Typical Boy:Chris Tighe

Listen along to some of the songs and artists mentioned while you read

L: Where abouts were you born?

 

C: I was born in Chesterfield. It’s a middling sized, east midlands town. Born in 1967, so I was a child of the Summer of Love. Probably explains why I’ve had an obsession with mid to late 60s culture ever since. Grew up there and because it was not a particularly interesting place, shall we say, not very much going on there, I got out at the earliest opportunity I could. Ended up in Manchester for three years, as you can probably guess that was university, and after I finished at Manchester, I ended up moving down to Oxford. Not deliberately, I just got offered a job there and I thought this will tide me over for a bit, no plans to settle there permanently and I’ve been there ever since. So, I’m in Oxford at the moment and I have been for about thirty years.

 

L: So, going back to Chesterfield, what kind of place was that?

 

C: It was a fairly standard north Midland’s mining town really. It had a mining industry, but by the time I was growing up, it didn’t really have one anymore. It was in a period of managed decline. It was slowly shutting down. It’s improved a bit in recent years but really only because of out-of-town shopping centres and the like. I suppose it was very much a generic northern town. If someone now wanted to do a slightly tongue-in-cheek tv drama set in the 80s where everybody’s talking like, ‘Oh no, I don’t like that. I’ll have a pickled egg with me Grandad at the pub on a Sunday lunchtime,’ and all that. It was actually like that. There was no appreciable music scene there. Everyone seemed to be into heavy metal which was the rural music for England in the 80s. I went to school in one of the less salubrious parts of town which didn’t help much either. It was very much a generic northern town attitudes wise and accents wise. There wasn’t any feeling that it was moving forward, that there was anything particularly progressive going on.

 

It was very much a Labour party stronghold. Partly because of the mining industry which had been there in the past. It was very much old-style Labour. Denis Skinner used to be a fairly local MP in Bolsover which is fairly close to Chesterfield. He was quite a popular figure around there. I think the MP, most of the time I was a kid, was Eric Varley. He was a long-term MP, used to be shadow transport secretary at one point. He was seen as a very good constituency MP. Eric Varley retired, and Tony Benn was parachuted in which didn’t go down well with Chesterfield. He did get voted in, but I think he came to Chesterfield once every six months.

 

Due to the fact that there was nothing going on there and it wasn’t a good place to grow up if you were in any way unusual, eccentric, academically strong or not straight or not white. It was so standard that anyone who didn’t tick all the requisite boxes moved away. I think all of my friends that I had at school, they all moved away. No one I know lives there anymore except for members of my family. It was the kind of town you tried to escape from, in the very cliched way. It was almost like you were waiting for that day when you were 16 years old and you’d stand on the ring road with your little suitcase, thumbing a lift from a lorry driver, like, ‘Just take me anywhere.’

 

L: I think that’s a great description. So, maybe looking a bit more personally, how was growing up in Chesterfield for you?

 

C: Shit, basically. That would be the best way to put it. I didn’t have a bad family background or anything. The family aspect was all fine, but it was really just the fact, like I said before, if you had interests that were a bit esoteric, a bit out the ordinary, if Meatloaf weren’t your favourite band and you didn’t want to play football, and you wanted to dress a bit funny. Particularly in the 80s, if you didn’t want to dress like Miami Vice, George Michael style, Princess Di hair, if you wanted to wear a Paisley shirt, grown a fringe and have little round glasses it was basically the same as having a target on your back. There was a small community of people who were willing to be a bit more unusual. There were a couple of bars we used to meet in at weekends. They were usually theatre and hotel bars rather than pubs. If we went into pubs, we’d get laughed at, at the very least. There was a small community of people, largely goths then. There was a little bit of a subculture, but it really was just a few people sitting around in a hotel bar. We’d find one or two hotels where the bars were fairly empty and colonise them for a while. If we were lucky the hotel manager would be pleased there were goths coming in because, at least, they were buying Pernod and black every half hour. Occasionally, we’d commandeer somewhere where it was obvious, they didn’t really want us there even though no one else was actually going there. There was one hotel bar where they re-did it. It was originally a dingy little bar and then they put these south sea murals over the wall and put plastic palm trees which we assumed was an attempt to rebrand it and get rid of us. We stuck around for a while, but we gave it up because we found a theatre bar that was a bit more accommodating. It was difficult to be accepted. You didn’t really feel that you belonged there but at least, and I think this is true of any medium sized town around that time, there was a small community of people who even if they didn’t actively seek each other out, gravitated together because they ended up drinking in the same places or browsing the same racks in the record shops. At least there were a couple of record shops in Chesterfield, thankfully. Being the 80s, there were still a lot of independent record shops then, they were a bit of a lifeline as you can imagine.

