My new favourite band.

It says' Ettrick', they really do exist and they're really narsty - drum-sax doom metal, or whatever, bunch of radgies, anyway.
Google it.

Black t-shirt with white Infinite Horned Abomination Logo*. Available in M, L & XL.

$10 + $5 shipping & handling. Add $5 for international shipping.
Contact 'jfheule @ gmail' to make other arrangements.



* I want one, I fucking want one. Buy me one and I'll be your bum-luv dawg.

Violent sex in Billy Elliot-land.

Routine for the last four days - bring up a 'new post' page, get up, walk away from computer, do something else, anything else, write nothing...

Cheers to (ex) Junkie Joe from Meh-hee-ho for popping round and pointing out what I knew all along - either I keep on writing this in the same genital warts-and-all style as we hurtle towards the modern age, with scant disregard for my nearest and dearest, or just stop and pretend it never happened.

But, y'knaa, this is me, and this is how I saw my life unfold, and I have a deadline to meet. I'm sorry if you're in this and what you read upsets you, but ultimately, we're all but dust in the wind at the end of the day, and I don't really give a flying fuck what you think, when all's said and done. Have a cup of herbal tea or something, calm down, deal with it.

(nb - spellcheck wouldn't accept "all's" and I'm pretty sure that "when all's said and done" is from Shakespeare - what does that tell you about our American cousins? I suppose I could change it to the UK one, but I kinda enjoy getting my piss boiled once in a while. nb - it doesn't mind "kinda", for fuck's sake...)

So, aye, Emma. She was starting the second year of a sociology degree when we met, and it was becoming clear that she wanted to make drugs her field. What can I say? I wanted to get the fuck out of the drop-in, whereas Emma seemed to have found her spiritual home - helping them that's gone crackers on the drugs and that. Fair play to her, but I couldn't do it.

For the first couple of months, we spent all of our time at her place. Because the world/my world is tiny, she lived on the same street that I've lived on for the last decade now, so I have to walk past her old place and get a memory bump nearly every day - too much fucking perspective, as Spinal Tap would have it.

Nice house, Asian landlord, who somehow lived both downstairs and also in the house next door with his family, only let his rooms to female students, didn't like the look of me much, got more and more pissed off about me crashing there every night and eventually gave Emma one day's notice to quit on New Year's Eve, 1990. No, that's wrong - he got his Mrs to do it.

But I digress. Before that happened, Emma went home to the Very South for the Christmas holidays, and I foolishly had a violent one-night stand with a heavily-tattooed, hardcore punk woman from a pit village near Sunderland somewhere. She worked in a drug centre, had seen my picture in the magazine I'd done for the Chy drop-in and phoned me up at work to say rude stuff about vile things she wanted to do to me. So, when Emma was safely down in the Very South, I took her up on her offer.

I really wish I hadn't, mind. You know that fight I had in the Mayfair, when the huge biker was dancing on my face? Well, sex with the Pit Village Punker hurt way more than that did. Alright, the geeze was trying to kick my head off, but at least he wasn't raking the fuck out of my arse with his pointed fingernails and chewing on my banjo-string at the same time, which I'm not sure would have been technically possible for him to do, now I think on. OK, maybe if we'd been in a soixante-neuf together he could have done it, but we weren't - it was a fight in a nightclub, not gay sex - the bouncers would have jumped in much quicker if that had been happening...

You know, now I think about it, I'm pretty sure she had a cheesy cartoon tattoo of Sid Vicious, the one from the cover of Something Else, which, incidentally, I walked through a traffic-stopping blizzard to buy when I was a nipper. She definitely had shitloads of whips hanging on her bedroom wall, I remember that, although she didn't get them out for the lads, thank fuck.

She had two visitors next morning: A Sid clone, but fat -imagine if some dafty mad scientist were to combine the DNA of Sid Vicious with that of a recently-pregnant seal, and there's your boy. Fat Mackem Sid-alike, way to go.

And then there was her mother, who was a big, borstal-dotted old bird in a Beatles wig and Crimpolene spread-wear, who treated me like the new member of the family and made me quickly enquire as to when the next bus to Newcastle was due.

Standing at the bus-stop, Pit Village grabbed a hold of me and said, "Mind, I want this to be more than a one-night thing, right?"

"Hell, yes! If you're the kind of girl that can draw blood from six different parts of my body on the first date, then let's do it; let's fall in love!" - is what I would have said, if bludgeoning, masochistic jiggery-pokery is what I was looking for, but it wasn't, as I was well-pleased to discover, because that stuff fucking knacks.

Me? I divvent regret owt, me, man. (translated from the French)

The day after I first slept with Emma, I ran away to Sunderland, which sounds well drastic, but it was only for the one night at Jeez Louise's new place, for she had fallen for the wily charms of some Mackem fella and was living up that way with him.

We had a good bit chat about life and that, and I went back home to split up with Sarah, which she didn't take too well. I can understand that, because I was quite a catch back then, as I'm sure you'll agree, but it wasn't where I wanted to be any more. I didn't know yet if Emma was anything more than a one-nighter, but I'd made my mind up either way.

We'd harboured a vague fantasy about me moving away with her when she went to university, but, let's be honest, if that idea was a stick of rock then it would have 'DOOMED TO FAIL' written all the way through it, and I'm sure that we both knew that, deep down.

And I wish I'd never done it, I wish I'd stuck with her, but I can't wish that because if I hadn't chosen the path that I followed, I probably wouldn't be married to my wife now, and I wouldn't have Scarlett the genius wonder-kid either, which doesn't really bear thinking about.

So yeah, I wish I hadn't done it, but I'm glad that I did because things worked out fine, and I hope you can make some sense of that bizarre jumble of conflicting emotions.

A few months after we split, Sarah started seeing a bloke who I knew, someone she'd always joked about fancying, and I was properly gutted about it, and felt like it was me who'd been cruelly dumped, and not her. Verily, you don't know what you've got till it's gone...

The following Saturday, Emma invited me to a party, and said we should meet at her place first, so I headed over to Jesmond. She had a room in shared house - there was no living room so it was just bedsits, really - and I walked in to discover that there was another bloke there, a very tall and very, very drunk bloke.

I quickly discovered that Emma hadn't been lying about her previous boyfriends being a solicitor and a fireman. They were both part of a squad of 30-something, kamikaze binge-drinkers that she'd hooked up with, and this very tall bloke - Dom - was one of them, except he wasn't a brief or a firefighter - he was completely unemployable, and 'very drunk' was his default setting.

We all caught a taxi to the party, which turned out to be roughly 20 yards away from my place in Fenham. I've got a vague memory that the taxi driver was a Sikh with a turban, and Dom was muttering stuff about it, but I put it down to drunkeness rather than any racist tendencies. Anyway, it's all very well pulling folk about their perceived racism, but it's a bit tricky if they're mortal drunk, six-foot-seven and mates with a bird that you're trying to scuttle, so I let it pass.

Waiting for Emma at the party was her identical twin, Katie, who lived in London, so they hadn't seen each other in a while. I was stunned by how identical they were, apart from Katie's bubble perm, that is, and quickly decided that I also fancied Katie a bit. Well, you've got to when you're going out with a twin, it would be more worrying if I hadn't fancied her, innit?

short slanty bit about the Breadknife

(My mrs isn't reading this, for a variety of reasons. For one, I'd rather she waited till I was done and I can just print it all off for her, because I don't want her mental ginger input to influence things. And for another, she's not computer literate at all, and I think she's worried that she might somehow break the blog if she looks at it online. And for a third, she's not a big fan of my writing style in general - too flippant and too much swearing, apparently. Like I give a cunting fuck...

