Gob on the Tyne

Martin Blank from Gob on the Tyne has been in touch.  He and some others are putting together a book chronicling North-East music during the closing years of the seventies decade.

He mentioned that he had a photo from a festival at which we played, of Jeff – that’s it on the right.

The government had big plans for an expansion in nuclear power, Druridge Bay being one of the proposed sites.  Naturally, we were appalled!  The festival was one of many efforts to publicise the anti-nuclear feeling.

On a personal level, this part of Northumberland has been terraformed so much that I thought enough was enough.

In the Google Streetview below, spin the camera around – you see everything, I mean everything, that you can see, has been changed by man – from deep mining, drift mining and open cast mining, everything except the actual sand dunes,,, is man made!  Even the beach is laced with tank traps and pill boxes from WW2.

The lake, the lack of hedges, the copses of trees all the same height – these are the give-aways to a land totally churned up for profit and returned to something like it was – minus the odd farmhouse of course.

In the end, the station opened up at Sizewell and the program collapsed in political disarray.

This is Druridge Bay as it is now – and how it was then, more or less!  So we won, in a fashion….  except….

• Thatcher still made Britain the greedy thieving place it is now and Britain is still in energy debt.
• Nuclear power is on the up despite the Japanese tsunami and the hypocritical stance of Germany.
• The evil ‘right’ is on the rise again, just as it was in 79-80.