Saturday saw me journey north from West Yorkshire to my boyhood town of Gateshead, where I left to seek my fortune in 1987. This odyssey to attend a gig at Glasshouse International Music Centre (GIMC), formerly known as the Sage.

Footnote – I never earned much of a fortune, but spending the last 37 years in London or Leeds means I’m now au fait with lyrics of ditties like Boiled Beef & Carrots, and On Ilkley Moor Bah T’at… I am sure they’ll come in handy one day!

Having driven along Durham Road through Low Fell, where I resided in childhood, I headed towards my north Gateshead (NE8) hotel. A room for the night located on Hawks Road, the area my dad worked for two decades from the late 1960s, until he and my mum returned to West Yorkshire in 1989.

Our family moving from Leeds to afford dad a management opportunity at the Northern Butcher Hide & Skin factory. A rundown yard and offices back then which stood where Gateshead College now broadens educational horizons.

Even with those premises being long demolished, turning onto Hawks Road, a plethora of childhood memories flooded the corridors of my capricious mind. With the area undergoing a complete, and aesthetically more appealing regeneration, it is fair to say the domain was unrecognisable.

All, that is, apart from the railway bridge adjacent to dad’s place of employment at a time when Mike Neville sat on the Look North throne. An overpass which still stands, supporting the local rail network.

Witnessing the structure evoking recollections of boyhood Ford Cortina odysseys to the area. A domain which back then ‘boasted’ the carbuncle of a multi-storey car park made famous in the 1971 movie Get Carter.

Like the many incarnations of Trigger’s broom, in the current zeitgeist the locomotive overpass will be predominantly made up of different component parts from the 1970s/80s network. It’s tracks and brickwork no doubt disparate after numerous maintenance projects undertaken on the metal arch through the decades.

Driving under the bridge for the first time in 30+ years, as I looked right, instead of the yard and building where dad once earned a family crust, the Gateshead College building stared back at me.

No longer stood the rundown building storing bovine pelts/ovine skins, along with the company wagons which collected and distributed them. Also gone the small aesthetically unappealing office building where, amongst other relatively diminutive rooms, my dad’s office resided. A chamber my siblings and me visited many times throughout our childhoods.

It’s minimalist layout typical of that era; sparsely furnished with a solid dark wood desk, huge safe, dark green filing cabinet and a second smaller desk located by a sash window to the front. The view wasn’t brilliant, however net curtains and dirty windows can hide a multitude of aesthetically unpleasant views.

From recollection, upon the old man’s desk lay a rectangle blotting pad complete with doodles, a first-generation office calculator, a large desk diary and a folded up pair of black rimmed spectacles similar to those worn by actor Michael Caine in The Ipcress File.

Prior to witnessing these specs for the first time, I’d no idea my dad had a need for eyesight correction. I’d certainly never seen him wearing them at home – Although to be honest, as they were enigmatically perched on his desk calculator not astride his hooter, I wasn’t witnessing him adorning them in the office either.

During my post-‘O’ level hiatus as a 16-year-old, I occasionally worked in Northern Butchers’ yard, as this dark open plan outdoor working area was known. A filthy job lugging hides and sheepskins off wagons, before salting them prior to loading them back onto the vehicles for redistribution.

Apparently, the expression ‘Piss poor’ originates from this industry’s old practise of paying the poor for their urine; fluid delivered in chamber pots they used as pelt preservative. 

The expression ‘He hasn’t got a pot to piss in’ comes from the even poorer people who couldn’t afford a chamber pot, consequently having to urinate on the skins when they arrived at the tannery.

Thankfully by summer of 1979 pelt preservative practises had evolved from Victorian and Georgian times. Consequently, and mercifully, I wasn’t subject to the sight of a steady flow of paupers arriving with chamber pots full of steaming urine. Or, indeed, even poorer individuals uninvitedly turning up to ‘preserve’ the pelts/skins in front of me.

Regardless of this, working in the yard during the final summer of the 1970’s was still a pretty awful job. Particularly, at the back of the factory where the skips of bones and damaged hides and skins were located. A place where it wasn’t uncommon to witness rats who were nesting in the adjacent railway viaduct wall. The same viaduct wall I was driving past 40+ years later.

One Saturday morning, my brother Ian and I witnessed a rat the size of a cat in that area of the factory. The rodent rendered almost inert by the poison that’d been scattered by Northern Butchers in a seemingly vain attempt to control rat infestation.

At least I assumed its slow stumbling movement was a consequence of poisoning; not that it was actually a drunken feline staggering home after a heavy Friday night drinking at a rat fancy dress competition.

Regardless of what it was, the animal was in the wrong place at the wrong time as on being spotted by a yard worker was flattened by a spade, it’s body scooped up and unceremoniously launched into one of the skips.

The hotel I was to spend Saturday night a mere 200 yards from this place where my old man spent decades; his modus operandi to provide food, water, and shelter for his family.

One thing I noticed as I took the short walk to the Glasshouse from my hotel, passed the Baltic building, was my resilience against the cold had diminished markedly since I lived in Gateshead in the 1970s/80s.

Although it’s a cliché, there is some basis behind folklore claiming wearing a topcoat a few decades back, even on the foulest of winter evenings, could lead to ostracization by your peers. 

You could just about get away unscathed wearing a sweater if the temperature dropped below -10C… However, that concession was only afforded if you provided a doctor’s note and a promise not to steer the topic of conversation towards knitwear.

In my defence, on Saturday I had a decent reason to be cold. After all, with a cold breeze whipping from the Tyne, I’d foolishly chosen to don a tweed jacket instead of a coat more performant against the elements… Consequently, it is fair to say I was Baltic while passing the Baltic.

The gig by ABC, playing their iconic 1980’s Lexicon of Love album accompanied by a symphonic orchestra, was a triumph.

I bought and endlessly played the original LP in that decade when I lived in Gateshead. Although it didn’t register at the time I bought the tickets, sitting in my GIMC seat the irony of returning to the north east to witness the songs played live was not lost on me.