She does, however, like it when people approach her and tell her how much they're enjoying this leisurely yomp across the Hadrian's Wall of my mind, so if you know her and want to do that, that would indeed be champion. But I'd be grateful if you refrained from mentioning the bits about her shagging loads of gadgies and being heroically pissed for years and years and years that you'll be finding out about soon, because I'd quite like that to be a surprise for her when she finally gets round to reading it, so, no spoilers, please...)

Emma, slow death of a band, winding up Maddog.

I've been at the Chy drop-in for a few months when a new college term starts, which brings a new trainee social worker to the centre, and her name is Emma.

She's small, rosy-cheeked and cheerful of disposition, and she comes from Suffolk, wherever that might be. Next to Norfolk, apparently, but that means nothing to me, either - it's the Very South, where they all speak like Farmer Giles and there's no back-lanes, and that's all you need to know.

Do I fancy her? Well, yeah, in an abstract sort of way, in that she's an attractive young woman who I spend quite a lot of my working day with, but it's not like I'm having to sneak off to the bog to crack one off because I'm overcome with lust or anything.

Also, she has a boyfriend, she tells me; a solicitor. Oo, get you. But then she mentions a few weeks later that he's a fireman, so either it's a new boyfriend or he's retrained in a hurry, but I don't ask, mainly because I don't care either way.

We were on a training course together in town on my 25th birthday, so I coerced her into buying me a pint in the Doll at lunchtime, an event I only remember because we were both unofficially warned that we might get an official verbal warning next time we did something like that, and we both heard what they were saying, and owned it.

Did you notice I just slipped in a little Social Worker Speak there? There's nothing more fucking annoying than when you're talking to some smart-arse with an 'Ology' degree, and they say, "I hear what you're saying, and to me it sounds like wank wank wank wank wank wank, and I'm taking it on board and owning it."

Answers on a postcard if you've got any idea how I came to be back in the Legendary Harley Dread again, because I've got a total mental blank about it, but I definitely did three final gigs with them, and Emma came to the first one.

I'm guessing that they asked me to rejoin after the handful of gigs they did with the eight-foot-tall bloke didn't go down too well. I saw one of them, and they were rubbish, it just didn't gel, and all the chicks said so.

Actually, now I remember, Maddog was a bit affronted that I'd had the nerve to go and check my old band out, but, like, obviously I was going to do that - pass up on the chance to see some massive, becrimped fella singing songs that I wrote, songs about women that he never slept with and psychotic episodes that he never experienced? Wouldn't have missed it for the world...

In my own unique style, I said 'hello, hello it's good to be back' by designing a gig poster all on my own, and then clagging it up all over town without telling anyone else in the band.

It featured the bold headline 'MORE SONGS ABOUT GIRLFRIENDS AND DRUGS' and a photo of a naked Maddog in a crucifix pose, with his tackle tucked in between his thighs so he looked like a lady.

You're probably wondering why I had nude snaps of our bassist at my disposal around about now, and I didn't is the real answer. I did, however, have a picture of myself in such a pose (it seemed like a good idea at the time...), so I just cut my head off the pic and put a photo of Maddog there instead, arf arf. It's safe to say that he wasn't delighted when he first clapped eyes on the posters, but, hey, fucking done now, innit?

All I really remember about that first gig back in LHD is the fact that I absconded with all of the door-takings and woke up the next morning in the cellar of a house where there'd been a party the night before, and with my pockets bulging with full cans of Red Stripe.

Oh, and we did a cover of the Doors' LA Woman that went down really well, but that was just another nail in the coffin for me - you really don't want your best-received song of a set to be one that someone else wrote...

Anyway, Emma saw the band, and realised there was a whole other side to me than sitting on my arse, chainsmoking and occasionally prodding a glue-sniffer back into the real world, and she was smitten. (No, honestly, she told me herself a few weeks later.)

A couple of weeks later, possibly even the following weekend, all of the drop-in staff went on a team-building piss-up in a horrible pub in the Chy, notable mainly for having a talking cigarette machine, and you know you're in a shit boozer when the tab machine's the most exciting thing in there.

I ended up back at Emma's place in Jesmond, one thing led to another and I spent the night there. Actually, I spent most of the next day there - she left in the morning for her Saturday job in a cafe up the road, while I kipped till around three in the afternoon.

I popped into the cafe on my way home, a little corner place called Willow Teas, and dropped off Emma's keys for her.

Apparently, as soon as I left, the manageress of the cafe, who was well aware that her boss, Rachel, owner of Willow Teas, had a fondness for skinny young chaps with big brown eyes, turned to Emma and said, "I tell you what, you want to keep him well away from Rachel."

Talk about foresight...

logic and the death of cool.

I hadn't been working at the Chy drop-in centre long before I realised that, whatever the future brought after the year-long course finished, I wasn't going to make my living as a drugs counselor - I'm way too impatient for a start, and I've got a tendency to look at it logically, and logic and addiction rarely go hand-in-hand.

My logic ran thus - take a look at your adult life, especially the stand-out, traumatic moments where you nearly got raped by gangstas and shit. Look at how many of these traumas involved your drug of choice in some way - I'm willing to bet it was there in the majority of instances - and then apply the logic bit - stop using your drug and your life will become a whole lot easier, not perfect - you have to strive for perfect - but it'll be manageable.

Actually, that still makes absolute sense to me, and maybe I'd have been the best drugs counselor ever, but you've got to look at the timescale - it's less than a year since I was getting dragged out of the Doll doors by dubious drug dealers, deranged on dodgy downers and determined to do damage, innit? It was maybe all a bit fresh for me to be learning how to be a counselor.

Plus, as I've said before, I was only taking speed, whereas these bad boys and game girls were taking everything, all the time. Coming back in after the weekend was like catching up on the news from a particularly disfunctional war zone. I used to call them 'Bacardi junkies' - any time, any drug, anywhere...

For a bloke who doesn't care much for hippies - naa, that's not right, I quite like a lot of hippies, indeed, some of my best friends are hippies - it's posh hippies I can't get away with - I was wearing an awful lot of tie-die at this point, having decided that the Stone Roses were where it was at...around two years after everyone else, and just in time for them to hibernate and do fuck-all for five years.

I had a particularly nasty green/yellow/red hooded top that I'd rather not talk about any more, and I've mentally blocked out my footwear choice of around this time, but I've got an uneasy feeling about it, all the same.

I subscribe to the 'Trainspotting' theory of cool, which is applied to the works of Sean Connery in the film, but you can equally apply it to your own life, and it is: First you've got it, then you lose it, and it's gone, and you can never get it back, and that's how I was when I got booted from the band and then got my muppet hair cut off - from Dr No to Highlander II: The Quickening in a few easy steps.

It's a weird thing, but, when I was in Harley Dread and working for Grott, fiending on speed, throwing my soft-furnishings out of a towerblock window, seeing imaginary flies all the time and generally enjoying a prolonged, casual flirtation with Death - that's the time when I was beating the lasses off with a shitty stick, or not, as the case usually was. Never underestimate the mighty pulling power of heroin chic - looking like a ladyboy gets you laid.

Well, it did in 1989, anyway, you'd be knackered these days. I blame Nirvana.

For Scarlett.

I'm on the horns of a dilemma here, and it's chafing my hoop a fair bit, I tell you.

There are two people waiting in the metaphorical wings of this blog right now, just about to come on.
One of them is now my wife, and the other is the mother of my daughter.

My daughter's 12 now, and she's known from day one of the blog that I've been writing this, and at some point in her life, she's going to want to read it, and there are going to be things she never knew, opinions that she might not like and a journey into the dark heart of alcoholic chaos that might well be a bit of a harrowing trip - I'm certainly cacking myself at the prospect of writing about it.

