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Miss Redmond is aging, and will never marry, and will die smelling of attics.
The Three Legs o’ Man and the Unicorn call in the last of the old crowd, who will tell you that life was so much better when things were slightly worse.
I had several cupcake grapples in this year of 1973,
But he was a poor, gawky boy from Manchester’s forgotten side streets, and minus the blonde fantasy-fetish of a cutesy Madeleine McCann.
I vomit profusely when I discover that the album has been pressed in Japan with Sandie Shaw’s version of Hand in glove included. I am so disgusted by this that I beg people to kill me. Many rush forward.
Recording what would become the Meat is Murder album in a predictably cheap studio in Liverpool, I saw relief in everyone to be away from John Porter. Mike, at last, was free to play his drums his own way – rock-steady, yet with horse-race pace. Andy’s brilliance flourished without the schoolmasterly ear of John Porter. The key to everything, Johnny finally made his first album.
‘Ohhh ... I absolutely HATE the Smiths!’ I hear Slade singer Noddy Holder say in a daytime radio interview, as in the same week Cockney Rebel singer Steve Harley tells the Daily Mail, ‘I cannot STAND the Smiths.’ In Manchester, the famous Manchester Evening News desperately attempts to portray the Smiths as ‘fans’ of Hindley and Brady, and finally relent with the almost-invisible BAD BOYS ARE TOPS when Meat is Murder hits number 1. How delightful to be thought ‘bad’, I muse, as I sit by a reading-light, pawing George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. Life is clearly so much better when you can
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Alain Whyte is introduced to me as a street-sweeper from Camden, which may or may not be a joke – I never could tell. He looks a bit like ‘Kookie’ actor Edd Byrnes from 77 Sunset Strip, and he talks in a similarly bonkers 1950s backslang, which may or may not be a speech impediment.
Ancient boos from long ago at Dundee’s Caird Hall and Aberdeen’s Capitol Theater when it all went wrong – these memories still sting many years on, because all you want to give is your very best even when you feel your very worst.
