The Ned Wood Archive

You may see the meaning of within

It is being

The Beatles

Life had to go on.  I couldn’t just walk and write in my little book.  There were more important things.  The Pistols were on Top of the Pops doing Pretty Vacant.  They didn’t have a TV at the Traveller’s.  Or, if they did, I never saw it.  Looking back, I really should have asked, but somehow I assumed there wasn’t one, or maybe I felt I couldn’t ask.  Whatever, I went back to those digs in Buxton for the night and watched Top of the Pops with my sausage and chips.  Back then, you weren’t supposed to know who was going to be on, but I had a feeling, so I thumbed into town for the afternoon and bought an NME and then I bought the single.  Not that I had anything to play it on, but again, I felt I had to own it.  They were fab.  And it was such a great tune.  

I bumped into Oxford Rich again.  Or he bumped into me.  I was working on the A6 bypass at Taddington, trying to prove that the lava flows I’d found in Miller’s Dale had reached that far, even though you could tell just by looking at the break in the slope rising either side of the road.

Anyway, this old Ford Granada stopped on the dual carriageway just after it had passed me, and Rich stuck his head out of the passenger side window and yelled at me to jump in.  So I did, backpack, rock hammer, samples, and all.

We went into Buxton and Rich bought me lunch at one of the cafes along the high street.  You could tell he wasn’t surprised to see me – it was as if he had been thumbing up the road from Derby specifically to see me.  I was pretty hungry, so I sat and ate while he pulled a battered old paperback from his pocket and read.  I asked him if he ever stopped, to which he said ‘Reading or riding?’ then ‘not until I’ve finished’ by way of an answer to both implied questions.  He was reading Kerouac systematically and then he’d move on to some other author.  In the same way he was thumbing round England systematically, or at least alphabetically.  Just to find out.

‘Where next?  I asked.

‘I’ve got to go up to Scotland and do the A7 next’ he said.  And, true enough, after lunch he walked up past the Devonshire to start thumbing further north.

After that, I took to thumbing into Buxton on the odd day, and going into the small record shop at the bottom of the hill near the crossroads to get my shot of vinyl.  Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner, Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, the Jam, the Stranglers.  But they didn’t have too much modern stuff, so I ended up buying what I could find.  Old Stones singles, Sonny and Cher, Creedence, Them.  I kept them in a cardboard box and took them out to look at every so often.  I carried them all home at the end of the summer, still unplayed.

Elvis died.  And in the NME there was this advert saying ‘My aim is true Elvis’.  And I thought: how callous.  The guy looked more like Buddy Holly than Elvis, but here he was trying to make a quick buck out of Elvis dying.  But I soon found out what a genius this new Elvis really was.  We went to see him, me and Annie.  There were five of them: Nick Lowe, Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric, Larry Wallis, and Costello.  He played stuff from his second album.  It was incredible.  You don’t always know when you hear new stuff for the first time at gigs, but with these songs, you just knew they were wonderful.  We met the bass player out of the Jam afterwards.  He’d been to the same gig.  He still looked like his trousers were too tight.

The funniest of all was the Hot Rods’ single Do Anything you Wanna Do.  I saw it advertised in an NME I bought on one of my trips into Buxton, so I ordered it.  The following week when I turned up to collect it, I was charged twice the price of a single, because it was a twelve inch, not the regulation 7 inch.  I argued with the woman at the shop, but she showed me the invoice from the record company and suggested I write to them.  She gave me the name of the bloke to write to even.  So I did.  And I got this letter back which said:

‘You are right about the record.  It’s not our fault.  You better do something about it.’

And on the outside someone had written ‘Do something Neddy’.

I pinned that on the wall, but even though I kept seeing the message, I didn’t do anything about the single.  All I did after that was listen to the record when I got home and as it was so wonderful, I decided it was worth what I paid.  Some singles are worth even more.

Talking of which, I haven’t told you about the day that last term when I saw Bernie in the coffee bar putting all these singles he’d bought on top of the juke box.  He’d got about five of them, mostly second hand I think, cos they were at least six months old.  He’d put them all in white sleeves – he gave me the picture sleeves to keep safe.  When I asked him what he was doing, he said:

“Have you ever heard of the Provos and their bikes?  They left all these white bicycles lying around Amsterdam so anyone could ride them for free.  I always thought that was cool.  So I worked out what we could do.  I got these records right.  I’ll put them in these white sleeves so everyone knows they can borrow them, then what happens is, you take one, listen to it, and then bring it back the next day.”

So I thought I’d have a go.  He’d got The Saints ‘I’m Stranded’, The Boys ‘I don’t care’, Eddie and the Hot Rods Sound of Speed EP, Tom Petty’s’ ‘American Girl’, and The Vibrators ‘Pogo Dancing’.  He left them all on top of the juke box in the coffee bar.  I borrowed the Vibrators for a day.  Actually it turned out to be Chris Spedding, but that didn’t make it any better.  Apart from the Saints single, which no-one ever borrowed, all of the singles disappeared, so Bernie had to give up his idea as a bad job.

And I went to a couple of games after the season started in August.  It wasn’t easy.  The first one was OK – Everton away on the first Saturday of the season.  I was able to get a ride along the A6 and then another to Liverpool.  Didn’t have too much trouble getting back, because I scrounged a lift with a couple of Trickies.  Everyone in the away end was so happy after that game, I could probably have scrounged a lift back with any of them.  We’d started off well with pretty much the same team that brought us up, so we were happy.  Really we were just happy to be back among the big boys.  Playing all of the big teams in their nice big grounds made such a change.  For a start, we were actually playing in grounds with an atmosphere.  Somebody asked me once: 

“What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” 

And I said:

“York City away.”  

The smallest crowd we got that first year back in the show was for the local derby at Leicester!  Over 50,000 watched us the week before Christmas when we won 4-0 at Old Trafford.  I watched that game on Match of the Day as proud as any father.  We’d been top of the table more or less since the start of the season and after seeing that we knew we’d be top at the end.

I thumbed over to see us play West Ham in the League Cup too.  That was much harder.  Not for Forest: we won 5-0 and went on to win the cup.  It was hard for me, because it was a night match and I figured there was no way I was going to thumb back through Derby and then along the A6.  Instead, I sneaked into one of the boathouses along the Trent, just next to the ground, and kipped in a canoe.  I remember that night we played some amazing football.  The sky over the ground turned red and stayed that way as each goal went in.  Even when I woke up early the next morning, it was still red.  And so was the river reflecting the sunrise as I looked at it down past the Trent End.