People's History of Pop BBC Music

A few surviving Punk books, zines, surprisingly these didn’t end up like the rest cut up and stuck on my bedroom walls

I was a huge David Bowie fan and made this scrapbook up to remember all the special moments from those days. These are some pictures from the concert, and after I think. I was in shock when he announced it was the last show he would ever do, as I thought I would never get to see him live again, but luckily saw him on the Glass Spider Tour and the Serious Moonlight Tour.
Still followed him right up until he died and I was devastated like so many other people and still cant comprehend that he has gone, he was unique in every way and there will never be anyone like him ever again

I was a freelancer at BBC Radio Leicester and Marc signed this poster for me before asking me to ‘smuggle’ him out of the venue and give him a lift to his hotel.

PHOP spoke to Ska fan Phil Bush about his love of records and original soundsystems. Phil was a teenager in the late 1970s when the 2 Tone Ska revival. Listening to Prince Buster covers got him interested in the original artists themselves – “I sort of got carried away from there.”

“Ska music is like soul music in that it’s from the heart. There’s also a lot of social commentary in it – on the poverty in Jamaica etc. – so it’s a combination of true stories and the raw music that make it so great – it’s honest. That social commentary side of the music translated quite well to the UK. It’s a different kind of hardship in the UK compared to Jamaica but the honesty and working class aspect of it did translate. Besides it’s just good music anyway.”

Phil got into building sound systems nearly twenty years ago after being frustrated at the lack of proper amplification at the parties he was attending. “A sound system isn’t a PA; it’s like a musical instrument so you have to treat it like on when you play.”

This photo shows Phil’s own creation, Sounds and Pressure, alongside another system called Axis at a sound clash in London.

Osibisa + Capability Brown ticket stub and paper clippings for 1972 Cheltenham Town Hall saved by BBC Radio Gloucester listener, Pauline Clayton

This was one of the Frisbees thrown to the audience by Paul and Linda McCartney during a Wings Concert in 1973. It was caught by BBC Radio Leicester listener Trevor Mee who was at the Wings concert at the old Odeon – now Athena – on Queens St. in Leicester in 1973.

PHOP spoke to Northern Soul fan, Mick Sway, about his memories of the scene in the 1960s.

“The club scene of the 60’s and 70’s was very much a “anti-pop” creation, born out of the working class youth, who sought escape from the hum drum and gruelling regime of work in the factories, mines and mills of the North of England.

“The music and in many cases the drugs, dominated the culture of what became known as; “The Soul Scene” and around 1970 “The Northern Soul Scene”. The latter courtesy of the late Dave Godin; journalist, critic, movie archivist, recording entrepreneur, soul fan and coiner of the title of the music genre; “Northern Soul”.

“What no one knew at the time was that this culture would have legs.

“It outlasted its anti-pop rival Punk, then New Romantic, Brit Pop,Heavy Metal and later Acid House, in some ways itself evolving into the mainstream.”