The Soundtrack of Our Lives
A Double Album in Prose
by Annie Christie
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: For anyone who has ever got lost in music!
Swearwords: None.
Description: For anyone who has ever got lost in music!
Disc One
Side One
Lost in Music
We're lost in music
Caught in a trap
No turnin' back
We're lost in music (Sister Sledge)
Side One
Lost in Music
We're lost in music
Caught in a trap
No turnin' back
We're lost in music (Sister Sledge)
Track One
Oh yeah, life goes on,
long after the thrill of living is gone (John Cougar)
~ 2013 ~
Oh yeah, life goes on,
long after the thrill of living is gone (John Cougar)
~ 2013 ~
‘They’re pulling down the old school. We have to do something.’
The text from Laura really got me in the guts.
‘They can’t,’ I texted back. ‘That’s our lives in there.’
Of course forty years ago if someone had told us they were going to pull down the school we’d all have cheered. But forty years ago we hadn’t invested our lives in the place. Over the six interminable years of our passage through High School it wasn’t just part of our individual memories, it was mixed with our communal memory and in an important way our very identities were tied up with the old place.
I called her up.
‘Old,’ I scoffed, ‘it wasn’t built till the late sixties and here we are only fifty years later with them planning to ‘rebuild’ it.’ Truth be told, it was pretty ropey even in the seventies – the flat roof was inappropriate for the Scottish weather and the concrete brutalism didn’t exactly foster a Brideshead Revisited experience. The windows rattled, despite being painted shut so you couldn’t open them in a heatwave, the roof leaked all down the exterior walls, like the tears of all the kids who were ever belted within them, the internal corridors were reminiscent of a prison block – albeit an open prison, especially when you walked down towards detention class – but it was our school.
Funny that at the time when they were trying to engender a ‘pride’ in our school through the wearing of uniform blazers and ties (which must be of the regulation style and worn properly tied up over a white shirt not in big knots and top buttons unbuttoned) neither they nor we realised how much of an impact that crappy old building would leave on our future lives. How, once we’d left, in a grudging way we all became somehow or other proud of having been there. I nearly said being educated there, but I’m not sure the education was the most important part of it. When I look back, it’s not the classes I remember, it’s the trips, the discos and the boys. Oh yes, the boys. We were the first year to ‘have boys’, as the school took the lead in a new 1970s experiment in the city, offering the fully co-educational comprehensive experience. Who cared what you were being taught when there were boys?
The experiment, like the architecture, had serious flaws. They didn’t do an immediate change-over, integrating boys into all years. No, they started with our S1 year. So the year above us was still all girl – and this presented not a few challenges for both pupils and teachers. Especially the multitude of young, male teachers who were parachuted in to help address the gender balance in the teaching staff. They didn’t call it gender balance in those days of course – they just wanted more effective crowd control. Like most things in the 70s it was an example of short term planning with little thought to the consequences.
We were so many guinea pigs and lab rats, and we acted accordingly. Our secondary education was one massive experiment which took place not just in the science block but in the classrooms and the Assembly Hall and the playing fields and yes, round the back of the bike sheds.
We lived the social policy out in practice and in due course we left. The school remained. But now it was under threat. And even though we knew the school was poorly built and major renovation long overdue, the problem with ‘rebuilding’ is that they have to demolish first. And in that demolition a vital part of our lives – our mis-spent youths – would also disappear.
But what could we do?
‘We’ll have one more reunion,’ Laura said when I met her at Starbucks in town. We’d tried to meet in the Italian Café, which was our refuge on ‘free’ periods in the mid-1970s. Just round the corner from the school, it had long since gone, replaced by a ‘cool’ gallery. This was cool only if you didn’t date from the time it was an Italian café, in which your hopes and dreams were mixed with the frothy coffee. To us it was a travesty. Another sign of the relentless passage of time. Another challenge to our identity.
‘It’s the only thing we can do,’ she added. ‘You in?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Despite what happened last time.’
Our last school reunion had been the twenty fifth anniversary, a decade before in 2003. It ended, somewhat predictably, in a fight. School discos had always ended up in some sort of fight – but then, we were teenagers. This was a full-on, adult affair with threats of GBH and restraining orders being flung around. It kind of took the shine off things. Everyone went their separate ways and even Laura and I had only kept in touch sporadically over the past decade, and we’d been best, best friends all through school.
