The Linda McCartney Signed and Numbered Prints

Taken from the book ‘Linda’s Pictures’

Prior to marrying Paul McCartney, Linda Eastman was an accomplished artist in her own right. She served as the house photographer for the Fillmore East in New York City and took professional portraits of every major act in the music business including Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton.

This exclusive collection of Linda McCartney photography entitled “Linda’s Pictures: Images of Linda McCartney” was framed and hung in the Malibu home of Dick and Kari Clark. In 1977, the works were published in a limited edition of 150 and 15 artist’s proofs. All images (except that of David Bowie) measured 18 1/2 x 12 1/2.

Two More Sleeps to Go

The Man With The Child In His Eyes!

Well, here we are at last: it’s Christmas. The one day in an otherwise hectic year that may be put aside to concentrate solely on home, family and friends. A day to perhaps forget the news of a troubled Europe and all the other ‘stuff’ coming out of media city, instead concentrating on those things closer to our hearts. Tomorrow, Christmas Eve, will see millions of people buying those last minute items that will ensure that this Sunday, when all the shops are finally closed, goes like a dream. Our family will be gathering at our house this year to celebrate the birth of a man whose arrival on this earth over 2000 years ago fundamentally changed the way in which we live and operate as societies all over the world. Our Prime Minister last week spoke of the values beyond politics that bind a society together that have their foundation in the a book like the Bible. Yet he could have been speaking about any of the great texts that have bound many different societies, cultures and peoples together for centuries: books that speak of love, forgiveness, tolerance and understanding. Many people don’t like to talk about religion for fear of upsetting others or even finding themselves open to ridicule, yet, like it or not, this weekend is only happening because some people in the world believe that God arrived on this earth in the body and spirit of a man called Jesus and in the most miraculous of circumstances. There is undoubtedly nothing finer in this life than watching a child open a present on Christmas morning. Indeed, I remember as a child being surrounded by adults watching and waiting for my reactions. Of course, people’s experiences of Christmas are different, and change with the circumstances of our everyday lives. Christmas can be a lonely or sad time for many. It can be a day when the financial pressures of our world are felt more than most. A few years ago I found myself at the funeral of a child. The presiding priest reminded us all on that cold and saddest of saddest days that we must cling onto the child inside us all, for it is only through the innocence and wonder of a child that we might see the world as a happier place in which to live. Here’s a thought for all adults this Christmas. Think of what it was like to be in a nativity play when you were seven. Find the nearest church to you this Christmas day and go along to re-live the child you once were. Listen to the words and sing those carols. If you want to find a church near you it’s even easier this year: just log-on to http://www.christmasnearyou.com/, (nine million hits in one day) enter your post code, and a list of churches close to you will pop up. Easy. What have you got to lose: you may even awaken the child deep inside you. Merry Christmas.

My first and only new bike: given at Christmas. A Raleigh RSW

When The Beatles Came To Northampton – Twice!

Inside the ABC Cinema, Northampton, as it is today

ABC Cinema, Northampton
8.00pm, Wednesday 27th March 1963
The 17th date of The Beatles’ tour of England with Tommy Roe and Chris Montez took them to Northampton, for a performance at the ABC Cinema. Other acts on the bill were the Viscounts, Debbie Lee, the Terry Young Six, and 208 D.J Tony Marsh.

 The group’s setlist on this tour contained six songs: Love Me Do, Misery, A Taste Of Honey, Do You Want To Know A Secret, Please Please Me and I Saw Her Standing There.

A printed menu from the Angel Hotel, Bridge Street, Northampton, Wednesday 27th March, signed and annoted on the back in blue ballpoint pen Love from The Beatles Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr xx George Harrison xxx and in pencil by John Lennon xxx

The Beatles were to return to Northampton on one other occasion in the same year, playing again at the ABC Cinema on 6th November 1963.

queuing in Northampton to see the worlds greatest popular band. Opposite is the old bank building that later became my workplace: BBC Radio Northampton

ABC Cinema, Northampton
8.00pm, Wednesday 6th November 1963 The fifth stop on The Beatles’ Autumn Tour of England and Ireland in 1963 took them to the ABC Theatre in Northampton. All of these pictures appear to be from this second appearance.  On the same bill were Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers, the Brook Brothers with the Rhythm and Blues Quartet, the Vernons Girls, the Kestrels, and compere/comedian Frank  Berry.

