Down to the Waterline(1978)
North East England, particularly Tynemouth in December can be spectacularly beautiful, its the one time of the year when you get to see these spectacularly beautiful red sunrises, all you have to do is be up before 8am. We were living with some of the best songs from Dire Straits and Lindisfarne, eloquent in describing the place we lived. This was no backwater. Why would anyone want to leave? Strange as it now seems in 1979 we used to ask ourselves why anyone would want to stay. Youth, the world looks different when you are eighteen.
1978 the year before travelling, girlfriends, and interesting jobs – still living with our parents. Our spare time was mostly spent on motorcycles and in pubs, with few evenings spent at home. Back then, there were no gaming consoles, bedroom TVs, or PCs. If you wanted to talk to people, you went out – mostly to pubs, and sometimes to go weight training and admire each other’s motorcycles. We wanted girlfriends and well-paid jobs, but wanting and knowing how to get them were two different things. We knew there had to be more to life than motorcycles and pub nights, but we didn’t know what it was. So while we were waiting for our dream jobs and girlfriends to appear, we knew we had to do something else.
Motorcycles meant freedom
When I get me moped out on the road
Jasper Carrott
I’m gonna ride, ride, ride, ride, ride!
The Dream of the Open Road – Trips to the Lake District
Motorcycles provided us with a sense of freedom and adventure, something Arthur and I both shared as a common interest. It was easy to become more consumed with maintaining and repairing less reliable British motorcycles than actually riding them. Owning a British motorcycle meant months spent rebuilding the engine. The only time we truly experienced the thrill of the open road was during trips to the Lake District.
Many say that England’s only truly spectacular road is the stretch between Hexham and Penrith via Alston, and the 75-mile journey from Newcastle to Pooley Bridge was nothing short of exhilarating, with breathtaking views and hairpin bends. However, in the rain and dark, it was less enjoyable. During one trip, we stopped halfway at the Blue Bell Inn in Alston as the rain poured down and dusk fell. We must have caused disruption for the regulars as we unloaded our wet motorcycle gear and camping equipment in the middle of the lounge, but they took it in good spirit. Our weekend trips involved camping, and in the mornings, the friendly campsite owner would send his doberman into the tent as a gentle reminder to pay the campground fees.
Looking back, the experience with motorcycles as teenagers was quite the adventure, especially while learning to ride. Motorcycles would become a lifelong interest for most of us, providing an easy talking point when meeting strangers. However, there were limits to what we could get from a bike. Despite all the promises made in Lindsay Anderson’s film ‘If’, at no point did I come close to persuading a naked girl to get on the back of my BSA Starfire, which was notoriously unreliable due to its engine’s relatively high compression ratio, putting additional stress on engine components, particularly the bearings. The big end bearings, in particular, were known to be a weak point and prone to failure if the engine was revved too hard or not maintained properly. This was a common issue with many British bikes of the era. Six weeks after buying the bike, the big end went dramatically, and it took 15 months to rebuild it. When the time came to leave home, the decision to discard the bike and motorcycling in general was not difficult.
The Nightmare of a Dead End Job
As teenagers, there was always a fear of getting stuck in a rut and ending up like our parents or some other old person. Such was the mindset of an 18 year old. “If you’re in a rut, you’ve got to get out of it” to quote a popular song at the time. Yet our lives were not that dull we were constantly trying new things, meeting new people, starting new courses or jobs, going to bars and clubs for the first time, but we were still too young to have found our niche in life. We had a friend, who shall remain nameless, who was the same age as us but seemed to have aged well beyond his years. Within ten minutes of starting a conversation, he would be explaining why it was imperative that he remain in his job as a civil servant for the rest of his life. There’s nothing wrong with this, particularly if you enjoy what you do, but when proclaimed as the least worst option, it’s not the inspiring talk that any 18-year-old wants to hear. Thirty years later, he was still in perpetual fear of losing his job. People who hate their jobs really hate Mondays. At the time, The Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” was riding high in the charts, and of all the songs around at the time, that was the one sung in pubs with the most gusto. We were not alone.
Bar, Bars and More Bars
We would queue up at opening time, and leave when we got thrown out, lots of singing and drinking, though no dancing. Pooley Bridge was where we went, usually six of us, either on motorcycles or in cars. We camped and drank. Don’t think I’ve ever had such a good time in a pub. the next morning after paying the campground fee we would go in a cafe in Pooley Bridge. The cafe had a jukebox, we would play ‘Into the Valley’ by the Skids. After breakfast we would go for a walk or wait for the pub to re-open.
Late License at the Beachcomber
A typical weekend evening might consist of walking between four pubs; The Pheasant, The Border Terrier or Broadway, The Rigger and finish at the Beachcomber. The Beachcomber had a late license, unusual in those days. By the time you got there you were three pints in, this lent the beachcomber a surreal atmosphere, compounded by the South Sea Island decor, at odds with the world in which we lived.
Newcastle Pubs
Our favourite Newcastle pub, the Duke of Wellington on High Bridge. In this pub the beer, Belhaven 70/- was our favourite, was served on trays. We promised to take our Dads in there, but we never did. If you sat in the wrong part of the public bar, the smell from the toilets was overwhelming, the lounge was fine though. Can remember upsetting the landlord one night. In the 70’s this pub was an oasis in a landscape dominated by Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, whose offerings Scotch and Exhibition were less palatable.
