Drunk In Your Sled

Alternatively of course Freaks and Geeks is a show made by those who, having been locked out of the love-in during their own school daze in the early ‘80s and having found themselves suddenly in positions of (new) media power, have made a TV show that rewrites their own history as fantasy drama. Of course it doesn’t change reality, and it doesn’t reflect reality, but that hardly matters because since when was reality TV any good anyway? Discuss. (In your own time).


Disappointment of the (end of) summer: The Strokes. Is This It. Well is it? I guess so. All the Television references are so wide of the mark. S said that the Strokes songs end when someone like Television or the Velvets would only just be getting going, which is true, but not necessarily a criticism of Strokes but rather the dumb journalists who tell you that Strokes sound like either of those bands. Because they don’t. They just sound like a kinda fine dumb-ass rock and roll good times band of kids who could be straight out of that great Bruce Davidson book Brooklyn Gangs. With stupidly fantastic names and pouts to boot… which is all well and good but oh. I dunno. The actual noises they make… it’s not exactly dynamic, is it? It’s good enough as passable power-pop but I thought we had been promised more, again not Strokes fault but that of media and me dumb enough to believe it again or worse, desperate to want to believe it again. I mean, what the hell do I want/need with a band like Strokes when I’m 35? I can play my Voidoids records and get a lot more fun. Or Ornette Coleman.

Anyway. The mail this morning brought The Strokes and the overdue Swirlies remixed album Strictly East Coast Sneaky Flute Music. And of course the Swirlies record sounds by far the more beguiling, compelling and downright magical of the two. I wrote about Swirlies before though so I’m not going to say anything more here. Except… Swirlies and Ostriches. What is all that about?


posted by duke harringay at 9:25 PM

Hi-Karate or Old Spice?

It’s a good question, posed by Bill in an episode of Freaks and Geeks which is currently my favourite show on TV by a long way. Of course I shouldn’t really like it. Of course it’s just another of those shows that promotes the tired old wholesome messages of, oh you know; the importance of the family group, how ‘rocking the boat’ or being in any way ‘different’ is maybe okay as a passing phase but really you KNOW if you want to be happy and get on in life you’re going to have to knuckle down and conform and be ordinary, and really that’s not so bad after all. And it just sneaks those messages in the back door through a show that on a face of it purports to celebrate those who might be ‘different’. Hence the title. Of course.

Of course it’s all a false image anyway. I can’t speak for the US where the show is set, but I can say that in 1980 Britain or at the very least 1980 Marr College school in Troon, Scotland, there were no such social / cultural distinctions as ‘freaks’ or ‘geeks’. We didn’t even have ‘jocks’, although I guess there were the Rugby Boys and the Hockey Girls which amounted to the same thing, but really when it all boiled down no-one really talked about anyone in those terms. It was much simpler: you were either Popular or you weren’t.

That was it. Of course the Popular kids tended to be the sporty kids, and by no coincidence at all those tended also to be the ones with rich parents and who came from the right end of town (by the sea, or by the woods – take your pick), but no-one called them anything other than Popular. And I don’t even think anyone called them that. It was unspoken. No-one had to say who was Popular or not, it was like some weird mass awareness. You just knew.

You particularly knew if you were unpopular. Unpopular boys had crushes on Popular girls because it was chemically impossible not to. They hung out in the darkest recesses of the playground and they talked about Punk Rock and how much they hated everything. At least that’s all I remember talking about, and in fact mostly I remember not talking about anything at all but just huddling together for escape from biting winds, hurled abuse and footballs in the face. It wasn’t really very much fun.

No-one ever called anyone a geek, and I should know because if anyone was a proto-geek it was me. Maybe they called kids like me ‘geek’ in America in 1980, maybe not. I’d like someone to tell me. Clear it up. But in the UK, no. It’s one of those retro-categorisations that suddenly we all feel comfortable using, associating ourselves with the sort of inverted cool the term ‘geek’ seemed to attain at the end of the last century. Or ‘nerd’. I’m not sure which is better/worse.

So yes, I was a geek, even though I wasn’t. I was just a bit different to most people in school and that’s something that seems to have stayed with me. It’s not something I think about often, although at times when I do, like now, it makes me sad, proud and stupid. Sad because of the memories of all the beatings, all the name-callings and the failures at socialisation; proud because I don’t think I ever really ‘gave in’, because I think that still I just go about doing what I want to do, digging what I want to dig and fuck everyone else and their ideas of cool and fashion; stupid because why do I even care anymore?

