#21: THE WANTED
“Glad You Came”
Single released: July 2011
If you ask me what I remember about Blackpool, which you will never do, it would have to be the smell and the light, in that order. The smell of lager and the neon lights in the pub advertising it. The sun was gently going down but the atmosphere was still warm and congenial. The lovely, ignorant bliss of Friday evening, of not having to do anything else or go anywhere else, not for a while at least, knowing that this was a moment.
My parents and I went to Blackpool on holiday no more than six or seven times and I have not been there since the mid-seventies. The meat counter of that amazing butcher just up Talbot Road, close to Marks and Spencer. The smell of steak cooking which was as unique to Lancashire as that intense red brick. 25 Egerton Road, on the North Shore. We didn’t always manage to lodge there but we went there so often it became a second or third home. Loved walking out of there towards town of a sunny morning; at the bend in that road was a row of shops, and as you turned right you could spot the top of the Tower emerging from behind a house bearing an advertising hoarding for Omega watches. Walk down a little further and you’d see another hoarding, this time advertising Heinz Salad Cream, and just to the left of that was the sea, the Promenade.
We’d travel there on the coach from Glasgow or Hamilton. The first two weeks of July, Fair Fortnight, when Blackpool briefly became Glasgow-on-Sea. Nothing but the competing smells of several million variants on fish and chips all the way down the Golden Mile. You’d come in through a small suburb called Layton, and in the distance, as the road gently curved, you received – indeed, you were gifted - your first shimmering glimpse of the Tower and everybody on the coach cheered. We saw Ken Dodd twice at the Opera House, once in 1968 and again in 1971. By around 1974 I had discovered that the place was a haven for imported Marvel comics, in a good two months ahead of the ones you got in Glasgow. There was bingo on the North Pier which I adored (although I think we only won once). You’d venture down South to Lytham St Annes for classy sunbathing. If it was raining there were always cinemas.
There was a goodness about the place – not in terms of moral goodness, but a general feeling of emotional goodness – which was probably illusory. By the late sixties Blackpool was on a downturn; most British holidaymakers now preferred to fly abroad to Spain (Franco’s Spain; yes, I know now – but didn’t know at the time). But we got the last of the good grapes. I look at Google Street View and know in my bones that the town now isn’t what it was, that returning there would only depress me. The town I knew no longer exists; I can’t get back there (and would I want to? Boating in Stanley Park, though…). But I enjoyed a YouTube video (which isn’t there anymore) of someone driving their car into central Blackpool, past the Bloomfield Road football stadium and the old coach park where we used to get off, usually into the fleets of waiting taxis, and the Tower is tantalisingly getting closer. The car radio is turned on to some local station; it is clearly Saturday afternoon and the DJ is chatting about football. But the song it plays is “Glad You Came,” a punchy yet generous pop song which depends on, of all Blackpool-friendly instruments, the accordion (or at least an expensive keyboard with an “Accordion” setting). It makes me think of that lager, and that light, again. As the scenery clears we realise with a start the Woolworth building next to the Tower – such an abrupt, decisive curve! - and Tiffany comes on the radio at that point, asking children to behave, much as I experienced half a century before.
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