17

Lobley Hill

lee avison / Alamy Stock Photo

With a sound like a large animal being castrated, the steel shutter rolled up, and there it was – my old P.A. system.

It had taken some detective work to find it. After calling all of Geordie’s old roadies and drivers and getting nowhere, it was Ellis who finally pointed me in the direction of the warehouse just outside London where it was being stored. He told me that I could come down and get it any time – it was mine, after all – but he couldn’t promise that it still worked. It had been almost two years since Geordie’s last show.

The speakers were covered in cobwebs and dented and scratched from years on the road – but all the bits and pieces were there and intact. The system had been added onto and improved over the years, now boasting 300 Watts of power, a mixing desk, and a pair of enormous JBL trumpet side speakers, enough to fill even the biggest of gigs. I mean, okay, it was now badly out of date, and it had taken a beating on its travels, but as long as I could get the thing powered up again, I didn’t care.

Hauling the amp and speaker cabinets out of the warehouse and into the back of the Transit was the next order of business – and hard work, given the weight and bulk of the equipment. To help, I’d brought along an aspiring roadie, a soft-spoken blond-haired kid named Derek Underhill, still in his teens, who loved being around bands.

Soon enough, the van was loaded up – and off we went, back up the A1 to Newcastle.

Now, at this point, you might be wondering why I needed my old P.A. back.

Well, I’d started a new band, of course . . .

Semi-professional, this time, so I could keep my day-job as a mobile windshield fitter.

And the name?

Geordie II. Very original.

Other than yours truly, Geordie II had no carry-overs from the old band.

The rest of the line-up was Derek Rootham on guitar, Dave Robson on bass, and a lovable lunatic named Davy Whittaker on drums. They’d all previously played in a Newcastle band called Fogg with a singer from London, Chris McPherson. Fogg had released one album in 1974, entitled This Is It. We’d done gigs together in the clubs and the pubs.

The singer of Fogg, Chris, was quite a character, with a Cockney accent that stood out like a donkey’s dick in the North East, and a love of dramatic stage effects. And by dramatic stage effects, I mean fog – which made sense, I suppose, given the name of his band.

In fact, the one time I went to see Chris’s new band was when they were trying out a new opening with a fog machine. The idea was that all the lights would go out before they went on, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey would begin to play, a blanket of fog would creep out over the floor, then the band members would enter from the back of the room, and make their way dramatically through the tables and chairs to the stage. All of which sounded very cool in theory. But what the lads hadn’t realized was that they’d rented a fog machine that was far too powerful for the venue, and that the ceilings were unusually low, which meant that once the fog had covered the floor and started to rise – not a problem in City Hall or the Theatre Royal – it had nowhere to go.

So, out went the lights. On came ‘Space Odyssey’. Then – phhhhsssssst – all this fog started to appear, first covering the floor, then rising, then hitting the ceiling, then coming back down again, until within a minute or two, it felt like being trapped inside a house fire. I mean, you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face – it was fucking scary. And, of course, the band couldn’t see where they were going, so they ended up just stranded at the back. By the time ‘Space Odyssey’ came to an end, the band hadn’t moved an inch, people were coughing and wiping their eyes and running for the exit, and the concert chairman had to switch the lights back on and open all the windows, just so the band could find the stage. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.

All Geordie II had needed was a P.A. system, which, thanks to finding my old gear, hadn’t cost us a thing.

Geordie II’s first show was on a Friday night at Shiremoor Working Men’s Club, not far from Preston Grange.

It was a typical club set-up, with rows of long tables and vinyl-covered chairs in front of a little stage with a glittery backdrop, with a men-only bar, a lounge for couples and the concert room for live music. We’d had some rehearsals and we were instantly tight. The band gelled immediately. It was fantastic and we were really looking forward to rocking, then the P.A. packed up about three songs in.

But we had a great roadie named Frankie who, with Derek as an assistant, managed to get it working again.

I’m not going to pretend that it wasn’t difficult going back to such small-time venues. With the original Geordie, I’d been spoiled by playing big venues and universities. After a few more gigs, though, I started to get the hang of things.

You’d go on, and for the first four or five songs, you’d get absolutely nothing in return – nobody wanted to be the first one to clap. If there was any reaction at all, it would be somebody shouting ‘Turn it down!’ But, as long as there was no booing, you were doing okay. Then at the end of the first half, you’d get a smattering of applause before the concert chairman rushed over and told you to shut up and get out, because the bingo was about to start.

