11

Geordie Boy

I bought the P.A. system from a music shop called Windows in Newcastle’s Central Arcade, a beautiful glass-roofed indoor market that dates back to Edwardian times. What I paid for it, I’ve no idea. All I remember is that when the salesman asked if I was interested in a hire-purchase agreement, I uttered a phrase that I never thought I’d hear coming out of my own mouth – ‘No thank you, I’ll pay cash.’

The P.A. was a WEM system with a 100-Watt amp and two columns of four eight-inch speakers – less powerful than the stereo in the average South Korean hatchback today, but the absolute dog’s bollocks back then. I even had some money left over for an echo machine. Boy, did it sound professional. I was careful not to overdo it, though – you could always tell the terrible singers by how much they turned up their echo machines.

The P.A. system wasn’t the only boost to my self-confidence. Now that I’d completed my seven parachute jumps, I was also officially awarded my ‘wings’ at a special Territorial Army presentation ceremony – and it was one of the greatest moments of my life. Even better, I got to go home in my full uniform of red beret, combat smock and jump boots. That was the best thing about the Paras – the uniform looked so tough. There were no shiny buttons or sashes or any of that shit. You dressed like you were about to jump out of a plane over enemy territory, then crawl through twenty miles of mud to blow up a bridge. I swear my dad shed a tear of pride when he first set eyes on me – before rushing me straight down to his social club to show me off to his friends. It made me so happy to see that look on his face.

Meanwhile, now that I had the right musical equipment, it was time to get back to more important business than fighting the Cold War. I needed to join a new band and start playing some shows.

Before we get to that, I should probably rewind a bit and explain that I hadn’t completely left the music scene after leaving The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub and getting married.

For a while, I’d messed around with a couple of lads from Seaton Delaval and a keyboard player who I only ever knew as ‘Shrimp’. They’d previously been in a band called Hannibal Kemp – where they got that name, I’ve no idea – and they wanted to form a new band but under the same name, so they’d keep their old fans. The only problem with that plan being that they’d never actually had any fans, so when we booked our first show, no one showed up. An emergency band meeting followed, but after several hours of chin-stroking and heated debate over what we should call ourselves, inspiration still hadn’t struck. ‘We just need something . . . fresh!’ I said. And that was that. From then on, we were called ‘Fresh’.

It was actually a great little band, was Fresh, because we did stuff that was more chart-y and mainstream than the heavy blues of The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub. We covered songs like ‘Magic Carpet Ride’ by Steppenwolf, and ‘Back in the USSR’ by The Beatles – a great rocky number, with that hard-driving piano riff. Not that I looked much like a rocker. I was still in paratrooper training, preparing to save the world from the Communist hoards, so my hair was short. If it had been a few years later, I could have at least pretended to be a punk. As it was, I just looked very out of place.

Even if we rarely played though, I still loved that sense of belonging that came with being in a band.

We’d walk around town as a band. We’d go to the pub as a band. We’d hang around outside Windows in the Central Arcade as a band, waiting for the hot-off-the-press sheet music to arrive for new songs that had just entered that week’s charts.

Fresh reached its creative peak when we hired a sax player. He was one of the top turbine engineers at Parsons, as it happened, an absolutely brilliant guy. Just not so brilliant on the sax. Technically speaking, he couldn’t actually play the sax at all. But he could do a few chords.

But our sax player’s greatest achievement was building this ingenious, almost Pink Floyd-esque lighting rig. The guts of it were made from an old record player, which he modified by putting ten microswitches on the turntable, so that when it was spinning, the switches would hit different contacts in a pre-set sequence. The contacts would then send electrical signals to an old floorboard with ten light sockets attached to it, each one with a different-coloured bulb – not the kind of bulbs you’d use at home, but big, floodlight-type things. When he gave us a demonstration, our jaws dropped. It was like a strobe, but in colour. Absolutely stunning.

After another band meeting, the decision was made to deploy this secret weapon at our next gig – during the guitar solo in ‘Magic Carpet Ride’. We were so excited, we played all the songs before it at about twice the usual speed. Then the big moment arrived. As the guitar solo began, the stage lights went down, the jerry-rigged turntable started to spin, the microswitches were activated in sequence, then . . .

As each giant light bulb lit up, it exploded, sending shards of coloured glass flying everywhere.

