BORN SLOPPY

It's not the leaving of Throckley that grieves me part #1

2009-12-31T09:47:00.000-08:00

August 4th 2007.

This blog, and all the subsequent parts that shall make up my autobiography, is dedicated to my dear friend, Kate Reeves, who we buried today.
Shine on, you crazy diamante...

I was born on the 12th of October, 1965, in a maternity ward in Hexham, Northumberland. Around 13 years later, this same maternity ward would see the birth of another skinny, wide-eyed bloke with both a love of the written word and a troublesome fondness for chemically-altered states, one Pete Doherty, Libertine and tabloid slag, still alive at the time of writing.

I was christened Andrew George Ettrick Scott, youngest son in a short series of two borne by Joan Margaret Scott, and sired by my father, Stuart Scott AKA the Maths Wonderboy of Byker. (more on this later.)
My older brother, Jonathan Basil Ettrick Scott, is nearly two years older than me, born as he was in August 1963.
(At various points in this blog, I may refer to my brother Jon as Wor Kid. This is a Northern term of endearment meaning 'my brother')
At some point, I shall talk to one or the other of my parents and find out what the Ettrick thing is about. Then I'll tell all youse.
I became Ettrick Scott by deed poll at a party in Peterborough in 1998, having been known to everyone as Skotty for around 30 years. (Why Peterborough? Read on, Macduff...)
One of my earliest memories is of watching Andy-Pandy on the TV and Wor Kid taking the piss and calling me Andy-Pandy as well.
I have utterly loathed the name Andrew ever since. Apologies if is your name, but it is proper shit.
When I was Andrew Scott, I was a drug addict, shoplifter, alcoholic, thief, total fucking zero.

Since I became Ettrick Scott, that all stopped and life got a whole lot brighter. Now I get to tit about in Europe and write travel articles, and nobody has ever sussed that I'm a worthless waste of space on the blag. And that's because I'm not anymore, and I have to say that it feels pretty fucking mint.
I couldn't have got sober without the help of Ettrick Scott, he totally saved my life, dude.

It's not the leaving of Throckley that grieves me part #2

2009-12-30T10:24:00.000-08:00

So anyway, my parents took me back to my new home in Throckley, which is quite a rural suburb of Newcastle, to the west of the city at the start of the sprawling wilds of Northumberland.

I can't tell you the first thing about living there because my mother left my father when I was 10 months old, and me, her and Wor Kid all moved to 46, Nuns Moor Road in Fenham, just outside the centre of the city.
Quite why my parents split up, I'm not 100% on. One of the things that put me off writing my life story for years is that I will have to talk to them about this stuff, and other wounds that will need to be picked.
Last time I asked my Mam, she said something along the lines of "Your father can't open his mouth without telling a lie, and I couldn't cope with it any more."
I put this to my Dad, and he said that that was pretty fair comment, really, so what does that tell you?
Much as I love my old man, he could never fucking keep it in his trousers back then, so you'd have to guess that another woman was involved.
So, aye, I will go and ask them to elaborate a bit. I'll just tell them it's for my blog, I'm sure they'll be sweet.

upstairs/downstairs

2009-12-29T02:49:00.000-08:00

The Nuns Moor Road house stood on a corner, which meant it was bigger than the rest of the houses on the street, with four bedrooms instead of the normal three.
At some point, it had been divided into two separate flats. Up until I reached the age of 11 or 12, we lived on one floor and rented the other one out to a succession of tenants. The first ones I remember were an Asian family, but there were also a Chinese couple, a bunch of hippy actors, and, for a couple of years, my Uncle Bruce and his wife and young family.
I started at nursery really young, pretty much as soon as my parents split. My Mam took a job as an Art teacher at the local comprehensive, Rutherford - former pupils include Hank Marvin and Ant off Ant and Dec - and didn't have any choice but to enrol me and Wor Kid in nurseries.
I'm told that I hated the first one and cried on pretty much an hourly basis. But when I got to two, I started at Ashfield, a short bus ride away to the badlands of Elswick Road, and the tears subsided.
Ashfield was an imposing Edwardian building with a walled garden to the back.
My earliest ever memory is probably of the day I visited Ashfield before I started there. I can remember standing at some French windows, looking out over the garden and thinking "yeah, I think I'm going to like it here" to myself.