When I was in school I used to write the names of my favourite bands on the cover of my school books. I used to decorate them too with lyrics, and doddled drawings of logos. Every kid draws logos on their school books. Most kids draw the badges of their favourite football teams, and these days too they’ll draw the logos for surf-wear or whatever. If they do bands it’s always Nu-Metal, and that’s just fine. I guess in my day it was old-metal like Iron Maiden. I saw so many dreadful drawings of that horrid Iron Maiden freak monster thing it could give me nightmares (if I cared). Me, I drew logos for Campagnolo, Gitanes and P.I.L.

No-one else knew what I was doing. No-one else got the references, except the Punks who knew P.I.L. and nicked my metal lapel badges because they said I couldn’t be a punk with a haircut (short, neat, nothing special…) and shoes (dark blue deck shoes – in 1980. Not good…) like mine. I didn’t really care though. Most people though just thought that I tried way too hard to be ‘different’, that I was making some kind of intentional cultural snobbery snub. And of course they hated me for it. Such is the way of life. It’s not such a big deal really. You learn that much pretty early in life and no-one can tell you, you have to experience it and just know inside.

Really unpopular kids never went out. They never had friends. They always sat alone in class in school and in their bedrooms in evening and weekends, and although that was romantic, it’s never going to make great TV. Which is maybe why Freaks and Geeks is great TV. Because in Freaks and Geeks Popular Girls talk to Unpopular Boys. In Freaks and Geeks there is camaraderie against the bullies. In Freaks and Geeks it all ends in a smile. And everyone, regardless of age, who was ever or will be Unpopular at school knows that all those things are a fiction, a laughable fantasy, and yet also finds themselves wanting to hold onto that fantasy because, as is the function of fantasies, they can make the reality seem just that little less harsh.

So roll on 7pm.

posted by duke harringay at 1:01 PM

End of the season

Playing the Kinks Something Else again. White butterfly dancing on the breeze. Blue jeans.

Walked to town and back this morning. Nothing to see and nothing to do, just picking up mail and hardly any of that just a press release from Pioneer and one from Sothebys telling me about an auction of ‘Punk’ artefacts. Dull. Wednesday.

Bicycle rides past two days, yesterday over Paradise Copse and over West Hill with its feeling of gated community; a refuge for the wealthy; day before out along back lanes down the Creedy valley and into Crediton before heading out to Tedburn St Mary then to strange Pathfinder Village and up Pound Lane, eventually downhill to Exeter and home. Both times sun still warming but that tell-tale chill to wind and air; the comings of Autumn and this afternoon I want to ride to Trusham, the last of this summer, to see Old Rectory thatched beautiful courtyard house how many hundreds of years old ? … and … hair tied back in clasps, white gloves, shelling peas. The village green. The red phone box and the hills beyond all brown and full of hay bales. Pretty soon the leaves will fall. Make me go out in Autumn and ride it again, battling the bitter winds if need be, but make me do it.

No, I know I’ll wither and get fat and bloated again. Hateful winters approaching.

School starts again in mere days. What’s to look forward to?

Well exactly.

Point me at my bicycle.


posted by duke harringay at 1:51 PM

Don’t let anyone tell you that the rural economy is in tatters; it’s a fair chance they’re just after some kind of subsidy.

I remember once, back in the late ‘80s when I was at Art school in Glasgow, and all around the city there seemed to be building sites, someone told me that the best way to tell if a city was in decline or ascendancy was to look at how many cranes you could see on the skyline. More cranes = more building and development = more money and more positive investment = a city that is growing. A simplistic way of making a judgement, perhaps, but certainly in those years in Glasgow it was accurate because the city for sure was in the early stages of a remarkable renaissance that saw it shake off its old industrial, decaying, depressed and violent image to emerge as a beautiful phoenix.

