I wasn't a Punk: 1978 to 1978

 Awakening to the Music
I remember a lot of music from 76 to 78- so this must have been when i started paying attention. Unfortunately not all of it - most of it - was very good. That summer there was the extremely irritating Smurf song. But The Motors' "airport" Kate Bush, "Man with the child in his eyes" among others made an impression. I didn't like punk yet. I don't think i approved.

Charts at that time was filled with a lot of junk: Showaddywaddy. Dreadlock Holiday by 10cc, and also gems: Jilted John, Siouxsie, Blondie, Costello, squeezeGradually I found my taste got wider - in 78 even began to pick up on such New Wave luminaries as Elvis Costello, Sham 69....

punk was passing me by completely - hot chocolate, showaddywaddy, ELO, Darts, Stayin' Alive soundtrack came out the back end of 1977 - so we had that inflicted upon us through most of 1978, and there was Grease which came out in 1978 - and a string of hit records by Olivia Newton John and unknown greaseball John Travolta: Summer Nights, You're The One That I Want, Hopelessly Devoted To You, Sandy.

My sister's tastes though. Not a bit like mine. She liked Abba, Brotherhood of Mann, , the Dooleys, The Carpenters. I must admit I really like the carpenters these days, but not then when it just sounded like MOR crap to me.  

most of the girls in my class seemed to be Bay City Rollers fans - they wore the scarfs and tartan stuff - though I still wasn't really driven by music by then...and I was never aware of the teenage girl stuff - my sister was too young, although that would soon change as she would increasingly get into bands like ABBA, The Carpenters, The Dooleys and Brotherhood of Man.

I wonder if I’d been a cis girl at the time whether I’d have been into BCR and done the screaming and idolising thing,or possibly, being neuro atypical, that was never going tobe my path. Later I met plenty of girls, thenwomen, who were essentially stealth Goths - so that they could only express themselves fully after leaving parents and school. I find it hard to believe I wouldn’t have been into goth, post punk and electronic music if I’d been a cis girl.

Maybe it was about this time that me and my sister were encouraged to call up the local radio station (which had only existed about a year or two at that point), Plymouth sound, and answer the quiz question. Actually, I think my mum rang and just put us on at the appropriate moments. The question was spell “Plymouth” which I think my sister got; and mine was spell “Argyle” which I got right. We won a pile of singles from their rejecto bin, kept in the foyer of the radio station offices. Dad had to drive us out there while we picked through this bin full of crap 7 inches and found however many records it was they said we could have each (5?). It was all Racey, smokey and other deeply mid 70s rock n roll revivalist pop bands. I picked mine more or less at random as I had no idea. But I did play them; don’t think they were ever my favourites and they never made it into my proper collection which began in 1979. 

SaturdayMorning Swap Shop influenced me too  - I usually saw music videos ontheir first, and saw pop stars like Paul Weller being interviewed. It started in 1976 - and because there was so much music on there,it was another breach of the wall my parents had tried to build around me to keep it out. 

Two important things from that period stand out - having the Plymouth sound Top 30 on in the car driving to/from trips to seaside or Dartmoor, and the tape recorder we were allowed to play with. Me and my sister put on little plays at first which mainly comprised of doing fake phone in shows. None of these tapes survive, which is probably a good thing. She had this old style machine which had a mic attachment which had to be held to the speaker of the radio.

Later, I used the tape recorder to record music from the radio. Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" was one - very odd sounding. Everyone took the piss out of it at the time, including Little & Large, but is held up as a classic today and Bush is hailed as a musical genius. But where Little and Large?

An extension to the taping little skits came around that time when our mum gave us a large bag of clothes for dressing up in. As they were mostly women's / girl's clothes I used to end up playing female parts and putting on one of the little dresses. I remember looking at myself in the mirror at myself in this little girl's dress with puffed sleeves; the dress was light yellow, the flared and frilly hemmed skirt sitting just above my schoolboy's bruised and scratched knees, though not hairy legged back then, and with a face still feminised by youth, could probably have passed as a girl but for my haircut and tomboy stance. My sister said I looked like the butch girl at school forced to put on a dress for Sunday best, and not really liking it much. Once my dad cottoned onto what was happening the bag disappeared pretty quickly though I never thought there was anything deviant in this, as it was OK for girls to dress up as boys, so why not the other way round?

Anyway – it was an important moment for me as a trans girl. I’d wanted to dress up as a girl for a long time and at this moment I realised why. Because to all intents and purposes I was a girl. My sister loved her dresses and through the summer especially I was very envious. This was followed by a period where I would sneak into my sisters bedroom and try her clothes on. It became an obsession and I just wish now that I could have talked about it to someone without being judged or condemned.

I think that the main catalyst for kicking off my obsession with music was my mother's tape recorder. Eventually I used it to tape songs from the radio - except my music tastes were rather limited so I struggled to find things to record. This rapidly changed though - the more I listened to pop music the more I found I liked it. One of the first songs I remember recording was Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" and I don;t think I even liked it that much back then.
Early finds were Blondie, Supertramp, Queen, none of that hard core punk stuff for me, at least not aged 10 and 11.
Gradually I found my taste got wider - in 78 even began to pick up on such New Wave luminaries as Elvis Costello, Sham 69....

While I studiously ignored the films of the moment - Stayin' Alive and Grease, I did go to the cinema to see new film Close Encounters of the Third Kind - a film about UFOs - something I'd been interested in for a few years now. April - Squeeze “take me”; beegees, night fever; pattis smith because the night; love is in th air; boney m “brown girl” and “rivers of Babylon”

My world changed when Numan appeared on TOTP doing are friends electric?. Yes!! There were alternatives to pop and disco. This music was utterly amazing and never quite left me – still has me in its power today.