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.

Picture of 7 inch single, Lonely at The Top by teh Tygers of Pan Tang

Why did I ever stop using this? The Scribefire Firefox plugin allows you to write to multiple blogs right from your browser. I used to do this  a lot. It seems to have progressed a lot over the years and looks quite sophisticated now. Maybe it even works in Google Chrome too. I shall have to spend some time exploring it.

I was sad to hear this week that Alvin Stardust had died. I spent quite a bit of time with Alvin in the late 80’s producing an albums worth of my songs with him. The tracks never saw the light of day so I’ll attach a compilation of them to this post.

I know Alvin was not his real name but I always called him that and he always referred to himself that way. He called me a while back and we talked about dusting off these recordings and trying to do something with them. Clearly that must have been before he embarked on the album that he planned to release in November but I now realise he was suffering with cancer at the time he called. He never mentioned it of course.

I remember him as quite a gentleman always very polite to everyone and never the pop star. He came to Newcastle several times to work on the recordings and sometimes stayed at my home in Whitley Bay. I didn’t drive in those days so we got the metro to the studio in Newcastle each morning. He didn’t bat an eyelid and nobody recognised him. I did see the pop star side one time however. After one set of sessions he was due to catch an early flight next morning so he was staying in a hotel. I dropped him off there in a taxi and as he went up to reception he said “watch this”. He checked in and on some subterfuge or other asked to see the duty manager. When she arrived he turned on the charm and a glowing pop star smile. The manageress asked if he would mind having his photo taken in front of the hotel and insisted on upgrading him to a suite of rooms at no extra charge. As she went off  to make these arrangements he turned and winked at me and said “works every time” !
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I picked up the following story from Guido Russo on Facebook. It seems just as I was crawling about under the stage, setting up for Stockton Weekender a crowd was “going wild” to one of my songs on another stage in Hamburg, Germany. Was I in the wrong place? The following from Guido.

“I was near Hamburg, Tygers Of Pan Tang were performing their show. I took this picture while the band was playing a beautiful song called Paris By Air. The audience goes crazy but all of a sudden my mind goes to Steve Thompson, the man who wrote this song so many years ago. Many thanks, Steve!”

I’m making this post on the basis that it should go to all my social media outlets using a mixture of plugins + smoke and mirrors. I’ve pretty much cracked it all but for Google+ – Now, Google + does not play nice with very much else at all. It’s a shame where Google have taken this social network as I thought it had great promise. I would like my postings to go to Google+ as there are people there that I like to connect with. However, I do not like Google+. Firstly the content is scrunched up into little boxes in the center of the screen. Then there’s the fact that Google are trying to channel people into using the network the way Google wants rather than how the people want. This probably goes for all the social networks and it’s a trade off between the benefits and fun we can extract from these tools offset against the annoyance they cause us with constant changes.

Rediscovered this on my iTunes today. When I was in the Whitaker Band I produced an album “The Tuesday Club” circa 1999. This is one of my many unfinished songs and we slotted it between the tracks as if it got there by accident. Sorry, it’s my naff vocals – maybe I should dust off the rest of the album.

Once I was a loner,
How did I survive?
’till the day you came my way
I was barely alive
Once I was a poor man
with nothing to my name
but a worn overcoat
and a crooked walking cane