Day trip to Greenock (Rental and Leer)

I've always liked music: first the tapes my dad played in the car - The Stones, a bit of Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beach Boys - then I was into Abba and Johnny Cash, which were my choices, but it was only when I bought Gary Numan's 'Are Friends Electric?' that I became consumed by it. 

Up until the glorious year of 1981 when electronic music properly broke into the charts* I had to scratch around to find things I liked, my three main routes to new music being the music press (NME and Melody Maker), David 'Kid' Jensen on the radio, and the occasional recommendations from the friendlier staff in record shops. (Their less collegiate colleagues are accurately represented in 'High Fidelity', which I would recommend to any music lover of a certain age.)

With the arrival of the Internet or, more specifically, the world wide web, it's been.a labour of love for me to go back and fill in some of the many gaps in my knowledge of that era, particularly during that period from 1978 to 1983 when I think that the post-punk/new wave era generated some of the most inventive and interesting music. 

Even now, I have yet to really explore some of the quite significant names in electronic music from this period such as Suicide and Throbbing Gristle (both of whose names completely put me off them at the time). 

A few months ago, I saw on Twitter that there was a forthcoming exhibition about Thomas Leer and Robert Rental. I assumed it would be in London and suggested to a couple of metropolitan friends that we go along before noticing that it was in Greenock.

Greenock?

It turns out that both Leer and Rental were originally from Port Glasgow and so the exhibition was based in Greenock. I got talking to the person running the exhibition's Twitter account and they said that if I came up they'd walk me around the exhibition. Well, of course I said yes please.

And so it was that today I took the train from Oxenholme to Glasgow Central and thence to Greenock. Actually, it wasn't that straightforward and nearly far more complicated. As I sat alone on the oddly dimly lit train waiting to leave Glasgow, a kindly old fellow popped his head 'round the door and asked if I was going to Greenock. "Yes, I am, actually." "You need to be on that train over there", he replied, pointing to a brightly lit and busy train on the other side of the platform. 

The journey from Glasgow out to Greenock was enjoyable for all sorts of reasons. As I listened to the ambient second side of Leer and Rental's album 'The Bridge', the Clyde was to my right, gradually broadening, while to my left was countryside punctuated by conurbations, which included some huge old and apparently abandoned tenements.  

I disembarked at Greenock Central and walked down to the Beacon Arts Centre where the exhibition was on. As I topped the stairs and came into the open plan area a friendly looking chap said "Fenner?". It was my host, Simon. I guess we were of a similar age and, of course, musical tastes, so we had a wonderful time, as he showed me around the exhibition, talking me through it and telling me how he managed to get hold of the various artefacts, including some of his own things. 

I only had two hours in Greenock and, to be honest, I thought it'd be an hour at the exhibition and an hour in a pub and then a train back but in the end I spent the whole time in the wonderfully curated exhibition. In this age of digital clutter it's amazing to see that, for example, there was only one photo of this particular event or to see Leer and Rental's handwritten replies to fan mail. Simon had done an amazing job of locating and collating these fragments and building a narrative from them. 

It wasn't far from the arts centre to the station but he and his wife insisted on giving me a lift and then I had half an hour at Glasgow Central to grab a beer and look at my merch. Then it was a train back to Kirkby Lonsdale, a couple of beers with Hugo and then dinner with Simon. A splendid day off!

*including: 'Vienna', 'Planet Earth', '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang', 'New Life', 'Tainted Love', 'Love Action (I Believe In Love)', 'The Model', 'Joan of Arc', 'Visions Of China', 'Love Song', 'Europa And The Pirate Twins'. 

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Reading: 'The Liars' Gospel' by Naomi Alderman