 

L: What was your introduction to music? How did you start to get into music?

 

C: It’s interesting this because I don’t come from a musical family or any kind of musical background. No one in my family ever played an instrument, no one sang. I think the closest that we came was when my sister started doing disco dancing lessons in about 1977. Neither of my parents have got very many records either. Around the time I was eight years old, three or four records appeared in my parents’ record collection which had a massive effect on me. It was Abba’s Arrival album, my dad got that for Christmas one year, then the following year we got Rolled Gold, the Rolling Stone’s compilation with all their 60s stuff on it, and my mum got a Mammas and Papas compilation. The most important one was actually, this sounds like I’m taking the piss, but it actually was, what I think started me on the journey to liking music was, my parents got me and sister as a joint Christmas present The Mike Sammes Singers Sing the Hits of the Wombles which was an album of Wombles cover versions. We just absolutely loved this. This was before the Wombles had loads of hits, so they padded it out with obscure Wombles’ album tracks. There was all sorts of styles of music on it because Mike Batt, who wrote most of the Wombles’ stuff, he would do all these musical pastiches. You’d get this Wombles’ album and it’d have a glam rock track, the next track would sound like the Beach Boys and the next would be a 1920s pastiche. It was all these styles of music, but all sung in the same way, presented in the same way. Me and my sister absolutely flipping loved that. Having those three or four albums that had an effect on me when I was very young sowed the seed really even though my parents didn’t encourage me to take an interest in music at all. They didn’t like me spending any of my pocket money on seven-inch singles. They didn’t approve of that at all.  

 

Around the end of the 70s, suddenly Gary Numan came along, and I got massively into synth pop.  I think, partly, because I quite liked disco music. Disco was the route by which synthesisers snuck into the mainstream. I got really into that sort of music, really into synth pop music. I lived fairly near Sheffield, which was the nearest big city to where I was, that’s where the Human League was from so, they were a local band for me who were only ten minutes away on the train. I started getting into local Sheffield music through liking them and that moved me onto stuff like Cabaret Voltaire, who were a bit more unusual, and I heard there the kinda band this guy John Peel plays, and from there I followed the standard 1980s indie kid route. You start listening to John Peel and, for me as well, to Kid Jensen who did the show before John Peel from 8-10 in the evening. He was more mainstream, new wave-y, alternative before John Peel took the gloves off. It’s a cliche but listening to John Peel changed my entire musical outlook. It introduced me to so many things. Certain bands came along, like the Cocteau Twins, where I had that of experience of a new band comes along and, I hate to say the phrase blow my mind, but they did. Certain bands I got into through listening to John Peel, Cocteau Twins, New Order, the Fall, those kind of standard Peel bands were what made me into a proper music fan as opposed to someone who just bought the occasional record. It made me into the kind of person who would seek out new bands and would want to buy something really obscure. I would buy a single without having heard it, just because I read something about it in the NME. That’s how I bought the first Jesus and Marychain single. I read a live review in the NME which said it sounded like a giant bee stuck in a lift shaft and they all looked really bored. I thought, ‘That sounds brilliant, I have to go buy that!’

 

This kinda leads into how I ended up living in Manchester. When I decided that I was gonna go to university, which was a great way of escape from Chesterfield, rather than choosing the university that was best for my course, I wanted to do physics, I got a list of universities that were supposed to be good at science and went through them, and though, ‘Ok, which of these cities has the most cool bands in them?’ I choose Manchester because Smiths, Buzzcocks, New Order, the Fall, Joy Division, Chameleons, Magazine, and I thought, ‘I’m going there’. That’s how I made the choice of which uni to go to. It wasn’t that they were great for my course. It was, that has the best music scene. I want to be in a city where you might see Morrissey walking down the street. Obviously, I wouldn’t want to see Morrissey walking down the street now! Back then before he went funny.