So, this next bit is for Scarlett.

"Dear Skidderly-Boo, As you know, this is my take on what I was and how I became who I am, my version of the truth. Other people will have another version of events, a slightly different truth, maybe, and that's because we all see things from our own viewpoint.

I won't ever lie to you, so if there's anything you ever need to know about all of this, just ask. And maybe ask someone else who was involved as well, just to get another side to the story, because that's always important.

You already know that the circumstances surrounding your birth were complicated, stressful and featured your dad at his most spectacularly dysfunctional, and I'm truly sorry if anything you read here upsets you or makes you angry, but it all happened.

Just always remember that, from the moment that I first held you in my arms and had a big old sniff of your adorable head, I have loved you unconditionally, and I always will.

Unconditionally means however you choose to live your life will be cool with me, and I'll be there to support you, if and when you need me.

Right then, are you all buckled up, coz it's gonna be a long ride? Let's stab it and steer, Honeybunny, stab it and steer...

Woof Woo,

Your Dad

X

Like 'Friends', but with mentally-bruised people.

I moved about a mile up the road into Fenham after the Spital Tongues house got condemned circa mid 1990, after I'd heard about a room that was free in a house there.

It was a tiny semi-detached, with an open-plan kitchen rather than a proper living room, but it was a nice enough gaff. There were, however, one or two disadvantages to the place.

The first was that the landlady lived next door, and we shared a party wall. The second was that said landlady was a right pain in the arse, often moving unsuitable persons into the house against my wishes. And the third was that she was my mother...

My mother moved from the big house that I grew up in not long after I left home when I was 19, and downsized her and wor kid into a much smaller place in a slightly more lairy part of Fenham.

A few years later, the house next door came on the market, and, seemingly fearful of the kind of new neighbours that such a property might attract, she bought that one as well. It should really only have been a two-bedroom place, but she'd turned the downstairs living room into a third bedroom to maximise returns.

Wagsley lived there for a short while, but then the housing people would only pay so much of his rent, leaving him to fork out the rest from his dole money, which he wasn't having, so he moved his stuff the 600 yards back to his mother's house.

Not long before he moved out, my mother moved in a bloke called Terry, a hobbit-like, grey-bearded chap in his late 40s who had recently stopped drinking after a lengthy period of drinking shitloads. I questioned the wisdom of introducing an aging, reformed booze hound into a house populated by two blokes in their 20s who liked to have a big old drink every night, but she seemed to think that he would be fine.

Which he was, for about three weeks - he'd pop into the open-plan kitchen and say hello before he went up to his room, and Wagsley and I would cheerily say hello back, waving cans of lager around in the spliff haze.

And then, one day, he stopped saying hello when he came in, and that was pretty much the last we saw of him, although he was there for at least another month. The door would go and he'd be straight up the stairs, bottles chinking in plastic bags as he went.

Like with most alcoholics, the real problems started when he suddenly ran out of money one day and his body went into booze-deprived shock. I wasn't home when it happened, but came back to discover that an ambulance had been and gone, and that was the last time we saw Terry in our happy home.

Next up was David, and who knows where my mother found him? He was of upper-class Southerner stock and he'd had some sort of breakdown, found Our Lord The Babba Jesus and was now roaming the land being an intensely sincere amateur carpenter/bible basher.

I've long had a problem with god-botherers, them that try to press their religious beliefs on others, and I couldn't be doing with David and his moving in mysterious ways. Plus, he smelt nasty - stale sweat, sour dairy products and musty church halls being the principle elements.

Finally, he was a big bloke, six-feet plus, with hands like shovels. If I absolutely have to share my living quarters with a slightly mental happy-clapper in some godforsaken future, I'd much prefer it to be someone scrawny who I could easily kick the fuck out of, should some unforeseen emergency dictate that course of action to me. Or if he, like, really got on my tits, whichever came first.

David upped the ante in the scary stakes when he made a large hole in his bedroom wall one night, which to me looked uncannily like he'd done it by punching the plasterboard really hard.

He got some filler off my mam and made a pretty cack job of repairing it, but I reckon she was too wise and too scared to pull him about his shoddy work, because she's normally pretty hot on that kind of thing.

Thankfully, he moved out not longer after this incident. Actually, did I move out or did he go first? Whichever, I didn't see him again for about 13 years, and then I briefly bumped into him on the street somewhere and he was exactly the same intensely sincere/sincerely intense big scary posh bastard that he'd always been,with the light of the Lord still burning behind slightly glazed eyes.

Let's leave the last word here to those fine social commentators, The Damned:

"I've got nothing against church
Or the people who go there and show they're
Plain ignorant, they don't understand
A congregation at weekends will change their behaviour.
So many people are weak enough
To have to seek answers from pedlars of hope
I should know; I used to go there myself
That's before the day I became anti-pope..."

"It says you're a wanker here, mind"

The drug advice centre at the Chy had a drop-in - essentially a small living-room crammed with furniture and chainsmokers - and that's where Michael and I spent most of our time, keeping an eye on the good, poly-addicted citizens of the area, of which there were many.

Not too long before I started there, two of the clients had gone down for some considerable time after attempting to rob the local Post Office with a hoover pipe masquerading as a sawn-off shotgun. The master criminals had run into the drop-in on the way to the robbery and stolen the pipe from the hoover, in front of about a dozen witnesses. I'm pretty sure they both got picked up within the hour.

By far the most regular visitor was Danny the glue-bagger. The drop-in rule was 'no substance abuse on the premises', but Danny would just abuse his substances outside and then stumble in to kip it off on one of the sofas. Needless to say, the boss of the place didn't want an unconscious, snoring bloke with 'EVO STIK' tattooed across his forehead to be the first thing new visitors saw when they entered the premises, so a large part of our time there was spent prodding Danny awake and attempting to keep his addled brain occupied.

I like a good game of Scrabble, but playing it with someone half-in a coma and totally reeking of industrial glue fumes just never made it enough of a challenge for me. The boss tried to point out that mercilessly beating him wasn't really the point of the exercise, but fuck that...I play Scrab to win at Scrab, or not at all. Having said that, there was a great moment once when Danny got a double word score by running 'EVO' off 'LOVER', which made him cackle softly to himself for hours, and even I had enough heart not to point out that 'EVO' isn't a proper word, strictly speaking.

As well as Danny, there were also a hardcore attendance of about a dozen people with serious addicted-to-everything problems, and several long-term heroin users who regarded themselves as being above all the drama that the poly-addicted usually had going on in their lives, and just wanted to quietly get on with their habits without too much hassle.

After I'd been there for a few weeks, I was asked if I wanted to have a crack at producing an in-house magazine for the centre. Reasoning that this would mean more time in the office and less time with the chainsmoking, hair-trigger squad downstairs, I immediately said yes.

The other centres produced swish, three-fold booklets with information about opening times and shit, but mine was more like a fanzine - a load of A4 stapled together, magic marker scrawled headlines and a cartoon of Keith Richards on the cover that I robbed from Rolling Stone magazine. Articles included a hectoring rant about not leaving dirty needles in the streets - something the Chy had a problem with at that time - and an 'amusing' piece about how to skin a killer whale with an electric breadknife.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it, and so, flushed with success, I put together my second issue...and dropped a massive fucking bollock that nearly led to a devil-dog biting my actual face off.

What I did was invite contributions from the clients, and one of them contributed a 'prisoner's poem', a traditional, word-of-mouth thing that gets passed around in jails.

