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1980 (15 YEARS OLD)
Discharged From Oliver’s Army

Discharged From Oliver’s Army

1980 (15 YEARS OLD)1 month ago

1980 - 15 Years Old

I discovered The Music Box while I was searching for a grand gesture of my undying love.

I was 15 or so and crazy about Donna Oliver.

She was pretty and had a great laugh.

And she was in the group I walked home from school with while I was still living on Goodrington Close.

Those were pretty much the criteria for the straightforward magic love-potion ingredients of a boy looking for his first girlfriend.

It was 2 miles (3.2km) from school to my house, and the group thinned along the way. By the time we got to my street, there was just me, Donna, and one of her friends.

They would have another mile or so to go.

So when I got home, I would throw my stuff in the garage, jump on my bike, catch up, and walk with them the rest of their way.

Despite the fact that my bike was manky as all get out.

I had had a really cool Raleigh Chopper that my parents had bought me. But I had outgrown it. And soon, I would buy myself a 10-speed. But in that in-between period, I had the shittest bike in the world.

I can’t remember how I came to have it. Or where it came from. Although it looked like it had been fished out of the canal.

I tried to cover up the rust with some mostly-empty cans of spray paint I found in our garage, and ended up with a bike that was blue, grey, and silver.

And rust.

Still it got me around, and I was never afraid of it being pinched.

So back to needing that grand gesture of my undying love. Something along the lines of this:

I had a boombox, but the spanner in works was twofold:

1. Say Anything wouldn’t be released for another 9 years.

2. Donna lived on a council estate, and I’d probably have gotten a good hiding from a brickie halfway through the first verse for interrupting his tea.

I could have gotten her flowers, but that seemed banal. But mostly, it seemed like something I could have simply nicked one night from neighbours’ gardens.

As we used to do every evening before Mother’s Day. And Easter. And somebody’s birthday. And…

Also, it was a little on the nose. I couldn’t couch it as something else if I chickened out at the last minute.

So I came up with a plan. I’d buy a single she liked, pretend it was mine, and give it to her.

My Elvis phase waning, I was starting to listen to different sorts of music, among them a different Elvis – Elvis Costello.

Especially, of course, his song:

How could it be otherwise? But it’s a great song. Even if you’re not in love with Donna Oliver…

But Donna was crazy about an American singer, called Leif Garret. I’d never heard of him. At 15, I didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of music.

More of a pamphlet.

But after a lot of digging around (there was no internet back then, remember), I found out that this is who she was crazy about:

I couldn’t see it. For someone who was supposedly made for dancing all night long, he danced like he had worms.

But the heart wants what the heart wants.

So I started out at my go-to record store, Osbourne’s. But one of the snobby salespeople gave me the sort of look that suggested I had just asked if they sold good-as-new toilet paper.

You sell the Bay City Rollers, you wanker. Get off your high horse!, I shouted.

But in my head.

So after a few hours of wandering the streets and back alleys of Banbury, I came across The Music Box.

It very cool. A little ramshackle, as I would learn a good record shop should be. They had everything, including a picture-disk 45 of our man Lief.

They also had something that made my jaw drop:

A Space-Invader machine.

I had only ever read about them.

It was 10p a go.

For those who don’t know, Space Invaders starts out with 55 aliens. As you killed one, their speed would become faster.

Until you were left with:

Or, as we called it:

THELASTLITTLEBUGGERTHATGOESLIKETHECLAPPERS

(the last little bugger that goes like the clappers)

But this increase in speed wasn’t intentional. It was the late 70s, and computer games were made in workshops that looked something like this:

Back in those days, the processor had to render the whole screen for each movement. The more invaders you killed, the quicker the rendering, and the quicker the speed.

But I didn’t care about what was going on behind the curtain; I just wanted to get past the first screen.

But even after 50p, I couldn’t.

That would come later.

Anyway, to cut to the chase – I gave Donna the 45, and it turned out she fancied Singhy.

And love died like that last little space-invading fucker eventually would.

I had to blame someone. I wasn’t mad at Donna. She had the right to choose who she wanted. I wasn’t mad at Singhy. We were beginning to become best mates. So I chose to be mad at Leif.

The worm-infested ponce.