On the subject of reunions – because they are the backbone of this story – we had the first one in 1979 a year after the first of our ‘gang’ left. It was really our year’s leaving disco, but the girls who left in 1978 crashed it and made it their first reunion. They’d always done that. We were always in their shadow. Despite our one clear advantage – we had boys!
We’d had a special bond because of the unusual circumstances in which we grew up together. Rules had been broken, those normal school rules which say you don’t mix out of your year-group. The girls’ only year above us had three clear options. They lusted after the male teachers, which was seriously dangerous for all concerned; they swore off boys – never really an option –, or they jeopardised their ‘cool’ and tried to muscle in on the boys in our year. With varied degrees of success. The fourth option was to find a boy their own age from somewhere else. That’s too much like hard work for most teenage girls. Or it was in my day.
It wasn’t a problem social policy makers had considered and in practicality the problem didn’t emerge until the last year of girls only were in 3rd or 4th year. Before then, who cared about boys? However, remember we were all being groomed by society – intoxicated by the rise of the boy band which served to sell records but also to create teen fantasies that needed some form of realisation. And even though the Bay City Rollers were literally the boys down the road for us – one lived in the same stair as my aunt – they might as well have been The Osmonds, because we stood no chance.
So, long before we were urged to Take That, and well before Girl Power, our year jealously prided ourselves on our one great advantage over the older girls. We had ‘real’ boys and they didn’t. Even if these real boys weren’t a patch on the manufactured boy bands, they sat next to us in class. They were available. To that degree we were an object of jealousy for the year above. They wanted what was ours by right. It was a recipe for disaster.
I won’t have to make the obvious comment that boys mature slower than girls, and you can draw your own conclusions about how viable a fourteen year old girl going out with a thirteen year old boy is as a rule. But there are always exceptions to every rule. And for us it was Billy and Rachel. I should tell you now that this is their story.
When we left school in 1979 the summer disco was a rites of passage. It was meant to be our celebration – what we imagined would be our time in the dark of the Assembly Hall, lost in music. But we didn’t reckon on the year above. I think that as much as anything the ‘event’ was an attempt to show them (though they’d left by this time already) that without them we’d become the coolest kids on the block. This was futile unless they knew what we were doing. I don’t know who it was that invited them, I have my suspicions – but invited they were. I didn’t think much of it at the time – until the fight broke out.
Nothing ever pans out as you think it will, from social policy to personal life, and four years later, in an attempt to make amends, we were invited to the fifth anniversary of the 1978 leavers. The year was 1983 and everything had changed. It was well organised and there wasn’t a fight. I wished I hadn’t gone, but something would always make me go back to school while there was a school to go back to and a hope to cling on to. The next reunion was in 1988, and, still in my hopeful twenties, just, at the time I thought it was the best yet. Though the contemporary charts were losing their appeal, for me, Fairground Attraction summed it up Perfect.
Then lives got in the way while Take That partied on, and The Spice Girls spoke to a new generation. Our next trip down memory lane was at the twentieth reunion in 1998. By that time we were all in our late thirties and everyone was there. Everyone. But it was far from perfect. Robbie Williams was struggling to Entertain us with his Angels but we had our own demons to exorcise. Nostalgia was an itch that we couldn’t help scratching. And the co-ed experiment was still yielding unpredictable results.
We did it all again in 2003 for the twenty fifth. I blame Friends Reunited which was going down a storm then. More so than house music which was all the rage in the clubs we were too old to visit. We were so Busted. Like I said before, there was a fight at that one – a big grown up fight – and we went our separate ways. I abandoned the whole idea of keeping in touch with anyone after that – till Laura gave me the news that they were about to destroy all that was left of our adolescence.
We had to have that one last chance to get ‘lost in music’ (which by the way was one of the big songs of that last summer term in 1979). It wasn’t my kind of music, but that wasn’t the point. They were stealing our memories and we had to fight back the only way we knew – by dancing.
So in 2013 we ditched our address books, gave Friends Reunited the body swerve it deserved and got ourselves onto the new social media space, Facebook, to try and find as many of the year groups 1978 and 1979 that we could.
‘What about Billy and Rachel?’ Laura asked.
‘Got to,’ I said. ‘Whatever happened. Whatever happens. Got to invite them.’
