1981/12/04

Friday, December 4, 1981 (#338)

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tickets for the Electric Light Orchestra playing at Wembley Arena on December 4, 1981

Woozle recollects

I remember everyone in the audience being all excited and loud and standing up and stuff, and I just wanted to listen to the music and maybe sing along some.

They mainly performed songs from Time, and also they did a tribute to John Lennon who had been shot to death almost exactly a year earlier. I mainly remember feeling that the ELO treatment of "Across the Universe" worked particularly well.

There are multiple scenes in my head from one or more England visits around this time, and I can't figure out if there were two visits or one, or which visit is which...

• I'm walking around the neighborhood at my grandparents' house and I'm very depressed and I'm walking past a radio that's playing the song "Waiting for a Girl Like You", but it's at the part where there's just this brief nonverbal kind of cry, and it seems to echo my mood completely
• reading Fungus the Bogeyman at my Aunt Judy's house, which I had heard of because of Paul McCartney's song "Bogey Music" (see McCartney II)
• meeting Emma, the daughter of one of Dad's old friends (maybe a year or two younger than me?), as an adolescent for the first time, at her grandmother's(?) mansion, and keenly envying her figure (she apparently later said I was "very American")
• my cousins telling me about Tears for Fears, of whom I had never heard
• staying in The Old Post Office, Egton (if that was Aunt Judy's household at the time, then the Bogeyman memory has to be from a different visit, because the layout I remember was different for that)
  • ...and seeing the music video for The Voice (Ultravox song) on the TV (this one; I didn't know about this one)
    • That song hit the US some months later, in time for me to get Jessica a copy for Christmas, I think? We both agreed that we liked it. (IIRC I got her a 12" EP with 3 other songs on it, all of which were listenable; I have it now.)

This had to have been the visit after which I visited Jenny's house for some reason and her mom asked me "How was England?" and I replied, in an English accent, "small" -- primarily in reference to the low ceilings at The Old Post Office. So that provides some clues, anyway. ...except that we were clearly already doing poorly by that time, and the Jenny's-house memory feels more positive.