Just a boy…growing up with Leo Sayer.

I was about seventeen when I discovered my first real pop idols in the early 1970s. In the previous decade I had grown up ignorant of the Beatles or the Stones and their contemporaries as my Roy Orbison loving father and general pop curmudgeon hated any music he called “modern muck”. He refused to listen to any of the youthful radio stations and wouldn’t tolerate being in the same room as Tops of The Pops! ‘Look at him! He looks like a girl!’ Personally, I put all down to conscription into the army.

At this time I had got acquainted with two young miners my age, that I had met on holiday in Ostende. They were called Andy and Dave and they finally introduced me to a brand new pop success that was Leo Sayer. Andy was also into T.Rex and Marc Bolan and Dave was a dead ringer for Noddy Holder of Slade, sideburns and all.

I hung around with these guys on a Wednesday night and sometimes at the weekend when I came over from Derby to Swadlincoate on the bus in order to drink lager and lime in a local smoke-filled pub full of miners and to listen to the music on the jukebox. We would spend hours drooling over the latest Leo Sayer album, starting with Silverbird released in 1974. The LPs had the lyrics of the songs printed on the reverse and we learnt each song word for word and sang along word for word, matching (vaguely) high note for high note and not forgetting mimicking the wild hand gesticulations on the bouncier tracks. My vocal chords have never recovered. Back then I even had the trademark mop of curly hair and was convinced I looked like my new hero.

Our passion for all that was Leo was supported by the music papers of the time like Sounds and the Record & Radio Mirror. We devoured every article and believed every word printed! There was some other band called Queen who looked and sounded pretty cool too and we dutifully learnt all the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody.
Andy was especially good at the air guitar and strutting.

Poor old Andy and Dave’s mums must have been tearing their perms out as we practised our Sayer singing in the lad’s bedrooms like any other noisy teenager. I can just imagine us now in our flares and bright coloured shirts giving it all to such tracks as The Show Must Go On – Quicksand – Bedsitterland – Moonlighting – Only Dreaming- One Man Band and Giving It All Away. These and many others were superb little songs that carried a good storyline. Some of the less jaunty songs were themed on loneliness and sadness and having no one to love and whatever did happen to those Moonlighting couple? Answers on a singles cover please.

I was always thrilled to watch Leo perform live at The Assembly Rooms in my home town of Derby and got ridiculously excited if he appeared on the telly on programmes like The Old Grey Whistle Test and the forbidden realm of Top of The Pops.

Ten of the original Leo Sayer albums were re-released on CD a few years ago and having thrown out all my old LPs and forgotten Mr Sayer for a while, I eagerly went out and bought them all. If only to remind my fifty-year old self of those fun times in a smoky pub. This time it was my ex-wife whose ears suffered my singing and raised her eyebrows at the notion of me going off to see a Leo Comeback gig in Derby around the year 2000.

Well the curly hair may have gone down the proverbial plughole of life and my musical tastes may have changed a bit but Leo – you still “make me feel like dancin’!”