I Was a Teenage Rock Fan!

By Richard Cosgrove

Welcome to 1985! Live Aid feeds the world, Marty McFly goes Back To The Future, and fifteen year old Richard Cosgrove makes a discovery that changes his life forever - rock music! Plunging headlong into a world of tight trousers, big riffs and bigger hair, the author takes us on a funny, informative and at times poignant journey through the eighties rock scene and his quest to become a guitar hero himself. Along the way he sees landmark early tours by some of the biggest names in rock, falls foul of US border guards at Niagara Falls, narrowly avoids death in a Leicestershire field, and gets caught up in a full scale riot at Rock City. Part memoir, part social history, I Was A Teenage Rock Fan also recounts the impact of rock music on society as a whole, from the advent of AIDS to the rise of MTV, via Hollywood, the dastardly PMRC and even an Australian soap opera. So grab a beer and tune up your air guitar because this tale goes up to eleven!

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Haven Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949515268

Book preview

* Introduction*

I have a confession to make. I have an affliction that can be triggered at the most inopportune of moments. It can happen while I’m driving in my car, or browsing the racks in my favourite book shop, or even when I'm walking down the fresh fruit aisle of my local supermarket. Regardless of where it happens, though, my reaction is always the same.

All it takes to trigger this Pavlovian reflex is the sound of an electric guitar - it doesn't even have to be cranked up to eleven - at which point my fingers begin to twitch and my body yearns to contort itself into the classic air guitar pose, subconsciously drawing on some deeply ingrained muscle memory.

Thankfully I’m usually quick enough to suppress these urges if I’m in a public place, but the reality of my affliction is that when confronted with a surprise blast of AC/DC's Back In Black or Bon Jovi's You Give Love A Bad Name I struggle to stop the fingers of the left hand from assuming a chord shape (it doesn’t matter which one, we’re all virtuoso musicians on the air guitar) and the right hand strumming with an invisible plectrum.

So what causes this reaction?

To quote a certain Mr Bongiovi, who was good enough to provide an excuse for myself and the many, many others who suffer from this affliction , you can blame it on the love of rock and roll.

Allow me to explain.

I spent my socially formative years expressing my love for the likes of Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, and Metallica by listening to a lot of loud rock music and drinking a lot of beer in a variety of dark and dingy pubs and clubs in my home town of Nottingham. I also saw a great many bands, ranging from the local groups who were happy to have three men and a dog in the audience, and often did, to multi-platinum arena acts like Def Leppard and Iron Maiden.

Back then, in the heady days of 1985 when I first fell in love, or more accurately lust, with rock, the world of music was very different to the one we know today. There was no MTV, no Myspace, no Facebook, YouTube or Spotify; the internet was still the stuff of science fiction, and the chances of seeing a denim and leather clad band with a distortion pedal on Top Of The Pops on a Thursday night were very slim indeed.

While it was true that the likes of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy and Motörhead occasionally troubled the singles charts, and were duly given their three minutes of fame on national television, the general public largely saw rock music as something of a joke.

Before I fell hard for the primal squeal of the electric guitar towards the end of 1985 I would watch these bands on Top Of The Pops with a certain curiosity, and though I couldn't quite put my finger on the reason why, the sight of Rob Halford belting out Breaking The Law dressed head to toe in leather and studs, or Bruce Dickinson whipping the crowd into a frenzy in one of Maiden’s live promo videos, or Lemmy craning his neck back to bark his lyrics into the microphone a foot above his head while giving his Rickenbacker a sound thrashing, grabbed my attention and I was vaguely aware that something inside was sitting up and taking notes.

Throughout the early 1980s my musical diet had consisted largely of what had been force fed to me by the controllers of Radio One and the producers of Top Of The Pops. This aural smorgasbord included pop acts like Howard Jones and The Thompson Twins, punk survivors like Adam & The Ants and The Stranglers, new wave upstarts like Duran Duran and Depeche Mode, and electronic pioneer Gary Numan.

Numan’s Down In The Park particularly stood out, the deep, rumbling synthesisers moving me in a way that music hadn't done before, awakening me to its powerful effects.

Even now I struggle to explain why the opening bars of AC/DC’s Whole Lotta Rosie on their live album If You Want Blood make me shiver when I hear the crowd chanting 'Angus' after each of his signature riffs.

