WITH corresponding tickets for his 2013 UK tour about an eye-watering £600 each, it’s no wonder Pauline Horton has fond memories of the night in 1973 she paid just £2 for a front stall seat to see Rod Stewart in concert at Worcester Gaumont.

“In fact, it’s so long ago I can’t really remember who paid,” she said. “It might have been my parents, but I was earning £1.96 a day for a Saturday job at Littlewoods store in High Street, so I suppose it could have been me.”

At the time, Pauline Lea was a 16-year-old student in the lower sixth form of the City of Worcester Grammar School for Girls in Spetchley Road, now Worcester Sixth Form College, and an avid Rod Stewart fan.

Her memories of the show were stirred by a set of photographs your Worcester News published recently after they appeared in a new novel called Sixties Boys on Tour.

The images of Stewart on stage were taken on the night by Chris Nicholson, who was then a student at Worcester College of Education, and they sent Pauline looking through her bottom drawer.

Sure enough there were the pictures she had taken on her own little camera of Stewart singing with the Faces, together with a cherished ticket stub. It was for seat J38 in the stalls, which was only 10 rows back from the stage, almost in the middle of the auditorium.

Virtually the perfect place.

“Unfortunately I can’t remember much. I can’t even remember who I went with, although it would have been with a group of friends, or how I got there,” she said. “I just remember it was a brilliant night. I expect I cried and shouted a lot. Of course we weren’t supposed to take cameras in, but a lot of people did. As soon as Rod came on stage the flashes began going off all over the place.”

Pauline’s two photographs taken on her Instamatic show Rod in a typical pose of the time with his top pulled back to reveal a bare chest and pianist Ian McLagan in the background, while in the other he is farther back near Kenny Jones on the drums with bass player Tetsu Yamauchi in the foreground.

“I’m so glad I kept them.” she said. “I don’t think I would be sitting in the same place at a Rod Stewart concert now.”

Today Pauline Horton is married, lives in the Harley Warren district of Worcester’s Warndon Villages and works in the IT department of SMH Fleet Solutions at Norton, near Worcester.

But on April 10, 1973, to borrow a line from a Faces favourite of the day, she was “a sweet little rock ‘n’ roller” from North Malvern with A-levels just around the corner.

Now listen to Rod Stewart singing his 70s classic, Sailing....