One of the oldest pubs in Newcastle had a club in the late seventies, you paid a pound annual membership and could drink until two. The dance floor would vibrate when you walked or danced on it, always a surprise that it didn’t collapse. One night we arrived to avail ourself of our club membership but a wedding party had booked the place. Arthur tried to gate crash this. Outside were the Long Stairs, a good place to stop and throw up on your way home. A practise I would reveal to subsequent touring parties many times in years to come.
Newcastle in the dark ages of the 1970’s
At the start of the 1970 movie Get Carter, the hero played by Michael Caine, arrives at Newcastle Central Station. The entire railway station looks like its illuminated by a single 60 watt bulb, even the platform signs announcing Newcastle upon Tyne are almost impossible for anyone on the train to read. Michael Caine leaves the railway station and walks into a nearby pub. The bar, which is also very dark, is frequented by men who look like they’ve spent their entire working lives down the pit hewing coal with a pick axe and shovel.
My own memories of Newcastle in the late seventies are similar though less clear cut. One night in the late seventies we went on a pub crawl around Westgate Road, just up from Central Station. There was a pub called the Waterloo.
I remember asking for a Britvic orange, today you would ask for a Diet Coke, I was driving. The barman, laughed, reached up to a high shelf behind the bar, pulled down a bottle of orange squash, blew a load of dust off and proceeded to fill up my glass. Later walking down a back alley we found ourselves in the midst of complete devastation, blackened ruined buildings, it looked like the Luftwaffe had just left after a bombing raid. We were surprised, this was not the Newcastle we were used to, the Newcastle of indoor shopping malls and Art Deco cinemas. We never forgot that experience and it still serves as a reminder there were still parts of the city that looked like Beirut during the civil war. Needless to say this particular area of Newcastle around Central Station has been transformed. Devastation can still be found but not so close to the city centre.
One night Arthur went for a job interview at a Casino for bar work, just off Westgate Road, the same part of Newcastle. I waited outside, bleak doesn’t begin to describe it. Unbeknown to me I was standing a few feet away from Newcastle’s ancient Town Walls and Towers, built when Newcastle really was a town rather than a city. In the seventies these walls were almost completely obscured by Bus stations, sheds and rubbish, if they had been visible they would have appeared blackened with centuries of pollution. Today Newcastle’s Town Walls and Towers are clean and proudly illuminated at night for everyone to enjoy, some indication of the kind of transformation that has occurred even in the bleakest parts of the city centre.
Wallsend Weight Training
On the rare nights that we didn’t go drinking, we would go weight training in a gym in Wallsend. There was a club, cost a pound a week, the fees were collected by this guy with a perm, who didn’t look like he ever lifted any weights. One year he organised a Christmas do, which consisted of touring all the CIU clubs in Newcastle and Heaton. Some of the members of the weight training club were enormous and it was a funny feeling going out drinking with them. Needless to say we were not enormous.
Black Horse Monkseaton
The barmaid in the Black Horse had ample cleavage and was keen to show it off, this provided two reasons to go in. Uncharacteristically we would compete with each other to buy the next round. We soon learned it was better to ask for pints that needed to be pulled rather than a button press.
One night a guy came up, introduced himself and asked if he could sit down and talk to us. People in the north east in pubs have a reputation for being friendly, compared to London, but this was unusually forward. He then proceeded to tell us all about his travels, in Europe with nothing more than a sheet of polythene. A good storyteller, we were both impressed with his forwardness and his spirit of adventure. Perhaps this was something we could do.
GAP Year
The term “gap year” is believed to have originated in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, initially referring to the practice of taking a year off between finishing secondary school and starting university. However, I had never heard of the expression at the time. If I had, I would have welcomed the idea with open arms. Nevertheless, I had already left school and was working at a bank which I detested. Moreover, I did not have the grades to attend university. To make matters worse, a teacher had told me that I was not university material, despite the fact that he had never been to a university himself. When he was 18, only a small percentage of his cohort went to university, and he was not one of them, so he had no idea about universities.
I did have a couple of tantalizing glimpses of university life when I went on day visits at 17. The students showing us around all seemed to have an unhealthy preoccupation with architecture, the bars seemed to be full in the middle of the day, and no one seemed to have a care in the world. I was quite willing to give all this a try, but my A-level results were not good enough, so I guessed that this world was not going to be for me.
Some time later, the bank sent me on a week-long course to Leeds, and I went to see the Ramones, who were performing at Leeds University Students Union. John Peel, a British radio DJ, famously described the first time he heard the Ramones as “one of those moments that are unforgettable.” He went on to say, “The sense of a new start and a new possibility was in the air. It felt like a new day was dawning.” For me, the first time I heard and saw the Ramones was at Leeds. From that day on, I knew my days at the bank were numbered
Getting Fit
We thought it would be a good idea to get fit before we went, remember clearly going down to our local beach ‘Longsands’, me in the car, Arthur on the Triumph, then, running half way along the beach and collapsing in a heap by the rock pool, we must have run a good 500 meters. That was the full extent of our preparation.
Newcastle is one of those places that visitors fall in love with, if they spend any time there, they never want to leave. But we were young and happy to go at least for a while.