So. If the idea that the amount of building and development in the city is a good measure of its health is accepted as being largely accurate, how about using the same measure for the countryside? Well if you do, you’d have to accept that in the leafy summer lanes of mid Devon at the very least, the countryside is undergoing a phase of healthy development. When I ride the lanes and backroads of the county I am struck, this year more than any other in the eight I’ve been here, by the amount of building work that is going on in isolated groups of cottages and farms; the number of expensive 4WDs, BMW, Mercedes and Jaguar cars squeezing past on single track lanes. It used to be that when you rode these lanes you saw either those sorts of polished vehicles or junked up old rust-buckets, and that the ratio was kind of 50/50, but not anymore. This year it’s a Mercedes or a tractor and barely anything in between.

Of course there’s an argument that says that the development of the countryside is only being undertaken by wealthy refugees from the City (read London) who are making the most of their investments and moving to what they consider will be an idyllic life in the country, and that as such these people are destroying the very fabric of rural society that has existed for centuries. Such arguments and concerns may be very real, and may carry weight, but the most real concern must surely be that rather than destroying a mythic English rural heritage, the current influx of private money is creating just a different version of the same thing: where most of the land is owned by a few, and that the right to enjoy it comes at a price. That said, I’d still rather the countryside was owned by middle-class City Guardian readers than by farmers.

I don’t believe that people visiting the countryside for leisure are remotely interested in farming, and couldn’t particularly care less if there was a working farming industry placing sheep on the hills and cows in the dales. All they want is pretty views, a nice pub for their lunch (preferably by a nice river) and maybe a nice easy, gentle path to walk on. And if the stench of cow shit from the farmyard is overpowering, well, maybe they’ll make some joke about ‘healthy smells’ but don’t kid yourself that they wouldn’t rather the farm be turned into a nice craft shop or another pub. Which of course would only be a good thing.

One of my abiding memories of the foot and mouth ‘disaster’ of 2001 (apart from the gross, needless and endless images of dead animals in the media) will be farmers telling me that I, like the rest of the world ‘don’t understand the ways of the countryside’. By which I assume they mean ruthless killing, the spreading of noxious chemicals on fields and huge amounts of slurry (that’s shit to you and me) ‘escaping’ into rivers and as such they would be right: I don’t understand it.

Farmers, it seems to me, are endlessly whining about lack of understanding and support for their industry, forever demanding hand outs and subsidies, determined that their way of live should go on regardless of the realities of global economics and the fact that by its very nature, the tiny island they live on cannot hope to compete in a world market, certainly in terms of intensive farming. Not against the massive countries like Canada and the USA or Australia, where one farm might be as big as Wales. Which might be an exaggeration, or it might not, but you get the idea. I seem to recall a similar outcry being made by Steelworkers and Miners a long time ago as their industries faltered and became less economically viable in the face of global competition. I don’t remember seeing many farmers standing in solidarity with the miners, though. If anything, farmers being, on the whole, the biggest bunch of rabid xenophobic blood thirsty Tories you could imagine, they were, I don’t doubt, cheering on Thatcher and her lackeys for stripping the Unions of their powers and applauding the police as they charged the picket lines on their horses. ‘Just like killin’ bastard foxes’ I expect they roared with delight as they watched the news on the telly.

Now I had solidarity with the miners in the ‘80s, even if they probably wouldn’t have much cared that a specky middle class Art student was ‘on their side’, and I felt they had a point, but that the point was missed. And that point was not that mines should have been kept open regardless, and not that simply because recent historical ‘tradition’ had produced a mining community it must always be thus; but rather that no-one in Government or in the management of the mining industry seemed to be giving thought to the people involved; all they could see were figures on a spreadsheet. There was no alternative offered to mining, no reasonable attempts to give back to communities and individuals something positive and worthwhile as a replacement. All they were given was a place on the dole queue.

And if I had any sympathy for farmers and others involved in the ‘rural economy’ it would be the same thing; that government ought to consider the rural economy and create opportunities for development that gives something to the people of the whole nation, and not just to those with the money to buy into it. But of course that ain’t going to happen and any slight glimmer of sympathy I might have had for most farmers disappeared years ago. So instead for now, here’s to the City slickers ousting the country bumpkins, and here’s to the farmers smart enough to muck out the shit from that cow shed one last time before calling in the builders to covert it all to nice holiday or second houses for the rich folks to buy. Here’s to the people who don’t understand the ways of the country.


posted by duke harringay at 9:33 AM

Curtains drawn at six past nine in the Morning, blocking out the sun, not from vampiric goth hatred, naturally, but to stop reflections on monitor. Also to deflect some heat from entering geek lair here up top of the house, attic sweet room with shelved CDs and floor bound vinyl at one end, rectangle of white lightness falling crossed over bottom two shelves, catching and reflecting, blinding if I look, off the top of the Velvet Underground and Velocity Girl. Remember Velocity Girl did a lovely cover of New Order’s ‘Life’s Two Faces’ and I must dig that single out some time again and play it. So many things to play. So many things to hear, again and again.