I’d always wanted to play to a screaming audience.

But without the wounds and blood . . .

I still miss the boys from Fresh. They were great times.

Then another opportunity came along from an unlikely source – a big, black and very sassy young comic and singer called Ruth Saxon, who was known for going on stage wearing platinum blonde wigs.

Originally from London, Ruth was a breath of fresh air on the working men’s club circuit – and she was constantly booked. What’s more, she carried herself like a star. She put on a little bit of an American accent, she had a big rented house, she even had a manager. This being the 1970s, I’m sure she must have suffered some racial abuse, but she was such a force of nature, no one dared to give her any stick when she was on stage.

Now, what you need to bear in mind is that this was the time when the hippie rock-musical Hair was still very much all the rage. It was just this huge phenomenon. And, of course, the fact that the cast got their kit off halfway through the show didn’t harm when it came to selling tickets.

Anyway, Hair had given Ruth an idea. Not to perform stark naked, I’m pleased to say, but to write and star in a cabaret act that would tour the country, but with a Hair-style rock’n’roll band.

That was where I came in . . . along with some of my old pals from The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub.

After I’d bought my new P.A. system, the band had basically re-formed under the new name of The Jasper Hart Band. (Once again, I’m afraid to say that I’ve got no idea where this came from.) On guitar was Ken Brown. On bass was Steve Chance. And on drums again was Fred Smith. The only problem being that we all had full-time jobs – and a wife and a baby, in my case – so the only time we had to practise was at gigs.

We were at least getting gigs, which was in part thanks to my P.A. system, but also down to the fact that we’d expanded our repertoire to include songs that didn’t all have fifteen-minute blues solos. Even the working men’s clubs were starting to ask us back.

It was after one such gig that Ruth’s manager approached us and told us about her idea. None of us were really into Hair, of course, musicals were for tarts and twats, but hey! Where there’s cash, there’s a will. To play covers from hell.

But the offer came with conditions. First, we needed to hire a keyboard player so that we could play a wider variety of material. Second, we needed to book ourselves into Studio One on Clayton Street for rehearsals, because Ruth had noticed our lack of practice and wanted us to be (in her words) ‘as tight as shit’. Ruth wanted us to get ourselves some proper stage gear, so we looked the part.

It was all incredibly exciting . . . but pretty stressful too. Exciting because we found a keyboard player – a guy named Alan Taylorson – making us a five-piece. (Alan had previously played with Ken, Steve and Fred in another offshoot called Crusade.) But it was stressful because when we booked ourselves into the rehearsal studio and started traipsing around for clothes that would pass muster with Ruth, the bills racked up fast. We even had to drive all the way to Manchester because that’s where Ruth wanted us to do our promotional photo shoot. And we really didn’t have the money.

Still, we were about to go on tour.

When we got back from Manchester, we were told that our first show had been booked at a cabaret club in Newcastle – a trial run, to see if we were ready to go full-time on the road.

On the day of the show, Ruth burst in and announced with great excitement that the stars of the travelling production of Hair – which was at the Theatre Royal that week – would be stopping by that night to hear ‘all the songs that we’d learned’.

‘What songs that we’ve learned?’ I asked, genuinely confused.

‘The songs from Hair!’ replied Ruth.

‘But we haven’t learned any songs from –’

‘Here’s the sheet music,’ she said, handing me a binder. The shame was, no one in the band could read music . . .

We all looked at each other and groaned. On top of the set we’d already rehearsed, we’d now have to spend the hours before our first show rushing through new material like ‘Aquarius’ and ‘Good Morning Starshine’. Not to mention songs with titles like ‘Sodomy’, ‘Hashish’ and . . . worse. (You really couldn’t do some of that stuff today.)

In the end, almost the entire cast of the musical turned up to the gig. Which was a good job, because no one else did. The male actors had the big fluffy things over their shoulders. The girls took their tops off. Peak late-1960s shit – even though this was by now the spring of 1970. So there we were, playing this music that we didn’t much like, to a near-empty room, with all these actors jumping and dancing around us.

What a waste of time.

Ruth didn’t even seem to like heavy rock – whereas the stuff that I was listening to was getting heavier by the day. The big eye-opener for me had been going to see Status Quo play at Blaydon’s Central Youth Club, of all places, in October of 1969.

I can’t remember who I went with, but I wasn’t going to miss it.