I didn’t tell her, because I didn’t need to – she knows fine – that Billy and Rachel are probably the biggest part of my teenage years. You might think that’s sad, but it’s true. I was a plain Jane in every respect and Laura and I didn’t have a lot going for us, whereas Billy and Rachel were the coolest of the cool. ‘Too cool for school’ didn’t begin to touch it.
If I’m honest, my life at school was nothing beyond being an observer of the lives of Billy and Rachel. I’m no longer ashamed to admit it. We can’t all be the cool kids. Some of us live vicariously and I was one of them. It took me a long time to step out of their shadows and get my own life. I have one now, of course, but they still ‘own’ (as the common phrase is now) my teenage years.
~ ~ ~
And so we are back in 1979. When Billy McGinley and Rachel Shaw were the Romeo and Juliet, Bogie and Bacall, Burton and Taylor, Jack and Diane, Posh and Becks of our lives. If you’re anything like any of us, it’s music which takes you back to those times most quickly and most certainly.
Disco Crap. That’s what Billy called the music Rachel liked in 1979. That might even have been what started the fight. It was the days when what you listened to defined who you were and Billy had had more than had enough of the 70s disco scene.
So when Rachel pulled him onto the floor to dance to Leif Garrett, he spat the dummy. Now of course we’d seen Billy and Rachel have arguments before. They’d been together for years, after all. But this time it was different. He was just leaving school, she’d been away a year and while she’d been a year ahead of him all through the seventies, this was the first time she let it show. From their first kiss (which some say happened in 1973 and others say was 1975) she never made him feel younger, never listened to those who told her she was stupid for not going after a boy two or three years older, with a car, a job, and money to spend on her – which was what all fifteen year old girls were after (and probably still are.) Rachel knew better. And Billy was better. Simply the best long before Tina Turner was trying to get us to just Stay Together. So if you’re wondering What’s Love Got to Do With It, don’t adjust your headsets, just settle down and get lost in music. I’m going to tell you the story of a real Jack and Diane.
Discography: Want to sing along? Here are some YouTube links – sorry about attendant ads – sure you can find these all on your streaming music delivery platform (if you have such a thing!):
John Cougar - Jack and Diane https://youtu.be/h04CH9YZcpI
Sister Sledge - Lost in Music https://youtu.be/43qB9FpfCR8
Leif Garret – I was made for dancing https://youtu.be/3GVugJj7BUs
Fairground Attraction – Perfect https://youtu.be/txapREGWHp0
The text from Laura really got me in the guts.
‘They can’t,’ I texted back. ‘That’s our lives in there.’
Of course forty years ago if someone had told us they were going to pull down the school we’d all have cheered. But forty years ago we hadn’t invested our lives in the place. Over the six interminable years of our passage through High School it wasn’t just part of our individual memories, it was mixed with our communal memory and in an important way our very identities were tied up with the old place.
I called her up.
‘Old,’ I scoffed, ‘it wasn’t built till the late sixties and here we are only fifty years later with them planning to ‘rebuild’ it.’ Truth be told, it was pretty ropey even in the seventies – the flat roof was inappropriate for the Scottish weather and the concrete brutalism didn’t exactly foster a Brideshead Revisited experience. The windows rattled, despite being painted shut so you couldn’t open them in a heatwave, the roof leaked all down the exterior walls, like the tears of all the kids who were ever belted within them, the internal corridors were reminiscent of a prison block – albeit an open prison, especially when you walked down towards detention class – but it was our school.
Funny that at the time when they were trying to engender a ‘pride’ in our school through the wearing of uniform blazers and ties (which must be of the regulation style and worn properly tied up over a white shirt not in big knots and top buttons unbuttoned) neither they nor we realised how much of an impact that crappy old building would leave on our future lives. How, once we’d left, in a grudging way we all became somehow or other proud of having been there. I nearly said being educated there, but I’m not sure the education was the most important part of it. When I look back, it’s not the classes I remember, it’s the trips, the discos and the boys. Oh yes, the boys. We were the first year to ‘have boys’, as the school took the lead in a new 1970s experiment in the city, offering the fully co-educational comprehensive experience. Who cared what you were being taught when there were boys?
