But if you want an evening of commitment, humour, wit and drama, all directed outwards rather than in, Kevin Coyne's your man."Įxtracts from NME review, January 14, 1978. Most people simply prefer something a bit easier on the ear (Elvis Costello, for instance). "A larger public for Coyne seems no nearer, unfortunately, even though the tunes are immediate and the vision humane rather than bleak. Whichever, Money provided texture and swing, slightly mellowing Coyne's raw presentation of his songs." He played solo, briefly with Money and sang several accompanied only by his partner's electric piano. His guitar technique is Richie Havens-style, thumb-as-bottleneck, the instrument tilted well back into his stomach. "Coyne's grasp of melody, rhythm and narrative is such that his many vocal idiosyncrasies only rarely upset the structural applecart. John Martyn is another reference point, in the use of gadgetry (in Coyne's case backing tapes and use of echo) and of voice-as-instrument." "Let loose on Johnny Ray's Cry, Coyne recalled no-one so much as Joe Cocker in his assault on Bye Bye Blackbird. "Though many at The Nashville had evidently expected to find oppressively intense, the humour that frequently surfaces in his songs and his banter helped to engage the affections of the audience." Nashville Rooms in London: January 5, 1978. Kevin Coyne supported by Zoot Money at the
Feel free to laugh and point, but spare a shudder for your own teenage lapses in taste too. My listening during this period ranged all the way from the Gang of Four to Joseph & his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and I've included my embarrassing choices here right alongside the NME-approved ones. It makes me cringe a bit now to remember some of the bands I loved in the first half of the seventies - Uriah Heep and Budgie spring to mind - but there it is. What I haven't done is rewrite the past to make myself look any cooler than I really was. If there's no quotation marks, then that means the original remark rambled on so much I had to rephrase it from scratch to make it tweetable. Where you see quotation marks surrounding a tweet, it's been subject to no more than these minor tweaks.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should also add that squeezing the diary's original observations into the strict 140-character limit demanded by Twitter often required some rewording and cuts. Seinfeld's George Costanza once remarked: "If you take everything I've ever accomplished in my life and condense it down into one day, it looks decent" - and that's exactly the principle I've followed here. The beauty of this format is that it allows me to pack a full seven years of events into just one year's tweets, which makes my life at the time look seven times more fascinating and fabulous than it really was. Twitter allows for no more than the briefest snippets recalling each gig, but here I've been able to add full write-ups of concerts I attended by the Clash, the Rolling Stones, Kilburn & the High Roads, the Ruts, the Specials, Eddie & the Hot Rods, Eric Clapton, Ian Dury & the Blockheads, Slade, Elvis Costello, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Chilli Willi & the Red Hot Peppers, the Undertones, Sam & Dave, Kevin Coyne, the Stiff Records revue, Richard Hell and a good few others.Īs you'll see, I leapt around pretty freely from one year to the next when choosing what to tweet about.
This version allows me to present the tweets in proper January-December chronological order, reinstate some of the missing punctuation which Twitter had forced me into and add whole host of bonus material too. That's why I've decided to give Moshpit Memories a more permanent home here.
The Twitter feed containing this material never picked up a lot of followers, but I enjoyed doing it and I think other old farts of about my age may find some nostalgic pleasure in it too. When I couldn't get to the gigs themselves, John Peel's nightly radio show and the ever-acerbic NME kept me up to speed. Along the way, I saw many of that era's best bands playing live in sweaty little clubs, bought a great many of their invigorating records and drank a ocean of beer. I started the diaries as a callow 16-year-old and ended them as a mature sophisticate of 23. These cover the period from 1975 to 1981, an era which included the heyday of UK pub rock, punk and ska. Throughout 2014, I maintained a daily Twitter feed giving extracts from my old diaries as a music fan.