Mrs Loony

2009-12-28T05:33:00.000-08:00

I get collected from nursery every day by a woman who lived down the road from us.
Her garden was always obsessively neat and tidy. Now, we'd say she was a clear-cut case of OCD, then, we just thought she was mental, and dubbed her 'Mrs Loony'.
As I grew older and started playing in the lane, it was always the rule that a ball that went over into Mrs Loony's yard was a lost ball, unless you were playing with a new kid that didn't know the dangers, in which case, you sent him to get it.
One day, my mate's mam walked past Mrs Loony's garden while she was in it.
"What a lovely garden!", said my mate's mam. "You must come and do mine sometime."
Mrs Loony's reply?
"Fuck off, cunt."

family bus encounter

2009-12-27T09:54:00.000-08:00

My mother's parents lived about a mile up the road from us, in a big house with a snooker table in the attic. Grandad died when I was six or seven. The only memory I have of him is being on a bus with my dad and Wor Kid, and then Grandad got on.
"Shit, it's your grandfather. Try to look like someone else."
No love lost there. I do believe my grandad thought my dad was a complete cock for many years - before he met my mam, he was mates with my Uncle Bryan, who was the proper black sheep of the family. Bryan was a really talented journalist but he pissed it all up the wall and was dead by 38.
Lightweight.

custard skin and kissing thighs

2009-12-26T10:27:00.000-08:00

I remember that the custard came in a big, white jug at Ashfield, and they always gave me the skin off the top, because I always asked for it. Also, a kid fell off the back of my trike one day in the garden there and twatted his head off the floor. I told him it would happen but he wouldn't listen, the muppet.
Other than that, I remember very little of being very little. There was one day that Mrs Loony bought me a Blue Ribbon chocolate bar, but that's hardly riveting. Weird how I remember the brand though.
However, my clearest memories of infant school are much more telling...they're all about sex and drugs, basically.
I went to Wingrove Infants school in Fenham, a kick in the arse away up the hill opposite our house.
I cried and kicked the school-room door on the first day, I remember, but they just let me kick and whine myself into exhaustion. I had been trapped by The Man for the very first time.
Just like the Pictures of Lily in the Who song of the same name, though,Mrs Snodgrass made everything alright. Everything about her - apart from her clumsy, ugly name - was perfect, and I remember the day that I kissed her smooth thighs like it was yesterday, he said, misting over.

We were all stood in a line to leave class and I was at the head of the queue, pushed up close to Mrs Snodgrass's mini-skirted legs.
As she addressed the class behind me, I couldn't stop myself. I leant forward and kissed her on the thigh, just below the hem of her skirt. I kissed first one thigh, then the other. The other kids erupted into laughter, and I can see her now, looking down at my four-year-old self and smiling gently at me. Even today, I have a weakness for straight-haired blondes in mini-skirts. Aye, me and every other fucker...

taking 'drugs' at a tender age.

2009-12-25T11:23:00.000-08:00

I loved mint Tic-Tacs when I was a young 'un, but not as much as I loved the smell of the empty container that they came in. It was a warm, mint/plastic odour, and I couldn't get enough of it. I used to neck all the mints double-quick just so's I could spend some time snorting air from the empty box.
One day, while playing Chase in the playground at Infants, I convinced some other kids that a quick blast on my magic box would enable them to run quicker.
Obviously, one of them was a little disturbed by this, as he grassed me to one of the teachers, who was by my side in double-quick time, demanding to examine the contents of my special container.
You can just imagine that short conversation, can't you?

Grass- "Miss, Miss, Andrew Scott is sniffing something to make him run faster!"
Teacher-"Oh, holy fuck!" (sprints across playground)

But the weird bit is, part of me was thinking something like "Don't be ridiculous, it's not drugs", but I could only have been six at the most, with no real concept of what drugs were.
Without wishing to sound melodramatic, I now like to think that my personal journey towards the Altered State Of Mind started right here.