Now, the bingo was a life-or-death business in those days, and a working-class institution. You’d have been strung up from the rafters if you’d have so much as farted between the calls of ‘two fat ladies, 88!’, ‘top of the shop, 100!’ and ‘key to the door, 21!’ It was so serious, some of the clubs were even networked together using early telephone technology, so the jackpots would be bigger – with the caller’s voice piped into every room through speakers in the ceiling. Some jackpots would run for weeks on end, with the prize money growing all the time. One week, I remember the jackpot reaching the absolutely mind-boggling sum of £800. There was absolute silence as the players chewed on their pencils and looked at each other furtively, before some old lady at the back leapt to her feet and screamed ‘Bingo!’

Then suddenly the bingo cards would be put away, and it would be time for us to go back on.

By that time, people had relaxed enough – and drunk enough – to loosen up and have some fun. They’d piss themselves laughing when you told a joke. They’d cheer when they recognized a song. And, of course, you could never play an original song to a crowd like that, because the last thing that anyone wanted to do on a Friday or Saturday night was concentrate. But we found ways around that by taking songs that everyone knew, like ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ and ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’ and rocking them up beyond belief. We also introduced them to songs they didn’t hear on the radio from the likes of Boz Scaggs, Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Whitesnake, Deep Purple and AC/DC.

But one song we would never do was ‘We Are Sailing’ by Rod Stewart – they literally had signs up backstage that read ‘No Sailing!’ – because people would end up standing on the tables, their arms outstretched, singing along. I mean, I’m sure it had been a good laugh the first time it happened, but it had got to the point that once the song had started, you couldn’t get it to stop.*

Anyway . . . as time went by, even though we were a barely semi-professional outfit, playing these very small and unglamorous venues, a strange realization came to me.

I was having the time of my life.

One night, I got a telephone call at home from Chris McPherson. My heart skipped a beat when I first heard his Cockney accent because I thought that he might want his old bandmates back.

But no. He had other news.

‘Alright, Brian,’ he said, sounding very chirpy. ‘I’m off to Switzerland tomorrow.’

‘Wow, you lucky sod,’ I said. ‘What for?’

‘Rainbow,’ he replied. ‘Ronnie James Dio just left, so they need a new singer. The audition’s in Geneva. And y’know . . . I’m feeling good about this. I’ll be back amongst my own, know what I mean? They saw me singing in Fogg and they asked for me.’

‘How d’ya get that, you jammy sod!’ I mean, the guy was a good singer . . . but this was as big as it got. ‘They just called you out of the blue?’ I asked, still reeling.

‘Well, not as such, no. They put an advert in the NME – and I replied to it. But I’m exactly what they’re looking for. To be honest, I think they had me in mind all along.’

‘Well, that’s great news,’ I said, ‘Knock ’em dead, mate?’

A few days later, I saw Chris in the Central Arcade, back from his travels. ‘I don’t think I got it,’ he shrugged. ‘Fuck ’em, waste of time. But I did mention your name on my way out . . .’

‘What? Really?’

‘You’ll owe me a lifetime of beers if you get it, mate.’

I was floored. As much as Chris was a bit full of himself, he was a good lad with a big heart.

He said, ‘I left them your number.’

I was sceptical, of course – my years in Geordie had left me a lot more jaded than before. But I couldn’t help but feel a little bit excited, not only to be on the radar of a big-time band, but also because of the prospect of a free trip abroad.

When the call finally came (and it did come), it wasn’t Blackmore on the line. It was a Scottish guy who wouldn’t even give me his name. All he’d say was that he ‘worked with the band’. It was getting too expensive to fly singers to Switzerland, so they were now doing auditions differently. I was disappointed and didn’t understand.

‘Okay, so how do you want to do this?’ I asked. ‘Should I make a demo and send it over?’

‘Nah,’ said the guy. ‘Just sing down the phone. Whenever you’re ready. I’m all ears.’

Suddenly I remembered why I’d come to hate the music industry.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ I asked, starting to get angry. ‘I’m not singing down the phone!’

‘Well then, you can’t audition.’

‘Who the hell are you, anyway?’ I asked.

‘Look, are you going to sing down the phone or not?’

