Send Me To Coventry

In 1982 I was a sixteen year old doomer, obsessed with Joy Division and their like. The first big exams of my life were approaching. GCSEs, or O-levels as they were known back then. I was taking 9 subjects if you split English into 2 separate subjects – English lit and English language. There was history, geography, physics, maths, French, Latin and one other I forget now.

Exams took place after the Whitsun holiday, which was the traditional week long break in the middle of the summer term. After five years in high school I think I was doing okay academically. My school reports didn’t give any reason for concern for my parents. I don’t know how they gauged my mental state of mind at that point. I was never built for exams – I’m not good under pressure, but I’m not sure if that was something I communicated to the outside world.

Anyway, with a week off school before these exams kicked in, you’d naturally expect me to be shut away in my room studying, with maybe a few supervised trips to the sea or out to the woods or wherever to get a bit of exercise and fresh air.  Instead, for a reason I never really grasped, I was spending that week in Coventry. Rooming with my brother and a houseful of other university students or post grads. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing my mother would’ve endorsed, but there you go.

The journey to Coventry began with my dad escorting me to London and then around on the tube to Euston station. From there I was on my own, packed on to a train heading north. I’d memorised the stops so I’d know when Coventry was coming up and I’d have my stuff ready to get off. This was my first time travelling away from home on my own.

I have only a dim memory of the people Tim was house sharing with. There must’ve been four or five others living there. Tim had graduated by this point and was working for a year at the student union. I guess others were in a similar position in terms of having completed their degrees. I know Tim’s friend Dave was there. So that would’ve been the first time the three later-to-be members of Monoshock and DFTND met.

I was a walking cliché of a Joy Division fan at this point. I owned a sweatshirt that had the iconic cover image from their album Unknown Pleasures on it. This was what I was wearing when I was introduced to Tim’s housemates and it did not go unnoticed. The other thing I remember from back then was because none of their records came with lyrics – and Joy Division were the kind of band people obsessed over the lyrics, especially after singer Ian Curtis chose to take his own life in 1981 – because the lyrics were absent, fans had taken to transcribing them and then selling printed copies via the small ads in the back of the music press weeklies.

Naturally as someone who had at that point bought every record the band had released, alongside probably several bootleg live recordings, I also bought one such lyric booklet. Hand typed, cheaply photocopied and then stapled together, you could say you got less than you paid for. I probably could’ve sat down myself and done a better job of transcribing those lyrics. To give you a flavour, here is the opening to Heart and Soul:

Instincts that can still betray us
A journey that leads to the sun
Soulless and bent on destruction
A struggle between right and wrong

The transcription I’d bought gave the opening line as:

Instinct and cats will betray us

I mean maybe there’d come up with a better line. Maybe cats are duplicitous.  Would you share your deepest secrets with your furry friends?

That’s the only example I remember now, but the whole thing was filled with similar implausible guesses as to what the actual lyrics might be – or occasionally they had simply left gaps or question marks where I assume they couldn’t even make up something that at least scanned with the rest of the song.

It didn’t really matter. It wasn’t as if I was going to write back demanding a refund for the five pounds or whatever I’d spent. I’m sure whoever the enterprising person who first saw that niche gap in the market did very well out of it.

But I digress.

How did I spend my week in Coventry? Not revising, that’s for sure. The only book I recall having with me was Homer’s Iliad. I presume I was tightening up on my Latin translation skills (or at least attempting to), but not much else. That was a slim hardback volume. I could hardly have carted all the textbooks for the eight or nine different subjects I was studying for up on the train. So I assume I’d been sent there to chill out, to put some clear air between the weeks of exam cramming I’d already done and the exams themselves. It doesn’t seem such a bad idea, it just doesn’t feel instinctively like one my parents (let’s be real, my mum) would’ve gone for.

So what little I do remember about that week was trips to the pub. There was one specific location I can recall where pubs existed on back to back streets and you could enter one pub on one street and exit from the adjoining pub out on to the next street. We also spent an evening at a fun fair. I remember being driven around by Dave in the dodgem cars (presumably I wasn’t allowed to drive myself) and scraping my knee after a particularly violent collision.

Coventry was not thriving in the early 80s. Nothing illustrated this more starkly than local band The Specials and their farewell single Ghost Town, which had come out the previous summer.  The lyrics and sound were a perfect reflection of how Coventry and many other towns across the country were in decline. But I guess as a passing visitor, I didn’t really experience that side of things during my brief stay.

Alongside my Joy Division obsession, I was also at that time a big advocate of fellow travellers The Sound. From the Lions Mouth was their recently released second album, but their own form of bleak but compelling music had been completely overshadowed by Joy Division (more so in the wake of Ian Curtis’s suicide), while they were also attached to the same record label as the more charismatic and photogenic Echo & the Bunnymen.

On all fronts their star was being eclipsed, which was a shame when viewed in retrospect, but at the time From the Lions Mouth was another cornerstone in my small but growing record collection. It was their best album, their masterpiece, lushly produced and released in a lavish and attractive gatefold sleeve. The residents of that house in Coventry were unaware of the band, but in the course of those few days I was able to convert them into fully fledged disciples. So that was one achievement I could take home with me. I know I opened up my copy of Homer at some point, but I’m honestly not sure how much (if any) real revision I got done.

At the end of my stay I made the return journey home, this time accompanied by my brother and his then girlfriend Allison. They escorted me as far as London and then I completed the trip back to Southend on my own. I wasn’t built for the exam process, but unlike the A-levels I took two years later, my results turned out to be acceptable if hardly spectacular. I didn’t get any A grades, but I managed six Bs and three Cs.

If I’d done badly, I wonder who would’ve shouldered the blame and whether that trip to Coventry would’ve been subjected to a thorough post-mortem? I guess we’ll never know.