So, on Friday night, I set off for Blaydon, about three-and-a-half miles away. My transport was the 89 double-decker bus right into the heart of Blaydon. I bought my ticket at the hall and went into a dark place with not many people in – most people went to Newcastle on Friday. But still, I was excited. The stage lights got a little brighter, then people were moving about on stage. Hang on, these weren’t people, they were musicians, and right in the middle was an unbelievable kit of drums, with more cymbals than I’d ever seen before. The amps looked enormous. To my eyes, it was everything I thought it should be.

Then, out of nowhere, Rick Parfitt, one of the guitarists, walked up to the mic and barked ‘WE PLAY FUCKING LOUD, SO IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, FUCK OFF NOW, AND WE WON’T BE PLAYING FUCKING “PICTURES OF MATCHSTICK MEN”.’

Wow, he said the F-word in a town hall, out fucking loud.

Then they hammered straight in to ‘Down the Dustpipe’ . . . oh, that harmonica, it was electrifying. If there was a moment in my life after Little Richard that sparks, then that was it.

Whilst being out of the public eye for a while, they had metamorphosed into a Rock’n’Roll Monster. I can’t remember how long they played. It was fucking good, and it was fucking loud and, lo and behold, I was fucking hooked. I was transfixed. It ended too soon, and they left the stage with no encore. They were probably wondering how to get their hands on the moron who’d booked them there.

We left the hall, got a pint at the pub next door and hung around outside. After about an hour, this six-wheeler transit van came round the corner and we could see some of the band sitting in the front, then watched them disappear down the road. I wanted to be a part of that, whatever it was.

While I was preparing for the tour with Ruth, meanwhile, an even harder, louder band came along – Black Sabbath. I can’t even begin to put into words just how revolutionary those guys sounded in early 1970 – especially their first big single, ‘Paranoid’. Every day at Parsons, I’d volunteer to get lunch for everyone from the café next door – The Paddock, I’m pretty sure the place was called – for the sole reason that they’d just added ‘Paranoid’ to their jukebox because it was at No. 4 in the charts. All the older guys in the queue for meat pies must have hated me, because I’d dump every coin in my pocket into that jukebox and play the song, over and over again. We even added ‘Paranoid’ to Jasper Hart’s set list for a while – even though Ruth didn’t like it. In fact, I was starting to have serious second thoughts about the whole idea of turning professional just to sing songs from Hair in half-empty cabaret clubs.

I shouldn’t have worried though.

Before the tour started, Ruth disappeared from the face of the earth. Just vanished. We never heard a thing from her again – even though we were all now deep in debt after buying our stage gear and all the equipment for the show. I’ve since learned that she became ITV’s first black presenter at around that time. We had no idea.

It was a lucky escape, really.

During my time in the T.A. Parachute regiment, I had been told that we were to go on a huge military exercise in West Germany. So, I had to go off and protect Western democracies against the Communist hordes. The name of the exercise was Red Hammer, or some other bloody silly name.

We would have to be behind enemy lines for two weeks. The enemy being played by the fearsome Scottish Black Watch regiment and French Canadians.

We were to be parachuted in by night and cause as much havoc and destruction as we could manage. Of course, all ammunition would be blanks, but it was still pretty scary stuff.

To parachute at night is never a good idea, but they always find a way to measure the size of your balls. I believe I was a size 7¾.

The inside of the aircraft at night was a ghostly, smog-like colour – the colour of a really bad dream. It’s like being in a tube of noise. The smell of bloody hell. The weather was bad, it was cloudy, and we were bouncing around. I felt my last meal reach my Adam’s apple, then oof! Home again. And there is no toilet!

This night, we had a guy who was a very experienced jumper, and his designation was ‘Pathfinder’. He would jump and make sure it wasn’t too rough. If he made it safely to the ground, he would signal the aircraft. If he didn’t, it meant he was dead or seriously injured. Brave lad.

The jump master signalled to us, we went through the usual routine, then off we went into the black.

On night jumps you’re always told to never drop your guard, because you can’t see the ground, or anything else for that matter. So, keeping your knees in the bent position was vital to keep both testicles intact.

The thing is, after a while, you keep wondering where the ground is and just as you relax, bang, found it!

It was raining and chilly, but we gathered our chutes and equipment and went into the woods, our officers and sergeants getting us sorted into our squads. Someone at the front must have known where to go, because we kept walking deeper into the forest.