 

L: What was your experience moving to Manchester? Was it this life changing experience with this amazing music scene that you had hoped for?  

 

C: It’s a decision which I’ve never regretted. Not in the slightest. I definitely did the right thing. It was liberating, obviously, because it was the first time that I got to live myself. Though, one of the first things that I realised was you go to uni and in your first year you end up in a hall of residence, and you find you’re surrounded by the exact same sort of people that you wanted to escape from in the town that you grew up in. The football lads, the pissheads. I ended up surrounded by people like that. The only difference was that they now had funny accents to me. At least they were intelligent enough to understand when I told them to piss off. So, I was surrounded by a different microcosm of the same people. In some ways it was like being back from where I moved away from but with loads more to do. Within the first two weeks of me starting at Manchester, I’d seen the Wedding Present, I’d seen Sonic Youth, I’d stood at a gig next to Lindy Morrison from the Go-Betweens without recognising her. Things like that happened within the first two weeks of me moving there and I just thought, ‘Yeah, the world has expanded.’ My horizons had expanded dramatically. It was liberation.

 

L: You started to get more directly involved in the music scene in Manchester and you started to write zines and stuff like that. How did that come about?

 

C: I think because so many other people were doing it basically. At first, I was just a gig go-er. I had a few friends who would go to the same kind of gigs as me. There was one person, I was particularly friendly with, that was my regular gig chum basically. We would always end up going to the same gigs. I was already aware of fanzines before I moved up to Manchester. One of the only decent things about Chesterfield was that it had a workers’ co-operative shop that gave jobs to people that were long term unemployed. They did charity stuff. They did crafts, for want of a better word. They also had a little shop where they would get in fanzines and political magazines. Things that you couldn’t get anywhere. They had Viz before you could buy that anywhere else. They also sold fanzines too, so I had been aware of those for a while. When the whole C86 thing started taking off new fanzines were starting to appear and there were new ones starting to appear around Manchester. The two of us just thought, ‘Why don’t we do one of these? We can write as well as these people. We like the same bands’. And we weren’t afraid to go up to bands and say, ‘Hey, are you Stephen Pastel? Will you do an interview for our fanzine?’ My co-writer was a bit more brazen about that than I was although I had my moments of being a cocky little shit, same as anyone else. So, we did it because it sounded like fun and loads of people were doing it also, we got to speak to pop stars that we liked. We also thought a lot of the fanzines we were seeing were kinda similar to one another and we thought we could do something that was a bit more irreverent, a bit more chaotic than what these people were doing. I supposed it helped that Manchester had pretty good independent magazines that were professionally produced. There Debris edited by Dave Hassland which was a cultural magazine that was available around Manchester.  In any other city that would have been done as a fanzine but because Manchester had so much culture and there was loads of people willing to help out, Dave Haslam was able to put out a proper magazine with staples in it. He also, very importantly, gave away flexi-discs with it. He’d put a pair of local bands on these flexi-discs, and it would be the first releases for these local bands. A lot of local bands got their first exposure through there. We went to see a lot of local bands, purely, because they’d been on one of Debris’ flexi-discs. So, we were trying to do a fanzine that didn’t look professional because Manchester already had professional fanzines. Our first attempt was a complete mess. You could barely read it. But, we were very proud of it when it came out.

 

L: I like the approach of everything is too professional, so we have to bring it down a bit.

 

C: We definitely brought it down a bit. I had the worst typewriter ever.

 

L: You were saying that the fanzine writing coincided with the birth of C86 indie stuff, what was it that attracted you to that?

