* These facts can’t be entirely verified, but have nevertheless entered the realms of urban mythology. As James Stewart said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, ‘Print the legend.’
* Colonel John S. Pemberton, 1831–88, manufacturer of America’s premier beverage and nerve tonic – brain food. John Pemberton, we salute your technical expertise.
* Kennedy Street Enterprises was the North-West’s key music promoter and artist management company, founded by hotshot lawyer Danny Betesh.
* Cyril Lord, aka the Carpet King, purveyor of the revolutionary wall-to-wall fitted carpet in ‘virtually indestructible’, deep synthetic nylon pile, direct from the Donaghadee, N. Ireland factory, at factory prices. The full TV advertising jingle went like this:
This is luxury you can afford by Cyril Lord –
Squash it, and it just springs back,
Wash it, and the colour stays fast,
Give it the treatment, the family treatment,
Enkalon is made to last for years and years and years and years . . .
This is luxury you can afford by Cyril Lord!
* Benny and Flood were allegedly members of the Quality Street Gang, of which more later.
* Aged forty-four, the larger-than-life Bill Benny died of a heart attack while getting a blowjob off a prostitute. The police had to batter down the door to his flat and lift his corpse off her flattened body.
* Even now, Holland’s meat and potato is my favourite pie. When I was in my twenties, I used to warn anyone thinking of moving south to pack a lifetime’s frozen supply, because in those days you couldn’t buy them south of Birmingham. Happily, they’re now available all over the country in packs of four in the freezer department of most good supermarkets. To conform with The Meat Products (England) Regulations 2003, due to the minimum meat requirement, however, they’ve had to change the name to Potato and Meat. Give them a go. However, you would never hear anyone in the Greater Manchester area asking for a ‘Potato and Meat’ pie. To do so would single you out as an invader from another planet who had taken human form and inadequately learned our local customs. It isn’t ‘Potato and Meat’ any more than it’s Tonic and Gin, Chips and Fish, Bowser and Callard, Costello and Abbott, Roy and Siegfried, Large and Little, Wise and Morecambe, or Vinegar and Salt. You see where I’m going with this?
* For the full sorry tale, I would refer you to the excellent documentary Too Good to Go Down based on the book by Wayne Barton, directed by Tom Boswell, and narrated by your humble scribe.
* In Austerity (or Modernity?) Britain by the excellent David Kynaston there is a photograph by Shirley Baker of a boy on a drop-handlebar bike in a cobbled terraced street in Salford. It could so easily be me: the bike is just like mine, I had that Tony Curtis haircut, and I wore a suit exactly like the one the boy is wearing to my Uncle Dennis’s wedding in 1961.
* Nan Levy, Shirley Baker’s granddaughter, keeps the archive of Baker’s great images of Salford in the time of its most dynamic changes.
* In Cockney rhyming slang, Cadbury’s Smash = cash.
* See 77 Sunset Strip.
* Mrs Forshaw probably could have been a concert pianist in another life. She had pretensions that were slightly beyond the denizens of the back-to-backs: she owned the corner shop.
* A half crown, or two shillings and sixpence.
* The answer, I found out later, was Vince in Newburgh Street in Soho, about which more later.
* Why no Dave Redshaw, you may ask. Redshaw had no interest in being in this outfit. Even though he was the first guitar owner I had ever known, he had never got round to actually learning any chords. He would just wear it around the house and mime to Eddie Cochran records.
* Who hasn’t got a fucking Strat today? I’ll shake their hand personally. They’ve lost all cachet since fucking Tony Blair showed up.
* Back then, it was always ‘groups’, never ‘bands’. If you said you were in a band, the reaction would be, ‘What do you play? Trombone?’ Bands involved a multitude of musicians, none of whom played an electric guitar.
* I don’t think people would describe me as being tall any more, but if you had to describe me back then you would have said ‘tall and thin’. You don’t really see as much stunted malnourishment nowadays.
* The Woodthorpe is where the funeral reception for Mark E. Smith was held; it degenerated into mass violence.
* John Simon still runs a shop, selling the same kind of stuff, in Chiltern Street in Marylebone. Worth a visit, it’s like a museum of American clothing.
* Sausage roll = dole.
* It would take me twenty years to realise that this is because the bass is usually on the off-beat and goes contrapuntal to the actual melody.
* The resultant look reminded me of Gort, the robot servant in The Day the Earth Stood Still, starring Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal. Gort looked great from the front, the ultimate art deco fascist robot with a death ray issuing from a slit where its eyes should have been. When you saw it from the back, however, you could clearly see that it was an actor wearing a pair of those stirrup ski-pants in some kind of metallic Crimplene.
* See their release ‘Jersey Lightning’ of 1930.