The bookshop that never was...

2009-12-24T16:33:00.000-08:00

The bookshop that never was still lives on in the furthest corners of my mind.
Allow me to explain. After my folks split, my dad would take me and Wor Kid out on a regular basis, usually to my Nana's place in Longbenton.
Quite often, on the way home, we'd stop outside some sort of shop and dad would leave us in the car for a bit while he went in. I can even tell you where it was, vaguely, somewhere in the Four Lane Ends area of the city.
One time, he was in there for ages. Although I was the youngest out of me and Wor Kid, I was the less timid brother, so I went into the shop to find my dad.
But he wasn't there, at least not downstairs. I remember shelves with not many books on them, and a man behind a counter, who said "he'll be down soon", so I went back to the car.
I asked my dad what that shop was all about a few years ago. "Don't know what you're talking about, never happened.", was his succinct reply.
Fair do's, but may I refer you to my mother's earlier statement that my old man opens his gob and lies fall out?
(You might wonder why I haven't discussed any of this with my brother. Well, I've tried to, but he's spent a lot of the last quarter-century gobbling down some pretty hardcore anti-psychotic medications to combat his schizophrenia, so his early days are a bit sketchy, to say the least. Anyway, How Wor Kid Went Mad doesn't happen for about another dozen years or so, we'll come back to this.)

The Magic Key That Opens All Locks

2009-12-23T17:02:00.000-08:00

First time I was allowed to go the shop on my own, I was four years old and I had a two-pence piece to spend.
Sadly, on, the way to Mr Woods the Grocers, I was engaged in conversation by a boy a couple of years older than me who was stood in the Chemist's doorway.
When I told him I was going to buy sweets, he produced a key from his pocket and informed me I'd be far better off investing my cash in The Magic Key That Opens All Locks.
Price? Two pence.
My mother found me an hour later, crying tears of frustration and jamming my Magic Key into gate-lock after gate-lock down our back lane.
What a fucking muppet.

The Maths Wonderboy of Byker.

2009-12-22T03:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I learnt not to write this stuff late at night, not unless I want to be contemplating my life's navel at four in the bastard morning, anyway.
Proper biogs tend to have stuff about the writer's parents in them, so, in the interests of being pukka, here's a quick sketch of Stuart Scott in his youth.
My dad was born into a dog-rough part of Byker a few years before the start of World War II. My Nana was called Florrie and cleaned offices, and my Grandfather, Charles, was an alcoholic merchant seaman who didn't come home too often. He died many years before I was born and I've yet to hear anyone say a kind word about him.
From an early age, it was apparent that young Stuart wasn't like the other kids in Byker and had aspirations that lay beyond doing the normal Byker childhood stuff like setting rats on fire and building suicide swings under Byker Bridge.
He joined the local library as soon as he could read, quickly exhausting the tiny children's section and then moving on to the classics.
He excelled at school, to the point where his teacher regularly announced class test results with the phrase "Right, we all know who came first, so we'll start with who came second, shall we?" Amazingly, he never got his fucking head kicked for this, and claims that his class regarded him as an exotic curio from another world, rather than a potential target for gang assaults.
At around the age of eight or nine, Stuart discovered that he had the ability to instantly calculate ludicrously complicated four or five-figure multipications in his head, and The Maths Wonderboy of Byker was born.
People would travel from miles around - you've got to remember that this is before anyone had a telly - to hurl complicated sums at him.
"Maths Wonderboy, what is 47475 times 86539?", they would ask him.
"4108439025", he would instantly reply.
And then he hit puberty, and his Maths powers deserted him forever.
I can't be the only person in the world who finds this all slightly odd, surely?

I'm not down with the brown.

