Jeff Barrett

Autumn 1981, Jeff Barrett got the job behind the counter in a record shop that he’d dreamt of since childhood ...

I was born in 1962 and grew up in Beeston, Nottingham. Straight after leaving school at sixteen, I went to work as a storeman at MBS Bearings. It was a horrible, depressing job. Depressing because I knew I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t mind working because it paid for records and gigs and clothes – I just didn’t want to work there. It was my own fault; I’d fucked up at school. I left with zero qualifications and a shit reference, which basically said ‘unemployable’. I knew that was a lie – I’d always worked and I’d had jobs since I was twelve. Paper boy, errand boy for the local Co-op, delivering pork pies to pensioners on a big heavy bike.

I’d been a naughty kid at school. A mischievous little fucker who liked smashing windows and setting off fire alarms and wearing things that weren’t approved uniform and drawing cock and balls on teachers’ white lab coats in felt-tip pen. At school I met like-minded people who were also into similar things . . . drawing cock and balls, that kind of thing. My best mate Pete was a big Bowie nut. We all loved Bowie. Soul was big in Nottingham; northern soul was a big part of the soundtrack of youth-club discos. I went to a grammar school, which was a surprise; I don’t think I was expected to pass my eleven-plus. What an opportunity! I took it as an opportunity to have a massive laugh.

So I failed everything. They brought these career advisers in to ask what we all wanted to do. Some kid who was good at maths was told to get a job in a bank. They asked me if I’d ever thought about the pit. The nearest pit was an hour away from my house, but these people took one look at me and thought I was only suitable for a hardcore labouring job. I just wanted to work in a record shop. Those places were windows onto an exotic world and I’d grown up in a very un-exotic way. My parents were quite boring. They were lovely, and they were good parents, but they were boring. They had no friends. There was never any social interaction in my house. There was never any music, just a couple of soundtrack albums – Carousel and West Side Story. Both of which I really liked. This sounds really disrespectful, but everything I’ve ever done has been anti my parents. I loved them both to bits but they didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke. They’d never have thought of getting high. I’d have been an embarrassment to them if they had known how I’d actually behaved. My lifestyle has been a response to them in many ways.

At sixteen, I was full-time in a bearings business and it was not where I wanted to be. I couldn’t get a job behind the counter in a record shop. Record shops were inspiring and educational. They were places of cultural significance, places I used to hang out even before punk. Walking down to the football across the Meadows estate, there was a shop called Selectadisc and I was obsessed with the window displays. To me, record shops represented music in every way. I would never have thought about the mechanics of how things worked back then, of how a record was made or how it got to the shops. How people wrote about them or got to hear them. It was quite a while later when I started thinking, ‘How does a gig happen? How do the people at the NME get to hear music? How do the records get into the window of Selectadisc?’

My obsession with music started at a really young age. It was the early 1960s and I had an elder brother and an elder sister who were both well into music so I caught that same bug very early on. Any music playing in the house was down to them. My brother especially would go out of his way to discover new music, he’d dance on different dancefloors. He was obsessed with r ’n’ b and jazz. One of my earliest memories is being in my bedroom, and my sister across the hallway doing her hair in the bathroom with ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ blasting out of the radio. The first record I bought was ‘Looking Through the Windows’, a single by The Jackson 5; I bought it from Boots with a record voucher I’d been given for Christmas. Record vouchers were big currency when I was a kid and, thankfully, people used to give me them as presents all the time. ‘Oh, he likes music, give him a voucher.’

My brother Stephen was a huge influence on my life. He’s fifteen years older than me and was a hip kid. Everything about him raised questions when I was growing up, the first of which was, ‘Where is he?’ He officially lived at home but he was never, ever there. There were a few traces – a bit of fishing tackle (he was a keen angler), a few records, a Bakelite lighter and a ciggy-rolling machine. But he was out a lot; every night he’d be out dancing. I got that that freaked my parents out a bit. It’s when I came to understand that the generation gap was huge. My siblings were part of the first post-war generation. My dad had been in the war at a very young age, my mum had worked in the NAAFI, in the ordnance depot. Then, before you know it, along came the teenagers who wanted to dress differently and act differently. And that was my brother.

I vividly remember one very significant event, when this lesser-seen brother decided to reappear on a Saturday night. On Saturdays we’d have tea between 5 and 5.30. We’d have it in the kitchen, and quite often it was kippers – always smoked fish, possibly a herring. Around that point, some bloke would come down the road ringing a bell selling the Football Post. My dad would religiously wait for this guy. Anyway, my brother re-emerged into this Saturday night scene and my dad started accusing him, ‘You think this is a hotel, do you?’ And then it kicked off and turned into something loud with my dad shouting something about ‘wasting your bloody money on that rubbish’. My brother stormed out one way and Dad the other. I gingerly picked up this rubbish – a newspaper called Melody Maker. I’d have been about four or five. This Melody Maker, this item that had sparked a five-minute war in our kitchen on kippers night – that’s always stayed with me. This was a music paper and it was a totem of rebellion.