D.I.D. - Day 7

Moving on now to my work years, I had a couple of years with Nat West Bank and then moved on to General Accident, one of the big 7 insurance companys. I started out in Ealing but then moved to Birmingham to take up an assistant accountants role in that branch. This was in the first couple of years of the 1980s and The New Romantics were the fashionable music genre. Throughout my teenage years I had only done local school or youth club discos and never any of the local clubs so when I hit Birmingham that world opened up to me as part of my social life. There were two clubs we all used to go to. Faces, which was at Five Ways in Edgebaston and The Rum Runner on Broad Street. The former was much more mainstream chart music, though somewhat tinged with New Romanticism as were the charts, the latter was heavily New Romantic. And I through myself well into it. I had the clothing, the double breasted shirts, neck scarves, pixie boots, jodhpurs. And all the make-up went on as well. Luckily for me there are no photos remaining of that time!

The big groups of the time were Duran Duran, Human League, Visage, Ultravox, Heaven 17. I had my hair like Phil Oakey

Not seen by the powers at General Accident as suitable hairstyling for an accountant, more of which tomorrow.

The song I really liked from then was by Soft Cell, their biggest single being Tainted Love, but I preferred Say Hello, Wave Goodbye.

I never saw them live but, a couple of years back, at Jools Holland at Kew his special guest was Marc Almond. I amazed all the other 40 and 50 year olds round me by singing along with every word of all his hits. Half of them had never heard of him. For 20 minutes I was 30 years younger.