Sue Bailey

My mother was 10 when Bill Haley’s song Rock Around the Clock got to number 1 in the UK. When I was around the same age, there was a “25 years of rock n roll” programme on TV, which talked about teenagers ripping out cinema seats to the new soun’ that was goin’ aroun’.

“To this?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Even I find it hard to believe now.” (As people who were married before the summer of love, I’ve always found my parents to be, musically, two generations behind me. So there you go.)

As part of my current, involuntary project to turn into my parents, I had a similar experience today, with (in a bit of synchronicity that’s almost too corny to note) another Bill. Mr Idol’s White Wedding was released when *I* was ten. If I’m honest, I don’t recall the first release at all, but the 1985 re-release that coincided with some horrible family holiday in (iirc) Cornwall, with me turning on the car radio and my father telling me to shut off the noise “or else” (I couldn’t imagine what he could do that was worse than a week in a grotty place we couldn’t really afford, pretending we actually liked each other, but again, there you go).

The odd thing about White Wedding is that it teetered on the edge of all sorts of interesting Gothic stuff, as I did then myself (“what have you done with your eye makeup, young lady?”), without actually sliding off into anything beyond middle of the road rock. I can’t imagine anyone ripping cinema seats out to it. Which is why I love the literal video so very, very much: