On the way home that night we decided to form a band. If they can do it, we said, meaning the Pistols, then so can we.
We decided to follow the rules of punk . . .
Rule one: act like the Sex Pistols.
Rule two: look like the Sex Pistols. One guitar, one bass.
Terry volunteered to be the singer. Barney had been given a guitar and a little red practice amp for Christmas, which made him the guitarist, so I thought, “Right, I’ll get a bass.”
Of course, I’m pleased it worked out like that because I ended up learning the bass guitar, really making it my own and developing a very distinctive style, whereas (who knows?) if I’d tried learning the guitar I might just have been a run of the mill rhythm guitarist. It’s one of the strange things about writing a book like this, actually. You start seeing your life as series of chance happenings that somehow come together to make you what you are. You start thinking, What if I hadn’t bought that week’s Melody Maker or seen the advert for the Sex Pistols in the Manchester Evening News? What if Barney’s parents had bought him a Johnny Seven for his birthday instead of a guitar?
But they didn’t. They bought him a guitar, so I became a bassist. The very next day I borrowed £40 off my mam, and got the bus to Mazel’s on London Road, Piccadilly, in Manchester. I had no idea how much guitars cost. But I think Barney’s was about £40. Mazel Radio was one of those shops that always felt dark, it was that filled with weird indecipherable stock. (I used to go there with Terry for fun most weekends.) It was an Aladdin’s cave stuffed with transistors, valves, accumulators, TVs, radios—all kinds of electrical doo-dahs.
And cheap guitars.
“Can I have one of those, please?” I said, pointing at them.
“Well, what kind do you want, son?” said the bloke behind the counter.
“A bass one.”
And he went, “Well, how about this one?”
“Is that a bass guitar?
“Yeah.”
“That’ll do.”
So I bought my first guitar, which I’ve still got: a Gibson EB-0 copy. No make on it. They tried to sell me a case, but after bus fare I didn’t have enough money so I took it home in a black garbage bag they fished out from behind the counter. Very punk.
Barney had been playing a bit so he showed me a couple of notes. He’d go, “Hold your finger there, then move your finger to there. Move your finger back. . . .”
We were off. Not long later, we got books on how to play: the Palmer-Hughes Book of Rock ’n’ Roll Guitar and Rock ’n’ Roll Bass Guitar. Mine came with stickers for the neck of the bass so you knew where to put your fingers. When the stickers wore off with sweat, I painted them on with Tippex. We’d be sitting round practicing, with Barney shouting out the chords, like, “Play A, A, A, A, and then we’ll change to G, G, G, G.” I’d practice by myself, too, but it was far more interesting learning together than it was playing on your own at home.
Teaching myself meant I ended up learning it wrong, though, because I picked up the bad habit of playing with three fingers. A teacher would have made me play with four, but the Palmer-Hughes Book of Rock ’n’ Roll Bass Guitar didn’t talk back, so I started off—and have ended up—a three-fingered bass player; and having to hold down my little finger as I play makes me slower. Saying that, I suppose it also gave me my style, which is slower and more melodic compared to most bassists. It’s a different way of playing, and it came through learning badly.
We began by practicing in Barney’s gran’s front room. I told you she was a lovely lady. She had an old stereogram record player, and Barney, who was always good with electronics, wired up our guitar leads to the two input wires on the needle cartridge so we could play through it. It worked as well. I mean, it sounded fucking diabolical, and if we both played at the same time you couldn’t hear anything but a wall of noise, but it worked. So we’d made it, we’d arrived—right up until his gran discovered that we’d wrecked her stereo and went berserk and threw us out. Then we ran down Alfred Street laughing.
But we didn’t care. We were punks. We raided a used-clothing store and cut up the clothes we stole; I spiked up my hair and took the dog collar off the dog to wear. My mam went mad yet again. At first we were just copying the look from Melody Maker and NME, and wearing what the London punks were wearing, but pretty soon we were developing our own style. Barney discovered the Scout Shop on New Mount Street and started wearing a more military look (typical of him, he wanted to be a neat-and-tidy punk) while I used masking tape on my blue blazer to put stripes on it, and we both sprayed prison arrows on our clothes.