I still get goose bumps listening to Churchill’s speech at the beginning of Maiden’s Live After Death, or the opening riff to Bryan Adams's Run To You, or the piano refrain from Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing.

So what is it about this music that remains so important to me after all these years?

Like many of my peers I was a young man in search of my true identity, and this music provided the soundtrack to my teens. For the first fourteen years of my life I had been something of a nerdy Clark Kent but by fate, chance or just dumb luck I happened to stumble across rock music and discovered my inner Superman.

We were pretty much the last generation to discover music in what might now be deemed 'the old fashioned way', so when we read in the pages of Kerrang! magazine that the future of rock and roll was a group of badass hell-raising dudes from Los Angeles called Guns’n’Roses it created a palpable sense of mystery and excitement as to what they would sound like.

We couldn’t just hit up Wikipedia to glean every last detail of their lives, or download their music, legally or otherwise. It was only when the vinyl was on your turntable and you expectantly lowered the needle onto it that you had your first delicious taste of this new material.

Fans of eighties rock music are a fiercely loyal breed. We still buy the latest albums by bands whose line-ups have long since ceased to resemble their original incarnations and we still go and see them when they reform, and then again when they undertake their absolutely, honest, final farewell tours (I’m looking at you Scorpions, Mötley and KISS).

We still play the old classic albums because we genuinely love the music, and we’ve bought multiple copies over the years, replacing our vinyl with CDs, and then buying the deluxe, anniversary, and super deluxe anniversary editions of our favourites.

The spark that ignited our passion for these bands all those years ago has never gone out. In certain cases it may have lay smouldering like the gently glowing embers of a late night fire pit – my own love for Metallica's output between 1991's eponymous album and 2008's Death Magnetic being a case in point – but it continues to burn to this day, occasionally becoming a raging inferno when we hear certain songs.

While numerous musical movements have come and gone since the 1980s, none of them have come close to seducing me with the same passion that rock music did, and still does.

The rise of Grunge, spearheaded by Nirvana, may have effectively brought an end to my golden age of guitars but its fans were never as outwardly passionate about their idols as we were, no doubt largely due to the discouragement of any kind of adulation by the likes of Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder.

Whereas David Lee Roth, Vince Neil, Bret Michaels et al positively revelled in their god-like status (and still do, though with a little less finesse and dignity than they used to), their Grunge peers craved anonymity, wanting to be respected for their music rather than their personalities. On the whole they got their wish, the exception being Cobain who by ultimately choosing to burn out rather than fade away elevated himself, somewhat ironically, to the deified status enjoyed by the likes of Jim Morrison, Ian Curtis and Bon Scott.

Rock music, and in particular 80s rock music, quite simply, changed my life. It helped me to navigate the uncertain teenage waters between boy and man, it inspired me to pick up a guitar and to aspire to rock stardom, and most of all it brought me into contact with a lot of people who remain great friends to this day.

It is this sense of discovery, of having been a part of something that was very special not only to me, but to the many other rock fans who shared these heady days, that prompted me to write this book, and in the coming pages I hope to share this sense of excitement, of discovery, and of belonging that I haven’t felt since, and probably never will again.

If you were a part of it then you’ll know where I’m coming from. If you weren’t, then let me take you back there. Either way, grab yourself a cold beer, and if you must, some earplugs, because this tale goes up to eleven.

Chapter 2

* In The Beginning*

It was on a cold and rainy night in November 1985 that my life changed forever in my friend Jason Stapleton's bedroom.

That night, like a teenage Manchurian candidate, something that had lay dormant in my subconscious for the best part of a decade was awakened from its slumber and I knew that I was destined to pledge my allegiance to the flag of rock and roll.

Though I was born in the city of Nottingham, England - home of Robin Hood, the first of many infamous long haired men in tight trousers that we'll be encountering in this tale, and the setting for much of this story, the seed that was to burst forth with life that night had actually been planted in my fertile cerebellum nine years earlier in a basement in Canada.

Back in the spring of 1974 my father, Tony, had decided to relocate the Cosgroves to Canada and so he packed us all up - us being my mother Barbara, my younger brother John (born in the March of this year) and myself - and shipped us across the Atlantic to the land of mountains, moose and maple syrup.