A few days ago sat in Boston Tea Party drinking double espresso and freshly squeezed orange juice, reading Mojo magazine for my sins, bought mainly for New Order article which was at best mildly diverting. R really doesn’t like New Order and reminded me of such later that night at Bowling Green back table overlooking pool table from previous meanderings, looked at by me with longing remembrances but no luck, R not pool player but bar billiards instead; different generation I guess. New Order, says R were always a poor Pet Shop Boys and he would have a point if not for the fact that New Order were always much more resolutely ‘rock’ than Pet Shop Boys and of course that’s good or bad, you take your pick. I have more records by New Order than by Pet Shop Boys, for whatever that might tell you about anything. The Mojo article suggests that Neil Tennant cried when he heard 'Blue Monday' because it pre-empted everything he and Chris Lowe were planning but I don’t know how true that is. Playing 'Blue Monday' again this morning, on a whim, for the first time in years, it sounds sparklingly strong. Maybe it deserves its reputation after all. Engineered, of course, by Michael Johnson, who produced all those early Beloved singles, when the Beloved sounded not unlike New Order and in fact I played those four Flim Flam label Beloved 12”s the other day (as part of my transfer of vinyl to CD) and they sounded stupendous, like the dynamic Pop giants I always knew they were.

Speaking of the ‘80s, I watched the VH1 Top Ten of the ‘80s yesterday at lunchtime and was surprised to see that Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ was top of the heap, ahead of Band Aid’s preposterous pop hyena ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’. Presuming the chart was drawn to reflect sales… so ‘Relax’ was the biggest selling single of the ‘80s? That makes me feel better about the decade because really it was a stunning record. And ‘Two Tribes’ was number four I think. Paul Morley and Trevor Horn must be very happy. Scary fact though; whilst watching the Band Aid video I could name pretty much all the faces, much to my amazement and embarrassment. Shocking to see too how young everyone looked, Weller especially. Spooky. Even remembered that the ugly, short guitarist from Duran Duran was called Andy Taylor, and wasn’t he referred to obliquely by Lawrence in Denim’s classic ‘I’m Against The ‘80s’ in the lines:

“I knew you when you were at school, you were nothing then. Then when you left the band you were nothing again. You bought yourself a farm and you looked about as calm as a man who’s going to freak because an earthquake hit his street.”

Which thinking about it again could be about some others I guess, but wasn’t Andy the one who left before the band ‘split’ or something? I can’t remember. And I guess it could be about Stephen Duffy who was in Duran Duran at the start of course, although did he buy a farm? He certainly sounded like it with the Lilac Time, whose double CD package I got recently and which disappointed… not sounding remotely as sweet as I remember the Lilac Time sounding at the time, and hmmm, in fact I much prefer the solo Duffy from the ‘80s when he would use the ‘Tin Tin’ moniker and recorded gems like ‘Julie Christie’, ‘Wednesday Jones’, ‘The World At Large Alone’ and ‘Broken Home’, and in fact wasn’t ‘Kiss Me’ one of the finest straight ahead Pop nuggets of the decade, right up there with April Showers’ ‘Abandon Ship’, the song that I will forever take any opportunity to remind the world of.

Tin Tin. Damn. Forgot that Channel 5 were showing another Tin Tin cartoon this morning at 8.30 and there I was, eating my toast and drinking the morning earl grey reading Ghost World once again instead of watching the telly. Yesterday I caught the end of the ‘Secret Of The Unicorn’ and actually it wasn’t all that good anyway so why am I annoyed?

