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Barry Blue
“My blue jean baby, she's the queen of them all
She's the only one who makes me wanna rock and roll
Don't have to say goodnight
Dancing on a Saturday night”
Growing up in the early 70s the world was a different place and life seemed much simpler. Being young, things seemed definite (right or wrong, good or bad, left or right), I wasn’t aware of the ‘grey’ areas that take up so much of our time as we grow up.
Watching movies was simple - the good guy was an upstanding member of the community while the bad guy was shifty. There was none of this good guy with a tortured soul and a bad guy with redeeming qualities.
Football? Well all UK teams were good, all European teams bad (the first time I heard whistling from a crowd when they disagreed with the referee my dad turned to me and said “that’s foreigners for you, we don’t do that sort of thing over here”).
Politics? Easy. The USA were good and the USSR were bad. If you shopped in Slough you voted Labour whereas if you shopped in Reading you voted Conservative.
TV? This was a bit more problematic. While generally ITV was for normal people (like me), BBC1 for posh people and BBC2 for intelligent people there were exceptions. The most notable was the Blue Peter vs Magpie debate, here Magpie lost because they asked for money in their appeals rather than milk bottle tops.
Music? Well here I started to have problems. While Glam Rock was the right type of music, I was aware of some groups that seemed to be more manufactured than others and for the first time in my life I came across a ‘grey’ area. This ended up with certain Glam artists being ‘good’ and some ‘bad’. On the good side were the likes of Slade while the bad were headed up by Barry Blue.
Looking back on this now I can see how naive I was on all the above and I cringe when I think of my splitting of Glam into good and bad. I actually really liked Barry Blue and “(Dancing) On a Saturday Night” but I felt his name was too false and the song too ‘manufactured’. Why do I cringe? While I derided Barry Blue I remained vocal in my support for two key artists, Alvin Stardust and the Sweet, who between them probably owed more to a false name and ‘manufactured’ hits than any others in the Glam genre!
Barry Blue’s name was in fact only a few moves on the Dulux colour chart away from his true name. Born Barry Green in 1950 the name change was more of a Priscilla White to Cilla Black shift than a Bernard Jewry to Alvin Stardust rechristening.
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