I can only remember the last verse, which went something like

"Now the screws are listening, waiting,
Hoping to catch someone masturbating.
Then there's laughter, screams and shouts,
They've caught (insert name) with his tail hanging out"

And he had inserted a name - the name of one of his mates at the drop-in - a little friendly josh, or so I thought. The mag went to print, was distributed down in the drop-in one afternoon and off I went home, happy to have another issue done and dusted.

Next morning, though, there's some grave faces at the staff-meeting that we have first thing every day. It turns out that (insert name) isn't a mate of the bloke who wrote the poem. Not at all. In fact, they loathe each other. Oh, dear.

But worse still, it also turns out that (insert name) can't read or write, which is something he's rather touchy about (and he's rather touchy at starting-speed, anyway), so he's not at all fucking happy to hear that there's a poem in a magazine which calls him a wanker, and he's going to kill me for it, or so he screamed at everyone he bumped into last night, anyway.

We're just discussing how we might best deal with the somewhat volatile (insert name) when the front door crashes open and in he storms.

Actually, that's not quite right. What actually happened was, the front door crashed open and in stormed a massive, slavering Rottweiller, dragging (insert name) along behind it, holding onto its chain.

How I (A) talked him down and (B) didn't soil myself, I'll never know, but I apologised profusely and repeatedly in a high-pitched voice and promised to instantly recall and pulp all the existing copies of the magazine, and this, thank fuck, seemed to appease him.

Valuable lesson for all budding journalists there - if you're going to call someone a wanker in print, even if it's meant to be funny, check it out first and make sure that they won't sic a killer beast on you if they don't get the joke. If you think that they might, best fucking leave it...

Overcomes Whisky Ninja

We all got notice to quit the Spital Tongues house sometime in the spring of 1990, as the builders were moving in.

The place was proper falling apart by then - there was a weird goth kid on the middle floor who combined dramatic overdoses with window-smashing sprees once or twice, and various residents (ahem) had repeatedly screwed the payphone for beer money, so it didn't work anymore.

I had a strange chance meeting with a former television producer when I was living in the Tongues. I was staggering through Fenham after a hefty night on tha booze somewhere when I bumped into this bloke who was a mate of Jeez Louise's dad, and he was in a similar state to me.

He invited me to his big posh house for a couple of frames of pool and some whisky and spliff, so off we went.

Things get well hazy after that, but I've got the vaguest memory of him pulling a few fancy Kung Fu shapes next to the pool table, and then it's seven o'clock in the morning, we're both slumped in armchairs and he's got a massive black eye coming up, just in time for Christmas.

I make my excuses and leave, and quickly discover that I am way too drunk to walk. Luckily, Wagsley's mam's house is only 30 seconds away, so I lean on the bell and then fall through the door when she answers, in her nightie, and then I pass out in the spare bedroom till around three in the afternoon.

Now, I'm guessing here, because I've not a clue what actually happened, but I'd imagine that the black eye probably came about when he lurched at me with his Kung Fu shit and said, "How would you defend yourself against this?", and then my answer being "By headbutting you, like this." Either that, or I just lamped him with a pool cue.

Not long after this happened, maybe a year or so, the former TV producer died in a house fire after apparently going to his bed with a three-bar electric fire on full blast, far too close to him. I'd imagine that he would have been too pissed to react quickly enough, and hopefully, too pissed to feel anything, and there but for the grace of God go I. I think he was the first person I'd ever met who I'd describe as an alcoholic, in that alcohol had completely subsumed, and now defined, every aspect of his personality. I just wish I'd had the smarts at the time to think, "Mental note to self - do not get that fucked up."

Little Johnny update

Oddly enough, Little Johnny was living in the Chy when I first started working there, in a halfway-flat attached to Phoenix House, another South Shields-based rehab. (They're big on rehabs up there, the populace kind of demand them...)

I only saw him once or twice, and the second time he was doing a deal with some blatant heroin hags, so it's safe to say that he wasn't clean at the time, unlike my good self, who had pretty much entirely given up the speed. Mind, as I've said before, speed's got a distinct advantage when it comes to giving-up time, in that, unlike heroin, it's not one of the most horrifically addictive drugs known to man.

Not long after I saw him at Chy Metro, he moved to London in a bit of a hurry, eventually becoming a dispatch rider, a job that didn't kill him, astoundingly, although he did destroy several powerful motorcycles in an assortment of spectacular accidents.

A few years later, I was doing a college course with a bloke who came from the same Northumbrian town as this girl that Johnny and I had both 'known', in the fucking sense of the word.

I mentioned her name and that I used to do drugs and sex with her, and this bloke said "Hey, are you the kid with the motorbike that her dad and his mates kidnapped and left hanging upside down off a meathook in a deserted warehouse because he thought you'd been selling heroin to his daughter?"

"Erm, no," I replied, "but I've got a pretty good idea who you're talking about..."

I put this charge to Johnny in a "you kept that one fucking quiet" kind of way a few years later (we lost touch for a bit), and he denied it indignantly, like a lady, protesting too much.

"Can you imagine that fat fucker kidnapping me?", he asked, rhetorically.

What? The big, scary fully-grown bear of a man in the prime of his life who suspected you, a malnourished smackrat, of selling skag heroin to his only true precious? Naah, I can't see that happening, you'd have put that bad boy on the floor, no bother, is what I felt like saying to him, but I never, because it didn't really matter anyway - it didn't happen to me, and that's the main thing, eh?

On the acid you will trip...but don't forget the Evo-Stik.

On my first day at The Chy advice centre, I bumped into a bloke there who I'd been to school with.
I immediately wrongly thought he was a client rather than one of the staff, and it later turned out that he'd also assumed the same thing about me.

Michael had been a bit of a boy when he was younger, getting bust for weed twice, but now he had a young kid and a more sensible outlook on life, and he wanted to turn things around. He later faced a load of hassle with his convictions when he started training as a psychiatric nurse, but he managed to convince the fuck-witted powers-that-be that, just because you were the goddamn pusherman when you were 18, it doesn't have to follow that you're still that same person when you hit 30.

I like Michael a lot, he's good people. Interestingly though, his speaking voice has become distinctly camper over the years, seemingly in direct relation to how long he's been working in the mental health sector. I should point out that he's straight, and I have no explanation for this phenomenon whatsoever, and nor do I think that there's anything wrong with talking like you're a nice boy who loves the sailors, before you accuse me of being homophobic.

One of my first duties at the Chy was to take out Danny, the resident glue-bagger, on Giro day, to help him pay his bills and fines before he blew the lot on industrial-sized drums of Evo-Stik. I'm not exaggerating there - he used to buy two five-litre cans of the stuff to last the fortnight till his next cheque came.

On the very rare occasions that I saw Danny when he wasn't completely fucking monged out of his brain and reeking of Evo fumes, he was actually quite good company who liked a laugh and enjoyed singing along to the pop crap on the radio.

You don't get many glue-sniffers in their late 20s, it tends to be an early teen thing, but Danny was 27 then, and had made it his Drug Of Choice years beforehand. He'd been to rehab a good few times, but he either couldn't - or didn't want to - give up the bag.

I think his tattoos made things considerably more difficult for him, mind, being a constant reminder of who he was and what he did...he had 'EVO' above his right eyebrow, 'STIK' above the left one, and a bulldog's face in the middle, just to set it all off. A really badly-drawn bulldog's face, at that.

On his right forearm, he had a small, shakily-inked heart and scroll. The name in the scroll? 'EVO'.