At that point I snapped. I grabbed the receiver in both hands, took a deep breath, then made the kind of noise down the line that a hyena might make if you shoved a porcupine up its arse. ‘FUCKING SUCK ON THAT,’ I added, before slamming down the phone.

Funnily enough, I didn’t get the job.

The working men’s clubs where Geordie II played might not have been very sexy, but they dominated all live entertainment in the late 1970s – especially in the North East – and after initially focusing on talent competitions and the like, they’d now fully embraced live music.

Overseen by the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union in London, which had branch offices all around the country, there were thousands of clubs across the country, with about four million members in total – and long waiting lists of people who wanted to join. (There was even a working men’s club on King’s Road in London, if I remember correctly.) Flush with members’ subs and other fees – not to mention their bar takings and whatever they made on bingo games – the clubs had more cash than they knew what to do with. And because they were run as co-operatives, the profits were used to benefit the members instead of being paid out to investors.

The names they could afford to book as a result were the very best acts of the time. Shirley Bassey played at Batley Variety Club. As did Tom Jones and Tina Turner. Even Louis Armstrong. And most unbelievable of all, Roy Orbison recorded an entire live album there. I mean, this was West Yorkshire . . . at a club built on top of an old sewage works!

What made it all the more remarkable was the fact that the clubs were run by some of the most awful, officious, small-minded committee men that you could ever imagine. You could spot them immediately by their navy-blue double-breasted suits, club ties and lapel pins – and they always had a new Skoda or Lada parked outside. There was one infamous guy – I forget which club he ran – who’d been accused of embezzling money, so he got up on stage one night and declared, ‘It’s come to my attention that there are people in this room who have made serious allegations against me, so before we go any further, I want all of the allegators to stand up.’

Those were the kinds of great minds that you were dealing with.

There were a few occasions, of course, when we ended up on the wrong end of a concert chairman’s power trip. There was one guy, in particular, who was constantly telling us that if we didn’t turn down our amps, he’d send us to a disciplinary tribunal – a very real threat that could have seen us ‘banned from the area’ because that was the power they had, and they could put you out of business for good. Eventually, he bought himself a decibel meter and sat in the front row, holding it up, to make sure that we didn’t go over whatever level he’d deemed acceptable. The night he did that, though, we didn’t make any noise at all. We just walked off the stage in protest – and, of course, the guy ended up getting mobbed by the audience, furious that he’d ruined their Saturday night.

Anyone who performed at the clubs, meanwhile, also had to put up with the brutal honesty of the members. There was a certain type of working-class man in the clubs who loved nothing more than to insult someone famous to their face. It was a kind of bragging right – ‘You know that so-and-so? I told him he was shite.’ Legend has it, there was this one guy, an unemployed miner by day, M.C. by night, and he worked at one of the bigger clubs – again, best not named. Frank Sinatra had played at this place, Engelbert Humperdinck, everyone. And he loved sticking the boot in whenever he could. One night, The Four Tops were on tour in Britain and they were doing a gig at City Hall in Newcastle, but their manager was told that if they came down to this big club and did a thirty-minute set, they would get an extra couple of grand, finish, and be able to drive back to City Hall for the real gig. And just as they were about to go on, they got introduced by this ignorant dummy, who got the mic and said, ‘Okay everybody, I’ve got a lovely surprise for you now. I’ve no idea who they are . . . but here are four darkies from America!’

The Four Tops just turned around and walked out. They were like, ‘Fuck you.’ And they’d already been paid, so the club had to take the loss. The guy got the sack and was banned from the club forever – or so the story goes. He told the management that it was ‘just a bit of banter’. But that was always the excuse people used for just being disrespectful and nasty – and in this particular case, racist beyond belief.

It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now.

What made Geordie II so successful in the working men’s clubs was that we weren’t just a typical rock act. The clubs usually hated rock acts, because they were too loud and took themselves too seriously, which turned off the older members. But we had a sense of humour. For example, at random points during the set, Davy Whittaker would get up from his drum stool, push me aside, sing the first line of ‘Nessun Dorma’ – he didn’t know any more of it – then go, ‘Thank you very much.’ At the end of the night, meanwhile, we’d leave the stage to Ivor Biggun’s ‘I’m a Wanker’ and the place would be in stitches. And all of this created so much goodwill for us, it was rare for even the most puffed-up concert chairmen to give us any trouble.