Ghost World the movie appears to be set for a November release in the UK, according to the Guardian Guide which ran a feature at the weekend. Some rantings about comics and dweebs and such like which was marginally interesting, but spot on for the point about comics being a male dominated arena, populated by largely, yes, weirdos and oddities you wouldn’t want to share a room with. But it’s just a microcosm of society in a wider sense really, because if you go into a comic store you just get hit by these racks of boring fantasy shit and tracking down anything remotely interesting is nigh on impossible; which reflects wider cultural society in that whatever you’re talking about (movies, music, books, whatever…), then finding something a bit out of the ordinary is hard. So finding work by interesting writers IS hard. I haven’t seen a David Clowes or a Chris Ware in any Exeter comic store and don’t hold out any hopes of doing so in the future… But yeah. Comics. Girls. Reading Ghost World again this morning and C looked at the book and made scathing remarks… I was saying that no, it’s not full of mutants and super-hero types, it’s just a really good story, to which she says ‘why does it need pictures then?’ She can be such a lit bore sometimes. Bloody English teachers…

Watched Sliding Doors last night. Mildly diverting. Too many bloody irritating characters though. No likeable male characters at all. Made me feel like crap again for being male and always when this happens remember that Field Mice song that was on one of the Autumn Store 7”s on Sarah, the one that goes on about how some men are such fools, and how they make Bobby Wratten ashamed of being male. And always hating the fact that some women would laugh about the insecurity of that sentiment, and in other breaths curse men for being disgusting and me just wanting to escape to the heavens in those moments and in fact in so many moments. The world just so horrific and all the fragility of beauty ignored and forgotten and how much I miss the stars and the leaves falling from the trees and it’s too hot already. And oh dear, remembering the ‘80s again and hearing/seeing the Lotus Eaters doing ‘The First Picture of You’ on the telly the other day and then right after Depeche Mode ‘The Meaning of Love’ and it all seeming to be so fantastically naïve and pure. Which is never the thing I think of as being the lasting impression of the hated ‘80s but maybe, maybe… It’s only nostalgia. My generation was born nostalgic. But really. ‘The Meaning Of Love’ all chirpy cheeky grins and Woolworths synthesisers, and think about it, if anyone were to do something like that these days, well hell, there’d just be no chance. It would have to be 16 year olds with barely any clothes on, making it out to be totally sexual, and really it’s the meaning of SEX they’d be talking about and wouldn’t it be so bloody obvious and wouldn’t they make you feel a sad loser for not thinking the same and not looking the same, and yes, some days the world just seems so horrible and I want to scream and escape, and so of course I do.

And then reading a post on the Sinister Belle and Sebastian mailing list from someone in Seattle I think saying how they had made up their own flyers for B&S show which I thought was a lovely thing to do but then blowing it totally by asking people to send some sort of trade to get one. Saddened me. Remembered back in the mists of time making posters and flyers for first bunch of Sarah singles and going out in Troon despicable streets and flyposting just because of love and wasn’t it hilarious and so fine to walk down the street and along the prom and see posters for the Poppyheads and the 14 Iced Bears and the Sea Urchins? And posting those flyers and posters to friends with mad scribbled letters of love and hate on the back, and expecting nothing in trade except communication and excitement at being alive and to be doing something magic, dumb, pointless and glorious. Sometimes I hate the world so bad.


posted by duke harringay at 10:35 AM

I was saddened to hear of the death, yesterday, of Ken Tyrrell who died of cancer at the age of 77. Whenever I hear the name Tyrrell I’m taken back to my years as an early teenager, buried in my bedroom beneath copies of Auotosport and Tamiya model race cars. It’s hard to remember those days, and it’s hard to express just how much of a hated geek/dweeb I really was in those times. Also hard to communicate just how much of a lost and lonely outsider people such as me really were in those far off days of the end of the ‘70s and birth of the ‘80s, in the days before the freaks and geeks were, if not loved, at least made the subject of TV shows. And actually, isn’t Freaks and Geeks a great show, if only because it seems to be oddly wrong (in UK eyes) at least with it’s cultural references, but that’s probably just a UK/USA thing and there’s nothing wrong with that really. My favourite is the Bill character, all gawky limbs and big glasses and a mumble mouth full of stones. If I say I was like that, well, maybe you kind of get the picture. I don’t know.

But Ken Tyrrell. He was my favourite team-owner in Formula 1 racing and I think if you asked anyone in the pit lane even today about Ken they’d say the same thing, although perhaps only if they were forced to talk from their hearts and not their commerce driven heads. Because really Ken was from another age, an age before multi-nationals owned sport and there was still room for the enthusiasts, and isn’t it ironic that many of the Minardi team crew are ex-Tyrrell personnel, the Minardi team being maybe the only team left with the spirit of Tyrrell.

