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!

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