My poor old man turned white. I think he’d been expecting something along the lines of ‘Knees up Mother Brown’. But I left the record on anyway. Finally, after six minutes and eighteen seconds of Tony and Geezer thrashing away on their guitars, Bill beating the shit out of his drums, and me howling on about a man in black coming to take me away to the lake of fire, my dad rubbed his eyes, shook his head and looked at the floor. Silence. ‘What d’you think, Dad?’ ‘John,’ he said, ‘are you absolutely sure you’ve only been drinking the occasional beer?’ I went bright red and said something like
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