* Club 43 was Manchester’s most contemporary jazz club; its founder, Eric Scrivens, had been instrumental in bringing the American modern jazz greats to the city since 1940.
* Cockney rhyming slang again. Bubble and squeak = Greek.
* There are only two acceptable rock and roll haircuts – the quiff, and the post-Beatles alternative that still pertains today: the one favoured by the Runaways, Chrissie Hynde, Jane Fonda in Klute, Ron Wood, Steve Marriott, most members of the K-pop corporation, Dr John Cooper Clarke, and especially Rod Stewart. Is it a mullet? I don’t think so. For the mullet in all its horror I would refer you to Billy Ray Cyrus. (Now that I’ve mentioned his name, I defy you to expunge the infectious ‘Achy Breaky Heart’. There are only three songs that will rid you of this earworm: the theme from The Magic Roundabout, ‘The Macarena’, and ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Astley.)
* Show me the rest of the opera, Keith. Just saying!
* ‘Year of the Cat’? What’s all that about?
* Johnnie Hamp produced, among other things, The Comedians and later Wheeltappers and Shunters Club. He was also responsible for The Beatles’ first TV exposure on Scene at 6.30 and a series of television specials featuring blues-based American artists, notably Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On (1964), with Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent, and It’s Little Richard (1963); then in 1964 The Blues and Gospel Train with Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
* This didn’t stand in the way of me liking posh chicks – in fact, I went seeking them out. Let’s face it; they were more likely to be sympathetic to my choice of career.
* Or Tangiers, or some other hippy destination, but usually Kathmandu.
* That’s why I’m not allowed to practise medicine: a mere formality like my non-familiarity with Greek and Latin.
* I’m not going to include monkey-minder here: Charlie may have been pretty well brought up, but the goofy little bastard did make demands.
* Chas Hodges as one half of Chas and Dave, and Albert ‘Mr Telecaster’ Lee as a guitar legend, playing alongside the likes of Clapton, Emmylou Harris, and the Everly Brothers.
* Later on, post-Sex Pistols, Thursday night at Fagins became Punk Night.
* Mickey Mouser = Scouser.
* Owsley Stanley III, aka Bear, was a Berkeley-dropout-turned-LSD-chemist who became a financial and pharmaceutical supplier to the Grateful Dead.
* ‘Don’t Look Over Your Shoulder, but the Sex Pistols Are Coming’, by Neil Spencer, NME, 21 February 1976.
* Bag of sand = grand.
* To the tune of the National Anthem.
* In 1976 Pat Seed was admitted as a cancer patient of Christie Hospital, Manchester. Specialists considered she would only live a few more months – she was to prove them wrong. While Pat was a patient she heard of a new technology, Computerised Axial Tomography (CAT) scanners. Hospitals at the time were unable to launch fund-raising appeals. With the help of North Fylde MP Sir Walter Clegg and the Minister for Health, Roland Moyle, Pat succeeded in lobbying for an amendment made to the 1948 Health Act and she helped to raise £1.75 million for the hospital. The campaign turned Pat into a national celebrity, meeting royalty, and she was even the subject of a This is Your Life TV profile.
* The whole thing was filmed and recorded, and later released on vinyl as Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus.
* Sweaty socks = Jocks.
* CBS insisted on the addition of the eyes behind the joke glasses, which I think was a mistake.
* For further examples of the great Barney Bubbles’s work, I can highly recommend Reasons to be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles by Paul Gorman: the definitive publication.
* If you’re interested, check out their compilation release, Songs from the Lost Boutique. I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t highly influenced by Fairfield Parlour and their should-have-been-a-hit single, ‘Bordeaux Rosé’.
* Changed following objections raised by the BBC about using the Virgin brand name.
* The Rooms, aka AA meetings.
* Nigel is now a very rich man: he got involved early on with some area of computing and cleaned up.
* Aqua Marina was clearly modelled on Dr. No Bond girl Ursula Andress.
* Willy Smax was responsible for the George Harrison ‘Got My Mind Set on You’ video in which a room full of inanimate household objects come to life.
* If you’d like to learn more about these characters, I would refer you to my younger brother Paul and his mate Gaz, who because of their anti-social working hours would hang out at the Cotton Club, the Badda Bing of Manchester.
* Indeed, most of them featured in The Invisible Girls at one point or another.
* His bass player was a guy called B.B. Cunningham, former gonzoid lyricist and singer with the Hombres, responsible for the hit tune ‘Let it All Hang Out’.
* James Berry, singer in a doo-wop band called the Flares, also wrote ‘Louie Louie’.
* A Riot of Our Own is, in my opinion, the best book written about the Clash; because Johnny was involved, he tells the human story.