The Ned Wood Archive

I searched for form and land
For years and years I roamed

This is my home now. These four walls of my room in the Palace of Marchmont. I’ve got everything I need. My pictures on the wall. My albums and my singles. My small collection of books. Sometimes I go and chat with the others in the kitchen. Gav or Pall. Maybe Fi or Cat or Nessie if they’re round. Kat comes round with Nessie sometimes, but it seems like I always put my foot in it with her. Say the wrong thing. So maybe I relax in my room. Put on an album. Tom Verlaine. Roxy Music. The Human League. And now I’ve got a new toy. We’ve rented a TV from Granada. My room’s got the old aerial connection in the corner because it used to be the lounge so I get the TV in my room. Pall comes in to watch Top of the Pops.

This is my home now. This town. I feel like I belong here. Marchmont. The Meadows. Shopping over in Bruntsfield or Newington Street. Getting records down in the centre of town from Bruce’s or Virgin. Hunting out old books. The Grassmarket. The Botanical Gardens. St Bernard’s Well. Up on Salisbury Crags. Even just wandering round Tollcross or George IV Bridge, I feel like I know this place and it knows me.

You know what a land bridge is? It’s when the continents move around and bump into each other. Species from each side flood across the new join and colonise the new lands. Not all of them survive, and after the continents split and go their separate ways again, the species evolve differently. But if you look back at the fossil record you can see when the land bridge occurred. Edinburgh is a bit like that. You get all of these different influences mingling and mixing and you look back and you can see how all of these influences flooded through the whole place. It must be the crossroads of the universe. Every life form in the galaxy must pass through it at some time or another. That’s why I love it.

But there is one place down south that I think about often. That I feel equally at home in even though I never go anymore. The green green grass of home. The City Ground, Nottingham. I’ve been watching the results all year. I’ve even managed a couple of games on TV, when Dougie Donnelly isn’t showing the curling or Heriots FP v Boroughmuir. When they’ve got someone other than Aberdeen or Dundee United on Sportscene.

May 28th 1980. This is why we got the TV. The European Cup Final live from Madrid. Kevin Keagan’s Hamburg v Nottingham Forest.

These past three years have been like a dream. A fantasy. Scraping up out of the second division in May 77 while I was watching Split Enz in Reading. Grabbing all of the points from Goodison on the first day of our season back in the show when I took a break from Millers Dale. Catching the fantastic displays on TV once or twice as we marched relentlessly to the league title. Getting the draw we needed at Coventry and knowing we were champions while I was window shopping in Southampton. Squeezing into the Trent End at the start of the following season after finding that my favourite spot next to the tunnel was now reserved for seat boys. The occasional game down in London. The wonderful results in Europe. Not being stupid enough to write us off. Watching the final in the student halls in Paddington and discovering that the whole student population now supported Forest when Trevor Francis scored.

The Miracle Men of Munich. The magnificent mass of Peter Shilton in goal. The mean and moody monsters paired in central defence. The mercurial fullbacks. The midfield magicians. The marauding wingmen. The menacing marksmen. Could this really be the same team I saw struggle against York City five years earlier? And now? Masters of Madrid!

It wasn’t any easy game to watch. Trevor Francis was injured and we put five across midfield. It wasn’t entertainment. It was determination. Sheer hard work. Gary Birtles played a blinder. Ran his socks off and kept the Hamburg defence busy. The midfield kept Keegan quiet. Kenny Burns and Larry Lloyd were totally solid and Peter Shilton stopped anything that got through them. A goal from Robbo after twenty minutes was enough. Champions of Europe again. Like I told Cat (and anyone else who would listen): it’s not just about telling stories. These boys are writing new ones.

So here I am, watching from a distance. The old place, where the old dears live, is just somewhere I go back to every now and then. To see the old folk from school. If they’re around. To see me Mam and me Dad. And this year, I remembered to go home for Dad’s birthday at the beginning of June like the obedient, well-mannered son that I am.

And Fi told me how stupid that was because I missed the Meadows Festival on the Saturday. That’s right. A festival on the Meadows. If you believe that! Assorted punk bands playing at the bottom of our road. And assorted punks pogoing at the bottom of our road. I should have been there. And I’d missed Adam and the Ants at Valentinos the Sunday before, so she was winding me up about being a part time punk. Did I go walking down the Kings Road? Yes, once or twice. Did I play my records very loud? Yes, all the time. Did I pogo in the bedroom? Probably. Did I go to see the Clash for £2.50? No, we only paid a pound. Did I go to Rough Trade to buy Siouxsie And The Banshees? I can’t remember. There or Virgin. Join Hands would have been Virgin in Birmingham. Scream could have been Rough Trade. I guess all that pretty much qualifies me as a part time punk. I’d said that Adam Ant would have been too punky which made her laugh. He was just trying to get his new sound together. The really successful one. Kings of the Wild Frontier and such. But they played old stuff like Zerox as well. And the mighty Cheetahs played the Meadows Festival and I’d missed that too.

But, bless her, she didn’t tell me what I’d really missed. The Flowers supporting the Ants and the Delmontes burning up the Meadows.