When we stopped, Corporal Stirling said, ‘Right, make your bivouacs, get something to eat and get some shut eye.’

Now, that’s easier said than done. First, you have to find branches, stick four of them into the ground, hang on, I’ll draw a picture, it’s easier. Then put leaves and such underneath as a kind of mattress and your waterproof poncho over the top of it all. They were only about eighteen inches tall, so it was pretty hard to crawl in and, either way, you still got wet.

When I’d finished my built-in-the-dark craphouse, I decided to see what was for dinner. So, I opened my backpack and pulled out my field rations, mmm! That agony of choice: a small tin of sausage and beans and hard biscuits or stewed unknown-to-mankind meat, or how about a tube of cheese, or a tube of jam, and finish it off with a nice piece of blood chocolate. Then again, I did have some packets of soup – now that took heating up. To do that we had these small white blocks of something that smelled vaguely of urinal tablets. The idea was to light them, fill your mug with water from your canteen and sit it on the flames, which you had to keep covered. It took for fucking ever to heat up. Eventually, it was hot enough to absorb the powdered soup or a brew of tea.

The next few days saw us walking and hiding from the enemy, then setting ambushes for convoys of trucks, which never came. And it kept raining. I was singing in a band one week and the next I was in Germany with a rifle. Being my dad twenty-five years earlier, without nearly being killed.

Then one black night in a forest, somewhere and nowhere all at the same time, we stopped. We’d had a long, exhausting day and I just wanted sleep. No cigarettes allowed, no lights allowed, it was pitch black and the trees hid the sky.

‘Johnson,’ the sergeant whispered, ‘follow me, I’m putting you on first sentry duty.’

Oh, bollocks, I was just dropping off.

We stumbled along for a while and he said, ‘This’ll do. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears sharp, I’ll be back in two hours with your replacement.’

‘Yes, Sarge,’ I said.

I lay on my belly looking at nothing and, after about thirty minutes or so, I started to drift off and then, out in the dark, I could see something. What the hell was it? It looked like a milky-white soldier with a First World War helmet on. With an outstretched hand, it felt like it was asking for water or help or . . . Holy shit, was this a ghost? I turned away and splashed some water over my face to clear my mind and eyes. I turned back again, oh shit, it was still there. That’s when I turned into a girl and ran as fast as I could, back in the direction of the squad. The sergeant was a little pissed off. He said, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

I told him I had just seen a ghost. He grabbed me by the armpit, and we went back to the scene of the haunting. There was nothing there, and probably never was, but I still had another ninety minutes by myself waiting for my new friend to come back. I still don’t believe in ghosts.

Footnote: it all ended, thankfully, courtesy of a big, hairy Scotsman who was with the Black Watch, who had been watching us and attacked suddenly. He was no more than two feet away when he fired his rifle right at my stomach. Thank God it was a blank, but bloody hell, the percussive power knocked me over and left me winded. That’s when the umpire said, ‘You’re dead’, and gave me a little ribbon to stick on my uniform. We, the dead that is, were put in the back of a three-ton truck and driven to the P.O.W. camp. It was there I was given a cup of tea and a sandwich. After ten days of sleeping in the woods and the rain, it was luxury. No more sleeping rough. I wish I had been killed sooner.

Back home, the disappointment and financial hit of the aborted cabaret tour with Ruth Saxon were too much for Steve Chance and Alan Taylorson. They both left The Jasper Hart Band soon afterwards. (I’m told that Alan went on to manage a DIY chain store in Sunderland.) But the rest of us weren’t ready to give up yet. So, we put the word out that we were hiring, and quickly found two very talented guys, Tom Hill and Brian Gibson, to take over on bass and drums respectively. Both of them were well known locally, having previously played in a band called Sneeze, and we all hit it off immediately.

Soon enough, we’d become the ‘tight’ band that I’d always wanted to be in, playing two or three shows a week at working men’s clubs and nightclubs – sometimes two shows in one night. That was good money to earn on top of a draughtsman’s salary. Better yet, we didn’t have to play a single song from Hair . . .

Then another opportunity came along.

