The English Beat – Save it For Later

On June 1, 1983, my mother started her new job up in Maine, leaving my oldest sister, who had just graduated from college, in charge of the house and the rest of us kids who were not done with school yet. New York schools ended in late June since there was a week of final exams followed by a week of Regents exams. I don’t remember where my second oldest sister and my brother were, but my little sister was finishing up sixth grade, the last in elementary school, and I was in 10th grade, my other sister was in 11th.

Needless to say, with my mom hundreds of miles away and busy in her new job, our house in New York became party central. My oldest sister had spent her junior year abroad in London and came home with lots of music she’d heard while over there. She made a tape called “Mom Goes to Maine” which featured many of those bands and served as a frequent soundtrack for those last weeks of school. She also had the album Special Beat Service by the English Beat in heavy rotation.

My sister invited this guy she had met in London to come and stay for two or three weeks. Lindsay, this drop-dead gorgeous British guy, tall, curly hair, swoony accent, was just there living it up with us. He wasn’t even my sister’s boyfriend so all of our friends were super eager to come over and hang out. With classes over, they would tell their parents they were coming to our house to study.

I suppose we did do some studying but we did it while sunbathing in the backyard, gin and tonics in hand and music playing out of the window in the den. By night the sunbathing gave way to games of badminton or croquet with the flood light on, music still blaring out the window, gin and tonics still flowing. If it rained, we were inside playing Trivial Pursuit, making Lindsay read the questions so we could listen to his accent. I’m sure it drove our neighbors crazy, but those were fabulous days for not quite 16-year-old me.

So tonight, 40 years later, I went to see the English Beat. It is basically just Dave Wakeling with a backing band at this point, but I was on my feet dancing the whole time. The crowd was all middle-aged people, some gray and bald heads, most of us wider than our younger selves. But if I closed my eyes, I could picture our friends in the backyard, Lindsay looking like he walked out of a movie with a drink in one hand and croquet mallet in the other. Ah, youth.