Our new home was in Silver Springs, a north-western suburb of Calgary, and my parents soon became friendly with the Vietnamese family who lived across the street.

I’ve long since forgotten their names, sadly, but I remember exactly what their basement looked like. Huge tapestries woven with intricate designs hung from the walls and a couple of overstuffed sofas were arranged in front of a coffee table with a smoked glass top, and they had a state of the art, for the time anyway, stereo system, compete with four speakers.

It was here in this subterranean seventies den that in 1976 the six year old me, sprawled on several large embroidered cushions that were strewn across the floor, first heard the record that was to ultimately change my life nearly a decade later.

That fateful night began much the same as many others we had spent in that underground leisure room. As was the norm my brother was fast asleep upstairs with his Vietnamese counterpart, and being the youngest in the room by a good few years I thought it was very cool to be allowed to hang out with the grown-ups while they smoked and drank beer and wine while I sipped my Kool Aid and demolished tubes of Pringles.

After an hour or two of listening to Country & Western music – in Canada in the mid-1970s it was a pretty safe bet that your parents would be into Kris Kristofferson, C.W. McCall, or any number of down on their luck guitar wielding cowboys lamenting the loss of their wives, lovers or dogs (and often all three) - the eldest son of our Vietnamese friends asked Dad if he’d like to hear a new album that he’d just bought.

Having always been open minded and willing to try something new when it comes to music, with the possible exception of anything containing the words ‘Celine’ or ‘Shania’, Dad was interested in giving this new album a go and so the stylus was lowered onto side one of the twelve inches of vinyl that were to change my life.

The unique popping and crackling that defines the first few seconds of the vinyl experience issued forth from the speakers before the basement was filled with the sounds of dishes being washed while a radio played in the background. A radio announcer reports on an accident in which a youth from Pontiac, Michigan has died after being catapulted through the windscreen of his car following a collision with a delivery truck, and we hear the sound of keys being picked up and someone climbing into their car and turning on the ignition.

The car stereo springs into life with a muffled, tinny burst of an upbeat song about wanting to rock and roll all night and party every day, and the driver guns the car’s engine, taking off into the night as a two note guitar riff kicks in, writing the first line on the first page of my rock and roll story.

The album was Destroyer, the song was Detroit Rock City, and the band was KISS. Given the iconic status that both the song and the kabuki faced upstarts from New York went on to achieve I couldn't have asked for a better band to initiate me, however subliminally at the time, into the world of rock music.

As Detroit Rock City screeched to a halt I had heard enough to sell me on KISS but the further double whammy of King Of The Night Time World and God Of Thunder ensured that my six-year-old soul was signed, sealed and delivered to Messrs Simmons and Stanley for all time (even Crazy Nights couldn't shake my faith).

The following day I discovered that many of my classmates at Silver Spring Elementary School were already familiar with KISS, largely thanks to their older siblings, and I hungrily devoured any morsel of information that they could provide about this awesome band. I was particularly intrigued by the rumours, which surely couldn't be true, of a long-tongued Demon that breathed fire and spat blood on stage.

Incredibly this fiery, bloody rock and roll creature turned out to be real, which for a six year old who was already a fan of horror movies thanks to my fascination with the old Hammer and Universal flicks that I would watch as part of the Saturday afternoon Creature Features, was mind blowing.

However, as is usually the case with six year old boys and their microscopic attention spans, my interest in KISS was soon replaced by a moderately successful space opera called Star Wars.

Though KISS would go on to produce things good (Alive! II), bad (The Elder) and ugly (KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park), my young mind had temporarily forsaken rock music for a galaxy far, far away and it would be eight years before another theatrical and controversial quartet of rockers would show up to put me back on the path to musical salvation.

Before the, in the autumn of 1978, October to be precise, the family Cosgrove returned to the shores of dear old Blighty as a result of Mum having contracted a particularly severe bout of homesickness. As I settled into my new school I became friends with Nick Webber, who by some strange coincidence had also just arrived back from Canada after his family had emigrated there around the same time that mine did, and Jason Stapleton (hereafter known as Stapes) whose dad Terry was a die hard rock fan.