This time, the offer was from a guy called Mike Forster – a manager, songwriter and aspiring music mogul – who’d started a company called Circa 2000 Records. After seeing us play, he wanted us to record three songs that he’d written, with the aim of shopping them around and getting a record deal. So off we went back to Clayton Street – this time to the recording studio next to the rehearsal room – and laid down these okay but rather middle-of-the-road tracks. It was the first time that I’d ever sung in a studio with the big microphone in front of me and the tape going around – and it felt fabulous. Ken still has the master copies today, and you can find a snippet of one of the songs – ‘Down by the River’ – on the internet somewhere. When you listen to it, though, you can tell how wanting we still were as a band. It’s just so empty in places. We were almost there . . . but not quite.

In the end, we never got the chance to take our demo tape to any record companies because over the following weeks, The Jasper Hart Band lost all but one of its members.

It wasn’t that people left.

We were poached.

The poacher in question was Vic Malcolm, a guitarist from South Shields, and about as much of a legend as you could be in the North East without being an actual rock star. He’d been in a band called The Influence with the singer John Miles, later known for his epic song ‘Music’, and the drummer Paul Thompson, later to join Roxy Music. They’d even released a single in 1969 called ‘I Want to Live’. Vic had also been in a couple of other bands with Paul Thompson – Yellow and Smoke Stack Crumble – and both of them had released singles too. He’d even played a two-week residency at the famous Top 10 Club on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg.

Vic was the real deal – there was absolutely no doubt about it.

Anyway, the first I knew that something was up was when Tom Hill told me that he’d been asked to try out for Vic’s new band, called U.S.A. – and had been offered the job.

Then Brian Gibson told me that he’d also tried out . . . and had also been offered a position.

I was gutted. Tom and Brian had only just joined The Jasper Hart Band, and we were better than ever. And with the songs we’d just recorded, it seemed like we could go all the way.

‘We can’t turn down Vic Malcolm,’ sighed Tom. ‘The guy could be the next Pete Townshend.’

‘Aye, I know, I know,’ I admitted sadly. ‘I’d probably do the same in your shoes.’

‘Well, that’s good to hear,’ grinned Tom. ‘Because Vic wants you to try out for the band too.’

The audition was in a scout hut, of all places, in the middle of a council estate in South Shields. It was a pretty low-key thing. On the phone, Vic had just said, ‘Come and have a sing.’

From the moment I walked in, though, I could tell that this was going to be next-level stuff.

Vic was in another league as a guitarist. He could have joined pretty much any of the biggest bands in the world and fitted right in. But the riffs and songs that he was playing were his own. And they were good. So instantly catchy that you felt like you already knew them from the radio. He looked the part too, with his Fender, hair and low-necked T-shirt, not to mention all his Keith Richards-style jewellery.

Whatever you do, Brian, I told myself, don’t fuck this up.

Vic had three or four of his songs written out for me, amongst them ‘Don’t Do That’ and ‘Keep on Rockin’’.

Before I started, I hadn’t even thought about what it would be like to sing completely new material. But the feeling of exclusivity – of having a potentially chartworthy single that no one else had – was magical. In the back of my mind, of course, I was also thinking that the clubs would never let us play this stuff, because they wanted covers. But Vic didn’t care. He had his sights set far higher than the clubs. Besides, if you didn’t have your own songs, you were never going to get a record deal.

‘You’re in,’ said Vic once I’d got through the songs. ‘If you want to be, of course . . .’

He added that his plan was to get U.S.A. out on the working men’s club circuit, get the band nice and tight, then make a demo, take the demo to some of his record company contacts in London, get a record deal, turn professional, and release some singles that would get us on Top of the Pops. It sounded almost easy, the way he said it.

There was only one problem – Ken. The poor guy was the only one who hadn’t been offered a place in Vic’s band. He was a guitarist, after all, and Vic didn’t need a guitarist, given that he was one of the best guitarists in the North East. It was especially awkward because Ken was going out with my sister-in-law. But the truth was, The Jasper Hart Band had run its course. It was cruel – especially after everything we’d been through with Ruth Saxon. But that’s the music business for you.

It was early 1972 when U.S.A. played its first gig.

I believe it was in the town of Peterlee, County Durham. It was one of those ‘new towns’ created in Britain, which meant it was a nightmare to navigate because it was split into zones, with each zone sharing the same street names, and all the red brick houses looking identical. Meanwhile, the venue was a working men’s club, but there were about a half dozen of the bloody things, also identical, with just slightly different names. By the time we found the right one we were seriously late, and the club’s ‘concert chairman’ – that was the grand title these union men liked to give themselves – was none too happy. Not the best way to start our first gig, especially given how nervous I was about singing original material.

