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The great love of my father’s life was machinery and the world of mechanisms, timing, design and draughtsmanship. He loved cars, and loved to drive, although the laws relating to speed he deemed inapplicable to himself, along with seatbelts and driving drunk. After losing his driving licence, he volunteered for the army. Volunteers got paid better than conscripted men and the army didn’t seem picky about who drove their jeeps.
We had a vacuum cleaner and my favourite device, a mangle – two rollers that squeezed the water from washed clothing.
We had no pets, save a goldfish called Peter who lived for a suspiciously long time.
If gossip or old newspaper wouldn’t do, the world outside might require a phone call. The big red phone box served as a cough, cold, flu, bubonic plague, ‘you name it you’ll catch it’ distribution centre for the neighbourhood.
The whole neighbourhood was in a permanent state of shift work. Upstairs curtains closed in daytime meant ‘Tiptoe past – coal miner asleep’. Front room curtains closed: ‘Hurry past – dead person laid out for inspection’.
Manton Primary was the local school for coalminers’ kids. Before it was closed, it achieved a level of notoriety with Daily Mail readers as the school where five-year-olds beat up the teachers.
Nothing in childhood is ever wasted, except occasionally parents.
view of Tolkien from my history teacher, Mr Quiney: ‘One bloody feast after another, a long dreary walk, a battle and some rubbish songs.’ I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was 12. Entertaining, but he had a point.
My dad swam like a fish. He would swim three miles in the ocean as a boy. I, on the other hand, have always regarded swimming as thoroughly hazardous. It is merely preventative drowning.
Mr Moynihan was a good sport and he taught me never to panic, even when you are on fire.
Wild Turkey had ex-Jethro Tull bass player Glenn Cornick in their lineup, and their first album, Battle Hymn, stands the test of time to this very day. Out of my mind on Fanta and Mars bars, raging with hormones, I was on a high for days. Every square inch of me was drenched in sweat as I staggered back to my dormitory across the forbidding lawns topped with dark shadows from academic spires. My heart was thumping, my ears were ringing and it seemed like my head was full of bells, with a madman tugging at ropes to ring the changes and pulling at the back of my eyeballs as if to say, ‘Listen to
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Pawn Hearts. (The latter was such a manically depressive record that you could actually empty a room with it after a couple of minutes.
Next was a council-sponsored Afternoon in the Park in Weston Park, by the university and just up the road from the Royal Hallamshire Hospital. A local DJ from Radio Sheffield turned up, but he’d been in the pub all afternoon and was quite possibly on acid.
Nevertheless, with our new-found notoriety I pressed hard for playing our own material and a name change. Paradox was too wishy-washy; we needed something legendary. ‘How about Styx?’ I suggested. ‘Isn’t somebody else called that?’ ‘Oh, they won’t notice,’ I stated confidently. Our second appearance at the Broadfield was also our swansong, but our first as Styx.
Bethnal – a punk band with a violinist.
Biff Byford, the singer, produced a large knife on stage, which he brandished triumphantly during one song. I watched with great interest as he tried to hurl it into the wooden stage, where it would embed itself menacingly. Except it didn’t. It bounced off and clattered all about the floor. Bending over and picking it up to try again did not improve the situation, and even though it did end up stuck in the wood eventually, the drama had rather vanished.
fans of the previous singer, Paul Di’Anno, remained unimpressed. One wrote a letter of complaint, detailing his horror at hearing his favourite songs being played through an ‘air-raid siren’, and there may well have been an uncomplimentary remark about a cement mixer as well.
Finally, Tony Wiggens, our tour manager, came to the rescue. His American girlfriend recommended a chiropractor. ‘A chiropractor? That’s like a fortune teller who uses dead bodies.’ ‘No, that is a necromancer.’
couldn’t help but think of Van der Graaf Generator’s masterpiece ‘A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers’.
When we came to make a video for ‘2 Minutes to Midnight’, the director was keen to show how cinematic his storyboard was, so he met us to show polaroids of locations. The Greenwich foot tunnel was one of them. It brought back memories of college and walking under the river to catch the bus to the Green Man in Plumstead. He then produced a series of drawings describing the mercenaries’ hangout. ‘We found this fantastic location. It’s disgusting, full of rats and piss – horrible,’ he said. He flipped over the polaroid. ‘I used to live there,’ I muttered. It was 22 Roffey House. How the world
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When people say ‘bad weather’ in Britain it usually means it’s wet. In North America ‘bad weather’ means you might die.
Peter Ackroyd. I think it is one of the best of his books, the other being London: The Biography.