And on his left forearm was the maddest tattoo that I've ever seen; in a lopsided, childish scrawl of capital letters in wildly differing sizes, some absolute bastard of a tattooist had inked the legend:

"ON THE ACID YOU WILL TRIP...BUT DON'T FORGET THE EVO-STIK'

You see his problem? I just got a quick haircut and that was me straight back in with The Man, but if I'd had had 'I NEED SPEED' tattooed across the front of my napper, it probably wouldn't have been nearly that simple.

You can cut our hair, but you can't cut our benefits.

Around about the spring of 1990, the dole insisted that I go on a course aimed at getting the long-term unemployable off the statistic sheets and into some sort of dodgy 'training scheme' for a year.

My fellow attendees on this course were a mixed bunch, and I've forgotten most of them, but the scary, tattooed, 40-year old football hooligan who held strong views on Ulster being a British state definitely stands out. He used to turn up in a grubby white T-shirt with insulting slogans about Rangers signing a Catholic player - Mo Johnston, on it, which was just the thing to impress all the prospective employers we were meeting, but that's not why I remember him - he really sticks in my head because he told some bloke in a suit who was doing a presentation for us that his name was Elmer Fudd.

Now, I'm not sure if the suit bloke was unfamiliar with the wascally wabbit hunter from Bugs Bunny, or whether he was just too scared to say "Haway, daft cunt, that's not your real name", but he called him Elmer for the rest of the afternoon, completely straight-faced each time, while we all tittered behind our hands. Maybe he'd changed it by deed poll, though, now I think about it. I wouldn't be surprised...

After quickly ascertaining that I didn't want to be a trainee plasterer, bricklayer, bookbinder or mop up all manner of horrible stuff cleaning and caring in a big, scary mental hospital on the wrong side of the Tyne, I was fast running out of options, and time. If I didn't go on a course, the dole would slash my money drastically for about six months, and I was already skint as it was.

And then this suit - who, incidentally, was the total spit of Sir Les Patterson, uncannily so - came in to do a talk on the training agency he was the boss of, which was the North-East Council on Addictions, or NECA, for short.

Reasoning that sitting around and chewing the fat with a bunch of junkies was vastly preferable to cleaning up the spew and shite of the good mentals of Gateshead, I put in an application for an interview.

Only Sir Les didn't seem to take my desire to become a hip kind of drugs counselor too seriously, and I was back at the training centre, no further forward. One of the trainers pointed out what I already knew, but was trying not to dwell on - the fact that I had a bleached, candyfloss muppet haircut of the type normally sported by people receiving drug treatment rather than administering it definitely wasn't helping matters.

And so, with a heavy heart, I trekked round to Dulcie's and got her to chop all of the bleach out - my dark roots were over two inches long, so it was like I already had a ready-made sensible hair-style, lurking under the mad one.

It fucked me up for ages, losing my Magic Fanny Magnet locks. The first person who saw the New Me was Baxter in Grott Guitars, who laughed like a Hackney drain for about ten minutes and then called me a cunt, which was precisely the reaction that I was expecting from him. And then from Maddog, around two minutes later.

But, y'knaa, being ridiculed by your peers is so one thing, whereas being so poor that you have to make a choice between eating and heating is something else altogether, and that's what would have happened to me if I hadn't got on the course.

So back I went to see Sir Les with my new, sex-free hairdo, and this time, he offered me a place at one of NECA's centres.

Unfortunately, the centre in question was in Chichester, near South Shields.
For some reason, you pronounce it 'Chy-chester', rather than the more traditional 'Chih-chester'.

Actually, if you're from those parts, you won't call it that at all; you will refer to it as 'The Chy' at all times, and I will probably cross the street to avoid you, because I never met anyone from The Chy that I wasn't really fucking scared of, or wary of standing next to in case I caught their fleas.

As you can see, I had the kind of warmth for my clients that really makes a first-class drugs counselor stand out from the crowd...

The accidental rioters of 1990

It's the 31st of March, 1990, and it's a glorious, hot spring day - proper T-shirt weather.
Or at least, it is if you happen to be in London, which is where I am, visiting the Boy James for a few days to see how he's getting on at his fancy-assed carpentry college, where he's learning archaic Victorian wood-turning skills, or something.

We're at a bit of a loose end on this particular day, so James mentions that there's something happening in Trafalgar Square that might be worth a look - it's a rally to protest against the introduction of something called the Poll Tax...

And that's how we accidentally found ourselves in the middle of the biggest riot that London had seen since the peasants kicked off about the original Poll Tax in the middle ages sometime.

I've just been looking at some news reports of the riots there and apparently there was bother kicking off on the march all day, with an anarchist faction trying to storm Whitehall, but we knew nothing about that - we were just soaking up the rays next to one of the fountains in the Square, watching a bunch of crustie punks splashing about in the water and trying to drag unwary passers-by in with them.

And then, along came a red-faced, angry bald man in his 40s waving a sheaf of papers around. He didn't know it yet, but he was about to provide us all with a moment of pure comedy gold.

He stood on the lip of the fountain, with his back to the pool, looked at the assorted crusty low-life around him, who were dripping wet after just coming out of the water, and angrily declared "You lot make me bloody sick! I came here to make a serious protest about the Poll Tax, not to splash around in a fountain, annoying other people!"
There's a moment silence while the crusties consider the weight of his words, and they all appear to be suitably chastised. But then, suddenly, one of the ones still left in the water lurches towards the bloke from behind, rugby-tackles him around his knees and flips him over backwards into the pool, completely submerging him and his sheaf of papers.

If anger is an energy, as John Lydon once claimed, I reckon that baldy bloke could have powered-up Watford for a good few days after his ducking - his head was proper glowing and everything, and he couldn't speak any more, he just went "GGNNNNAAAARRRRRGGHH!!" like the Hulk when he's changing from Bruce Banner, and everyone laughed and ran away into the crowd. I bet you his family still walk on fucking eggshells every time someone mentions the Poll Tax on the telly these days...

And then the mood started to get a lot darker. I don't know if you've ever been stood in a crowd while someone drives an armoured mini-bus straight at you, but it's not an experience that I ever wish to repeat. Apparently, driving vehicles into crowds was a standard UK police dispersal tactic back then, but it winds people up something fucking terrible, I can tell you that much.

The Boy James and I got separated in the madness, so I tapped up the bloke next to me for a swig from his whisky bottle, watched those builders' cabins in the pic burn for a while, then went slightly further along the square to observe a massive crowd stoving in the huge, bullet-proof glass windows of the South African embassy.

And then I headed back to the Boy James' gaff, once I finally found a tube station that was open. I got there just in time for the news, where I discovered, much to my surprise, that the protesters were a bunch of evil bastards who had launched a series of completely unprovoked attacks on her Majesty's finest Riot Dibble. It would be around about now that I realised that The News and The Truth aren't always necessarily the same thing...

Next day, I'm catching a coach home from Victoria when I get a pull from two very rattled-looking coppers, who have noticed, and taken exception to, the 'FUCK THE POLL TAX' sticker that I'm sporting on my lapel.

They search me, and immediately start giving me grief about the belt I'm wearing - a polished length of motorbike chain with a buckle attached to it.

"This could be an offensive weapon, son."

"I suppose it could be, cuntstable. But at the moment, it's holding my trousers up and I'm not about to hit anyone with it."

Astoundingly, they let me catch my coach without further hassle. Mind, I'd imagine that the cells of London were massively exceeding their capacity at around this time, and nicking some daftie for wearing an offensive belt probably wouldn't have got them too many Brownie Points back at the nick.

1990 right in yer fuckin' face, bwoy, part # 2

Of all the romantic attachments I've had in my life, or 'fuck buddies' for those of you well versed in 21st-century speak, I'm finding Sarah by far the hardest to write about. For one thing, I can't remember what colour her eyes were, which I can just imagine her seriously kicking off about, in the unlikely event that she ever gets to read this.