They performed 10 songs: I Saw Her Standing There, From Me To You, All My Loving, You Really Got A Hold On Me, Roll Over Beethoven, Boys, Till There Was You, She Loves You, Money (That’s What I Want) and Twist And Shout.

This was The Beatles’ second and final concert appearance in Northampton.

Two sets of autographs from that night

Paul, John & George tune up just before going on stage

  

Home From Home

When my Grandma arrived at Corby railway station, following a long and undoubtedly testing journey from Scotland with her five children, they were given the God sent ‘gift’ of an affordable new home. A building that belonged to the local authority which was specifically reserved as rented accommodation for those without the means of affording a home of their own. One of those children was my Mum who met the carpenter from Essex, my Dad, in a council house on Corby’s Occupation Road. They in turn eventually found a council house to call home in Thoroughsale Road, in which they would bring up a family of their own in the secure knowledge that their tenancy was protected by the local authority. So much so that my parents treated that house as if it were their own, maintaining it and its gardens throughout their entire marriage to the highest possible standard. It looked better then than it does today!

27 Thoroughsale Road as it is today

Hand on heart I can honestly say that it was the safest, warmest, love-filled pile of bricks and mortar on this earth. This is an example of what can be achieved when people are given the opportunity to live in a home that can’t be sold under a tenants feet. Rents are stable and protected by law. Council housing declined sharply in the Thatcher era, as the Conservative government encouraged aspiration toward home ownership under the Right to buy scheme, leaving us today with only something like 40% of the country’s social housing stock owned by local authorities. As I have progressed through life I’ve managed, through hard work and due diligence, to afford and live in private housing, derived from the simple aspiration to have what my parents didn’t. “That’s progress son,” I can still hear my Dad saying. Yet, despite my best efforts, I struggle to find any evidence of current affordable council house building in the Corby Borough village in which I live. Perhaps I’m not looking hard enough, though I can’t help but see swathes of private houses and bungalows eating up what remains of appropriate (or inappropriate depending on opinion) building land, new homes that might sell, when completed, for ‘lottery-winner’ prices. If my Mum and Dad met today in Gretton, they would have to move away from what they knew purely because of the lack of affordable rented accommodation. Its seems a sad indictment that the society of the 40’s and 50’s had a more imaginative long term view of what was required by the vast majority of people within its remit. A decent start in life is not synonymous with owning ones own home. Indeed, we live in one of the few countries in the world where there seems to be an unhealthy appetite for the ever expensive and, certainly these days, illusive mortgage. It was the sub-prime mortgage market in the U.S.A. that highlighted the incredible weakness in human nature to refrain from ‘screwing’ the system, consequently bringing the global financial house of cards falling to its present state: on its knees.

Slangevar (Gaelic for good health)

Another year will soon have passed us by. Many of us will reflect, for different reasons, on the things that we have lived through during 2011: the good and the not so good. The media will take care of the local, national and international retrospectives, packaging them together in such a way for them to be broadcast in a nostalgic lead up to 2012. My parents never really celebrated the passing of the years, or if they did they kept it very quiet. I, on the other hand, was a teenager growing up and working in Corby, a place that even Billy Connolly and Gerry Rafferty told me they know as ‘little Scotland’. As soon as the sun had set on another 70’s year my friends and I would gather in some pub or other to begin a night that was completely unplanned. It would be a night where money was no object, no temperature too low to bare. Corby taxis were an essential part of the process given several obvious facts. Neither I nor my friends could drive, it was a cheaper form of transport than hopping on busses, plus there seemed to be an exclusive element of excitement as we hurtled through the last night of a year to our next crowded pub experience. Of course, in those days as soon as one entered a pub on New Years eve the thick smog of cigarette smoke would be the first thing to hit one and by the time one reached anything resembling a bar an entire lifetime would have passed by. Yet that was all part of the experience: sending your mates off to find the ‘grail’ that was a free table and chairs. It seemed to me that just about everyone knew everyone back then and the mentality was most certainly straight from the script of Life on Mars.

