The programme cost two pounds. David paid. He always paid — that was David, the oldest, the one who made the gesture. He handed it over like it was nothing, but two pounds in 1976 was a fortune. It was glossy. Properly glossy — the kind that made you hold it with both hands, afraid your thumbs would leave marks.
Christmas Eve. London Olympia. Rod Stewart.
I was fifteen, though for the longest time I’d have told you twelve or thirteen. I had the venue right. I had the excitement right. I had the feeling of it — the noise rolling back off the walls before Rod Stewart even walked on. All of that was right. What I had wrong was who was there with me.
We were staying at my brothers’ place in North London. Upstairs of two semis knocked together. David and John shared the place. The family downstairs had a son my age, and his dad was a detective who looked like he’d walked straight off the set of *The Sweeney*.
David would make his famous cherry cheesecake when we visited, and nobody’s glass was ever empty around him — he’d refill them before you ever noticed. Not long before he died, I convinced him to share his cheesecake recipe with me.
Mum and Dad were with us that Christmas. Her health had really deteriorated — happy pills, they’d called them, prescribed until they’d destroyed her liver. The Royal Free in Hampstead was just up the road. She had two years left. She was soldiering on. That was always the phrase.
We spent Christmas together in London frequently after her surgery. Pantomimes in the West End — Rod Hull and Emu one year. Superman in Leicester Square. But mostly we’d stay in and watch the Christmas specials. Les Dawson. Dick Emery. Those were Mum’s favourites.
John said he couldn’t come to the concert. Had to work on his PhD. But he’d watch it on the TV — Whispering Bob Harris was presenting it live on the Old Grey Whistle Test, John Peel simulcasting on Radio One. It’d be *just the same*, he said.
I didn’t think twice. I was fifteen and going to my first ever concert. I wasn’t thinking about what John was giving up. I wasn’t thinking about John at all.
So it was David, Mary, and me. Mary was John’s girlfriend — not David’s. She’s his wife now. Forty-eight years.
David steered us in. I remember the noise hitting us — not music yet, just the sound of thousands of people pressed together, all of them bigger and older and louder than me. I remember Rod kicking footballs into the crowd. I remember him wearing the Scottish football strip for part of the set, though I’ve learned not to trust the details anymore. Britt Ekland was supposed to be there. They were together then, and there’d been rumours. I thought I saw her, stood off to the side of the stage. But maybe I made that up too.
What I know is real: the second song.
This Old Heart Of Mine.
The Isley Brothers. Tamla Motown. One of the records John used to play at home after he’d dragged me into Chesterfield on a Saturday, spent what Mum gave him to look after me at Hudson’s Records, carrying his haul back like treasure. Hudson’s still had listening booths back then — you’d hand your single to the person behind the counter, they’d put it on, and point you to the right booth. John would slip into the booth and I’d stand beside him, too small to reach, too young to be offered a turn. I couldn’t really hear anything. I’d watch his body pick up the beat — the nod, the shift, the half-smile when the hook landed. I’d ask if I could listen. He’d ignore me. I’d pretend to hate his music.
I didn’t hate his music.
And now Rod Stewart was singing it. The opening bars, and the crowd pushed forward, and I was fifteen, stood in the Olympia on Christmas Eve, and the song I used to pretend I couldn’t stand was filling a room I had no business being in.
John was back in Hendon. Watching it on the TV. Just the same.
I told this story for years. Decades. It was one of those stories you recycle — John and I would get together, start reminiscing, and the Olympia night would come around like a favourite track. I’d tell it the same way every time. The four of us — David, John, Mary, and me — at Rod Stewart on Christmas Eve. My first ever concert. What a night.
John never corrected me.
Not once. Not in forty-something years of me telling it wrong. He’d let me keep him in the crowd, standing next to me, watching his favourite singer — Rod ‘the Mod’ Stewart, the voice of The Faces, who’d come out of The Small Faces, who were John’s band. He’d let me have the version where he was there. Where we heard This Old Heart Of Mine together, the song he’d played on Saturday afternoons while I pretended not to listen.
I found out about three years ago. I was back in the UK for John’s 70th birthday, and we were doing what we always do — pulling out the old stories, turning them over. I started in on the Rod Stewart night. Told him how he’d taken me to my first ever show.
He went quiet. Not waiting-for-his-turn quiet. Something else.
Mary said it.
“No he didn’t. He didn’t go.”
I thought she was getting confused. I had this memory — fully formed, detailed, certain — of John at Olympia. But she was adamant. It was me, her, and David. I’d taken John’s place.
John wouldn’t look at me. I asked him to confirm it. He did. And when I asked him why — why he’d given up Rod Stewart on Christmas Eve, his favourite band, a gig going out live on national television — he said:
“You really, really wanted to go.”
That night became a story about me, when it was really a story about him all along.
The programme is gone. I threw it away when I was seventeen. Mum died, and I got rid of everything that marked my youth up to that point — the toys, the books, the glossy programme David had bought me at my first concert. It was time to put them behind me.
David’s gift — the one you could hold — I threw that away. John’s gift I kept for fifty years without knowing I had it.
His records, though — those I kept. He gave me his 45s in 1980, and I carried them back to Wolverhampton like holy relics. They’re in my jukebox now. A 1951 Seeburg, model 100B. His records and mine, side by side on the carousel.
Every time I drop a quarter in, I’m back in Hudson’s Records. Saturday morning. John with the headphones on. Me beside him, too small to listen, reading his body for the beat.
He’d already put me in the booth.
Mary’s still a little miffed he wasn’t there with her.