 

C: I think I already liked a lot of music that sounded like that already. The early Creation releases, I was already aware of those.  Primal Scream were a band I had known about for a while. So, I was attracted to it because it was like music that I already knew and that I already loved and the stuff that was new, it all seemed to have a similar kind of attitude to it. The bands tended to sound different. When you’re listening to C86 now, it’s kinda remarkable what spread of different styles there are. You have fairly twee jangle pop on one side and on the other you’ve got Big Flame and the Shrubs and all the bands who were at the more extreme end. They all seemed to have this rejection of 80s conformity, both in the music they were making and the things that they were singing about. Also, when you saw the bands, the way the presented themselves. There was a lot of difference in how a lot of these bands presented themselves. They didn’t all present themselves in similar ways. If you went to see the Wedding Present, they looked quite laddish really. They were almost like sensitive lads. Similar, to the type you’d see popping up again in the Britpop era. Whereas, if you went to go and see the Pastels, they were very much not like that at all. They were almost confrontationally awkward. Within the big spread of presentation and the big spread of sound, you could feel that they all had the same kind of attitude. The same kind of attitude we had. This is another cliché, but it was almost like the kind if people we used to hang around with in Goth bars had all gotten up on stage and formed bands. You could see where they were coming from. They all defined themselves in opposition to 80s Yuppie-dom, box-shouldered jackets and the like. Conspicuous consumerism. Although they did want us to buy all their seven-inch singles, but we didn’t class that as consumerism because it was all a labour of love.

 

L: I think the fashion was the most conspicuous rejection of mainstream 80s culture What stands out to me, is the almost asexual element to the clothing. It was not gendered and it certainly wasn’t very macho, there was almost a rejection of mainstream masculinity. Do you think that levels up?

 

C: I think, to an extent, that is true. There was this definite rejection of what 80s fashion was. To an extent though, that was dictated by the fact that we didn’t have very much money, so we just ended up buying things in charity shops and second-hand shops. Manchester had Affleck’s Palace which was a rickety, old, three- or four-story building, that was like an indoor market that had people selling second-hand clothes, second-hand records, model trains, all sorts of odd things in it. There was a thriving second hands clothing market around there and that’s where we got a lot of the stuff we would wear. So, it was not a, ‘I’m going to buy an expensive suede jacket because I do not want to dress like Dom Johnson in Miami Vice,’ it was, ‘I’m gonna buy a cheap second hand suede jacket because it’s cheap and I kinda fancy looking like David Crosby circa 1966.’ Some of the more baggy clothing, I always felt that was kinda coming out of punk. David Keegan from the Shop Assistants was always known for having huge, great jumpers. When I saw that, I thought it was actually very like John Lydon. He always used to wear baggy jumpers at one stage as well. I saw it as a continuation of that. I know in the music press around Manchester in 1986 there was an awful lot of celebration for ten years of punk. We even had a festival of the tenth summer in Manchester, which I think was ’86 rather than ’87. There was gigs and exhibitions all around the city that were all about punk. I saw the baggy, shapeless clothing as being more of a punk signifier than a gender signifier, but the punks did use it in that way as well. They were trying to reject, particularly the female punks, what a nice safe 70s woman was supposed to look like. There was a certain amount of both really. Some of it was a hark back to punk fashion and some of it was a definite rejection of what the mainstream fashion roles are, what men are supposed to dress like and what women are supposed to dress like. We were very into rejecting cultural roles. I would suggest though that most of us weren’t thinking in quite so specific terms at the time. We wouldn’t have thought, ‘I am going to wear a baggy t-shirt because I don’t want people to see what my body looks like.’ I think a lot of it was almost instinctive. We so used to coming from an outsiders viewpoint and not wanting to make an effort to fit in with the mainstream. That came naturally, to an extent. I know I wasn’t consciously thinking about it in that way at the time but a few years after it I thought, ‘oh yeah I use to wear baggy shapeless shirts all the time’. Not so much jumpers but really big shirts. I also had, at least, one blouse. I know I didn’t buy it because I was thinking, ‘I’m buying a blouse, I’m buying woman’s clothing.’ It was just that it was a Paisley blouse. It was really big, it was Paisley, it looked like the kind of thing Morrissey would have worn. I got some looks the first time I went out wearing it, I must say. I think we were thinking more about what things looked like rather than what they signified. It was quite good that what we liked the look of turned out to have quite good signifiers attached to it as well. None of this is anything we would have objected to at the time if it had been thrown back at us.

