Remembering the chief Spider, Mick Ronson, who died 33 years ago
In the last week of summer 2019, I found myself in the Humberside hellhole of Kingston upon Hull for the first and quite possibly the last time. 2019 would be my final year before becoming a pet owner, and that September was one of those months where my unfettered wonderlust took me to such a cornucopia of destinations that I didn’t set those feet in Australia or France the entire time.
Having traversed through the more heavenly environs of Switzerland, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine & Chernobyl — and finally Moldova — I flew from Chișinău via Vienna to London, ostensibly to see Pet Shop Boys perform an intimate club gig in London. That was followed, the following evening, by one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had: some Japanese cult with books to flog held an event in Fitzrovia where we could ‘enjoy’ the blessed iron herself Margaret Thatcher speaking from beyond the grave about current events, including Brexit.
Seven years on and I’m still so subliminally traumatised by the proceedings that I’ve yet to post any of it. Perhaps I should?
The next day I paid a visit to my parents in Buckinghamshire, and while I was there I received an invitation to attend the premiere of Hanif Kureishi’s stage adaption of My Beautiful Launderette in Leicester. The Midlands city is only an hour from where I grew up yet all I’d ever seen of it before was a bus station to catch a connection to see Bowie in Birmingham. Gosh, the glamour.
As I was endowed with a rental car picked up in Bletchley and no real need to be back anywhere for a while, I glanced at the map and the huge multi-county conglomerate of Yorkshire was screaming out at me. Very last minute (OK, I winged it on the door), I used my press privileges to catch The Christians in Holmfirth, and the next day decided to motor sensational in an easterly direction to Hull. Just because I could.
The unitary capital of the so-called East Riding, the port city an unloved, largely deprived place, let’s put it that way. Hull is only one letter away from “hell” after all. Though the fact Everything But The Girl took their name from a local shop, and some fine thespians such as Tom Courtenay, Andrew Lincoln and Maureen Lipman hail from Hull, as did my paternal grandmother and several Spiders From Mars, made the visit slightly more appealing.
Although I was acutely aware of a guitar-based memorial sculpture to Mick Ronson in East Park’s Garden Of Reflection, it was somewhat serendipitous that I only discovered a brand new Ronno mural because I drove past it on the way to the chip shop.
Why? Because, if I can paraphrase Jarvis Cocker, if you wanna live like common people there is no better place than Hull to do it.
Covering an entire bare brick gable end of a parade of shops on Bilton Grange’s Greenwich Avenue, the mural of the east Hull axeman was created by local artist Lydia Caprani and aerosol miscreants Spray Creatives, and was funded by arts organisation Back to Ours and Hull City Council. Happily, the huge portrait had only been up for three weeks and apparently is just a stone’s throw from where the guitar hero himself grew up.
Thinking about it now, I suppose I could have looked up his family had I planned the visit a bit better. Though, lovely lass that she is, the times I’ve encountered his cheerleadery younger sister Maggi I sort of got the impression she only really has three topics of conversation: Mick Ronson, Mick Ronson, and er, Mick Ronson.
Talking of living in the past, the following morning I needed to drop the car back in Bucks, so after shimmying down the ever-congested M1 I took the opportunity to catch up with Deana Parr, an old school chum I hadn’t seen for 34 years (I know, right).
Reunited in pub grub and ready rub, we had a wonderful day surveying the transformation of the place that was not only my college site of further education and workplace in the 1970 and 80s but even my driving test centre where I became roadworthy — Bletchley Park, now a feted museum to Alan Turing’s Codebreakers. Now there was a man from the future.
Steve Pafford
Mick Ronson Only After Dark – The Complete MainMan Recordings reviewed is here