The hey-day of the Tyrrell team of course was before my time, and Ken started in F1 when I was two years old in fact, winning the championship in his second year of entry with Jackie Stewart in 1969. Naturally Stewart will inevitably be the driver history records as the key Tyrrell driver, being the only driver to deliver a driver’s championship to the team (in fact he gave them three). But not for me, because as I said, he was before my time, and already retired with those three championship titles under his belt before I was even aware of Grand Prix.

I only knew the Tyrrell hey-day through books and magazines, particularly a pile of old Autosport magazines that I picked up at a vintage car rally in 1980 in Cumnock, of all places, which was a stones throw from my birthplace in the lost mining community of New Cumnock in a place they used to call Ayrshire. I looked at faded black and white photos on yellowed paper of Stewart in his Tyrrell 003 from 1971, when he dominated the championship, winning 6 of the 11 races. Tyrrell themselves won their only constructor’s title that year also, thanks in part to Stewart’s dominance, and to the sole win of the charismatic Frenchman Francois Cevert at Watkins Glen. Cevert had a movie star’s looks and should have risen to prominence after Stewart’s retirement from the sport in 1973, but with tragic irony, the Frenchman died in a practice accident for the last race of the season, at the very same track he had raced to victory on two years previously and the Tyrrell team was never quite the same again.

But as I said, I only knew that from poring over those old magazines, and later through gleaning statistics as only the truly geek male can, from the very wonderful Grand Prix Data Book which I bought in 1995 just before I turned 30, recognising it as the book I would have killed for at 15 and there’s nothing wrong with that.

My first real awareness of Tyrrell though came in 1978, the year I followed Grand Prix for the first time, the year I cried when Ronnie Peterson died at Monza because really even a 12 year old could see that year that Ronnie was the real hero, the real racer and that it was he should have won the championship and not Andretti, even if Andretti deserved it for sticking with Lotus through some hard years and for developing their ground-breaking ground-effects cars. But then of course Peterson himself had suffered his years with Lotus when their cars were either so ancient it took heroics to get them to the front (in 1975 with the venerable Lotus 72) or were close to being pigs (the Lotus 76 that the team started 1975 with, and the early incarnation of the Lotus 77 of 1976) although of course in ’76 Peterson jumped ship quickly to the March team, leaving Andretti to struggle on with the 77. And in fact Peterson got a win in ’76 at Monza, a race which has the odd statistic of listing one O. Stuppacher failing to take the start because, so the records state, ‘he believed he had not qualified’! His car? A privately entered Tyrrell.

In 1978 Tyrrell had the all French driver line up of Patrick Depailler and Didier Pironi, Depailler being one of the longest serving Tyrrell drivers ever, spending five straight seasons with the team from 1974 to 1978, and in fact Depailler made his F1 debut as far back as 1972, at the French Grand Prix in a one off ride for Ken. It wasn’t a great year for the team, but then in the face of the Lotus domination it wasn’t a great year for anyone else, although it did bring Depailler’s long over-due first Grand Prix victory, which he scored on the glamorous streets of Monaco.

In 1978 too, Christmas brought my first 1/12th scale Tamiya model kit: the strange Tyrrell P34 six wheeler Grand Prix car. I spent several intense days constructing the kit and was proud as hell when it was finally complete. I showed it to everyone who came to the house and they must have thought I was crazy.

The Tyrrell P34 was maybe the oddest F1 car ever, with its four tiny front wheels designed to cut down wind-resistance. I don’t know if it really did cut wind resistance, but even if it did, it didn’t help make the car particularly fast. Tyrrell raced the car in 1976, which was the last year Tyrrell sported the logos of French petroleum giant Elf as major sponsor, with Depailler and Jody Schekter driving. Depailler picked up a bunch of second places, notably in Sweden, where he tailed home his team mate for the P34’s only victory, and the Tyrrell drivers came home in distant 3rd and 4th places in the championship behind the duelling Hunt and Lauda. And incidentally did anyone see the recent biography show about James Hunt on the telly recently? I never realised just what a sad character he became, and somehow even though I never liked him as a driver or an individual much, it seems that the F1 paddock could do with some characters like him these days.

