September 12th 1980 – The British Steel Corporation closed down Consett’s iron and steel works thus ending a 140 year old, proud tradition and throwing 3000 people out of work.
Steel Town, (the musical) tells the story of the dying days of steel making in Consett and the town’s struggle for survival. All of this is set against a young man’s dream of rock stardom and escape from an industry in decline.
This is a story of laughter and tears, heartache and pride. The show was a great success when it premiered at the Customs House in South Shields – April 2000. It ran again in September at the Consett Empire twenty years on from the closure of the works. Visit the Steel Town website.
You can hear the original cast album here and you can also download it.
I wrote Lonely at The Top for the Tygers of Pan Tang for their 3rd album “The Cage” back in 1982. They were already planning to record my song “Paris By Air” but their chief songwriter, John Sykes had just quit the band and strong songs were in short supply. I went round to their management office which was above a Carpet shop in Whitley Bay and played this song to their manager (My brother Graham actually). Tom Noble may also have been present. All I had was an acoustic guitar so I demonstrated the song with much arm twirling, foot stomping and shouted “kabooms”. They loved it and said “go ahead and make a demo” – which I did, and the song made the album. What I didn’t realise until just now (see pic) was that the song also came out as a single. To be honest in 1982 things went ballistic with my songwriting and I would have had a hard time keeping track of where any of my songs were.
Sorry to bother you with tests but it seems my WordPress postings do get triggered to Google + via the Jeptack sharing plugin. However the title is not included and it seems a somewhat random image from my blog gets posted. What happens if I purposely add an image to this post? 
Why did I ever stop using this? The