2009-12-21T01:35:00.000-08:00

My mam's done some great things for me in my life, but choosing clothes for me isn't one of them.
Clothes were really crap in the 70's, it was all massive collars, tank tops and flares flapping in the wind.
As if that wasn't bad enough, my mam decided I'd look good in predominantly one colour....brown.
"The kid's got brown hair and brown eyes, let's swaddle him completely in shit-coloured clothing. That'll work!"
From toe to top circa 1972, then: Brown Polyveldt shoes, a shoddy Hush Puppies rip-off made out of PVC, moulded plastic and glue. I used to try to kill every pair as soon as I got them but they were nigh-on indestructible.
Brown flares, often made with materials like Crimpelene or Nylon.
Brown shirt with massive, fuck-off wing collars. And white buttons, just to look even shitter.
If it was a chilly day, I'd have on a brown, hand-knitted chunky cardigan.
And finally, outdoor wear was a brown, quilted anorak with a hood. When they invent the time machine, I'll be heading straight back to 1972 to wipe my arse on that coat.

growing up in a world without nonces.

2009-12-20T05:26:00.000-08:00

Except that there were nonces, really. The Moors Murders had just happened and a young girl called Mary Bell murdered two toddlers less than half a mile away from my nursery in 1969.
What I mean is that the red-topped tabloids were still a few decades away from whipping the nation into a state of paedo-hysteria when I was a kid, so at least we got to play outside without our parents becoming convinced that we'd be raped or murdered, which is a luxury that today's children have all but lost.
Anyway, the gang of kids I knocked around with had everything. There was a funny fat kid who was surely going to grow up to be gay (and did), an easy girl who would show you her fanny in exchange for one Bazooka Joe bubblegum (or two Blackjack chews), a spoilt, only-child kid with about 30 action men plus all the vehicles, and a thieving kid who would regularly dip his mam's purse and buy us all treats from the Mister Woods the Grocers.
Most importantly, there were also a load of slightly older kids kicking around, which meant that we were safe against any attacks from the marauding, Catholic kids who all came from huge families and lived just across the main road from us.
Quite why all the Catholic kids lived in a ghetto (albeit a markedly middle-class one), I'm not entirely sure - it's not as if there was a sectarian divide in place in Fenham during the late 60's and early 70's, but they did all live right next to each other. You didn't fuck with the Catholics, largely because they all had five rock-hard big brothers who would bray you if you did.

describing my family as a mental/visual aid

2009-12-19T06:02:00.000-08:00

Because it's nice to have images, I reckon. Otherwise, you'd just make your own up and get it all wrong.
My mother looked like a horse with a Joan of Arc wig on. There, I've said it now. I don't wish to sound uncharitable, but who the fuck was cutting her hair? The council? High fringe, short hair, long face, sombre expression. As I get older, I sometimes see her when I look in the mirror - a fate that befalls many men, I'm told.
She also used to make a lot of her clothes herself, because she could and because it was cheap, I suppose. A heavy wool, red-and-grey checked poncho with huge pouch-pockets is one that particularly gets my memory shuddering.

My father looks the spit of Rudyard Kipling these days, so I suppose if you pictured Kipling dressed as a groovy Polytechnic lecturer from the 70's, you'd be close. I remember that he favoured silk scarfs worn with a shirt for a number of years, and was over-keen on Aramis after-shave. He's always had his moustache, except when he shaved it on a whim when I was about seven. He turned up at our school's Christmas Carol concert without it, and the general consensus was that, clean-shaven, he looked like the most sinister kiddy-diddler that ever lived, so he grew it back pronto.

Me - Smack-rat skinny since the day that I was born. A metabolism that pie-loving, fat birds would kill for as I'm completely unable to put weight on, no matter what I've been necking. Big brown eyes, light brown hair, exclusively brown wardrobe.
Oh, and small. I was always small for my age. But hey, if you have to be a smart-arse, be a small one - it'll drastically reduce the amount of beatings you'll pick up from your peers as you make your way through life.
Wor Kid looked not unlike me, but darker-haired, taller, chunkier and wearing gepps, or spectacles, if you will. Also owned a wardrobe of clothing in radical colours such as blue and red, the jammy bastard.

the drugs DO work, but they fuck your teeth up.