 

L: It wasn’t part of the agenda. Rather it was a by-product of what was going on. Similar to the clothes, Splash One was one of the first clubs, outside of gay clubs, where men could dance with men. Was it the same with Manchester indie clubs?

 

C: Not that I ever saw, to be honest. I must admit, I really wasn’t aware of anyone else on the scene not being straight. I wasn’t flamboyantly out. I was someone who took a pretty slow path out of the closet really. Partly because I had grown up in the era of AIDS. Just at the point where I was starting to realise that I liked boys, I’m probably gay then all of a sudden tv adverts with the giant tombstone come on, you’re getting leaflets through your door, the Daily Mirror has headlines about ‘gay plague’. I scuttled right to the back corner of the closet after that. I crawled out fairly slowly during the mid-80s. I wasn’t open about up until the Sarah Records era. I didn’t know anyone else I could discus this with on the indie scene. I wasn’t aware of anybody else.

 

One thing that was very true of the mid 80s but changed towards the end was that there was a real difference between bands that you danced in and clubs that you went to see bands in. Around Manchester there was the Hacienda and the Ritz Ballroom, they were the only venues that had dance nights where you could go and dance, and also bands would play. You didn’t really tend to get venues that did both. If you went somewhere where you wanted to dance rather than mosh, you’d go a different place from the band that you wanted to see. There weren’t a great deal of indie discos. We used to go to the Hacienda’s Temperance Club. Hacienda’s gay night was on Monday and that was the only chance anybody ever got to dance with other men. You could dance with your friends. A few guys with bowl haircuts doing floppy indie dancing wouldn’t have been seen as anything weird but you wouldn’t have seen them in a clinch.

 

L: Moving away from Manchester, you moved down to Oxford and was it there you got more involved in the Sarah Records scene?

 

C: I was buying Sarah Records from when they started. I think the Sea Urchins’ first single was about late ’87. I remember buying Pristine Christine when I was in my second year of uni. By the time that I had moved down to Oxford, they had become a much more established label. It had an aesthetic and had a much more political stance to it as well, in a personal politics way, which the C86 bands didn’t have in quite such an overt way. When Sarah came along, that’s when you got the, ‘We are trying not to look masculine,’ stuff. It wasn’t accidental because you were buying different clothes. So, I carried on doing fanzines when I moved down to Oxford. I had done two up in Manchester with another guy and when I moved down to Oxford, I just carried on doing them by myself, basically, as way to get out and meet people. So, I could go to gigs and say, ‘Hey, do want to buy a fanzine?’ and most people would say, ‘God, do I have to?’ but occasionally you’d find someone, and they’d be really enthusiastic and then they’d be your friend forever. So, it was useful for that, and I made some long-term friends out of that. It was an interesting thing to do when I was doing it by myself. It was purely my thoughts going out on this piece of paper, shoving it into people’s hands, giving it into shops.

 

When I first moved down to Oxford one of the first things that I noticed was that even though it’s quite a large place, and it has a high student population, there really wasn’t much to do. There were a couple of pub venues and if you wanted to see a band, you’d have to get the train to Reading. I would often go to Reading to see bands like Spacemen 3, they were the first band I went to see after I moved down to Oxford. It was always a bit of a pain to get back, the venues in Reading did venue hours, so you’d be sat at Reading station praying that the 2AM mail train was actually going to appear tonight. It was a steep learning curve there, going from a place where you had a very vibrant culture to a place that I imagine Chesterfield would be like if it had a couple of pub venues in it. Even though you thought, ‘Tallulah Gosh are from Oxford, Razorcuts are from Oxford, it must have a vibrant scene,’ it didn’t. But, the fact that it was a small scene meant that if you did want to meet Tallulah Gosh or the Razor Cuts you knew where to find them. They’d always be in one of those two pub venues whenever a half decent band were on and that’s how Tallulah Gosh and the Razorcuts ended up in my fanzines.      

 

L: I find the political side interesting. There was definitely a really strong political current among many bands. Some bands were brought together and were motivated by their politics. What do you think the attraction to politics and political music was for them?