Like I said earlier, she was 15 when we first met, and we were together just short of two years. She didn't take drugs, didn't really drink that often, went to a private girls' school and knew a hell of a lot about fine art.

I'm a dilettante when it comes to art, myself, and can point you in the direction of any number of pricks of my vague acquaintance who'll tell you that's there's no point liking a painting unless you've got a degree in Fine Art and can explain exactly why it is that you like something, but fuck that. I like the pretty colours and also think that someone should have told Reubens to go away and come back when he'd learnt to paint tits properly, coz they're like spaniels' ears in every picture of his that I've ever seen. Rubbish.

But anyway, much as I loathed art-wank in all its forms, I liked going to galleries and exhibitions with Sarah, who was always a fount of knowledge without ever sounding like a twat. She'd have made a brilliant teacher, which is exactly what she was doing in Hong Kong, last I heard of her, possibly reasoning that that was far enough away from Jesmond to massively reduce the risk of bumping into me, pissed, maudlin and apologising for having been such a shit boyfriend, as was my wont for several years after we split up.

And I was a shit boyfriend. She should have been exchanging love poetry with some Art Fop from the boys' grammar school opposite hers, not hanging out in the puerile netherworld of Grott Guitars and the Legendary Harley Dread, watching her beloved stumble around on - and off - stage like the Netto Iggy Pop.

Sarah lived with her grandparents, her mother had died when she was very young. I don't know how, it was something she never talked about. After we'd been seeing each other for about a year, I met her dad. "So you're the toerag who's going out with my daughter?" was his opening gambit, a snarl was my reply (I'd had a couple), and then Sarah pulled me out of harm's way and into her room.

And then I got her pregnant...just the fucking sort of thing that a toerag would do. Even the finding out was a convoluted drama, because first she was pregnant but no, hang on, it was a false alarm, but no, hang on again, the false alarm was a false alarm in reverse, ha ha, and she was pregnant after all. Are we sure now, coz this is actually quite draining? Yep, definitely.

I think we had about a week where her family didn't know, while Sarah figured out what she was going to do. I'm doing that rubbing my brow thing again so I'd best just pile in before I over-analyse what I'm trying to say, which is, I told her that I'd stand by whatever her decision was, but that it was her decision to make.

And she chose to have an abortion. Do I think that was the right decision? Absolutely, no contest. 16 years old with university and the rest of your life ahead of you versus a baby, a council house and an unemployable, wildly unfaithful, considerably older partner with a drug habit, a thirst for tha booze and insane delusions of rock god grandeur? It's a toughie, for sure...

Out of all the people that I've lost touch with in my life, the ones who only knew Skotty, the drunken twat and never got to meet Ettrick, the sober gentleman, I think that I miss Sarah more than anyone, and I hope that she's happy, wherever she is.

I clearly remember a night in the Broken Doll ; Sarah was in tears because I'd gone off with some girl the night before and I was trying to sweet-talk my way out of it, when Baxter pulled me to one side.

"You wanna sort your fucking life out and hang onto her, mate", he growled at me, "Because I'll tell you what, you're never gonna fuckin' find one like that again."

And he was right, the dirty Cockney soothsayer that he was - I didn't sort my life out, I didn't hang on to her...and I never found one like that again.

1990 right in yer fuckin' face, bwoy, part # 1

Fucking everything happened in 1990, man. It was as if the year itself was spelling out that this was the start of a whole new decade, and what was, would change, he said, sounding like some portentious fella portenting about on the Radio 4 afternoon play.

At the beginning of February I got sacked from my role as Chief Chemical Rock God in the Legendary Harley Dread, my dismissal coming in the form of a mumbled muttering from Maddog in Grott one morning. He had to repeat himself, as I thought he'd said "You're out of the van", which didn't make any sense at all. "You're out of the band", is what he was trying to say.

I should have seen it coming, really. For one, Jez had been booted about two months before, without my prior knowledge and against my wishes, and it was decided (by our only remaining guitarist) that we'd be carrying on with only one guitar.

And we'd doing Hawkwind covers again, and maybe a new one he'd written that wasn't in my register, and I could just play maracas on that one or something, and we'd be getting a sax player in for a couple of numbers, and, well, you get the picture. All we needed was Maddog's bird to join as the new singer and it tips over into Spinal Tap, if it hadn't already.

That never happened, fortunately, although I do believe that the idea of Dulcie doing a Yoko was mooted at some point. But what tragically happened was that he sacked me three days before the Red Hot Chilli Peppers played at the Riverside, a totally packed, sold-out gig that's since gone down in Newcastle legend...and we were first choice for the last-minute support when the touring support band had to pull out.

That is, we would have been first choice if I hadn't happened to have been in the Riverside office two days beforehand, mentioning my acrimonious sacking to Babs, the venue's booker. I'd asked for the Chilli Peppers support slot months before, but then they got a touring support act, so we were in reserve, or rather, we were until I told her that my band didn't have a singer any more.

The very next day, the tour support pull out of the tour due to family illness. Who ya gonna call? Erm...The Force, and Christ on crutches but they were shit. Me and Maddog both watched them through our fingers in the sardine-packed crowd, each of us inwardly cursing the Gods of Bad Timing who had conspired to rob the Legendary Harley Dread of what would doubtless have been our finest moment, or 'the most people in one room that I had ever called cunts at the same time', as it would most likely have turned out if we'd got the gig.

A few weeks after my dismissal, we return to the scene of our finest hour - the Cooperage nightclub - to play at a fan's 21st - she'd begged us to reform for her party, and I think we all got a semi lob-on from that, if I'm being honest.

Anyway, we were fucking terrible, the worst gig of our short career, no question. In fact, we only played three songs, then everyone on stage seemed to spill beer into something really important all at the same time, then something really important spluttered and died, and so we just gave up and got even drunker instead. A fitting end, I thought.

Not for the rest of the boys, though. They had a six-month period of doing fuck-all and then got in a totally wrong new singer, who was about two foot taller than the rest of them and built like a brick shithouse. Midge, his name was (the sax player they got in was called Nidge, so that's Midge and Nidge in one band. It just doesn't sound right, does it?) big on Celtic knot tattoos and wearing his hair long, crimped and in a top-knot ponytail and every fibre of my soul screams wrong wrong wrong just looking at the pictures. From cool band to fool band in one simple step.

Not that I'm bitter or harbour any resentment towards my daft cunt former bandmates who had no vision, no integrity no dreams and no soul, like. In fact, I even briefly joined them again, right at the end of 1990, when they got the smarts to realise that the way of Midge'n'Nidge was not the way forward, but nobody really liked each other any more, especially me and Bambi, and I wish I'd never gone back, to be honest.

Although, if I'd never gone back for those last couple of nail-in-the-coffin gigs, I might never have hooked up with the mother of my child and my future wife, who, in the fucked-up and complicated way that things tend to happen in my life, are actually two very different people...

Dirty shitting bastard Gypsy.

I had a crack at music-promoting around this time, starting a night called Club Trevor at the Broken Doll, reasoning that it was a shit name to be burdened with and wanting to give something back to the Trevs of this world, I granted free admittance to people who brought ID that proved they were indeed called Trevor, and I got two or three at every gig, a wacky piece of promotion that got me a couple of inches in the Daily Star, which I never actually saw, but I'm willing to bet that 'Club is Clever for Trevors' was the headline nonetheless.

Truth be told, I only ever really enjoyed doing the night when Harley Dread was playing it, and found the process of bigging up other bands just to make a few quid to be a right royal pain in the arse.

