For all that Dad and I watched motorsport together and he supported my running, as I grew through my teens we started to clash. Long story short, at times during my teenage years my dad struggled, both in terms of his own life and also later because of the way my interests changed. After work, he used to go down the pub quite a bit, like most working-class men of that period in Britain. My dad was also a heavy smoker, Senior Service or John Player Special unfiltered. Back in the seventies, that was very common; as a kid you just took it for granted that everyone smoked and that every five years you’d have to paint the woodchip wallpaper because the magnolia paint had been stained nicotine-brown. Dad was probably miserable doing a job he didn’t like and frustrated by the struggles he’d had. I think he became disillusioned because he wasn’t quite as successful as some of his peers, even though he was probably smarter than them.
His fortunes at work were reflected in where we lived. After the big Victorian house in Wigfull Road, we had to move to a smaller house in Penrhyn Road, so I guess there were some issues with the family’s finances. As the years went by, there were periods when my dad just wasn’t around for me. Through our previously shared interest in motorsport and running, you can argue that he was a big influence on me, especially when you consider what I have gone on to do in later life. However, when I discovered rock music, then girls and later alcohol, our relationship started to change. I said I didn’t have a skateboard earlier – well, what actually happened was that one time I bought a skateboard but my dad wouldn’t let me use it. That was how he could be at times. He could be super-controlling, which to a teenager growing up into a young man could be an issue.
By the age of fourteen, I was really starting to get into rock music. Although Dad had been in a skiffle band when he was younger, there was just an average amount of music around in our house. There was an eight-track cassette player on which they played the Best of Bread and albums by the Carpenters, but music was never really on that much. Dad kind of taught me how to play guitar and at one point he actually bought a Gibson SG, but he wouldn’t really let me touch it. One time when for some reason my brother and I were fighting over the guitar, we dropped it and, of course, the fucking neck broke. You can imagine two teenage lads watching this guitar fall in slow motion and then seeing the neck break. Shit! The guitar went away to be repaired and never came back.
Like I say, around fourteen, I grew my hair long and within a couple of years I’d also discovered girls and alcohol. All of a sudden I’m not really into running any more, because you could get in to the pub at fifteen and start drinking and having girlfriends. Neither of these new ‘interests’ particularly suited being a finely tuned long-distance runner, so my training mileage started to drop pretty dramatically and I stopped keeping the training diaries as the running started to fade away. That was the beginning of the end of the cross-country.
Instead, in came albums by the likes of Motörhead, Status Quo, UFO, Saxon, Rainbow and the whole new wave of the British heavy-metal scene. Motörhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’ came out in 1980 and I was certainly fully into that; I remember seeing them at the university. I never became a punk. For some reason, Motörhead seemed to appeal to punks and rockers. You’d go see them play and be standing next to someone with an Exploited jacket on with a Mohawk and a UK Subs T-shirt. In the early eighties, the Sheffield band Def Leppard was just starting to conquer the world, so they were the local heroes and, for a time, the biggest band on the planet. I also loved Saxon, who were from nearby Barnsley. I was lucky that pretty much all these bands came through the City Hall, so I got to go to gigs by all the big acts. I’d wait for Top of the Pops on a Thursday night to see Motörhead or Saxon or Thin Lizzy; I loved it.
Sheffield is a great musical town. The nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow had a club there in the sixties, and Joe Cocker was the big local export of that era. As well as all the rock bands I’ve mentioned, by the early eighties Sheffield also had a thriving electronic music scene, courtesy of bands such as the Human League, Heaven 17, ABC and Cabaret Voltaire. The Human League’s lead singer Phil Oakey lived down the road in a big Victorian house, and we’d occasionally see him in the fish and chip shop, even after they’d had their massive Number 1 hit ‘Don’t You Want Me’. Even so, Sheffield always got overshadowed by Liverpool and Manchester with bands like Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division and New Order. For me, however, it was always about rock music. I was never drawn to electronic music, even though I was around it locally.
