evening, I recall, ended up with us having a smoke while sitting on the Coventry city centre ring road!

My time in Coventry was kind of strange.

I was young - 24 to 26 - during my time there and immature, and there was a lot of messing around, as my friends The Specials might have said.

Looking back, I did not take life at all seriously, drank a hell of a lot, talked too much and generally made a complete fool of myself.

I was constantly in trouble. At times my news reporting was distinctly suspect. After a few late starts (one 2pm instead of early calls at 8am) and a couple of dreadful mistakes, I was offered the pop column where, I suspect, the Editor, Geoff Elliot, thought I could do less damage.

Although in Hull I had known The Housemartins, I was not particularly au fait with popular music at that time.

Nonetheless, I accepted the job of a writing a thrice-weekly pop column and went into it with some verve.

At that time I did not own a record player, so for at least a few weeks, I wrote all the record reviews on the basis of what I thought of the album or single covers.

Eventually I invested a few pounds in a mono Fidelity record player from a secondhand shop and started listening to the records and going to see bands.

My lifestyle changed.

I would go out to a gig most nights of the week, either driving to the NEC, Birmingham or Leicester in the Fiat Uno, or walking or taking a train to somewhere closer and making a prettty boozy time of it.

During the day I would interview rising pop stars on the telephone and try to persuade local musicians to make themselves famous, as The Specials and The Selecter had done some years before in the Two Tone era.

Often I ended up in terrible dives getting dreadfully wasted.

Going out to the gigs - large and small - was great fun and I got to know some interesting people such as The Specials' Lynval Golding - a lovely man - and the band he then managed, After Tonite.

Lynval's nephew Brian, the sax player, became a friend. We would spend a good deal of time on the razz in the public houses of Coventry and Leamington Spa.

I had such confidence in those days. To mark my 26th birthday, I put on five acts at a club in the city centre (under the guise of Christmas Party for my pop column).

Later, I promoted a fairly large gig to raise money for the anti-apartheid movement.

I was evicted from my rented room at gunpoint, got doused in beer by an aggrieved band, was threatened by The Macc Lads, and interviewed the Godfather of Soul James Brown, backstage at the NEC with Jason Tilley's help, shortly before he [Mr Brown, Jason!] was jailed.

However, way and by far the biggest thing to happen in Coventry during my time there had nothing to do with music.

When Coventry City Football Club - the Sky Blues - won the FA Cup in 1987, it seemed like greatest moment of my life. I believe everyone in Coventry felt the same way.

Words cannot recall describe the collective joy that the people of Coventry and the surrounding area felt at that moment.

Remarkably, you could see it coming.

From the quarter-final stage, I was totally convinced Coventry would win and even successfully predicted the winning score for the final.

I just wish I had put my wages on it!

Exeunt Omnes : Jason Tilley's India

Hallelujah! A miracle has happened. I have found a great new day-job! I am leaving Leamington Spa! I'm returning to the big, bad city of London!

I can hardly believe my luck. Although I have been happier here over the last few months than before, quitting Leamington for gainful employment is an opportunity I have to - and will - seize with both hands.




It has been a long time in coming. I have lost count of the number of jobs I have applied for over the past two years.

I became so desperate at one point last year that I foolishly enrolled with almost every headhunter and employment agency in London. All to no avail. Until now.

It could not have come at a better time. When I came back after Christmas, my dear flatmate Attila Szalo expressed a burning desire to jack in his job in Leamington to travel in India.

So I invited my old friend Jason Tilley, who has spent the past five years travelling and photographing on the sub-continent, round to talk about India with Attila.

(Incidentally, I selected 18 of Jason Tilley's brilliant images to display with this blog.



Jason's tales of travelling India were extraordinary and, in some cases, rather disturbing. For instance, a sleazy bloke spiked his drink in a bar and then followed him back to his room, resulting in a narrow escape.

I would absolutely love to travel in India, but, as when I went to Ecuador, I suspect I would spend a lot of time avoiding other Westerners.



Attila has put in his notice at work and leaves on 18 February and I hope to arrange a good send-off for him.