Hello from 1977….Richard Oliff & Roy Garlick

Wizard, Abba, Mud, Bowie or Showaddywaddy would blast from every jukebox which served as a temporary bar to those huddled around it. My friends and I reminded me of the vultures from Jungle Book. ‘Where do you wanna go?’ ‘I dunno, where do you wanna go?’ and to this day I don’t ever recall any of us coming up with an acceptable suggestion. The best bet was to find someone who might know where a party might be found where one might meet girls for those all important midnight kisses. Once we had found the scent of a party we would be off like rats up a drainpipe, usually to a flat or some poor unsuspecting stranger’s house on the Lincoln or Shire Lodge estates. Then, following the midnight countdown with Andy Stewart and the White Heather Club we might spend a couple of hours huddled on the floor next to the nearest rubber plant. We must have looked a right old sight wandering the streets of Corby with our half empty ‘party four’s’ or ‘sevens’ in our best stack heels and mullets. Incidentally, I’ve never once been to a ‘retrospective’ 70’s party that looked, sounded or felt like anything from the 70’s.  Waking up on New Years day in the 70’s was always a very ‘painful’ experience.

Private Lives

Make a decision – do we want the ‘Fourth Estate’ endorsed or controlled?  A thought: ‘As far as individual rights go in a communist state, there really are none. No freedom of speech, religion or assembly. No free and honest elections or media. No expectation or right to privacy. In fact, most people in Vietnam and China assume their email, cell phone traffic and other forms of communications receive at least a routine cursory check now and again’. See People Living Under Communism: Very Limited Rights (If Any) by John E. Carey, Peace and Freedom, 25^th July 2007.

The findings of the Leveson report into alleged phone hacking and media ethics are not due to be published for about two years. My question is, why? All too often in this country we see the wheels of enquiry turn at such a frustratingly laborious and costly pace, that even the donkey turning the wheel will have forgotten why he started walking in circles in the first place. The world will be a different place in 2013. The London Olympics will be history and Greece, Italy, Ireland: perhaps even Spain may be using currencies long thought consigned to the to Euro monetary graveyard. The diamond jubilee will be the subject of documentary retrospectives, and the ‘red-tops’ will be speculating on England’s prospects in the following summers F.I.F.A. Brazilian extravaganza. In amongst all of this we will all have to be reminded about some seriously disturbing testimony given to Leveson, an enquiry that began crawling back in 2011. Not withstanding the feelings of all concerned which include the family of Millie Dowler, the public too will all have to relive the days when the news infamously made the news. Are we seriously being led to believe that all of those people that lived through Leveson once will have to continue to wait two years for some conclusion? Of course no one can predict an outcome, and neither should they. The only thing that is guaranteed is that the British media will continue in its present state, regardless of eventual outcome for an unnecessary length of time. Surely even those who work in the media would appreciate a speedier process, if only for clarification. I guess we’ll all have to be patient and remember the reasons why all of this process was deemed necessary in the first place. Watching some of the testemony given live on T.V made me begin to wonder just how safe all of our private lives are, and not solely from media intrusion. Should, for example, an employer or unknown third party have access to any aspect of those areas of our lives that exist only behind the doors to our homes? An employer who has been more than happy with the conduct, productivity and general demena of an employee may, if presented with certain privy knowledge, perhaps concerning marital, sexual or financial problems,  may view that individual in a wholly different light.  Surely such bias or prejudice would be morally wrong. President Clinton is still regarded as one of America’s most respected holders of that office, even avoiding impeachment in the light of matters arising from his private life. He helped bring peace to Northern Ireland, peace to Eastern Europe, increased the prosperity of the American people and, some have said, that had he been president instead of Bush, America would never have invaded Iraq. Speculation: of course. My view is that no individual, organisation, employer (private or public), religious, political or media group has any right whatsoever to intrude in any way, shape or form in any aspect of our private lives. That’s communism. Remember, most people in Vietnam and China assume their email, cell phone traffic and other forms of communications receive at least a routine cursory check now and again. Ring any bells or ring-tones?