I started to meet a few mates who were also into the same music. We would get to see all these big bands for £2.50, maybe £3. I’d buy the ticket a month in advance and couldn’t wait for the date. I would get NME, Sounds and Kerrang! every week, religiously, and I began going to the rock clubs around Sheffield pretty regularly. Rebels was a full-on heavy-metal club, so we used to go there on a Monday when it was free to get in before 10 p.m. and beer was 50p a pint. The student crowd tended to go to the Leadmill, to see bands such as the Cure and Bauhaus, but if your poison was rock, you went to places like Rebels.
I’d be out at clubs and gigs three or four nights a week. The first Monsters of Rock Festival I went to was in 1982 with a buddy from school who had a driver’s licence. The journey from Sheffield to Donington was kind of a big deal and, of course, it rained. We didn’t get back till midnight, to find my mum waiting up for me, worried sick.
As well as the long hair, I was wearing denim and leather, dirty ripped-up jeans, combat boots and, like a lot of rockers, I started putting embroidery on my jacket. That idea of patches goes way back to the forties and even earlier in biker culture; it’s all about personalization but also wanting to be a part of something. I’d buy denim jackets and cut the arms off then bleach them up. My mum could sew and would often make her own dresses and clothes for my sister with a Singer sewing machine that she had. She always supported me in whatever I wanted to do, so when I started to show an interest in customizing my denims, Mum showed me how to stitch old Levi’s so they’d be real tight and also how to sew all these band patches on to my jackets. I embroidered a Saxon logo on the back of my denim jacket and painted ‘MSG’ for Michael Schenker Group on there, too. I also stitched a Rainbow patch on it, as well as a Black Sabbath one. Little did Mum or I know how important those sewing lessons would later become.
At school, I was struggling. Thanks to my mum (who kept everything from when I was a kid) I’ve still got all my old school reports and they make fascinating reading, although perhaps not for the right reasons! The Silverdale School report card from 1981 has some memorable quotes. How about: ‘The overall message of this report seems to be that Magnus is not using his abilities to the full. He cannot hope to improve his standards until he makes the necessary effort.’ Or what about: ‘Magnus has worked poorly throughout the year … Magnus is not finding this particularly easy … Magnus is not a linguist … a disappointing end result …’ My personal favourite was a biology teacher whose response to my mark of 51 per cent was summed up in just two words: ‘Totally unsatisfactory’. Well, looking back as an adult, I accept that maybe I could have made more effort in some classes, but equally he could have made more effort with his fucking report, right?
I got a girlfriend when I was fourteen and along with the rock music that sort of took over. No extra revision classes for me; we’d go home at lunchtime and make out. Even though I had intelligence, you only have to read those school reports to realize I didn’t put the effort in. At that point, I had decided school wasn’t for me, so I kind of flunked out at the end of the final year. I just sort of gave up; I didn’t really care. I wasn’t ditching class altogether and bunking off, but I wasn’t putting the work in when I was there. Some of the kids in my year were doing ten subjects. I only took four. I ended up with two O levels in the final exams, a C in English language and a B in geography. Failed maths, failed physics. At the time, there was a lot of unemployment both in Sheffield and nationally, so leaving school with just two O levels wasn’t exactly a guarantee of a bright future.
I had no grand plan or vision for what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go; I was just a kid enjoying music and going out. The focus I had shown with the running didn’t really translate to rock music, although like a lot of fans I had vague ideas of being in a band myself. I spent that summer going to all of these rock concerts and I still have all the programmes, which bring back fantastic memories. But in other ways this wasn’t a great point in my life. I was living at home, on the dole and clashing with my dad quite a bit. Growing my hair long really aggravated my dad. I’d get the old, ‘You’re not living under my roof with long hair, cut your hair and get a proper job’, all that. This coincided with him losing his job, so he went on the dole, started complaining about bad back problems and he would be in bed till noon, then get up in the afternoon and go to the pub at seven and stay there till eleven. So my mum became the breadwinner.
