I must confess that I didn’t rate them too highly back then. Listening to July Morning I think I was a little harsh even though they stretched the material to breaking point. Thanks for posting it, Andy.
I still have my LP of “Demons and Wizards,” from which came "Easy Livin’ " their only song I ever heard played in the US on our local AOR (album-oriented rock) FM broadcast station. I liked them at the time. Have to admit that I listened to the album last month for the first time in several decades and was less impressed by it than I remembered being. But the Hammond was a memorable part of several tracks!
73
Scott WB8ICQ
No a Mellotron was a machine that had individual tape recordings of orchestral instruments for every key. When you pressed a key, the tape played the sound stored. It didn’t use tape loops but finite lengths of tape so you could only hold a key down for about 10secs. When you released the key then the tape was rapidly rewound. Part of the distinctive sound of a Mellotron is the wow and flutter of the mechanisms as different numbers of keys are held. Also they were a right sod to use live, they didn’t like being moved and temperature changes caused big changes in key.
A famous example of a Mellotron that most people will have probably heard is the introduction to Strawberry Fields by The Beatles.
On July Morning, the synthesiser is a Moog played by Manfred Mann. You can hear him using the tone bender expression wheel. Ken is tripping out on the Hammond B3/C3.
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Thanks for the technical info Andy, very interesting.
73 Phil
Oh dear, now actor Geoffrey Palmer, 93 has left us. A regular face in sitcoms and dramas from the 1970s onwards, I remember him for his essentially expressionless face that just happened to be almost identical to my best school-mate’s father. Let’s see Butterflies, Dr. Who, As Time Goes By, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin (sorry CJ), Tomorrow Never Dies.
And there was his appearance in Fawlty Towers “The Kipper and the Corpse” where he battles to get his sausages. That is the one I remember best.
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I’m here using up vacation days, I can’t go on vacation because of COVID and I have so many unused days I cannot carry them into next year, use them or lose them. So I’ve done a few jobs around the house and binged watched Netflix as the WX has been mostly awful till today.
And so without any drama I looked at the BBC News website and a single story wound back the clock to 40 years nearly to the day. I was strongly surprised at how clear the images were in my memory. I can remember the clothes I wore when the police interviewed me, lumberjack shirt, jeans, cowboy boots. I can remember where in the kitchen the policeman sat and which flat members were interviewed at the same time.
Mid-November 1980 I’d been a university student for 6 weeks at Leeds. That was some change from living at home but the student flat in Headingley, Leeds was comfortable and the 4 other men (boys?) were decent enough. University owned buildings, 9 flats to a wing, 3 wings to a building, 6 buildings = 800 students in a walled enclosure with grass, shrubs and trees. I’d been astounded to find my week was 4 lectures or tutorials in the morning and 3 hours of labs in the afternoons for 5 days a week. A flatmate was doing some soft politics subject and had 2 hours of lectures and 2 tutorials a week. The rest of his time was to be spent in the library or writing essays. Or actually drinking tea and doing The Guardian crossword.
Apart from Tuesday. Tuesday morning started at 10 not 9am and meant a more leisurely start. I always walked the 25mins from the flat to the Engineering buildings, saving the money on bus fares for beer! Apart from this day when the rain was best described as biblical in quantity. Three of us in the flat could not understand why the was a WPC (female police constable) standing in the middle of the field in the grounds in this rain. Anyway I was off on the 3-5 minute walk to the bus stop.
I got on the bus and met Malcolm from Carrickfergus, someone on my course. He had a wonderful Ulster accent and greeted me with “Hey Andy, have you heard about the body?” Well that explained the WPC. in the field. I didn’t think anything more till returning home and the flats complex was crawling with police. And press and TV. It was another victim for the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe who has died today in prison.
My first time living away from home disrupts the order of your world and then this. We were the centre of attention by the police and press for 2 weeks. Everyone on the site was interviewed by the police, manually written up and manually recorded. The press were out in force looking for stories to sell newspapers and so we obliged. A female reporter from The Daily Mail knocked on the door of the flat and we were happy to invite her inside and tell her about “student life” in exchange for some money for beer. ISTR getting enough for 3-4 pints and whether she believed us with the amount of debauchery we described or should I say invented as it was what she wanted to hear, I’ll never know.
The last victim was a student whereas many of Sutcliffe’s victims had been prostitutes. She had made the decision to take the 4min walk from the bus stop that passed some dark waste ground behind a shopping centre instead of the better lit 5 minute walk because of the heavy rain. Most people would have done the same.
Christmas didn’t start so early 40 years back but a few weeks later as December came, up went the lights and decorations and life returned to normal pretty quickly for the vast majority of students, people who didn’t know the victim etc.
Sutcliffe was arrested with a prostitute in early January 1981 and was later found to equipped to carry out another murder. He was charged with 13 murders and several attempted murders and given a whole life tariff, no chance of release and apparently died from a COVID infection this morning. In the last 40 years, stories about Sutcliffe have regularly featured in the press every couple of months. There have been TV programs about him and about how the police struggled under the sheer volume of paperwork the massive search for Sutcliffe produced. Later investigations of unsolved attacks and murders link them to Sutcliffe though he was never charged.
I’m surprised by how clearly names, images and voices of people I haven’t seen for getting on for 40 years came flooding back when I read the news of his death. I can clearly recall that once the shock of being a teenager and having someone murdered 300m from your home and the fact I didn’t know the victim at all subsides, life for me was back to normal. I feel for the people directly affected, friends and family of the victims who will have what normality of life they developed over the last 40 years have affected yet again.