I’m pretty sure I first came across The Flowers in Bruce’s. I walk in, the guy behind the counter sees that I’m a groovy chap, slings their first 45 on his turntable and I’m hooked. They were wonderful. That could well have been just before Christmas about the time I got London Calling or maybe the following year after I came back. They were on the first Earcom which came out some time in 79. We all got the second Earcom cos Joy Division were on it. I’m pretty sure Pall had the first. Just that Earcom and two excellent 45s were all the Flowers managed. Groovy rhythm with dirty chiming guitars. Funky driving bass, less ominous, less foreboding than Joy Division, but not far off. Lyrics maybe a bit dark, a bit negative, but they sound happier than Ian Curtis. The singer reminded me of Lene Lovich. That yelp in the voice. Or maybe Essential Logic. And guitar which was part Gang of Four part Velvets clatter. Slashing and spiky. Maybe a bit Mekons too, none of which should surprise given that they were from the Fast Product stable. Two singles. Then they disappeared.

I didn’t find out about The Delmontes until later. They put their first single out while I was in Italy. Guess I heard them in Bruce’s sometime after I got back. Wonderful psycho punk organ. Could be from late 60s California. Trembling surf guitar. Vocals out of the Nico school of classical pronunciation. Apparently they were originally called Strange Daze suggesting a Doors obsession, but they were better than that. More like the late great Seeds. Or the Electric Prunes. The second single came out in March 81 – a bit rockier, but still with that psychedelic 60s Nuggets vibe. After that, we didn’t hear any more from them. Pity. They could have been huge.

And while they were playing down our road, I was down south. At least, I think it was that weekend. I was on the road a lot that term. Sid Harris got married to Julie Greene in Exeter that summer. A few of us went down and stayed the weekend. Jo had a party in Southampton. That was another weekend trip, meeting up with all the old folk – Sonia, Sniff, Vic Carson. Good times. Then there was the conference in Birmingham and some other work with Liverpool University. Trouble is, I can’t remember which weekend was which. So, maybe back home to see Dad was June 7th. Maybe it wasn’t. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, what I’m coming to is this. For some reason, probably because ancient history was on my mind, when I was back home to see Dad, I decided to go out to these Roman ruins outside town. They’re just the remains of walls, not much more than a foot high. It was an army station or staging post on Watling Street. You know – those small Roman settlements every 15 or 20 miles, spaced so that folk could walk between them in a day.

I thought it was fairly small beer, but that evening when me and Dad were talking about it, he told me that it was once much larger and that there was a roman villa nearby. None of this was in any of the guidebooks or stuff about the ruins, so I was a bit sceptical. He told me about some other ruins that had been found by one of the farmers in a nearby field and they included this mosaic which he said suggested that for some time the Romans had based someone fairly important in the area. Later that evening, he dug out an old cutting from the local newspaper that he’s filed away deep in the recesses of his office. Apparently this farmer had ploughed up all of these ruins – not that there was much in terms of volume to plough up, mostly just bits of the wall of a single room, but also the mosaic that was on the floor of that room. This would have been sometime in the 50s, Dad said. Nowadays it would be the crime of the century. People had a laugh about it back then. Said that farmers would do whatever they wanted and get away with it. Mind – they still do.

But there was a photograph in the old newspaper of the mosaic from the floor of that room. And that mosaic was of a king being crowned while sitting on a stone. And it looked, although you couldn’t really be sure cos it was black and white and a bit blurry, but it just looked as if the stone that was being sat on had a sword pictured on it. So maybe that mosaic was the source for the Anglo Saxon cross 30 miles away. Or maybe both were myths and both myths had the same source. Maybe the stone existed. Maybe it didn’t. All that remains is an old photograph of an even older mosaic.

On the train going back up north after I’d left, I was thinking about Pete’s tall tales about his Viking mates half inching the stone and I started wondering whether it could all fit together. Is it possible that there was a stone in deepest darkest south Staffordshire? Is it possible this Roman with his villa knew about it? Is it possible that the Vikings came down here to Staffordshire and lifted it? Had they even been this far? Very probably. They’d been to Abbots Bromley anyhow. Quite a few folk know about the Horn Dance: some folk messing around carrying these old deer antlers. This takes place each year in this place called Abbots Bromley. It’s a small place not too far from back home. Just on the Staffordshire side of the border with Danelaw. Not to be confused with King’s Bromley. Nor to be confused with the Bromley of the Bromley Contingent.

Everyone’s heard of the Bromley Contingent. Quite a few folk have got the records some of them made. But no-one outside of Yoxall, or Tamworth, or the Ridwares has ever heard of King’s Bromley. Mainly because there is nothing to be heard off. Folk from there generally haven’t got the wit of the Yockos or the eccentricity of the Tammos. They just tend to go unnoticed. If ever anyone meets a Brommo and finds out where they’re from, the chances are they’ll say, if they say anything, “Oh, I know that Bromley, where they do the horn dance.” Which is like confusing Lancashire and Yorkshire or mixing up a Geordie and a Mackem.

So these two Brommos were at Nottingham University. Brommos as in from King’s Bromley. This would be in the 60s or something. As part of some rag week stunt, they stole the Abbots Bromley antlers and took them down to King’s Bromley and held them for ransom. Like when Sid Harris borrowed the aardvark from the Biology department at Southampton. Not exactly, though. Abbots Bromley wanted the antlers back. The Biology department didn’t notice the aardvark had gone missing for a couple of years. But the theft itself was just as easy. The antlers were only kept in the Parish church, so it wasn’t the most difficult challenge ever undertaken in a rag week. The tragic thing is that the students managed to break one of the antlers as they were taking them from the church. Anyway, coming out of all this, they decided to do some carbon dating and stuff on the bits of broken antler and found that they were reindeer antlers from around 1000 AD. From Scandinavia. So they must have come over with the Vikings.

We know that Staffordshire is the centre of the universe and that all of humanity has passed through there at some time or other. And that includes Vikings messing about in Abbots Bromley at least. Maybe they traded some antlers for an old piece of stone.