Over the next seven years I would be entranced first by punk, and then Gary Numan, who would be my first proper gig on his 1983 Warriors tour, while Terry passed his love of rock on to Stapes, taking him to the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington in 1984 when AC/DC headlined, supported by Van Halen and Ozzy Osbourne. Terry would regularly introduce Stapes to any new bands that he’d discovered, which Stapes would then share with Nick and I as we played computer games in his bedroom. Thus the scene was set for my imminent rock and roll epiphany.

It was November 1985 and Nick and I were up in Stapes's centrally heated bedroom playing through our latest haul of pirated Spectrum games and listening to a selection of his extensive collection of rock cassettes.

The walls were plastered with pictures of Maiden and Priest, and a huge commemorative AC/DC Donington poster hung over his bed, dominating the room. As we wrestled with the Spectrum’s infamous rubber keyboard, whatever had been playing on the stereo reached the end of the tape and Stapes ejected it before sliding another into the cassette cradle.

‘Check this out,’ he said and pressed play, unaware that he was about to change the entire course of my life. After the usual few seconds of silence that anyone who grew up with cassette based music is familiar with, the sound of a snare drum being beaten to within an inch of its life erupted from the speakers, followed by the abrasive scrape of a plectrum being dragged down a heavily distorted guitar string.

Suddenly a voice that sounded as though the owner had been gargling with napalm screamed ‘You say you don’t want to run and hide,’ and I was transfixed, my head snapping upwards as this beautiful noise commanded my undivided attention.

The song was I Wanna Be Somebody, the opening cut from W.A.S.P.’s eponymous debut album, and for only the third time in my life I was completely and utterly mesmerised by a piece of music. (The first time, of course, had been KISS and the second when I first saw Gary Numan perform Are Friends Electric on Top Of The Pops in 1979.)

Though Detroit Rock City had technically been the first rock song to do this, I Wanna Be Somebody hit me between the eyes in a way that, as impressive as it had been eight years earlier, the KISS classic hadn't quite managed. If ever there was a rallying cry to recruit fresh-face young rock soldiers like myself then I Wanna Be Somebody was it. Blackie Lawless screamed about his desire for fame and recognition with such passion that I was nothing less than one hundred percent certain that he wanted it more than you wanted your next breath, and given his background it wasn’t surprising.

Going by the name Blackie Goozeman at the time, Lawless had been given his first major break when he joined the legendary New York Dolls for a whole two weeks in May 1975, standing in for recently departed guitarist Johnny Thunders for two shows in Florida.

Following this he formed the Killer Kane Band with Dolls bassist Arthur Kane before putting together Sister with future Mötley Crüe founder Nikki Sixx and W.A.S.P. band mate to be Randy Piper. Sister are widely believed to have been the first group in the Los Angeles scene to use an inverted pentagram as their logo, something Sixx took with him when he left to found Mötley, as well as Blackie’s gimmick of lighting his boots on fire on stage.

Lawless also enjoyed a brief tenure in an outfit called London which has since gone down in rock history as being the most famous band that never made it despite featuring, at various points, Nikki Sixx, Cinderella drummer Fred Coury, and three fifths of the classic Guns’n’Roses line up in the shape of guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin' and drummer Steven Adler, though none of them were ever in the band with each other

By the time Lawless formed W.A.S.P. he was more than ready to make his mark and did so with a combination of high energy metal and a theatrical stage show that owed a hefty debt to Alice Cooper, including throwing raw meat into the audience, drinking blood from a skull, and the mock torture of a topless woman strapped to a rack.

‘I’ve just got to be / Up high where the whole world’s watching me,’ sang Lawless, and with W.A.S.P.’s controversial image and live shows he achieved his goal, although it wasn't long before he, and rock music generally, would be watched a little too closely by a group of Washington wives.

Here in England the WH Smiths chain refused to carry issue 65 of Kerrang! featuring Lawless quaffing blood from a skull on the cover, grinning like a maniacal Hamlet as the red liquid ran down his chin.

Not wanting to be outdone, an outraged Nottingham City Council tried to ban W.A.S.P. from playing at the Palais on September 25th 1984, claiming that their stage show was degrading to women and an affront to public decency. They were right, of course, but the authorities and media never seem to learn that the minute they declare something to be forbidden they fan the flames of curiosity and make it indispensable to those of us who want to know just what it is that we're not supposed to be exposed to.