I think I only did about half a dozen Club Trevs in total before I decided that the murky world of music promotions wasn't the place for a lazy sod like me, and I knocked the night on the head after a packed-out Christmas bash. Actually, no, I did one more after that, but we'll come to that in time...

Which brings us to the end of the 80's quite neatly. I moved around this point, after the housing association that owned Bucket Street finally evicted my ass after months of receiving no rent whatsoever.

My new gaff was one room in a massive, four-storey house in the Spital Tongues area of Newcastle, which is an area just outside the city centre, right by all the universities, the dental hospital and the RVI. Back then, it was almost entirely populated by students, along with a sizable contingent of Twirlies who had lived there forever and referred to Spital Tongues as 'the village', which it patently fucking isn't - it's a suburb in a large Northern city.

The house looked over the central motorway, and then onto the town moor beyond that. It was in a pretty dilapidated state - the landlord was waiting for planning permission to turn it into four luxury apartments - but after the deprivations of Bucket Street, where I'd had no heat or light for over six months, it was the height of luxury as far as I was concerned.

There were two bedrooms in the basement, along with a long, narrow kitchen. I had the smaller one at the back and the front one housed Gary Silver, Gateshead FC's jinky right winger, and quite possibly the only semi-pro player in Britain at that time who regularly took to the pitch sporting bright green dreadlocks.

After spending a few months on my own a lot of the time, it was good to hang with a loud, barrel-chested lust-for-lifer like Gary. He was a big ball of attention-grabbing noise and colour - think John Belushi with Brian Blessed's laugh and wearing a green dread wig - but he was also a man of diverse and unusual tastes.

Gary spent a lot of his time when he wasn't playing football hitching all over the country, following his three great loves around, which were Oxford United, Gaye Bykers on Acid and Marc Almond, a man who Gary credited with "saving my fucking life when I was a kid."

Unfortunately, Gary owned a dog, a highly-excitable, ginger collie/mongrel hybrid called Gypsy.
I say unfortunately because he would often leave it for 'the house' to look after when he was away hitching, which, in practice, meant that no fucker looked after it at all and it ran wild, doing runny shites all up and down the hall right outside my room. And if you ever took it out for a walk it would just fuck off towards the nearest horizon straight away and not come back for hours. Months of living next door to Gypsy mean that I have never, and will never, own a dog.

I once took part in a game of three-a-side in the local park with Gary. Our team was me, him and my girlfriend Sarah in goal. We were playing three Japanese students. It was meant to be a friendly kick-about, but Gary played like it was life-or-death, legging all over the pitch and going hard into tackles, shouting tactics all the while. Actually, shouting "Come on, we'll beat these bastards!" all the while, now I think about it.

(very) brief sensible phase

So I'm sticking needles into my arms on a several times a week basis, mainly at weekends, but things could be much worse - I could be using physically addictive drugs as opposed to speed, which your brain craves, but not your body. So you don't actually need it, you just want it. A lot. But you're not about to start on a daily regime of robbing grannies and twocking anything that isn't nailed down to get your fix. Or at least, I wasn't.

This came in well handy when I offended the wrong drug dealer and had to lay low for a while.
An old friend of mine put it perfectly the other day when we were discussing this particular dealer.

"If we'd been a bit older and wiser, the same age as him, do you think we would have trusted him?", to which the answer is no, would we fuck.

He was uber-pikey, he didn't like me much and his gear sometimes veered towards the purely shite, which led to me finding somewhere else to score, but I must have badmouthed him to the wrong snakey grass, because he came looking for me in the Doll one night with some scary-looking gangster types in tow, demanding money and all of my drugs with extreme menace.

He had away with my jacket and two grammes of speed, and was trying to force me out of the fire exit when some good Samaritan intervened. By the time he'd turned to tell the bloke to mind his own fucking business, I was gone, legging round the horseshoe bar and up out of the top door onto the street, where I kept on running until I got on the first bus I saw, which was going to Fenham, luckily enough.

After doing the last half-gramme of my gear round at Baxter's, I ended up at my mother's place, where I confessed all about my habit and the very bad men who were going to break my legs if I didn't cough up the £50 or so I owed, and even then, they might just break them anyway, for a laugh. (The dealer and his henchpricks came back to the Doll looking for me again the following night, apparently, but y'knaa, I'm not fucking stoopid, so I wasn't there.)

As well as paying my drug debts, my mam insisted on trashing my druggy threads "that make you look worthless." and buying some proper straight stuff from C&A. I'm too weak to resist, but I at least insist on the jeans being Levis....

Next day, I'm out and about in my spanking new Mr Sensible shirt, jeans and desert boots combo, when I bump into a bloke who knows that I'm avoiding some bad men.

"Fucking hell, are you going to wear a sign around your neck that says 'I am not Skotty' as well?", he says, laughing.

I'm not as bad as a mate of mine who absolutely refuses to ever wear a shirt, no matter what the occasion, as he thinks they make him look like the enemy/a prick, but I have to admit that dressing like I mow the lawn, fear God, pay into a pension fund and know a lot about mortgages and sport and shit like that has never sat easy with me either, so it was only a short matters of hours before the new wardrobe was jettisoned forever.

I split the leg-seams on the Levis with a penknife and took them back, claiming they were faulty.
I'm only mentioning this because the female shop assistant listened to my tale, then picked them up, put them up to her face, sniffed the crotch and said, "You've worn these...", which has always struck me as being something of a strange thing to do - maybe she fancied me, but her sense of duty wouldn't let her let me defraud the shop she worked in, so she had to find some way of satisfying both of these conflicting emotions.

Huw are ya?

Given my general dislike of all things Hawkwind and prog-rock related, it's ironic that Harley Dread ended up playing a couple of gigs supporting the former 'Wind guitarist, Huw Lloyd-Langton.

The first one was a few weeks before Richey jumped ship, downstairs in the Broken Doll.
Bizarrely, playing downstairs was a big deal for your alternative bands back then. Anyone could book the upstairs room for free and put any old shite on, but playing downstairs, when the pub was closed to normal punters and you had to pay to get in, that was the big time, baby. Fucking loads easier to get the gear in, as well.

Photos of this gig reveal me to be wearing a battered top hat, and sunglasses indoors once again, I'm ashamed to say. The topper wasn't mine, I blagged it for the night off this incredibly gaunt, thin and lanky bloke called Nick, the singer in the magnificently-named Chicken Dirge. I see him around to nod at every once in a while these days, and he still looks like a stretched version of Severus Snape from Harry Potter, but he's got a distinct whiff of the Civil Servant about him nowadays - it always fucking pains me when we lose yet another one of our boys to The Man, I tells ya...

We seemed to go down okay with Huw's crowd, so when I saw that he was playing the Kasbah club in Sunderland a few months later, I phoned the venue and sweet-talked us onto the bill - I might even have claimed that Huw was Maddog's uncle, come to think of it...

The Sunderland gig was the first (and only) time that Harley Dread had left the city limits of Newcastle to play a gig. Steev Oliver from the Dead Flowers drove us the 17 miles or so to the heart of enemy territory in his big purple van, which, incidentally, I once had a frantic scuttling session in the back of with someone else's girlfriend, when it was parked outside the Riv one Friday night.

Actually, now I think about it, he only gave me the keys for the van because he'd point-blank refused to hand over the ones for 'our' rehearsal room that we could never fucking get into, but still paid for. I'm not complaining, like, but there was a sofa in there, which could well have made that particular brief encounter a little less sordid than it turned out, but hey, beggars and choosers and all that, eh?