But our jitters disappeared within a few minutes of getting into our set. Vic’s songs were so good the crowd barely noticed they weren’t covers. By the time we got to our encore of ‘Don’t Do That’, a few people were even singing along. I was stunned.

Next thing I knew, we were playing the same clubs and dance halls that had previously refused to give The Jasper Hart Band the time of day – and within six months, we were headlining a show at Croft Park, home of the Blyth Spartans football club, with a capacity of 5,000. We even had two supporting acts that night – a band called Lyght Plynth and a rock outfit that went by the name of Brass Alley. The lead singer of Brass Alley was a local star called Dave Ditchburn (and he’s still one of my favourite singers to this day), who’d previously been in a band with Vic called Vince King and The Stormers . . . whose main claim to fame was that in 1963 they’d won a competition to play at Middlesbrough’s Astoria Ballroom with a hot new band from Liverpool.

That’s right: Vic had once opened for The Beatles.

And now I was standing on stage next to him.

We had a demo tape ready within just a couple of months. Then it was time for Vic and Tom to take it down to London to see if they could drum up any interest from the record companies down there. They literally just drove the band’s six-wheeler Ford Transit straight to Soho and parked it on Wardour Street, which you could do back then because wheel clamps and £10-a-hour parking meters hadn’t been invented yet.

I would have gone with them, but it was in the middle of the week, so that was out of the question.

No sooner had Vic and Tom parked the van than the power went out all across London, which was just so typical of 1970s Britain. So, the first few record companies they went to had no way of playing the demo. Whether the lads left tapes behind or not, I’ve no idea – and Vic’s memory of it isn’t any clearer. What’s not in doubt is that the power came back on just as they got to a company called Red Bus Records, which was new on the scene, but had just signed a deal with EMI Records so were looking for new acts. The timing couldn’t have been better.

Vic and Tom were met by a guy called Ellis Elias, a very right-on and groovy showbusiness-type. He owned Red Bus with another guy, Eliot Cohen.

‘Well boys, this is great stuff, yeah, alright, I like it,’ said Ellis, once he’d listened to the tape.

‘So, er . . . you’ll have a think . . . and give us a call?’ asked Vic.

‘Oh, I don’t think that’ll be necessary,’ said Ellis.

Later that night, I got a knock on the door. It was Tom, just back from London. Shell-shocked.

‘We fucking did it,’ he said.

‘You delivered the tape?’ I asked.

‘No. We did it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘You didn’t deliver the tape?’

‘We got a record contract!’

That was when I remembered that I was married with a kid and a full-time office job. So, I was delighted. But at the same time, I was like . . . what the fuck am I going to do now?

I had all of forty-eight hours to make a decision. Red Bus wanted U.S.A. to get down to London as soon as possible and record our first single – two songs in total, an A and a B side – with an album to follow. Not that there were any guarantees. If the single flopped, who knew if there’d ever be an album. We’d just have to take our chances.

Carol was worried, of course. She hated the thought of it all going wrong and us ending up even more broke than we already were. My draughtsman’s job might not have been very lucrative, but it was steady. Having a regular job also meant that I could help around the house. If I went out on the road playing rock’n’roll, on the other hand, Carol would be left at home by herself to look after Joanne, who was now four. Not only that, but Joanne’s little sister Kala would also be along soon, adding a newborn baby to the mix. So, it was a pretty bad deal for her, unless of course U.S.A. went all the way and we ended up living a life of luxury.

So, this was it.

One of those moments in life. Do you take the path well-travelled . . . or do you grab the chance with both hands?

What worried me the most, surprisingly enough, was the thought of telling the lads at work that I was quitting to become a professional musician. They’d piss themselves laughing. They’d think I’d completely lost the plot. Then again, the company was offering redundancies because business was drying up, so I had the perfect excuse – and it looked like there’d be more redundancies to come. The workforce had become so expensive in Newcastle and the Japanese were making the same product for a fraction of the price. Parsons would tell its customers, ‘We make the Rolls-Royce of turbines, they’ll last forever.’ But the customers knew that if they bought a Japanese turbine and had to replace it after twenty years, it would still be cheaper.

