Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure . . . said the late Marcel Proust. With me it was the other way round. Unlike that leisurely denizen of belle époque Paris, however, I was now expected to clock in at Kennings at 8am sharp. My night-time activities had to be curtailed; the Purple Hearts had to go.
Just like that, I knocked the amphetamines on the head. Enter peripheral hallucinations, mood swings, nameless loathings, and vague obsessions, all of which amounted to one thing in my self-diagnostic imagination: the much-anticipated nervous breakdown. I’d only been working for six weeks at the time.
I went to the doctor’s and told him the symptoms – little animals running up and down my shirtsleeves; peripheral hallucinations of small furry or spiky creatures, e.g. hedgehogs, scuttling along the skirting board, which upon further inspection were not there at all.
I said, ‘Give it to me straight, Doc. What’s my problem?’
It didn’t take him long to reach a diagnosis: ‘You’ve been taking too many pep pills. You can’t just suddenly quit like that.’
There was no suggestion of any character defect on my part – it was simply a question of avoiding the side effects of an abrupt cessation and ongoing quantity control. He suggested that I limit my intake to weekends and bank holidays. In the short term, he prescribed some downers along with a couple of weeks off work, for which he wrote out the all-important sick note: amphetamine psychosis.
The next day at Kennings, I gave it to the foreman, Mr Jeffries, who looked at it and said, ‘The wife had that. She was real bad with it.’ And he sent me home to rest up.
Amphetamine use continued to be regarded as a purely medical matter until the Sunday scandal rags whipped up a moral panic around the pepped-up delinquency of the new teenage generation. Suddenly we were implicated in the breakdown of society. These once freely available pharmaceutical products had become indispensable to the hyped-up schedules of our weekend routine, but now we found ourselves branded as outlaws by the citizenry at large. As I read those articles, it was difficult not to feel partly responsible.
The Mafia’s special debut outing at the Salford Technical College Freshers’ Ball had been a tantalising taster of the rock and roll life. Now, as the all-new Vendettas, we were hungry for more. We needed to crank things up a gear, and could no longer rely on Chet and the Challengers for amplifiers.
That’s where Georgie Williams came in. I don’t know how we ran into him, but as I said, Georgie lived in the brand-new Silk Street flats, the nearest thing to skyscrapers in Manchester. I was always interested in high-rise apartment blocks, so we arranged for him to audition at his gaff, and I finally got a look inside one. I was dead impressed.
More importantly, Georgie had some serious equipment. He had a Fenton Weill solid body guitar and a sky-blue and cream wedge-shaped Watkins Dominator amplifier. Not only that, but also an actual and totally state-of-the-art Watkins Copicat, the very first serious echo unit on the market.
There was just one stumbling block: Georgie’s hair was all wrong. He was wedded to his Gene Vincent quiffage, and that mattered to us. It took us ages to talk him into it, but eventually he agreed to comb it forward. Once he’d done that, he looked all right, so he got in.
There was quite a scene, meanwhile, back at the Twisted Wheel. I had acquired a large circle of friends, including some really, really posh county chicks who started to invite me and my pals to parties in places like Altrincham, Nantwich, Wilmslow, Hale Barns, Lymm, and Bowdon; places where United football players had houses. They probably all live in Glossop now, but back then, the des reses of the nouveau riche were in Cheshire, which for a while was the most expensive place to live in the UK.
Somebody would always be on the rob at these Cheshire soirées. (I knew a few of the people involved in this thievery, I’m ashamed to say.) After a certain hour, the parties would usually degenerate because everyone was drinking, dancing, the Moss Side dudes smoking weed, whereas we would be totally on the case because we were amped up on the pep pills. While everyone else was reeling about and spilling drinks all over the Axminster, whoever had the wheels would be stationed out on the lawn, and somebody else would be going through the parents’ wardrobes.
These were decidedly high-class dos, so there would be top-dollar schmutter: mink coats and suede and leather pieces. For a while, the most coveted item of clothing was a suede or leather – but preferably suede – three-quarter-length single-breasted overcoat, button-through with an optional tie belt, usually in a bottle-green or navy blue. If anybody owned what was an eminently desirable garment it was the Cheshire set. The thiever would select the choicest items and throw them out of the bedroom window for the guy down below in the garden to catch, then make an early exit from the party.
One of the very few licensed premises we used to hang out in was the Dive Bar in the newly built Hotel Piccadilly, which was the most modern place in Manchester at that time. For about half an hour around ten o’clock on a Saturday night, there would be a sale of these ill-gotten goods from the back of a van parked just outside the hotel. Shamefully, even though I’d seen the thieves at it and knew their MO, I did buy a fabulous jacket from them: double-breasted three-button in an inky-blue suede, like a pea coat – very similar to the one Bob Dylan’s wearing on Another Side of Bob Dylan. I wish I still had it now.
There was a lot of thievery going on among our Twisted Wheel brigade, it can’t be denied. That whole ‘I dig labels, man’ thing really applied to us. If you were a working-class lad and you had an office job, you wanted to be so smart as to make the boss look bad. You’d change your shirt three times a day. It was an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Amphetamines didn’t help, they just exacerbated the situation; consequently shoplifting became a popular sport. I used to steal a lot of clothes. It was easy back then. The kids who worked in the shops would actually help you out.