Impressively, and especially because several members of Harley Dread had enjoyed lengthy conversations with Hawkwind Huw in Newcastle not six months previously, he genuinely seemed to not have the first clue who we were, and only the vaguest memories of the Broken Doll gig. 'Distracted' would be a good word to describe Huw Llloyd-Langton as he was then - he always seemed to be thinking very hard about something else when he talked to you, like he was only half-there.

I don't know the geezer's drug history or anything, but Hawkwind and powerful hallucinogenics are familiar bedfellows, which would make a lot of sense. Having said that, he was still about a million times less of a cock than Johnny Thunders was when I met him, the year before.

The date of the Sunderland gig was November 2nd, 1989. I know this because it was the day after Maddog and Dulcie's daughter was born, and we were all as high as kites from it. Bambi and the Krute had written and recorded a special song to commemorate the event the previous night, the really rather sweet 'Dulcie, Your Egg's Been Fertilised', and I believe that some us may have been taking drugs in the toilets. Fucking loads of them, actually.

I remember Maddog was in a beatific daze - the birth had taken over 30 hours, so he hadn't been to sleep since Hallowe'en, and pretty much all he could say was "So tiny...and yet...so perfect", over and over.

The only real reason that this gig stands out in my mind, apart from the time backstage we spent liberally wetting (and powdering) the baby's head, is it's the night that my witty stage patter reached dazzling new heights:

(The first Harley Dread song comes crashing to a close, and the malnourished, unsteady fella with the raggy mop of blonde hair steps up to the mic.)

Me - Good evening, that Sunderland, we are the Legendary Harley Dread, are we too loud for anyone?

Stout bloke (sat with his lass right next to one of the PA stacks) - Yeah.

Me - Well, you shouldn't have sat there, man. You've not thought this through, have you? You've fucked right up.

Stout bloke - Grrrrrrrrr......

60 minutes of vinegar strokes*

If there was ever a time that the stars aligned for the Legendary Harley Dread, then that time would have to the twelfth of October, 1989 - my 24th birthday.

We played at a nightclub on the Quayside called the Cooperage, and for once, I was relatively sober and on the ball. A mate of Bambi's who was a projectionist had put together a slide show for our set, so we played in front of a backdrop of images of demons, purgatory, maps of hell and Hieronymus Bosch paintings, all emblazoned with the LHD logo of a pyramid with an eye in the centre.

Maybe I just had the perfect balance of booze and drugs in my system, and the fact that it was my birthday probably helped, plus the Cooperage had a club licence so we didn't go on until midnight, which is generally better than playing a pub and going on at half eight.

But whatever the reasons were, we were fucking astounding that night, I kept on getting endorphin rushes when we were playing and it felt like the happy pills were kicking in the entire time I was on stage. Everybody loved me and I loved them all back. Tellingly, my stage patter that night wasn't my usual "what a bunch of cunts you are" schtick. Instead, I was just laughing and trying to get the song titles out before my perfect band kicked into yet another perfect song from our perfect set-list.

Support came from a fast-paced rock 'n' roll outfit called The Gunrunners, who we'd played with in Tynemouth a few weeks earlier, when my drug/booze ratio had gone very badly wrong. They'd been really together and tight, whereas we had sucked a fat ass, which was mostly down to me and my antics - I remember trying to adjust a mic stand but it was too stiff to loosen, so I thew it across the bar instead, which the soundman in the venue wasn't too happy about.

So it was 1-0 to the Gunrunners after the coast gig, but then we totally slaughtered them at the Cooperage, when we briefly entered that magic hour where we became the greatest band in the world, no contest.

Of course, it couldn't last and we soon back to squabbling, sacking each other and falling over onstage, just like the good old days, and the audiences were informed that they were a bunch of cunts once more, and that brief, shining hour where we caught a glimpse of just how good we
could be when we tried not to be shit quickly felt like it had all been a dream.

But what a fucking dream, and what a fucking hour.




* I'd suggest that you Google 'vinegar strokes' if you're unfamiliar with the phrase, coz it's a belter.

Stop the taxi, I really need to be a twat.

If, like Cher, I could turn back time, I probably wouldn't waste it titting about on the deck of a battleship in a sheer body-stocking, showing off my arse to a load of sailors.

Actually, yes I fucking would, probably, for a short while, but only if the opportunity to do so somehow came up.

I wouldn't try to arrange it myself, though, I'd imagine that a man like me, with my well-known views on the annihilation of America and all that it holds dear, would have all sorts of hassle trying to flash his scantily-clad hoop at Yank sailors on a Yank battleship, which says it all about this shitty, fucked-up world that we're struggling to live in these days.

A shrink would say I'm joking here to deflect attention from what a mighty arsehole I am in this next bit, but I think I established my 'sehole brother credentials quite some time ago, and I just wrote that bit above because it made me laugh, actually.

So, as well as seeing Sarah and the affair with Mandy, I'd also been having the odd one-nighter with Barb for the last six months or so. Did she 'get pregnant' or 'fall pregnant', because I'm never sure? Whichever, she was definitely pregnant. Not very pregnant yet, but pregnant all the same. For sure? Yep, for sure.

She told me that she was having it whatever I thought, and she was older than me, with a decent job, and it was never my fucking decision to make in the first place, innit, and so that was that. She was going to have a baby, we weren't in a relationship, I left her to get on with it. Did I feel ready to be a father? Absolutely not, but who ever does when it happens like that?

Except it didn't happen, she miscarried a fortnight later. She told me in the Riverside, observing that she was sure I would be delighted to hear the news, which I thought was a little cruel.
I was relieved, for sure, but there's a yawning chasm in between relieved and delighted, unless you're in a massage parlour and you've gone for the 'happy finish' option on the menu, obviously...

We left the Riverside together to go back to her place. Just before we left, though, I was waiting for her to come back from the toilet when a girl I knew very vaguely came over and said hello-my-mate-fancies-you, and pointed at her mate, who smiled at me, and she was tiny, with brown saucer-eyes, olive skin, hair cut in a short, bright purple bob and a grinning, impish look that said "Funny, intelligent, dangerous, filthy and serious trouble" all at once, and I'm a sucker for impish looks like that from girls like that, he said, coming on like Humphrey Bogart after a heavy session on the crack-pipe.

But I was with someone else, and back she came from the toilets and the club was closing, so off we went.

We flagged a cab straight away. We were only about 20 seconds up the road when Barb said "You needn't think I'm having sex with you tonight."

I wasn't, as it goes. I wasn't thinking that at all. She was upset, she'd had a miscarriage carrying my child and we had a shared history together, that was why I had asked to go back to hers.

But suddenly, none of that matters and I'm shouting "STOP THE CAR!" and the brakes are slammed on, and I'm out of the door, leaving her open-mouthed in the back seat, and then I go straight back to the club and find the impish girl with the purple bob, and she's a bit shocked to see me as I just left with someone else two minutes ago, but she takes me back to hers anyway, and we have sex and I feel totally unforgivable afterwards, there's no other word for it.

I see Purple Bob, as I shall name her, a few times after that night, and she is indeed funny, intelligent, dangerous, filthy and serious trouble, but happily, she goes on to totally fuck up some other junkie muso's life, and not mine. I liked Purple Bob, though - she reminded me of me quite a lot, but me with a fanny and that.

What I don't know, and I honestly don't, is whether I stopped the cab because I wanted to be away from Barb, or whether getting to fuck Purple Bob was my main motivation, or maybe it was both. Whatever, it was a pretty shitty thing to do, not one of my finer moments at all.

I did try to say I was sorry a couple of years later, but I'd had a few, and her then-boyfriend (who she later married) solemnly informed me he was going to glass me in the face if I didn't fuck off, sharpish-like, so I'm guessing that my apology didn't really cut much ice.