2009-12-18T06:49:00.000-08:00

I contracted pneumonia when I was six. Double-pneumonia, apparently, which is double-bad, both lungs full of phlegm.
I was in Newcastle General Hospital for around six weeks. The only thing I remember about my stay is that my teacher visited me, along with a couple of my class-mates, bearing a huge card signed by everyone in my year.
This thoughtful gift actually really freaked me out, as I came to the conclusion that, if they'd gone to so much trouble, if was highly likely that I was odds-on to die very soon.
I got that bit wrong, because they saved my life, but they fucked up my teeth a bit in the process.
Due to the vast amount of super-strong antibiotics I'd had pumped into me, an unusual side-affect occurred. My baby teeth darkened a few shades, and when my adult teeth grew in a few years later, they were yellowed as well.
Still, it's a relatively small price to pay for, like, not being dead and stuff. And smiling's a hugely over-rated method of communicating your feelings, I've always thought.

My first music/stunningly inappropriate father behaviour

2009-12-17T08:45:00.000-08:00

The first music I can recall was snatches of songs that my dad would sing when we were out in his car. Some we'd join in on, others were a solo effort.
The Minstrel Boy To War Has Gone and Farewell And Adieu, All You Fine Spanish Ladies were singalong faves, but the old man had his darker moments, and that's when we'd get his Leonard Cohen. "I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me, but the room just filled up with mosquitoes, they'd heard that my body was free" - I must have heard him sing that hundreds of times.
Also, when Aladdin Sane by Bowie came out - which makes me seven or eight - he added the muttered phrase "Time, she flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor" to his repetoire, which was nice...
But the one that always sticks in my head comes from the time we were walking down the road to my Nana's on a winter's day. I was seven years old, tops.
I was saying how cold it was, when my dad suddenly proclaimed "I'm going back to the North again, where men are men and spunk is spunk. Not just a little dribble, but a great big frozen chunk.", then he turned to me and said "That's from a famous poem called The Ballad Of Eskimo Nell."
What I can remember most of this brief poetry recital is that somewhere in my head, a clear, adult voice of reason was saying "Haway, man. You really shouldn't be saying stuff like that to a young child."

In case you're worrying...

2009-12-16T09:17:00.000-08:00

This isn't a lead-up to my dad noncing me up or anything like that, because he never did.
Glad about that, don't think I could cope with writing my memoirs if I'd been nonced-up, it's already bizarre enough as it is.

Important lessons about change.

2009-12-15T11:28:00.000-08:00

When I was six, my best buddy was a kid from school called Robert. He lived a couple of streets away, but you could get there quicker by the backlanes. I can't remember the inside of his house as we always seemed to be in his back garden, which had a sandbox so vast, I once lost a Batman figure in it forever, and I'm still a bit gutted about that...it left the Batmobile lopsided, with Robin as the eternal passenger, forever waiting for the caped crusader's return.
Oh, and he once punched me because I gave his cousin the V's when she was looking out of the window, I've just now recalled.
When I was seven, he moved away, and I was totally gutted. At first, he thought he was only going as far as Whickham, which is just across the Tyne from where I lived, not that far at all. Then, his mam told him it was actually High Whickham they were moving to, which is the other end of the planet, as far as a seven-year old kid is concerned. I still hate the place on principle. Not that I've ever been there, but I bet that it's shit, all the same.
At around the same time, the bakers down the road from our house - Campbell's Bakers Cakes For Tea and The Oven Door Tea Room, as the signage had it - changed the font of its shop front lettering, from a classic, solid black one to a really crappy looking Olde Englishe affair.
These two important incidents, one emotionally upsetting and one aesthetically so - I had to look at that godawful shop front every day of my life until I left home - taught me that things change and become shit and unfair right when you least expect it.
Several years after the baker had changed his sign, me and Punk Kev from down the road shimmied up his drainpipe and stole several of the plastic letters. It wasn't to be the last time that I would take an E...

draws veil over the wonder years

2009-12-14T08:58:00.000-08:00

I think I've covered pretty much everything of import from my early years.
My folks splitting and me nearly dying in hospital being the key points.
Apart from that, my paternal grandfather and my Uncle Bryan both shuffled off their mortal coils during this period.

