Lorraine

It is a saturday morning in December 1980 or maybe January 1981. Tiswas is on TV. We have no TV at our house but, undeterred, we go to Dixons to watch it. They have plenty of TVs. We turn all the TVs in our view to ITV, so as not to get sidetracked by Swapshop. I, aged ten, pretend I am browsing for a colour TV. My brother just sits cross legged on the floor eating Sherbert dip. A song is introduced. A fat bald man appears and sings about Lorraine, a doll dressed up and sitting on a chair. The tune is driven by an upbeat harmonica line. The lyrics tell the story of Fatty meeting Lorraine, but the chorus tells us, 'that when I find her, I'm going to kill her, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine. It turns out they were going to get married, then Lorraine ran off. However once he catches up with her they have a brief fight before they 'sort the whole thing out' and Fatty decides he doesn't want to kill Lorraine after all. Three minutes, twelve seconds later and 'Lorraine' by Ska band Bad Manners is over, but this is the start of something. Something exciting, something to get obsessed by; this is my introduction to pop music.

I'm not sure I stumbled across pop music or whether I'd heard the buzz from the cool kids in my class and decided to go and suss it our for myself. I'd like to think I stumbled across it but I'm not sure that's true. The cool kids - Lee Perrin and Karen King - liked Bad Manners, but Madness were cooler and the Specials more dangerous. 

'Lorraine' wasn't the first record I bought but it was the first record I wanted. I went to Horsham market with my Dad to buy a record, but I was worried. Pop music was viewed with suspicion in our Christian household. There was a line where Lorraine punches Fatty in the nose and he slaps her round the head. Was this record too violent? I missed the bit where they went to bed together. I thought maybe they were tired, after all the relationship upheavals. I didn't have the nerve to ask for it and ended up buying, on my Dad's recommendation, 'Imagine' by John Lennon; a record far more offensive to Christians, what with its lyrics about imagining a  peaceful world free from the troubles of religion. At ten I would have been better off with the more cartoonish 'Lorraine'.

I would make regular visits to Horsham market or Boots and look at the Bad Manners' albums: 'Ska 'N' B' and 'Loonee Tunes'. I would write down the song titles and memorise the names of the nine piece band. Albums were out of my price range but I finally got a piece of Bad Manners when I bought their follow up single, "Just A Feeling', for my eleventh birthday.

'Lorraine' was never a huge hit for Bad Manners. It reached No.21 in January 1981. I tried to tape it off the radio, waiting with my fingers on play and record of a portable tape recorder, next to a poorly tuned radio 1, listening to the Top 40 countdown on sunday night. Unfortunately though, by the time I came to record it, it had slipped to No.36 and didn't warrant a play. 

I've never heard 'Lorraine' played on the radio since, or for that matter any Bad Manners records since the early eighties. The closest it came was a few years ago on the Mark Radcliffe show, when someone had rung in to answer a question for a quiz. The caller was a plumber who happened to be round fixing the sink of one Doug Trendle - Buster Bloodvessel himself. Doug spoke briefly on the phone and I expected Radcliffe to cue up a Bad Manners record, but it wasn't to be. Which is a shame because those early songs: 'Lip up Fatty', 'Special Brew', 'Just A Feeling' and 'Lorraine' are great fun. I must have bought the seven inch of 'Lorraine' about four years later from a second hand record shop. I listened to it tonight and I still love it; it was after all the start of my exploration into music.