Kim Horton on how the film library fired his interest in music
It was interesting because when I’d got into the library, they were a lovely bunch girls but they all looked like librarians. They all had the bobbed hairdos… and in fact, Julie Goodyear, who used to take a short cut from Coronation Street going through the film library, as a lot of them used to do, had dubbed them ‘The Nolan Sisters’, so I became one of ‘The Nolan Sisters’. I really wasn’t suited to the library life at all, but you know, to this day I owe everything to Sylvia saying, you know, “We’ll take you on.” I mean, the library thing was all about being meticulous, knowing that you should, you know, if you ever put film into a can, that can had to go on a shelf and you had to know the right place to put the can, and I was forever losing, you know, or rather somebody looking for a particular roll of film would go to where that can should have been on the shelf and it wasn’t there, because I’d put it somewhere else – so I wasn’t the greatest of librarians.
But what I was interested in, and none of them were interested in, was the music stuff that was coming in, So It Goes. And Sylvia said, “We’re not interested in all this disgusting punk stuff. You’re interested in music, you can catalogue it all.” So that was what I did. There were two series to deal with, and some other great things like Tony Palmer’s The Wigan Casino, all of that stuff. The outtakes were kept, because you never knew when someone might want to use that in the future. And I saw that… I saw punk… the girls saw it as this is just going to go away because they’re all interested in Sad Café and what have you, The Dooleys or something, whatever the current crop were. And I thought, “Well, this is something in this punk stuff. It’s just brilliant.” Even though I came from, you know, prog rock and the Stones and all the rest of it with me, you know. But I started to actually go to some of these things where they were doing the filming, like The Electric Circus and Collyhurst, and I saw Buzzcocks and Penetration and The Ramones… some of those things were filmed, some weren’t, but I kind of got into it, and it was an absolute joy, you know? And I wrote all these little cards up describing what songs were being done and what was happening, and if the people were spitting the band and all the rest of it, and there was some terrific stuff, which to this day I feel is an unused, underused sort of commodity really and I think there’s a lot of brilliant music stuff that Granada has got in its system that people don’t see because it’s not been transferred to some sort of source that can be used really.
