A Night at the Greystones...part two

But over 50 years after leaving High Storrs as a resident, with its panoramic skies and ungodly hills, most memories are reliable. The landscape, the townscape. Bingham Park, Hangingwater Road, the ‘wilderness’, Hargreaves corner shop and the Highcliffe – where the grown-ups went. Where my dad sang. And, to remedy another failing in my first account, where my oldest and annoyingly tall and talented brother also sang more recently.

According to my big brother, if you looked out of the back bedroom window of 25 High Storrs Rise with a pair of binoculars, you could read the time on the Town hall clock three miles away. This raises several questions. One, just how high is High Storrs?! Two, how come we had a pair of binoculars but didn’t have a functioning clock? Three, do people at High Storrs still use this method for telling the time? And four, is Twenty-Five High Storrs Skies a brilliant album title or what??!

My own memory of the back bedroom window and High Storrs skies was pulling back the curtains after bedtime on Christmas Eve and straining excited eyes for a glimpse of Father Christmas arcing through the darkness on an impossibly magical sleigh. There was a lot of sky. There were city lights, and I imagine the Town hall clock too. Never saw Santa though. Maybe I should have used the damn binoculars?

Some memories, like that one – early ones usually, are etched into the soul. My dad took us to see the opening night performance at the Crucible in 1971 where Ian McKellan (aka Gandalf) kissed the stage and demonstrated the full effect of the thrust stage on the first few rows of the audience. My first gig, Rick Wakeman at the City Hall thanks to my ‘prog’ mate Chris, clashed with the night Wednesday avoided relegation to the old fourth division in 1976. To his credit and long before smart-anythings, Rick announced the result to a mixed, but I like to think, largely positive reception. Close shave. A year later, the whole nation watched John Spencer winning the first World Snooker Championship to be held at the Crucible on TV. An even better use of the thrust stage. Of course, the ‘Boxing Day Massacre’ of 1979 – red or blue, it’s a fixed point in time which somehow overshadows other less serious (political) events that year. Almost. The chilling sight of an endless convoy of para-military police vehicles passing along High Street to do battle with local miners in 1984; how can you forget that? As an impressionable 22-year-old sitting at the top of Fargate looking down, possibly eating chips, while waiting for the late-night bus, it might have had an even bigger impact if I hadn’t had a few too many pints of Wards. After this, things get a bit blurry. But they always did after too much Wards.

Times, dates, years merge. But gigs especially seem to puncture the fog with points fixed less in time and more in space. Lonnie, and son Ronnie, Brooks at Ecclesall Non-Political Club, Frank White at The Pheasant, Don Valley and the Rotherhides at the University and the legendary Steve Gibbons at the Greystones (used to be the Highcliffe apparently) and now Blackbeard’s Tea Party, also at the Greystones, link experiences to places.

The omission in my misty-eyed reminiscences of the last venue and its family connections, more serious than my confusing a Greystones landmark with a Parkhead one was my dad’s return to the Greystones a few years ago, after my mum died and before Covid, as an audience member on singers’ nights’. Taken along by my big brother, known to some Sheffield music fans as ex-Rotherhide Roscoe Banks, and still playing brilliant guitar, occasional banjo and singing uniquely original songs, those nights were as special to my dad as any of his own glory days. ‘Tex’ would recount to me, as a matter of fact, with unhidden pride and on every occasion after those nights how, ‘Martin was the best’…Music seemed to keep him in the moment. He never stopped singing and at almost any opportunity, performing and started to play the guitar again somehow in his late eighties with arthritic fingers and a trademark smile. I think the good looks and retaining an enviable amount of hair helped. He seemed to harness the full power of the smile sometime after he retired and the last of his four sons finally left home. It’s up there with the power of music. Combine the two and you’re onto a winner…and if you also believe in Father Christmas and keep your eyes on the skies, you’ll probably not go too far wrong. Maybe keep a pair of binoculars handy?