Evocative songs...

I love how some songs are soooooo evocative that as soon as the first bars play on the radio you are instantly transported back to another place and time, complete with images and smells, rather like watching a movie of your own life story.

I picked up an iPod in the house early this morning and just for the hell of it pressed the play button and stuck one earphone in my ear - a piano chord and half a second later Paul McCartney's opening line "Hey Jude, don't make it bad" hit my senses and even though it was early in the morning I was instantly sitting in form 1S at Leeds Modern Grammer school, end of autumn term 1968.

The idea that music could fly through a wire into a box in your house and then be stored inside a small plastic stick that had no moving parts was, in 1968, the stuff of Raymond Baxter and his "Tomorrows World" team, in 1968 you got on a bus into your town centre, sought out a record shop and bought your music on either "singles" or "LP's", then jealously guarded them from your friends lest they scratch, or worse still, break them - sharing music with mates was limited to them listening to your records round at your house and music copyright lawyers were a thing of the future.

So there we were in the autumn term of 1968, fresh faced 12 year olds in the first year at what is now called high school but in those far distant days was grammer school complete with oak panelled walls, prefects from the sixth form who still had permission to beat you and who regretted the demise of fagging (readers from the USA - there will be a full explanation of the term "to fag" at some point in the future, yes we know it means something different in your country, but not that different), teachers were called Masters and all wore long black gowns to lessons and discipline was paramount, you certainly did not ever speak until you were spoken to - not unless you wanted a heavy smack around the earlobe or a blackboard rubber lobbing across the form room at your head - corporal punishment by Masters had been banned just two years before we arrived but it was a hard habit to break for most of the Masters who all had there own unique methods of administering physical punishment to errant oiks like us.

Our English Master was Earnshaw, one of a new intake of trendy young English teachers in that year, I often think that some terrible tragedy must have overcome the English department the year before we arrived because all of the English masters were straight out of teaching college, as fresh faced as us, and trendy too in that late 1960's freedom of expression, power to the people, ban the bomb, student protests in Paris stylee.

The English masters all wore their hair just a tad too long to fit in with the old fogies in the staff room and the new fashion for growing sideburns had turned into a competition amongst them, to sharp intakes of breath and horror striken gapes from their older collegues for whom anything other than a short back and sides was an outrage - Weber the old music master used to pick boys up by their sideburns if they ventured below the top of their ears.

But the trendiest of all the English masters was Earnshaw, think David Hemmings in the film "Blow Up" or Steve McQueen in "Bullit", Earnshaw wore the Masters black gown to teach in but underneath his gown he wore a flower power shirt with flared collar and a huge kipper tie, high waist banded Yorker trousers and chelsea boots, but best of all Earnshaw drove a Jenson Interceptor - think Ford Mustang on steriods.

When all of the other masters turned up to school in Ford Anglia's and Morris Minor's, Earnshaw arrived in the Interceptor, top down, exhaust roaring, wire wheels spinning in the gravel - he was our hero, a trendy hero.

In the last week of the autumn term he obviously couldn't be arsed teaching and so turned up one afternoon with a portable record player under one arm that he'd knicked from Weber the music teacher , plugged it in and asked if anyone in the class had any records to play.

We always had recrods to play, we were always bringing records into school to swap with friends, and Rob Vasey the class bully had a classic with him - Hey Jude by The Beatles.

Earnshaw played Hey Jude over and over and over again for forty minutes and we sat there and let it waft over us, joined in the never ending chorus of "nah, nah, nah, nah-nah-nah-naaaah, nah-nah nah naaah, Hey Jude" time and time again until Cheesy Holland the headmaster had to get off his arse and walk down the corridor from his office to see what all the noise was.

And so every time I hear "Hey Jude" I'm there, back in classroom 1S, 12 years old, school uniform, big parka coat on the back of the chair, singing and swaying to "nah-nah-nah..." while Earnshaw sat at the front, leaning back, feet on the masters desk, eyes closed, no doubt dreaming of the bird he'd pull tonight in Rockerfellas with talk of the Jenson Interceptor...

Happy days.

Full history of "Hey Jude" here