The experiment, like the architecture, had serious flaws. They didn’t do an immediate change-over, integrating boys into all years. No, they started with our S1 year. So the year above us was still all girl – and this presented not a few challenges for both pupils and teachers. Especially the multitude of young, male teachers who were parachuted in to help address the gender balance in the teaching staff. They didn’t call it gender balance in those days of course – they just wanted more effective crowd control. Like most things in the 70s it was an example of short term planning with little thought to the consequences.
We were so many guinea pigs and lab rats, and we acted accordingly. Our secondary education was one massive experiment which took place not just in the science block but in the classrooms and the Assembly Hall and the playing fields and yes, round the back of the bike sheds.
We lived the social policy out in practice and in due course we left. The school remained. But now it was under threat. And even though we knew the school was poorly built and major renovation long overdue, the problem with ‘rebuilding’ is that they have to demolish first. And in that demolition a vital part of our lives – our mis-spent youths – would also disappear.
But what could we do?
‘We’ll have one more reunion,’ Laura said when I met her at Starbucks in town. We’d tried to meet in the Italian Café, which was our refuge on ‘free’ periods in the mid-1970s. Just round the corner from the school, it had long since gone, replaced by a ‘cool’ gallery. This was cool only if you didn’t date from the time it was an Italian café, in which your hopes and dreams were mixed with the frothy coffee. To us it was a travesty. Another sign of the relentless passage of time. Another challenge to our identity.
‘It’s the only thing we can do,’ she added. ‘You in?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Despite what happened last time.’
Our last school reunion had been the twenty fifth anniversary, a decade before in 2003. It ended, somewhat predictably, in a fight. School discos had always ended up in some sort of fight – but then, we were teenagers. This was a full-on, adult affair with threats of GBH and restraining orders being flung around. It kind of took the shine off things. Everyone went their separate ways and even Laura and I had only kept in touch sporadically over the past decade, and we’d been best, best friends all through school.
On the subject of reunions – because they are the backbone of this story – we had the first one in 1979 a year after the first of our ‘gang’ left. It was really our year’s leaving disco, but the girls who left in 1978 crashed it and made it their first reunion. They’d always done that. We were always in their shadow. Despite our one clear advantage – we had boys!
We’d had a special bond because of the unusual circumstances in which we grew up together. Rules had been broken, those normal school rules which say you don’t mix out of your year-group. The girls’ only year above us had three clear options. They lusted after the male teachers, which was seriously dangerous for all concerned; they swore off boys – never really an option –, or they jeopardised their ‘cool’ and tried to muscle in on the boys in our year. With varied degrees of success. The fourth option was to find a boy their own age from somewhere else. That’s too much like hard work for most teenage girls. Or it was in my day.
It wasn’t a problem social policy makers had considered and in practicality the problem didn’t emerge until the last year of girls only were in 3rd or 4th year. Before then, who cared about boys? However, remember we were all being groomed by society – intoxicated by the rise of the boy band which served to sell records but also to create teen fantasies that needed some form of realisation. And even though the Bay City Rollers were literally the boys down the road for us – one lived in the same stair as my aunt – they might as well have been The Osmonds, because we stood no chance.
So, long before we were urged to Take That, and well before Girl Power, our year jealously prided ourselves on our one great advantage over the older girls. We had ‘real’ boys and they didn’t. Even if these real boys weren’t a patch on the manufactured boy bands, they sat next to us in class. They were available. To that degree we were an object of jealousy for the year above. They wanted what was ours by right. It was a recipe for disaster.
I won’t have to make the obvious comment that boys mature slower than girls, and you can draw your own conclusions about how viable a fourteen year old girl going out with a thirteen year old boy is as a rule. But there are always exceptions to every rule. And for us it was Billy and Rachel. I should tell you now that this is their story.
When we left school in 1979 the summer disco was a rites of passage. It was meant to be our celebration – what we imagined would be our time in the dark of the Assembly Hall, lost in music. But we didn’t reckon on the year above. I think that as much as anything the ‘event’ was an attempt to show them (though they’d left by this time already) that without them we’d become the coolest kids on the block. This was futile unless they knew what we were doing. I don’t know who it was that invited them, I have my suspicions – but invited they were. I didn’t think much of it at the time – until the fight broke out.