Then I shall leave about a month later. (My best efforts to tie up loose ends and negotiate a reduced notice period ended up meaning I was leaving in eight weeks rather than three months).

It is all a bit weird - rather unreal. I cannot get my head around it.



In order to help make better use of the next month, I have joined the nearby and expensive gym - Pure - right round the corner from the Leamington Garret.

It is 52.50 pounds sterling for a calendar month and I reckon I will have to use it at least a dozen times to get my money's worth out of it.

Easirt said than done as I am often only here three full evenings a week.

Today was my first day at the gym, so I got up at 6.20am and went for a swim before work; then went in and told everyone I was leaving; went down to London for a meeting; came back and returned to the gym.

Pure is a lovely gym, even if the human scenery is not quite as spectacular as on the streets of Belgravia (where I was this afternoon).

I like the swimming pool. It is as if the Leamington Garret has its own beautiful, private pool - just a minute's walk from the penthouse!




On the poetry front I have not made much progress. At the weekend I printed out 10 of last year's crop and have started editing them, but anything and everything distracted me.

Today, on the train back from London, it dawned on me that my valedictory appearance on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire is next week, and I had promised the station's poet laureate, the highly affable Jo Roberts, that I would write a poem about Coventry Precinct!

I started it but, having penned only two lines, started chatting to a friendly girl from Birmingham called Lydia who tried to convince me that Brum was an extremely welcoming place.

It occurred to me that she might be right. Perhaps, I should have lodged in Birmingham rather than Leamington Spa. (Too late now).



But I digress... I did not fancy having to find a new flatmate. Having had one good one (and one very bad one), I was not keen on playing Russian flat-lette once again. (The scar has not fully healed).

The Landlord - Mr Rigsby out of Rising Damp - has kindly agreed for me to stay on after Attila goes at no extra rent (after a wee verbal tussle).

Attila's charming sister and brother - Zsofi and Peter - are staying in the Leamington Garret at the moment which has greatly improved the quality of the food we are eating, and also caused the Garret to be cleaned in the nick of time for Mr Rigsby's visit.




It is late on Sunday night now and I have just returned to Leamington Garret to find that the bureaucrats on the local council have taken down the 9am to 6pm parking restriction signs and replaced them with 8am to 8pm ones. They have also removed the disabled parking.


The former means I will have to set off for work by 8am every day and then park the best part of a mile away from the Garret between 5.15pm and 8pm every night to prevent some Nazi contracted by the council giving me a parking ticket for parking outside my own home.

I am not even able to buy a residents' parking permit because this street, despite its many residents, has been classed as 'non-residential' by local authority morons!

As usual there was absolutely no warning of the impending change in regulation and no consultation. I really hate the local penpushers. And yet still I pay the council tax to bolster their fat wage packets.








Now it is quiet and cold in the Leamington Garret; almost ten-fifteen with only a few lights still in the block of flats. I can see no one walking around, or doing anything.

Attila is away, presumably in London, and his brother and sister have gone back to Hungary, after a successful stay.

I feel like I am in a numbed state of limbo at the moment. Yesterday I made a list of the things I needed to do before leaving Leamington on the morning of Thursday, 20 March.

It came to 52 items! After working away at it most of today, I have ticked off only four of them!

The worst of it is that I wonder how much of my leaving plans are related to what I feel I ought to be doing - 'to do the right thing'.

When in reality, the vast majority of one's work colleagues, for instance, most probably don't give a fig whether you, or anyone, goes or stays.

I am organising an evening leaving do, but, if previous experience of day-job leaving events up here is anything to go by, it will be a quiet affair.



Regular readers of this journal may recall my efforts to gain a rounded knowledge of English poetry by reading - from cover to cover - the New Oxford Book of English Verse.


The last time I mentioned this I had reached Andrew Marvell, who was marvellous (don't excuse the pun!)

Now at last I am on my progenitor and hero George Gordon Byron. But, boy oh boy, have I suffered on this poetic journey!

I have read some great poetry but also some of the dreariest verse. There certainly seems to have been a slow patch in poetry in the half-century before William Blake came along.