By the end of 1979, we were getting booked three or four times a week, and our fee just kept getting higher and higher. We were playing so much, there were nights when I forgot where we were. Usually we played Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, but when our fee hit £250 per show and we became impossible to book because we were so in demand, a lot of clubs started asking if we could do weeknights, even Tuesdays, for a bit less money. We were only too happy to oblige.

These were some of the best nights of my life.

We were supposed to finish our set at 10.30 p.m., but that never happened, it was always fifteen minutes later, then we’d pack up all our stuff, and we’d be home just after midnight, then up at the crack of dawn the next day to go to work. Unless we went out for an Indian afterwards, or down to the Selva Grill at the bottom of Dean Street – the only place in Newcastle that would stay open until 1 a.m.

My days playing the clubs also gave me an appreciation for great comedy – and there were times when I toyed with the idea of becoming a comedian myself if Geordie II ever broke up.

I mean, when I saw my friend Brendan Healy do his act, I couldn’t believe it. He’d never meant to be a comedian. He’d started out as a keyboard player and trombonist, then became a fully-certified concert conductor. But he was a clever, hilarious guy, and at some point he realized that he was good enough to keep a room hanging on his every word. He’d walk onto a stage and say, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m very sorry I’m late. My car broke down and I had to come on a bus. But it’s alright . . . I managed to disguise it as an asthma attack.’ After which there’d be a deafening silence while everyone tried to get the joke. Then just as the first person started to laugh – which would quickly turn into a deafening roar as everyone else caught on – Brendan would say, ‘Alright, here’s another one you won’t get . . .’

From then on, he’d have the audience eating out of the palm of his hand.*

I’m reminded of the night that our P.A. finally died – this time in a way that was beyond any repair. There was another band sharing the bill with us that night – fronted by a local character named Malcolm Wylie who owned two ice cream vans* – so we had to go and ask them if we could borrow their system. They let us plug into their gear, of course, but what I couldn’t get over was just how much of a star their lead guitarist was. I mean, he was this seventeen-year-old kid from Cullercoats who’d dropped out of school, and he’d come up to the front of the stage and you could just smell the quality. Then he’d do a solo that left me wondering how on earth he’d learned to play like that – until I found out later that his teacher had been one Dave Black.

Anyway, I never gave any of this another thought until a few years later when I was watching television in America and the video for ‘Save a Prayer’ by Duran Duran came on.

And fuck me . . . there he was!

The kid at the club, I realized, had been a very young Andy Taylor.

Things were going so well with Geordie II, I managed to save up enough money to start my own business. Not windscreens this time, but fitting cars with custom vinyl roofs. It was a great job for a musician because garages didn’t open until nine or ten o’clock in the morning, sometimes even later. Which let me catch up on some sleep if I hadn’t got back from a show until after midnight, which was most nights of the week.

I’d started out with a business partner called Jim, whose brother bought a van for us. But then I came down with the flu for a week, and because I wasn’t able to work, Jim fired me. After that, I was on my own. Instead of going to work for someone else, though, I hired someone I could boss around instead – a lad named Ken Walker – and we opened up a shop under the arches on the Quayside in Newcastle.

The best thing about Ken was his posh voice, which sounded just the part when he answered the phone. He was also just a lovely, handy, hard-working guy, always full of fun – and he was brilliant at taking care of the management side of things.

I almost found a new wife, thanks to that vinyl business.

The girl in question – I won’t mention her name, because she went on to marry someone else – came to a Geordie II gig one night with a friend, and they were dancing near the front. You could tell that she was class, right off the bat.* She was gorgeous, beautifully dressed, having a good time, but not getting too drunk. Anyway, we got talking afterwards, and I asked her if she wanted to join me and the rest of the boys for an Indian meal after the show. So, after our gear was packed up, she and her friend got in their car and followed the band’s van to the restaurant.

Over dinner, I told her about my business, and she mentioned that she’d just bought herself a brand-new Datsun Cherry – but she’d gone for the model without the vinyl roof, and now she was regretting it. So, of course, I told her that I did all the vinyl roofs for Datsun in Gateshead, and that I charged them about £40 for the service – after which they would rebadge the car as a ‘GL’ and raise the price by an outrageous £250. I offered to do hers for cost if she brought her car into my shop.