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This one is unique, Andy. Most of these departed mentioned in these threads are regretted as a loss, but with Sutcliffe one can only say “good riddance”!
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My mother was petrified by the news. Her “baby” was where people are murdered! I had long hair at the time, it was to get longer! She told me “I don’t want you out walking late at night till he’s caught. With your long hair in the dark he may think your a woman.” Jeez, thanks mum. She hadn’t seen me for 6 weeks and so was unaware I’d not shaved and was “bearding up” nicely. 
I was once introduced to the Friday night crowd at Manchester’s Embassy Club, by a certain Bernard Manning, as “and here for you tonight, Peter Sutcliffe on bass”. Musicians in this area have referred to this unfortunate “likeness” many times over the last 30 years 
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Nah, Pablo Escobar
I find it amusing that so many of my acquaintances in their “middle years” decide to grow beards - the lower hair seems to be pulling it down from the top! The next step is buy a scoot and wear leather!
ISTR I have had some form of beard or moustache for the last 38 years. Facial, shoulder, chest and toe hairs are the only ones that have not diminished in the last 40 years. Though I have managed to grow a fine “lockdown ponytail” since February 2020.
I was a Physics undergraduate at Leeds Uni in the early 70’s. In 1975 police interviewed me and all other male resident students after Sutcliffe murdered his first victim in Leeds.
My girlfriend [now my wife] and I also had a flat in Headingley. Took all my grant for the rent deposit and after that we had to live off her earnings working at the local Post Office.
But you know, we were 'appy in those days, though we were poor
Was Red Route(*) around when you where there? And the Roger Stephens lecture building with its Paternoster Lift? I can’t remember when that bit opened but it was already looking pretty tired by 1980. But Roger Stephens is a Grade II listed building now… “one of the finest examples of 1960/1970s Brutalist Architecture”. My Mrs. (also ex-Leeds) hated the Paternoster and never used it. Being engineers from “up the North end” of the campus had little need to visit the centre of the campus.
I can remember we had a load of exams in the rooms on Red Route and as it was a straight building 1/4mile long, there were little windows in the top corners of the dividing walls where laser experiments were performed. There was a big warning sign about the danger of laser radiation but it missed the chance to say “Do not look into window with remaining good eye” 
The main uni computing resources where around there but 40 years dulls the mind and I can’t remember if they were on Red Route or another level.
(*) Red Route. This part of the campus was on a steep hill. So having floor numbers was a pain, the ground floor of RS bldg was Level 5 and that was confusing enough. So the levels were coloured and you went by colour not actual storey. So Red Route was Level 10 which was the 4th floor here, 4 flights up from Level 5 which was ground floor. Colours made it easier
EDIT: Here’s a link to a view down what was the longest corridor in Europe. The signs for the rooms and staircases are red hence Red Route. Different colours on other levels.
I was interviewed by the police in connection with this murder in 1993:
Do not click or read if you are in any way squeamish - it’s gruesome!
I had been drinking in the same bar as the victim after my gig that night in the theatre on South Pier. What a thing some SOTA activators have in common!
Oh yes. I’ve run along most of its entire length a few times – usually when late for a Maths lecture.
We hated it too. I still have nightmares about getting my head or leg stuck when jumping out. Mrs G8CPZ just told me, she was more worried about dropping down the shaft. Can’t imagine there were any Health & Safety laws back then – I suppose students’ lives weren’t worth much.
For decades my wife and I said we must go back to Leeds for a nostalgia trip but a Leeds-man living near us said, don’t bother, it’s all changed.
The area around the Uni had loads of back-to-back terraced houses - most were so bad they were unoccupied except for hard-up students like me [we had mice running around my one] and were being demolished at the time. It’s probably all gentrified now.
Can’t remember if they were on the top floor or not but definitely in that building. I remember submitting programs on a deck of punched cards [to a DEC mini computer]. There was also a student computing room full of teletypewriters and a few VDU’s. The noise was more deafening than The Who concert.
Yours truly at Leeds Uni in 1974 [everyone had long hair and beards then]
Epic photo! Parkinson Building steps? I will search out some photos from 40 years back. You’ve still got a full thatch of hair, grow it long again whilst you can and join me in the former Leeds student SOTA ponytail club 
Thinking back and hard now but ISTR the DEC computer was on level 8 and they had recently taken delivery of an Amdahl 470 (IBM System 370 clone). By 1980 onwards most of the ASR33s had become VDUs with just a few ASR33 left. Being engineers we had our own Prime750 and a PDP11/40 up in the Mech Eng building next door to Elec Eng. and across the road from The Packhorse pub.
You know what is scary about that photo… it doesn’t look 46years old to me because it’s something I saw all the time as a teenager. My subconscious says it could have been taken a few days ago as it matches memories of the time.
Not been there since 1999 and a reunion as the Elec Eng dept was 100 years old. It was similar but very different then… Naffee’s Curry House wasn’t there but the Packhorse was.
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This has been the topic of discussion almost all day on UK media. I listened today to a quite shocking interview from a female media journalist who commented that all the police at news conferences and all the crime reporters at the time were male. She attended one press conference immediately after one of the murders and was was told on arrival “you are too late, the meeting has finished”. The previous meeting in that room had been where the police were advising the local sex workers. Institutional sexism.
Why should it shock you, Jim, its just the way things were? Things were changing then, just as they always have been, but why is it so easy to forget?