The moment I heard Lawless declare his metal mission statement I felt something awaken inside me. Lawless wanted to be somebody and, goddamn it, so did I! Given that I couldn't play guitar or bass at this point, and I sang like a cat on fire (though with less range), I didn't have any idea exactly how I was going to achieve this goal, but it didn't matter. I instinctively knew that I’d found my calling.

After three-and-a-half wonderfully relentless minutes, I Wanna Be Somebody gave way to L.O.V.E. Machine, The Flame, and B.A.D., all of which intoxicated me with their raw power, and then at the end of side one I heard for the first time the song that really spoke to me.

School Daze opened with a chorus of children reciting the American Pledge of Allegiance (which I can still recall word for word even now), building my anticipation for the song itself in the same way that the beginning of Detroit Rock City had done all those years ago, before offering up some of the fiercest riffing I had ever heard.

I had previously thought that Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills was intense but this was in another league entirely; louder, faster, heavier. The abrasive, aggressive guitars quickened my pulse but it was the lyrics that I really identified with, and particularly the chorus.

‘School daze, I’m here doing time / School daze, My age is my crime,’ sang Lawless, and while I didn't have anything against school as such, if given the choice between sitting behind a desk listening to my teachers and doing, well, practically anything else, then anything else would win every time.

Lawless seemed to understand where I was coming from and while I enjoyed the likes of Gary Numan, the Thompson Twins and Duran Duran, who had been the main musical influences in my life so far, Cars, Doctor Doctor and Planet Earth didn’t really say anything profound to me, even if we did find the video for Duran’s Girls On Film fascinating as none of us had seen an actual naked woman in the flesh and had certainly never considered that an ice cube could be used for anything but cooling your drink.

Despite my most pathetic grovelling Stapes was unwilling to lend me his tape, and as he didn’t possess a tape-to-tape machine he wasn’t able to run off a copy for me. This left me only one option; I just had to have my own copy of the album as soon as possible, and I knew just where to get hold of one.

Chapter 3

* Big Ten Inch Record*

Living in a city the size of Nottingham, the fifth largest in England, we were spoilt for choice when it came to record shops. We not only had a branch of each of the major chains of the day – an HMV in the Broad Marsh Centre and a Revolver on Wheelergate (both, sadly, long gone) - we also had a few good independent shops.

My record shop of choice was Selectadisc on Market Street. This was one of two shops they had in Nottingham, the other being a dedicated second-hand emporium on Bridlesmith Gate that was to become a regular haunt as my rock collection grew over the next few years.

Although I had been a regular Selectadisc customer for a while, or as regular as my two pounds a week pocket money allowed, I had never previously had any reason to investigate the ‘Heavy Metal’ section. Thanks to Top of the Pops I was already aware of bands with fantastic names like Iron Maiden, Motörhead and Judas Priest but here, literally at my fingertips, were Scorpions, Twisted Sister, Ratt, Dokken, Hanoi Rocks, Black Sabbath, Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe.

As I flicked through the vinyl I was pleasantly surprised to discover a fair few albums in the rack by KISS, which stirred long dormant memories of Canadian basements and fire breathing demons, though the four naked faces that stared at me from the cover of the suggestively titled Lick It Up album, the first to feature the band sans make-up, were a bit of a shock. I made a mental note of this and continued flicking through the sleeves until I found my prize.

As I held the sleeve of the debut W.A.S.P. album in my hands it was as though all my Christmases and birthdays had arrived at once. The cover depicted a post-apocalyptic scene (a common theme I had noticed amongst the various sleeves) with the four members of the band – Blackie Lawless, Chris Holmes, Tony Richards and the amusingly named Randy Piper – posing in front of a skeleton shackled to what appeared to be an MFI (the kings of flat-pack in the days before IKEA) torture rack.

They were all pulling their best rock and roll faces, though poor old Chris Holmes looked like he was suffering from chronic constipation, and wore tight leather pantsuits trimmed with what appeared to be spray-painted vacuum cleaner accessories.

I handed over my money and for the duration of the twenty minute journey home I pored over the sleeve, absorbing every last word and picture on the inner bag.

As soon as I got home I ran upstairs to my bedroom, lowered the needle onto the vinyl and proceeded to play the album virtually non-stop for the next few weeks. This didn't go unnoticed by my parents, who remarked that it was a bit of a departure from, and a little,