So that Saturday, she dropped off her car and went shopping for an hour, and by the time she came back, I’d fitted an extra-luxury ‘American’ roof to her car, with some beautiful trim around the edges. I even threw in a pinstripe. But, of course, I didn’t charge her any extra. She couldn’t believe how good it looked. That was what I loved the most about my vinyl business – people’s reaction when they got their cars back. It gave me such a sense of satisfaction. Some of the cars I did were two or three years old and were starting to look a bit sad, and the vinyl just transformed them.

Before she drove away, I asked her if she wanted to come to another show in Birtley. ‘I’d love to,’ she smiled, adding that she lived nearby in Chester-le-Street.

Over the weeks that followed, I learned that she was the manager of Timex Watches on a trading estate near where she lived, and that she’d lost her husband to cancer when he was just twenty-five – a heartbreaking story. But that had been a few years before, and now she was almost thirty and tired of being on her own. Then one night she invited me to stay the night at her house . . . and after that, we were an item. Or at least as much of an item as we could be, given that I was only separated from Carol and still years away from being ready to go through a divorce. What she wanted most of all was to settle down and have kids, which might have worked if I’d kept the vinyl business while playing shows with Geordie II on the side. But rock’n’roll had something else in store for me.

The better we got, the more calls I got for auditions.

It was a tricky situation. Although I wanted to stay with the two Daves and Derek, I also felt like I couldn’t say no when a bigger band invited me to come in and sing. So, when Manfred Mann’s Earth Band got in touch to ask if I wanted to try-out to be their new singer – the great Chris Thompson had just left to form his own band – I couldn’t think of a good reason why I shouldn’t give it a crack, especially since I had to go to London anyway to pick up some more supplies of vinyl.

First, they sent me a tape of ‘Blinded by the Light’, which they’d had a No. 1 hit with a couple of years earlier. So, of course, I sang along to it a few times, learning the words, all the while thinking to myself, this really isn’t me.

The audition was at a studio in London, late morning. As Ken and I were driving down to pick up some vinyl roofs anyway, we thought why not do both? The first person I saw when I walked in there was this very overweight, hippy-looking guy with a beard and long hair, and he told me that he’d just come down from Butlin’s, the chain of holiday camps. I asked him if he’d been on holiday there – while thinking to myself, rather you than me, mate – and he went, ‘Oh no, I play there to make a bit of money when we’re not touring.’

That was when I realized that the Earth Band was little more than a collection of hired hands who got together under the Manfred Mann name – founded by Manfred himself, a South African keyboardist who’d had a run of big hits in the 1960s. Then in walked Manfred, wearing his John Lennon glasses and little chin beard, hair all ruffled, and he was reading aloud a letter from his mother, who was telling him about things in her personal life that I’d never want to hear from my own ma. I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I possibly could.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I appreciate the invitation and I wanted to be polite and come down here and have a go singing to the tape, but I think you’re going to need somebody who’s happy just doing covers. Do you have any original material?’

Manfred – or Mr. Mann, or whatever it was that I was supposed to call him – looked at me like I was mad. I mean, the guy had made a very successful career from redoing other people’s songs. So, he must have thought that I was taking the piss. I’m not even sure that I sang anything that morning, it was so obvious that it wasn’t going to work.

Then a couple of days later, when I was back at the shop, doing a vinyl job, the phone rang again.

‘Hello, it’s Uriah Heep. We were wondering if—’

I interrupted him with three of the most liberating words in the English language.

‘No thank you.’

If my first career as a professional singer had ended with the bailiff’s knock in 1978, my second one began one night at Lobley Hill Social Club in early 1980. Or at least that’s where people tell me that the incident in question went down and given that most of Geordie II’s gigs have all merged into one in my mind, I’ll just have to take their word for it.

I’d come straight from the shop – by then I had contracts with several dealerships around town, and business was booming – so I had bits of glue and vinyl in my hair, my hands were filthy, and my white trainers looked close to surrender . . .

There were no dressing rooms with showers and lockers at venues like Lobley Hill, of course, so I had no choice but to go on stage looking like the working man that I was, which often happened when I had no time to change before a show.

As luck would have it, though, our roadie’s assistant – Derek, the soft-spoken, blonde-haired kid – had a spare T-shirt in his bag, and he said I could borrow it. When I put it on, it looked like an American football shirt, blackish-blue in colour, with the number ‘22’ on the front in white, and yellow and white stripes where the shoulders met the arms. But it was clean – well, as clean as a roadie’s spare T-shirt ever could be – and it did fit me, so I kept it on and went up on stage to do my thing.

