I was once a student prince. We all were, largely on account of having been born in the British-occupied part of Ireland. All you needed was 40 percent in two subjects in the Senior Certificate – the equivalent of the Leaving. A doddle.
No fees. Au, as us college types used to say in the Bogside, contraire. And we were paid living expenses of up to 100 euro in today’s money. The grant came in three installments, at the beginning of each term, heralding a couple of weeks of falling around the students’ union drunk.
Three of the most influential people I met at Queens were Emile Ford, Helen Shapiro and Brenda Lee. The first two played for free for the Glee Club.
Emile Ford and the Checkmates were at number one in Britain with ‘Whaddya Wanna Make Those Eyes At Me For?’ when they played Belfast. I was dragooned by Stevie McKenna of Omagh to accompany him to persuade Emile to perform at the Glee Club after his downtown gig.
He emerged with a big broad smile, piled into the taxi and, within the hour, was standing on a table in the union canteen singing his smash hit, as we also used to say – no, I am not making this up – followed by ‘Slow Boat To China’. Only two songs but – hey!
Helen Shapiro was just as amenable. A little lady from Golders Green, she was huge across the water at 14 – ‘Please Don’t Treat Me Like A Child’, ‘Walking Back To Happiness’ etc. She had a supple, dark, slightly husky voice, toured with The Beatles as her support act, Dave Allen emceeing. We enticed her up to the union, too.
In her early 20s, Helen went looking for a new light in the dim and found god. She remains a major attraction at “Christian Outreach” events. Looks a little Mrs. Brady old-ladyish, and cheerful. Whatever gets you up.
Our success in luring stars to the Glee Club had a little to do with Stevie’s glittery eyes and Tyrone chortle, a lot to do with the easy times that were in it, as illustrated also by no fees and decent grants. We didn’t manage to entice Brenda Lee, still one of the great female rock/pop vocalists of the last century. I did get to interview her for the student newspaper, Gown, through the brilliant stratagem of turning up in the Grand Opera House foyer and asking for a message to be conveyed – which was, would she mind coming down, having a chat? Which she didn’t. She was very shy. Then again, she was only 16, only 16.
The four top-selling artists of the 1960s in the US were Elvis, The Beatles, Ray Charles and Brenda Lee. Dial up ‘Sweet Nothings’, still gutsy, still rock and roll, or the plaintive, exquisite ‘I’m Sorry’.
I have previously suggested looking up the ‘Drinking Song’ from The Student Prince. Specify Mario Lanza: “All I ask is a right to see those smiling eyes beguiling me/Drink! Drink! Let the toast start/May young hearts never part/Drink! Drink! Drink!/Let every true lover salute his sweetheart/Let’s drink!
“Drink! Drink! Drink!/To eyes that are bright as stars when they’re shining on me/Drink! Drink! Drink!/To lips that are red and sweet as the fruit on the tree.”
I was well past being a student, maybe 23, before I discovered marijuana. Things could have been so different, although not necessarily better.
So The Libertines are back. A Guardian feature finds Pete Doherty and Carl Barat in the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, “sipping Brit Spritz cocktails with arms entwined like bride and groom, and disagreeing over whether the view from the hotel reminds them of Brief Encounter or The End of the Affair.”
Graham Greene, Noel Coward, Deborah Kerr, Celia Johnson... What a well-sussed pair of literary gents.
New album Anthems For Doomed Youth is set for imminent release. “Don’t look back into the sun? Now you know that your time has come.”
An even more dispiriting example of the way student life has been drained of joy and jizz is this.
Ulster University is shifting six faculties from its Jordanstown campus into Belfast. That’s 13,000 students. Planned accommodation includes a 14-storey and an 11-storey building near the city centre. Local folk are not best-pleased.
The project will cost around a quarter-of-a-billion sterling, a big chunk of this is to come from selling off the Jordanstown site to developers. Except that on August 24, Newtownabbey Borough Council voted to refuse planning permission.
The project is deservedly in deep trouble. We will come back to it.
In the meantime, poring over the plans and speaking with anyone who’ll talk, I discover no space allocated for a students’ union. Nor for individual rooms for lecturers. If a student wants to speak with a lecturer or vice-versa, they will book a room in advance for an hour, half-an-hour, whatever, then leave to make way for whomever has booked in next.
This is a place deliberately designed not to draw out and deepen understanding but to make a surplus by pitching fees at a profitable level. If the university authorities have their way, there will be nothing which could remotely be described as “student life.”
And so it shall remain until the society which generates philistinism is overthrown. Students should revolt. It should be what students do.