‘Dizzy’, performed by the Wonderstuff and comedian Vic Reeves, who was known as James Roderick Moir when he grew up in Darlington, went to No 1.
Reeves’ family moved to Hewitson Road from Leeds in 1964 when he was 5. His father, James, was a linotype operator at The Northern Echo, and Vic remembered seeing his fast fingers ‘spreading across the keys like lightning’. Vic attended Eastbourne primary and secondary schools, and let his imagination run wild digging ‘space pits’ on Yarm Road wasteland, from which he would make-believe he was an alien.
He shopped in Darlington’s alternative stores. ‘Guru was great,’ he told The Northern Echo in 2006. ‘I once bought a pair of white flares, split at the knee, but I dyed them green very quickly. They were only £1.99.’ He bought his first guitar, a Gibson EB3, from William’s music shop, and formed a band called Trout, or The Fashionable Five, which played at the Green Dragon in Post House Wynd and the Bowes cellar bar on Skinnergate.
After school, Reeves worked at Neasham market garden, where one of his duties was castrating piglets. But the bright lights of London beckoned. He teamed up with Middlesbrough solicitor Bob Mortimer and their Big Night Out comedy programme became a cult hit in the early 1990s.
(Reeves: Me: Moir, Virgin Books, 2006)