MAGICAL MEMORY ARCADE
DAVID ROBSON explores the Bradford Timeline website which celebrates a memorable decade of pop and variety shows
OU may think this is a trivial issue. Actually it is a profound question about one’s identity and very being. For famous people such confusion/ delusion/misrepresentation can be devastating. Next to the Iraq war, the thing that most discredited Tony Blair was not some big issue of policy, it was when he claimed to have seen Jackie Milburn playing for Newcastle United when he couldn’t have. He was misquoted but by the time he clarified matters in 2008 he was no longer premier.
When The Beatles performed in Harrogate I was often in the town in my “teens and twenties” but I must admit I didn’t see them. I lived in Pontefract in 1959 when the Johnny Duncan & The Blue Grass Boys package tour hit the Crescent Cinema with Billy Fury (“Decca’s new recording star”) low down on the bill. It was Britain’s greatest rock ’n’ roller’s first national tour. I should love to say I saw him, but I didn’t.
Had I claimed to see his whole act in Dublin in October that year I would also have been economical with the truth. The manager of the Theatre Royal objected to some of his movements (too sexy) and brought down the curtain early. I know this from one of the many