Another reason to leave was my shop steward, Harry Blair – a proud and stubborn man who spoke in war metaphors and was a member of the Communist Party.

I mean, I liked Harry a lot, but we were always butting heads because I couldn’t abide his politics. He even once ‘sent me to Coventry’ – a real thing in 1970s Britain, not just a turn of phrase – when I refused to support changing the name of our union from the Draughtsmen’s and Allied Technicians’ Association, or DATA, to the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section, or TASS. My objection being that TASS was also the name of the notorious Soviet propaganda news agency.

‘Exactly!’ said Harry, when I pointed this out. ‘We’re showing solidarity with our brothers!’

It was when I told him how I felt about that – especially as a member of the armed forces, trained to protect him from those same Communists – that he sent me to Coventry by refusing to speak to me for a week. He even announced it to the entire office.

Harry could also be very entertaining company, mind you – especially with a few beers in him.

Every Christmas, for example, there was a big ‘do’ for all the Parsons draughtsmen, and we each had to stand up and do a party piece. Harry’s contribution was a traditional Newcastle song called ‘Geordie’s Lost His Liggie’, about a little lad who loses his ‘liggie’ (or penka, or marble) and goes to extreme lengths to try and find it, including poking a broom handle down the toilet, then blowing up the toilet with dynamite, only to eventually discover that the liggie in question was ‘in his bloody pocket, aal alang’. Harry’s version of the song brought the house down – and I’ll always be grateful to him for introducing me to it, because I later recorded a version with Vic and the lads and I’ve had a great time performing it ever since.

The redundancy was a godsend because I got a one-off payment of £800 – a massive wedge of cash for someone who was earning £36 a week. If the record deal went south, I thought, I could always live on that money while applying for a draughtsman’s job somewhere else. That was wishful thinking, of course – heavy industry was dying all across the North East, and those kinds of jobs were disappearing as fast as the turbine orders were drying up. But it made me feel better about taking the risk.

A few days later, U.S.A. was being photographed by the Evening Chronicle for a feature entitled ‘Stars of the Future’ – then we were on our way to London in the Transit, which was packed with every piece of equipment that we owned. Tom drove, with Brian riding shotgun – me and Vic in the back, fending off an avalanche of amplifiers every time the van braked. Not exactly a relaxing journey – especially since we set off in the middle of the night to get to London for 9 a.m. – but we couldn’t have cared less. We were grinning so much.

Next thing we knew, we were walking triumphantly through the front doors of Red Bus Records.

Which was also when we came crashing back down to earth.

What happened next went something like this:

‘About the name, boys,’ said Ellis, frowning sympathetically. ‘We’re not sure “U.S.A.” hits quite the right buttons . . . I mean, it rather suggests you’re from the other side of the pond, no?’

‘No . . . I don’t think so,’ replied Vic. ‘It just means we play American-style rock’n’roll.’

‘Hmm,’ said Ellis.

‘I like the name U.S.A.,’ I chimed in, trying to be helpful.

‘Me too,’ added Tom, as the other Brian nodded in support.

‘Hmm,’ said Ellis again. ‘We were thinking of a name that . . . speaks more to your roots?’

‘Well . . . I suppose . . . that makes sense,’ shrugged Vic.

‘I mean, we are a pretty rootsy band,’ agreed Tom.

‘Excellent!’ said Ellis, clapping his hands. ‘So that’s it then. We’ll change the name to . . . Geordie.’

An awful silence.

We all looked at each other in horror, too scared to say what was on our minds. I mean, Geordie just seemed so, well, fucking obvious – and it would make no sense at all to anyone outside of Britain, who’d have no idea that a Geordie was someone from Newcastle, or that the four lads in the band were all Geordies. Not to mention the fact that there were a few parts of Britain where Geordies weren’t exactly popular. Sunderland, for example. If we pulled up outside the Sunderland Boilermakers’ Club driving a van with ‘Geordie’ written on the side, we’d be lucky to get out alive. But Ellis didn’t seem concerned about any of that – probably because the guy had never set foot outside of Golders Green, other than on his way to the airport.

Maybe we should have said something. But the truth was, we could hardly believe that we were actually getting paid to make a record – something that we would have jumped at the chance to do for free. This wasn’t the time to kick up a fuss.

So, with that, the meeting was over.

And Geordie it was.