I daresay I'll add any vital stuff if it occurs to me, but I'm done with this bit for now.

"PISS OFF INFANTS"

2009-12-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

When Wor Kid started at Junior School, he thought he'd better leave me a message telling me what a double-down, hard bastard he'd become since he'd moved up in the world.
I was a big fan of the Moomintroll books when I was a kid and was collecting the series with my pocket money.
When I opened the new one I'd just gotten the day before, I discovered that Wor Kid had inscribed the legend "PISS OFF INFANTS" in huge letters across the title page.
My old man went impressively ballistic when I told him, and docked Wor Kid's spends to buy me a new copy. Of course, I bought an entirely different book second time around because there was nowt wrong with the first one, apart from Wor Kid's heartfelt dedication.
I remember all this because (A) it was totally out of character on Wor Kid's part, and (B) it's pretty much the only time I ever saw my dad get really annoyed and shouty about anything when I was little.

get your hair cut/my mam won't let me

2009-12-12T02:37:00.000-08:00

in this early period of my life, my dad was shacked up with a somewhat scary woman with long, flame-red hair. They bought a house together in a Victorian terrace in the Gosforth area of town, and I can remember that it always stunk of garlic and incense.
K (as I shall call her) already had a kid, a boy a couple of years older than Wor Kid, with hair that was long even for the early 70's.
In the summer before he started at big school, he kept on asking K if he could get his hair cut, she kept telling him that he'd be fine.
And so it came to pass that, on his first day at the Royal Grammar School - probably the most prestigious school in Newcastle - this poor little fucker turned up wearing the full uniform of shorts, shirt and tie, blazer and school cap, all set off by his flowing, waist-length blonde hair.
My dad told me that when he dropped him off in the playground, the unfortunate junior hippy was instantly surrounded by a huge gang of incredulous kids, all of whom were acting like the aliens had just landed.

You shall pass this way but once...

2009-12-11T04:13:00.000-08:00

There was an alley that separated my infant and junior school playgrounds, and the top rule of the school was that you only got to use it once, and then never again.
On your first day of junior school, you and your classmates would be herded up Big School Alley by your old teacher, who would then deposit you in the junior school hall and wave you a fond goodbye.
First thing I remember about juniors is being told off for being a smart-arse. Our teacher asked how you could tell whether a year was a leap year or not. I shot my hand up straight away.
"Miss, it's because the Olympic Games will be on in that year."
"No", she said, "You can tell if it's a leap year because the last two numbers will be divisible by four. The Olympic Games might not be one year."
" But they're on every four years, Miss, unless there's a world war happening."
"Shut up and get back to your work, please."
Around this time, I had my first encounter with one of the school's hardest families, a mixed-race squad of kids who looked like sinister gypsies from some Enid Blyton adventure.
The middle kid, who's a couple of years older than me, approached me in the playground one day.
"I'll show you a trick. Let your arm go limp", he commanded.
I did as asked, then he grabbed my wrist and shook my arm violently, causing the muscles to spasm horribly, then walked off, laughing to himself.
Fast forward 12 years, and I'm sitting in my living-room, practically frozen with fear as this same kid - now a big scary man with a fondness for knives and headbutts - threatens to bite my face off, and indeed, the faces of my three friends who are also with me, as he experiences a very-bad-time-indeed smoking too much cannabis.
And I'm thinking "Which fucking idiot thought it might be a good idea to invite the school psychopath round to my flat, like?"

Bohemian Sandy unexpectedly reveals mystery.

