The Ned Wood Archive

Hello I love you

Won’t you tell me your name

The Doors

Me and Annie went to see Gabriel three or four times. We went to see him at Birmingham Odeon at the end of September. He did two shows and we went to both. Middle of the front row. Me and our kid had gone to get tickets. We planned to queue all night, but as no-one else had turned up by one in the morning, we went home. We still managed to get up early the next day and get to the front of the queue before the box office opened.

And me and Annie went to see him at the Gaumont in Southampton on the same tour when the autumn term started about a week later. And then we went to see a special charity gig he did in Bath, when Annie’s brother drove us over. We were good mates with him and the band by then. He said thanks for coming.

But the first Gabriel gig I went to was the one up in London in April just after his album came out. I’d got two tickets – the other was for Lil so I had an excuse to stay with him. Term started on the Monday, summer term that is, but as I had tickets to see Peter Gabriel at Hammersmith on the Tuesday, I had to thumb it into London the next day. I had to get over to pick up Lil, or at least get over to Lil’s so he could drive in to Hammy Odeon, so I had to leave first thing in the morning. Like I say, you can never trust thumbing, so you need to give yourself time. I was staying with Lil, because I also had tickets for Lou Reed at Victoria for the Wednesday. Lil was this guy who I went to school with who had digs in Ealing. Have I told you this? His name was John Lilbourne, but we called him Lil, cos that’s what you did at school.

The other thing you can never trust is buying two tickets for gigs. It had been my habit to buy two tickets for gigs I went to like Gabriel and Reed, so I could get someone to come with me. I remember a couple of years before I’d got a single ticket for the Who at Wembley when they did the Who by Numbers tour and then had a crush on a girl called Julie who went to teacher training college in Wimbledon. I managed to persuade her to go to the Who gig with me, but then had to buy a second ticket which was miles away from me own, cos you know with those stupid arena gigs that they are almost as big as doing a gig on the Great Plains. Me and Jules had a great time exploring her college and going on the tube and singing Small Faces songs, because she’d insisted that she’d seen Ronnie Lane at Earl’s Court, and then singing them all again on the tube back and then at her hall in Wimbledon. But we’d had a lousy time at the gig because we’d been sat so far apart. So after that I got two tickets for gigs just in case I ever fell in love again. It worked for Gabriel cos Lil had my ticket in exchange for a bed at Billy’s. (I suppose Billy is short for Wilma or Wilhelmina or something. She was Lil’s landlady. You know, like in Billie Davis the singer.) But it didn’t work for Lou Reed, cos Lil didn’t want to come with me, cos he knows what he likes, so I ended up trying to sell the ticket outside. I was having no luck (although someone did offer me a joint in exchange for it) until I found someone else with a spare ticket to sell and we managed to sell two together. Trouble was, this meant I had to sit next to him all night, and he was such a trainspotter, so I had to keep listening to the history of Lou Reed and how all the albums from Sally Can’t Dance to Rock and Roll Heart, none of which I’d got, were all works of genius, especially Metal Machine Music. Some folk will just not shut up.

But that was the next night; I’m getting ahead of myself. Gabriel was a better gig, even though we were way at the back and we couldn’t see Robert Fripp who was supposed to be playing guitar. As well as the album which I’d been playing pretty much non stop for two months, he did some stuff I didn’t recognise and also played the Kinks “All Day & All of the Night”, although Lil came out of the show singing the Doors song to the same tune. He was being dumb not sarcastic. I don’t think he knows any Kinks songs apart from Lola. Even more amazing, we called in at some older guy that he works with on the way back, and this geezer had the Kinda Kinks LP. Cos what I do when I go to folks’ houses for the first time is check out their collections. So I got him to play Tired of Waiting and he was flattered cos he thought he was ‘too old to be with it’. The other albums were all early seventies crap like Carole King. And still Lil sang Hello I love you in the car.

We spent the Wednesday playing football in a tournament organised by Lil’s work. I was the ringer on his team, which was pretty poor luck, if you expect a ringer to be any good. But I scored a couple and pranged my leg on someone else’s boot and gained a limp to show off.

Then on the Thursday, we both thought we saw Phil Collins driving a Range Rover down near Brentford which is where Lil took me to thumb back to Southampton, the idea being that I go along the M4 then cut across to the M3 rather than have him take me all the way to the start of the M3 at Staines which is almost half way back to Southampton anyway. It’s almost impossible to thumb out of London, on account of the decent roads start so far away from where you are staying and you spend all your time just getting there. Annie and I spent a whole day trying to thumb north one Saturday and we didn’t really know where to start, so we took a tube to Golders Green and walked around looking for the start of the M1. And if you know London, you’ll know it’s only a mile and a half from any tube station, but some friendly local put us on a bus to Hendon Way and we tried there. Some guy in a Roller stopped in the outside lane and offered us a ride to Royston which I wish we’d taken just for the bragging we’d have, but they said it wasn’t the Royston near Barnsley, so when we asked where the hell was it then, they drove off. They were blocking at least ten other folk in the fast lane and probably felt guilty. Or maybe not. Do Roller drivers feel guilty about anything? Somehow I don’t think so. Anyway, Annie and me got another bus to Brent Cross and wasted an hour there before giving up and going to Euston and catching the train.

Then there was the time we tried to thumb it from Southampton to Birmingham to see Jonathan Richman and got stuck at Reading. The tickets were at the old dears but I ended up in Southampton the night before the gig. Not the best of plans, I know. It should have been easy to hitch home, but we got lost in Reading, couldn’t find the right road out, and had to get the train. We knew we would have arrived too late to pick up the tickets, so I had our kid drive in to meet me outside Birmingham Odeon.

You’d think that on such a small island, you could thumb somewhere, anywhere, in a day. Or maybe the problem is that we’re just not free enough to let go of our cares. Me and Annie could have stayed in Reading until we got a ride out. It’s a question of priorities.