Tyrrell raced the P34 again in 1977, this time with Ronnie Peterson alongside, but next to newer cars from the other teams the car seemed even more unwieldy than before, and the best they could salvage was a 2nd from Depailler in Canada, and a third in Belgium for Peterson. Ronnie, however, was delighted to be on the podium to help celebrate what would be his compatriot and friend Gunner Nilsson’s only Grand Prix success; Nilsson of course succumbing to cancer just six weeks after Ronnie tragically died following the Monza startline accident, the race that with cruel irony handed his team mate Andretti the world championship.

After Depailler’s 1978 Monaco win, Tyrrell entered a barren period where the team struggled to find sponsors who could stump up the increasingly huge sums of cash needed to compete in F1. Through 1979 the team regularly ran with just the team name emblazoned on the sidepods of the car, although eventually Italian washing machine manufacturer Candy stepped in as sponsor, just in time to see their name flying through the air on TV screens across the globe as Pironi made his spectacular assault on the back of Niki Lauda’s unwieldy Brabham at the Mirabeau corner in Monaco. Pironi of course, having been given his F1 break with Tyrrell, landed a drive with the ultra-competitive Ligier team in 1980, eventually moving to Ferrari for whom he could and perhaps should have won the championship in 1982, if the 1982 season hadn’t been one so full of tragedy, with Ferrari team-mate Gilles Villeneuve perishing at Zolder in Belgium, and Pironi himself coming close to death in a horrific practice crash in the Hockenheim rain which ended his career and his championship hopes with shattered legs.

And really Pironi was a great example of the kind of unerring ability that Ken Tyrrell always had for spotting up and coming young drivers, nurturing them in his team before the big fish inevitably snapped them up.

Michele Alboreto, Tyrrell’s lead driver of 1982 was another such character, and in fact Alboreto was the driver who gave Tyrrell their unexpected final two Grand Prix victories, at the ’82 season closing Las Vegas Grand Prix held in the unlikely surrounds of the Caesar’s Palace car-park of all places, and then one year later, on the streets of Detroit. Alboreto, who of course tragically died in a sports car testing crash earlier this year, was a strange and lovely character who really should have fared better with Ferrari than he did, let down by the fabled Ferrari lack of reliability and luck that blighted the team throughout the late ‘80s and early/mid ‘90s.

And in fact Ferrari have further connections with the Tyrrell team, poaching the mercurial Jean Alesi from the team for the 1991 season, Alesi of course having made such a dramatic debut in the under-powered and under-funded Tyrrell in France in 1989. Jean finished an amazing fourth that day, having run as high as second earlier in the race. The dramatic French-Sicilian started the 1990 season even more dramatically, leading the season opener in Phoenix and famously re-passing the legendary Ayrton Senna during a fraught battle with the Brazilian. Sadly though, with their lack of funds, the Tyrrell team could not provide Alesi with the support he needed to mount a sustained challenge to the top teams that year, although at Monaco, where driver skill can count more than engine power, Alesi qualified a stunning third behind Senna and Prost, and there was proof if you needed it that really Alesi was a truly gifted driver.

As the ‘90s progressed however, the big teams with their mammoth budgets as last cottoned on to what Ken Tyrrell had done throughout his time as a team manager, and started to pay closer attention to the junior formulae, signing up young drivers at earlier and earlier stages of their careers. It was the kind of practice that took away any chance the less-well financed teams might have had of finding a great young driver to pull them up the grid, and it was a great shame that Tyrrell ended his time in F1 with a string of what amounted to little more than journeyman pay-drive characters, the exception being possibly Tora ‘Tiger’ Takagi. The trend for big teams signing more and more drivers has of course spoiled F1 to some extent, reaching the point where the teams who own the contracts to specific driver’s can juggle and trade driver’s on a whim. Which makes it clearer than ever that F1 these days is a business first and a sport last.

Which means that perhaps it’s as well then that Ken Tyrrell finally bowed out of the game at the end of the 20th Century, selling his team to the British American Tobacco company, leaving the game to the business-men instead of the racing enthusiasts. Like I said, Ken Tyrrell seemed to belong to another age, and although the past is passed and you can never go back, sometimes it’s good to at least glance over your shoulder, remember the magic, the good times (the tragedy and the tears too) and dream.


posted by duke harringay at 11:55 AM