Between Marvell and Blake, I read (some good, some dull): Henry Vaughan, Thomas Stanley, John Bunyan, Thomas Traherne, John Dryden, Charles Sackville, Aphra Behn, John Wilmot, Matthew Prior, Jonathan Swift, Isaac Watts, Alexander Pope, Henry Carey, James Thomson, Samuel Johnson...

And: Thomas Gray, William Collins, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Osbert Mordaunt, John Scott, William Cowper, Thomas Chatterton and George Crabbe.

I enjoyed parts of a lot of these dead poets, but it was like a breath of fresh air when I reached Blake and went into a purple patch of him, followed the great Robert Burns, the brilliant William Wordsworth, Walter Scott and Samuel Taylor Caleridge.

Before Byron, Walter Savage Landor, Charles Lamb, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, James Leigh Hunt and Thomas Love Peacock slipped in.

And I still have hundreds of pages still to read!



I have a couple of days of no-drinking to go.

This year I have decided that rather than being on the wagon for just January, I would extend it to 10 percent of the year, which means not drinking for 36.6 days (it is a leap year). Or this Wednesday night.

I have not really missed the booze, apart from in certain situations, like getting back to the Lewes Garret on Thursday night after a hell of a journey on the M40, M25 and M23, and really, really fancying a glass of red wine.



I went to The Stage's New Year at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, for the first time in about five years.

It was strange being the only sober person on that huge room awash with people and champagne.

One of the many things I like about showbiz folk is their tremendous optimism in the face of adversity - at least publicly.

I met one of the girls who didn't become Maria on the hit BBC show. She was delightful and told me enthusiastically about her pantomime and her singing lessons.

Later, I got chatting to a very pretty girl who told me about her forthcoming engagement at the Kings Head pub theatre in Islington, north London.

Only after she had left did a mate tell me, 'That was Abi Titmuss - John Leslie's ex.'

I remembered her name from the popular press. I have never been very good at recognising famous faces!



 More than ever I left the party thinking that we are all getting older; none of my generation can truthfully describe themselves as young any more.


Perhaps surprisingly, I felt quite sad to hear of Jeremy Beadle's death.

When I wrote about television for a national newspaper, I often used to attack his cruel prankster shows.

However, when I met him, he was most pleasant, despite his avowed hatred of journalists.

And Jeremy Beadle took it in good part when I successfully played a prank on him live on radio, and later wrote about it.

If nothing else, he was a good sport, although his true personality will always be a mystery to me.



It is late now and I need to turn in soon in order to make it to the Pure health club before work tomorrow.

I went five times in the first three days I have been a member, but I am not sure I can keep that up.

And I am very worried about my fast-approaching appearance on Coventry and Warwickshire Radio on Tuesday.



I have written about the council's plans to demolish the precinct after decades of redevelopment.

It made me almost nostalgic for my days as the local pop writer on the Evening Telegraph in Coventry (1987-8) - with Jason Tilley taking brilliant photographs for me - but I spend far too much time with my head flush with yesteryear.



Now it is Wednesday February 6 and I have achieved my goal of not drinking for 10 percent of the year.


I have also pointlessly driven 407 miles today and am exceptionally cream-crackered (much more of which in a forthcoming blog).

I am trying to write this on Attila's tiny Hungarian laptop and finding it near impossible (my fingers are too fat) so for now I shall publish (without checking it) and be damned!

Goodnight!

Images of India / Big Ken

Images of India

Leamington Garret. Something a bit different this week. I am featuring the work of my fast friend Jason Tilley, who is a very gifted and determined photographer.

His story is an interesting one. He was a successful press and advertising photographer until three or four years ago, at which point he decided to sell everything: his house, his car, and most of his other possessions, so he could travel in India for three years taking black-and-white photographs.

He returned about a year ago, his funds exhausted. Jason had taken hundreds of amazing images but the intensity of the experience had changed him.



He seemed very different from the Jason Tilley I had worked with in the 1980s and found it very hard to adapt to life back in Coventry.