You used to get shouted at in the street for dressing like that; you were treated like a leper. I mean, these days nobody would bat an eyelid, but back then it was really shocking to see these kids walking round with hair in spikes and their clothes cut up. Which was, of course, why we did it—we wanted to be shocking; we wanted people staring at us. We loved that our mums hated it and that we had to get changed on the bus. It was all part of being a punk.
This was it for us: we’d get the guitars out, play around for a bit, go out so that people in the street could treat us like lepers, then come back and play around on the guitars some more. It was great.
The next punk happening in Manchester was the Pistols’ second gig, on July 20, also at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Apart from the venue it was completely different: for a start, we were punks now and knew what to expect from the band; plus there were a lot more people there, not only because the word had spread in Manchester but also because the Pistols, unless I’m very much mistaken, had brought a busload of supporters with them, which was exciting straightaway. At that time if you put a group of Londoners—Cockneys, in other words—and a group of Mancunians into a municipal building at the same time, the, shall we say, “regional differences” meant a fight was bound to break out—which it did.
We were in the bar talking to these kids who’d come over to us, one of them going, “Hey, are you fucking Cockneys or what?” all up in our faces.
And we went, “No, fuck off, mate, we’re from Salford.”
Turned out they were from Manchester too: Wythenshawe. “We’re a group,” they said.
“Oh, right. We’re a group, too. Sort of.”
“Well, we’re Slaughter & the Dogs. We’re supporting tonight.”
Wow—it was Slaughter & the Dogs; and this bloke’s name was Mick Rossi, the guitarist. Slaughter & the Dogs was one of the earliest punk bands in Manchester—and they were on the bill that night along with the Buzzcocks.
“What’s your group called?” said Mick Rossi.
We looked at one another. “Dunno. We haven’t got a name yet.”
Didn’t have a name. Didn’t have songs. Didn’t have a lead singer unless you counted Terry, which—after a couple of disastrous practice sessions—we didn’t. But still, we were a band.
“Right, the Cockneys are here,” said Rossi, clenching his fists. “We’re having the Cockneys, we’re fucking having them.”
And this was the support band. So there was a hell of an atmosphere right from the beginning and, true to form, there was as much fighting as there was pogoing and moshing, everyone rolling around the room. It was more good-natured than you might have expected, but, even so, pretty chaotic and, because of all the scraps breaking out, a lot more exciting than the first gig. At the first gig it all went off onstage. At the second gig it all went off in the audience and onstage.
Looking back, I don’t know which of the gigs was the most important in terms of the influence it had. A lot of people say the second because there were more people there, the Pistols were better known, and punks had started to get going in the city, but for me and Barney it was the first because that’s when we decided to form the group. Overall I think you’d have to say they were each as important as the other. I mean, after those two gigs, bands had formed and venues were putting them on and there was a group of us who soaked up whatever punk we could. That autumn we saw the Stranglers at the Squat on Devas Street; in September, Eater played the first-ever gig, at Houldsworth Hall on Deansgate. Eater was supported by the Buzzcocks, who played at just about every gig in Manchester and were also doing a lot to help other punk bands find their feet. They’d encouraged us; their manager, Richard Boon, had come up with our first name, the Stiff Kittens, and later we found out that Ian had been in touch with them too. Together with the Drones and Slaughter & the Dogs they were the backbone of the punk scene and helped make Manchester the major punk city after London. They all played regularly at the Squat and at a gay bar on Dale Street called the Ranch, owned by Foo Foo Lammar, as well as at the Electric Circus on Collyhurst Street, which quickly became the city’s main punk venue.
Debbie Curtis remembers Ian talking to me and Barney at that second Pistols gig. (He wasn’t there for the first one, which annoyed him to no end, but he brought Debbie along to the second.) Maybe we did share a few words that night but he certainly didn’t really register with me then. The first time I remember Ian making an impact was at the Electric Circus, for the third Pistols gig. He had “Hate” written on his jacket in orange fluorescent paint. I liked him immediately.