The show that night was electric.

Kids were starting to come from all across the North East to see Geordie II, and there’d been a queue halfway up the street to get in. The place was absolutely jammed. I saw the concert chairman at one point running around, sweat running down his forehead, barely able to believe how much business he was doing. My brother Maurice was also in the crowd that night – as was a representative from Red Bus, which no one had expected. News must have reached Wardour Street that Geordie II was now one of the hottest live acts in the North East.

Lobley Hill being a working men’s club, there was an inevitable half-time break for the bingo, and when the concert chairman came over with that ‘shut up and make yourself scarce’ look in his face, I went outside for a tab. Then Maurice came and found me.

The moment he saw me, he froze.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘What are you talking about?’ I replied. ‘Nothing’s wrong. I mean, I’m bit tired, but—’

‘Your eyes,’ said Maurice, ‘they’re all red and puffy.’

‘Oh . . . yeah,’ I said. You see, I’d been sweating heavily during the show, as always, and the sweat had mixed up with all the glue and shards of glass and other shit in my hair and this toxic brew had been running into my eyes, forcing me to wipe it away with the back of my hand. It happened every time I did a show straight after work. My eyes would sting for a day or two, but then they’d be fine again.

‘Here,’ said Maurice, taking off his cloth driving cap and holding it out for me, ‘put this on – it’ll stop the sweat running down your face. You can’t keep rubbing your eyes like that, Brian, it’s not good for you – you’ll end up going blind!’

‘I’m not wearing that on stage!’

‘You’d rather damage your eyes than wear a cap?’

‘Maurice, if I was delivering newspapers or going grouse shooting, the cap would be brilliant, but I’m a singer in a band.’ Then I had a change of heart. I mean, my eyes were stinging pretty badly, and who cared what I wore? ‘Oh alright, give it here . . .’

With the cap on, I was now sporting a very odd combination of an American football shirt with the kind of headwear that every working-class man in Newcastle had worn for the last hundred years. I felt a bit ridiculous, to be honest with you, especially because when I wore the cap, my curls of hair bunched up around the sides and at the back. But when I walked back on stage, the audience went fucking nuts.

‘Hey, Geordie boy!’ people called out, grinning and cheering.

Even better – it really did stop the sweat running into my eyes.

At the end of the night – which we closed again with ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’ because I couldn’t get enough of that song after seeing Bon sing it on Rock Goes to College – I tried to give the cap back to Maurice. But by then it looked like a wet rag. ‘I don’t want that, it’s disgusting! Keep it.’ So, I did. Derek didn’t want his T-shirt back, either – even after I’d taken it home to be washed. He said it was too baggy for him, which it was, because the guy was whippet-thin.

It was the cap I loved the most, though. When I wore it out and about during the day, it was like an invisibility cloak. But on stage, it just looked so distinctive, especially when I wore it with a T-shirt or a sleeveless denim jacket. I wore the cap so much, in fact, that I had to replace it after a couple of weeks.

I’ve been buying them and wearing them ever since. I never felt comfortable without them again.

The crazy thing is that AC/DC played the second-last show of their Highway to Hell Tour at my old haunt of the Mayfair Ballroom in Newcastle at about the same time as the Lobley Hill show. I don’t know if it was the same night, but the AC/DC gig was on 25 January – it had been postponed due to a fire at the Mayfair earlier in the year – so at most these two events would have been just a few weeks apart. And, of course, Geordie II would have certainly been playing somewhere that same Friday.

If you’d been in Newcastle on the night in question, in other words, you could have gone to see AC/DC with Bon on vocals at one venue, then taken a bus to a working men’s club on the other side of town and seen me in my cloth cap and ‘22’ shirt singing one of the same songs from their set list.

Not that any of those things seemed important at the time. The cap and the shirt had just happened on the night – and I’m not even sure that I knew AC/DC were playing that week.

With Red Bus sniffing around once again, Geordie II’s future was the main thing on my mind.

‘Listen, you guys were great, we need to get you to London to start making an album. Y’know, boys, I think Geordie II could be the sequel that’s even better than the original . . .’ Ellis gushed to us after the Lobley Hill show, much to the delight of the two Daves and Derek, who’d never been on the receiving end of a music manager in full bullshit-mode before.