We met up, admittedly with pretty disastrous results. Gradually over the past year, my friend has seemed less down in the dumps. He came over to the Leamington Garret last week and we went out to the Jug & Jester for a couple of beers. As usual, it turned into the full gallon and we talked and talked.



Despite our very different experiences recently, I feel I have much in common with Jason. When I first knew him, he was an 18-year-old Cov Kid with a natural talent for photography who took pictures for my thrice-weekly pop column on the Coventry Evening Telegraph.

We had a grear time visiting and photographing pop stars including James Brown and Prince, but, at that time, he did not suffer from the same restive angst about life that I always have done. Now methinks he does. In spades.



We discussed how lonely life is. Even though there are nearly always people around me, I feel it strongly. I am alone in a crowded world. I was surprised Jason also expressed the loneliness of his existence. He is good at forming relationships. Yet you can be utterly alone whilst in company.

He said relationships do not matter to him any more. He just wants to complete his Indian project. This is his life’s work. I admired him because I could see it was all that really counted. He has put his art first and has to succeed.



His work is stunning. And, yet, it is so hard to get other people to see it. Jason said he has managed to get some well known photographers to endorse the project and a selection of his photographs are also displayed on the the PhotographyBlog. They look superb.

When you see all the suffering his subjects have been through, it is not surprising that taking these images cost Jason a slice of his soul.

Now he wants to go back to India to complete the project. He should and must do this. Jason Tilley is producing something historic.



After the obligatory kebab and chips at the take-away opposite the Jug, Jason and I returned to the Leamington Garret. We sat on the roof outside my bedroom, smoking his roll-ups and talking deeper and darker.

I was alarmed he insisted on sitting on the wall. It is around 100 foot down, a sheer drop. He could not be persuaded otherwise.

We talked of the madness of life in India and it made me think of all the horrible/wonderful things I saw in Ecuador. They are places where there is no safety net.



Well, I commend Jason’s photographs to you. I thank him for the permission to publish them on this site. Obviously, they are his copyright, so if you are interested in promoting them elsewhere, please email him through this site or Photography Blog.

He is a masterful photographer and deserves a huge break.

Apart from this special blog, I cannot resist a little round-up of what else has been happening:




· My flatmate brought home Taxi Driver on DVD. Watching it reminded me of what a great movie it is. Here, in reverse order, are my favourite 10 scenes:

10. Travis (Robert De Niro) driving through the burst fire hydrants in New York City,
9. Another taxi driver in the coffee house bullshitting about his sexual conquests with female fares,
8. Travis teasing the Secret Service man, giving him the wrong address and then the slip,
7. His first sight of Iris (Jodie Foster), the schoolgirl hooker he decides to save from a life on the streets,
6. Travis driving the presidential candidate and telling him the human scum needed to be washed off the streets of New York City,
5. Travis walking into the campaign office and super confidently and successfully asking out the beautiful Betsy (Cybill Shepherd),
4. The very moving reading of the letter from Iris’s grateful parents,
3. Travis inspecting an impressive selective of firearms and buying the lot,
2. Travis taking Betsy on their first proper date to a pornographic movie with a predictable reaction from her,
1.The big finale shoot-out in which Travis blows away the pimps, rescues Iris and emerges an all-American hero. Cool! Taxi Driver is a great film!




· I cycled for five miles through a thrilling lightning storm the other morning. It was incredible. The forks of lightning seemed all around the mountain bike. The water was coming down in rivers. I could not see, it was so heavy. My eyes were full of it. For the first time in my life I was literally soaked to the skin.



Big Ken. (Flashback to Tuesday, 9 May 2006)

Leamington Garret. 6.24pm by ‘The Clock’. I can get a really good reading from it in good weather with my glasses on. Sometimes in the dark, however, I am making a wild stab at it, and, yet, it is so more romantic telling the time this way than by looking at the clock on the computer (which I have taped over).

On the way here, I heard on Radio 4 the Six O’Clock bongs of Big Ben, and, I thought that Our Clock needs a name: Big Bill, Big Wen - or Big Ken, perhaps.

I am going over to Meriden to see my photographer friend Jason.

Oliver's Poetry