Nothing ever pans out as you think it will, from social policy to personal life, and four years later, in an attempt to make amends, we were invited to the fifth anniversary of the 1978 leavers. The year was 1983 and everything had changed. It was well organised and there wasn’t a fight. I wished I hadn’t gone, but something would always make me go back to school while there was a school to go back to and a hope to cling on to. The next reunion was in 1988, and, still in my hopeful twenties, just, at the time I thought it was the best yet. Though the contemporary charts were losing their appeal, for me, Fairground Attraction summed it up Perfect.
Then lives got in the way while Take That partied on, and The Spice Girls spoke to a new generation. Our next trip down memory lane was at the twentieth reunion in 1998. By that time we were all in our late thirties and everyone was there. Everyone. But it was far from perfect. Robbie Williams was struggling to Entertain us with his Angels but we had our own demons to exorcise. Nostalgia was an itch that we couldn’t help scratching. And the co-ed experiment was still yielding unpredictable results.
We did it all again in 2003 for the twenty fifth. I blame Friends Reunited which was going down a storm then. More so than house music which was all the rage in the clubs we were too old to visit. We were so Busted. Like I said before, there was a fight at that one – a big grown up fight – and we went our separate ways. I abandoned the whole idea of keeping in touch with anyone after that – till Laura gave me the news that they were about to destroy all that was left of our adolescence.
We had to have that one last chance to get ‘lost in music’ (which by the way was one of the big songs of that last summer term in 1979). It wasn’t my kind of music, but that wasn’t the point. They were stealing our memories and we had to fight back the only way we knew – by dancing.
So in 2013 we ditched our address books, gave Friends Reunited the body swerve it deserved and got ourselves onto the new social media space, Facebook, to try and find as many of the year groups 1978 and 1979 that we could.
‘What about Billy and Rachel?’ Laura asked.
‘Got to,’ I said. ‘Whatever happened. Whatever happens. Got to invite them.’
I didn’t tell her, because I didn’t need to – she knows fine – that Billy and Rachel are probably the biggest part of my teenage years. You might think that’s sad, but it’s true. I was a plain Jane in every respect and Laura and I didn’t have a lot going for us, whereas Billy and Rachel were the coolest of the cool. ‘Too cool for school’ didn’t begin to touch it.
If I’m honest, my life at school was nothing beyond being an observer of the lives of Billy and Rachel. I’m no longer ashamed to admit it. We can’t all be the cool kids. Some of us live vicariously and I was one of them. It took me a long time to step out of their shadows and get my own life. I have one now, of course, but they still ‘own’ (as the common phrase is now) my teenage years.
~ ~ ~
And so we are back in 1979. When Billy McGinley and Rachel Shaw were the Romeo and Juliet, Bogie and Bacall, Burton and Taylor, Jack and Diane, Posh and Becks of our lives. If you’re anything like any of us, it’s music which takes you back to those times most quickly and most certainly.
Disco Crap. That’s what Billy called the music Rachel liked in 1979. That might even have been what started the fight. It was the days when what you listened to defined who you were and Billy had had more than had enough of the 70s disco scene.
So when Rachel pulled him onto the floor to dance to Leif Garrett, he spat the dummy. Now of course we’d seen Billy and Rachel have arguments before. They’d been together for years, after all. But this time it was different. He was just leaving school, she’d been away a year and while she’d been a year ahead of him all through the seventies, this was the first time she let it show. From their first kiss (which some say happened in 1973 and others say was 1975) she never made him feel younger, never listened to those who told her she was stupid for not going after a boy two or three years older, with a car, a job, and money to spend on her – which was what all fifteen year old girls were after (and probably still are.) Rachel knew better. And Billy was better. Simply the best long before Tina Turner was trying to get us to just Stay Together. So if you’re wondering What’s Love Got to Do With It, don’t adjust your headsets, just settle down and get lost in music. I’m going to tell you the story of a real Jack and Diane.
Discography: Want to sing along? Here are some YouTube links – sorry about attendant ads – sure you can find these all on your streaming music delivery platform (if you have such a thing!):
John Cougar - Jack and Diane https://youtu.be/h04CH9YZcpI
Sister Sledge - Lost in Music https://youtu.be/43qB9FpfCR8
Leif Garret – I was made for dancing https://youtu.be/3GVugJj7BUs
Fairground Attraction – Perfect https://youtu.be/txapREGWHp0
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
The Soundtrack of Our Lives is Annie's fourth McSerial written for McStorytellers.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
The Soundtrack of Our Lives is Annie's fourth McSerial written for McStorytellers.