 

C: It was the era of Thatcherism. It was, as far as social polarisation went, it was almost as bad as it is now. You were either on their side or they said, ‘You might as well just fuck off.’ It’s probably no coincidence that a lot of the bands that were the most political came from northern areas. Around Manchester there was an awful lot of bands, some of which were C86, Big Flame, I think took their name from a Socialist newspaper. It was very much because that’s what society had become. If you were rejecting Yuppies and Duran Duran sitting on a boat, that was essentially the same as rejecting the prevailing right-wing politics. Anyone that was at all counter-cultural, under the radar, didn’t want to fit into the mainstream, I think just, even if they weren’t left-wing when they started, they were by the time that they finished. I think people who had left-wing viewpoints were probably more likely to embrace that style of music, they were in political opposition so that translated fairly easily into being social opposition. I could have just said Thatcher, and left it at that!

 

L: Some people have said that there was strong links with the New Left, such as the Women’s and Gay Liberation movements, and that it had a big impact on many of the bands, would you agree with that?

 

C: Yeah, I think that’s a fair point. There was a lot of overlap between traditional Labour and more, I won’t say fringe or extreme groups, but more specific interest left-wing groups. Socialist Worker’s Party was quite popular around Manchester. There was a Socialist Worker’s Student Party at Manchester uni, I used to think, ‘Can you be a Socialist Worker Student?’ They used to stand on the steps of the student union selling Socialist Worker. There was quite active women’s groups around there as well. I didn’t see a huge amount of it on my own personal scene, but I was aware of other people who were involved with it, some of the bands, particularly, were involved with that. A lot of, quite specific benefit gigs, would be going on as well. 

 

L: Do you have any reflections, anything you want to add?

 

C: One thing I’ve not touched upon very much was the experience of being a gay man in an area of culture and music where you weren’t particularly represented. It felt like someone who was on the inside looking in, rather than on the outside looking in.  It’s something that I’ve thought about a lot in recent years, particularly when I’ve been thinking about Sarah Records stuff. Something that I thought was quite interesting was that although there was a lot of talk about rejecting conventional gender roles, conventionally masculine role, particularly in the Sarah records era, it was all very, very heterosexual in the indie scene. There wasn’t very much embracing or investigation of different sexual roles. I know, I wasn’t the only person around that time who noticed there was a bit of a glut of what we called singer’s girlfriend on tambourine bands. You’d get bands where there’d be a load of boys looking cute in their bowl haircuts and there’d be a girl playing the tambourine, who would always be the singer’s girlfriend or their guitarist’s girlfriend. It was such a naff cliché, bands that were pretending to be inclusive. I always felt, it’s hard to put it into words really, that in some ways the rejection of masculinity was there but some of the roles weren’t rejected as much as they might have been. Boys were still supposed to dress like indie boys, girls were supposed to dress like cute little 60s chicks, for want of a better phrase. There was a lot of dress codes that the C86 bands seemed to be against but in the Sarah era there was almost a return back to that which I always thought was ironic because the actual Sarah philosophy was very much against that. Also, with a lot of fanzine artwork, you’d get a lot of 60s chicks, for want of a better phrase, on the cover. It became a bit of a cliché. I ended up using a photo like that on one of my fanzines and only after it I thought, ‘God that’s really cliched, I’m not gonna do that again’. Every fanzine I did after that had a picture of a man on the cover, a male singer or just someone I had found and looked cool. It was a deliberate thing, to go against that. I suppose what I’m trying to say was that there was still certain cliches that hadn’t been overturned about how indie boys and indie girls were meant to represent themselves. I suppose it was ideas of cuteness. I felt slightly alienated by that and it was only later when the Riot Grrrl bands came along that I felt this is more my kind of thing, the kind of sexual politics that I want to see on stage. I got really excited about them, I got really excited by Huggy Bear. I thought, ‘this is what we should have had 10 years ago.’ It took right up until that point for those kind of remaining cliches to be overturned. The Sarah scene laid the groundwork but, in some ways, it didn’t go far enough.

Once again, I'd like to express my graditude to Chirs for sharing his participation and his kindness. I cannot thank him enough to agreeing to this interview.