I Was Walking Down The Road The Other Day

Stafford in the mid 80s was not a stop off point for any of the big bands of the day. Even medium sized acts were probably giving the town a wide berth to be fair. Musical entertainment was thin on the ground. You took what you could get. And what you could get wasn’t always the best. (No offence if you were once a member of The Boothill Foot Tappers and are reading this.)

North Staffs Polytechnic was spread across two locations in the north Midlands – Stafford and Stoke. And I think Stoke was where bands mostly played. There was a venue in Stafford – the Whiteley Building – which belonged to the local Stafford College. That’s where we went to see live music and other related entertainment. (I vaguely recall a magic act that climaxed with bringing a dozen people up on stage and hypnotising them to do silly things – chicken impressions and the like..)

There would be student disco nights where, because dance music had yet to happen in any meaningful way, the go-to record to fill the dance floor would be Temple of Love (the 12” mix) by The Sisters of Mercy. (No shade here, I love the early music from The Sisters of Mercy but it speaks of the era we were in that that was the guaranteed floor filler.)

The best gig at the Whitley Building was when Ted Chippington supported Win. Win were from Scotland, a shiny pop infused descendent of The Fire Engines, who were one of the great Scottish new wave bands.

Ted Chippington was just .. odd.

Dressed like a 50s Teddy Boy, his act consisted of jokes that mostly began with the line ‘I was walking down the road the other day…’ mixed in with a selection of cheesy songs, sung to a basic Bontempi organ-like backing track. These included ‘She Loves You’ by The Beatles and Alvin Stardust’s ‘I Feel Like Buddy Holly’. Ted was great and he was also fearless because it would be fair to say his act did not go down well with the average student attending the gig that night.

At no point during a 25 minute set did he win the crowd over. But then I don’t think that was ever his intention. His whole career was ad hoc, one day he’d just randomly decided to get up on stage and start performing.

“I was walking down the road the other day  when I met this bloke who said to me, ‘I just got back from ‘nam.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, mate, Vietnam?’ ’No, Cheltenham.’ Good city that. You can have a good time there.”

At one point in the gig he even invited some crowd participation. “I can tell a joke about anything. Go on. Give me a subject.”

Someone in the crowd shouted out, “The QE2”

There was a moment’s thought and then Ted said, “I was walking down the road the other day when I saw the QE2…” He then paused for several seconds, before concluding, “No, I don’t know any jokes about the QE2.”

At the end of his set, Ted stepped off the stage and came back a few minutes later to stand by the entrance to the venue to try and sell copies of his recently released new single. I distinctly remember Mark Fletcher watching this from our vantage point nearby and exclaiming, “You’re not going to fucking sell any of those, mate.”

Ted came from the Midlands and he was signed to the same label as The Nightingales and Fuzzbox. He had minor success with some of his records, before disappearing in 1990 to live in America. His reputation seemed to grow as a result of this – forgotten for many years and then eulogised by a range of prominent stand up comedians, many of whom claimed to have been inspired to start out in comedy after watching him perform.

What I remember from that night was not only Ted’s steadfast ability to carry on despite the abuse he was getting from large sections of the crowd, not only the fervour with which Win performed for us in this rather shabby provincial student venue, but also the fact that John the Bastard (son of John the Bastard John) had been completely won over by Ted Chippington’s act. Having previously shown minimal interest in music of any kind, a few days after the concert he purchased for himself a copy of Ted’s album Man in a Suitcase. You could often hear it playing from his room down in the far portion of the accommodation block we all lived in.

There were other nights in the Whiteley Building, other bands that I’ve mostly forgotten the names of. Even a trip to Liverpool to see Propaganda (a cool German electronic band of the time). But nothing stuck in the memory like Ted Chippington. It’s hard to put it on the page, you probably did have to be there. Either by choice or because you just happened to be walking down the road and you decided to wander inside.