Looking back, I realize now that my dad was probably depressed, but people didn’t talk about stuff like that back then. So truth be told it became a bit of a toxic environment. My mum was always supportive; she didn’t really care about me having long hair, but it was like a red rag to a bull for my dad. There was a lot of conflict, so in the end I’d try to avoid him. I’d go out if I knew he was gonna be around; I’d just try and not run into him. My mum was much more the stable influence. She kept the same job at Broomhill Infants School (which I went to) for over twenty years. So she provided real stability and kind of kept the family together. My mum’s fantastic. I have such a strong relationship with her and I feel very lucky that she has always been there for me. She is remarkable, strong, intelligent, motivated and she was always so kind to me. Gotta love your mum, right?
Despite what might seem on the surface to be a teenage kid just listening to music, drinking and making out, it wasn’t quite that simple. When I did find something to focus on, I really applied myself. For example, one of my dad’s friends gave me a cash-in-hand job on a construction site, basically doing all the shit jobs like cleaning mortar off bricks, mixing plaster, all that sort of manual labour, for £10 a day. That guy Martin always said I was the best labourer he’d ever had. I really got quite motivated about the job, even though it was just labouring. I wasn’t sat around feeling bored on the site; the days went by pretty quick for me, as everything sort of became a challenge: fill the skip as quickly as I could, make the bucket of plaster before the plasterer had actually finished with the previous one so I was one step ahead of him. I was always motivated in whatever I did; I wasn’t one of those guys that was waiting for the tea break. It wasn’t so I could be better than the other guys on the site; it was just to motivate myself. Cross-country running had given me that edge at an early age, but I have always been more competitive with myself than with my peer group.
When I was seventeen, I got a new girlfriend and moved in with her for six months. She was an air stewardess working for Monarch Airlines and was based out of Milton Keynes, so I’d take a coach and go down south for the weekend. Then she relocated to Sheffield and got her own flat, so I temporarily moved in with her. By this stage, I’d sort of gone from the long rocker’s hair into more of the bleached-out Hanoi Rocks/Vince Neil/spiky peroxide-blond look, crimping it, back-combing it, make-up, mascara, more of the glam-rock vibe.
At this point, I still wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I’d had enough of bumming around the construction site, and I was disillusioned by going to the dole office where career advisers would put me forward for these completely random jobs that had nothing to do with my interests or abilities. Sheffield is known as ‘Steel City’ and has a history stretching back centuries in that industry. In fact, the stainless steel that we all use on our car parts was invented in Sheffield. However, by the seventies and eighties, there was fierce competition from overseas steel manufacturers; the industry around which Sheffield had boomed then started to dwindle and within a relatively short period of time was pretty much decimated. This coincided roughly with the collapse of the mining industry – which was a central part of much of northern England’s communities and way of life – meaning that this was not a great time to be growing up and looking for opportunities across many cities in the north. Strikes, protests, clashes with police, unemployment was rife, families were queueing for the food-bank handouts – this was a bleak period in the history of the north of England. So there were a fair few people around at the time who were pretty politicized, but to be perfectly honest, that wasn’t me. I wasn’t anti-Thatcher, anti-Scargill, ranting and raving. When I was younger I didn’t even know who Margaret Thatcher was, truth be told. Kids of a young age are obviously not into politics. Having said that, the consequences of those more political times were plain to see, especially as I grew older – even to a kid like me who was not really involved on a daily basis. For me as a teenage kid in a northern town which had been devastated by unemployment and the decline of industry, there were pretty slim pickings.
So I thought I should try going back into education and see what happened. At one point, I enrolled on a graphic design course, but that didn’t really fit and I stopped quite quickly. Next up, I went to Stannington College to study for a City & Guilds qualification in Sports Management, Leisure and Recreation. Obviously, I’d been into running and I quite liked swimming too, so it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. I wasn’t sure what else to try, and it’s not like there were hundreds of options for a lad of seventeen with just two O levels. The course was actually kinda cool, I learnt a little bit about sports studies and marketing, and they taught you how to become a coach, too. I did my Bronze Medallion lifeguard certification and learnt first aid and CPR, so there was some useful stuff involved. It was just a one-year course, but the pivotal point about that period in my life had nothing to do with my course or the actual work I was doing in class, it was when someone at college told me about an experience called Camp America, which was to completely and utterly alter the course of my entire life.