2009-12-09T05:29:00.000-08:00

Being as my old man and his oft-angry partner were of the Bohemian, 70's lecturer persuasion, their stinky gaff in Gosforth was often filled with their Bohemian, 70's lecturer friends with their trainee-Bohemian offspring.
One such sprog was a girl of my age called Sandy, with jet black hair and blue eyes, and a confident nature about her.
The sprawling, three-storey house was a great place to play hide-and-seek and we were involved in a game one day when I bumped into Sandy on the landing.
"Quick, in here", she said, pulling me into my dad's bedroom, "I want to show you something."
She then lay on the white fur-rug bed throw (some classy bedding choices going on there, like, dad...), pulled down her knickers, and said "There. I've never shown anyone that before."
"Ermm, great...thanks", I muttered, one eye on the door. "Anyway, I'd better go and find a place to hide." - and I stumbled off down the stairs, somewhat thrown by this unexpected turn of events.
"I'd better go and find a place to hide"? Good work, Andy-Pandy, you silver-tongued wooer of hot Bohemian chicks.
Alas to say, she never showed me it again. I'm guessing that she was hoping for a more enthusiastic reaction first time around.

Still not sussed I'm dressed in brown all the time.

2009-12-08T11:46:00.000-08:00

I'd go as far as to say that I was pretty happy at Wingrove Juniors, I reckon. Early on, a fuck-off massive kid in our year indulged himself in a few months of mildly bullying me, along with his crap side-kick, who always used to honk of vinegar, I seem to remember, but it was nothing majorly traumatic; chinese burns, mostly, or ' forearm twists' as they're doubtless now known in a world gone Politically Correct.
I was totally crap at art from the off, and teachers would comment that they'd never have thought I'd be so bad at it, what with my mam being an art teacher and all. I heard this comment from teachers and kids alike all through my school years. It was bollocks then and it's equally bollocks now, that statement. I've inherited a love and appreciation for the Arts, and that's a lot to do with my mam. Unfortunately, I also inherited really strong left-handed genes from my dad, to the point where the left side of my body has always felt much stronger and more capable than the right.
It basically means I'm a bit clumsy and uncoordinated sometimes, especially my handwriting , which, I've since discovered, is practically identical to Morrissey's mentalist scrawl.
It also means I'll never be able to juggle, so thank heavens for small fucking mercies, eh?
I possessed a hand-writing 'style' that was completely unacceptable to the fascist regime running the show. Our daily hand-writing lessons were like torture to me, I just couldn't draw round B's and straight T's -mine were all over the fucking shop.
When I got really excited, if I was writing a story or something, my brain would work faster than my hand could write and it would all turn into an illegible mess halfway down the page.
At the time, I remember pointing out that I was just going to type everything when I grew up, anyway, so let's not get all hung up on the presentation now, shall we not? And furthermore, discounting the appalling presentation, the quality of my work was excellent, so who really gives a shit what it looked like? And that's how I justified stopping paying attention in the hand-writing lessons, because I figured I'd learned enough about it for my needs.
Born sloppy, you see. The story of my life...

Books, not just for mooks.

2009-12-07T13:32:00.000-08:00

I devoured books when I was a kid. Put me in a book and I was gone.
Around the age of eight or nine,I got into the habit of picking up books off my mother's shelf at home and wandering off to read them somewhere quiet.
To say that my mam only had literature of a disturbing, violent or sexual nature wouldn't be true at all, because we had all sorts, from Greek classics to Watership Fucking Down, but there was definitely some stuff I'd be wary- and in some cases, forbidding - about my own child reading.
Last Exit To Brooklyn, for example, with its brutal gang rapes, drunken wife-beating and the murder and crucifixion of a homosexual paedophile - that's a book I wish I'd maybe saved for later in my life.
There was also Erica Jong's feminist classic, Fear of Flying (which, incidentally, I picked up because I'd never been in a plane and was scared of them myself...) which proved to be a rapid education.
I wasn't even ten, yet I was already down with the notion of the Zipless Fuck. And is that a good thing, I often ask myself...

the Ginger kid

2009-12-06T05:43:00.000-08:00

I was friends with a ginger kid up the road from us around this time.
He was a particularly vibrant shade of ginger. Also, although he wasn't actually a Jock, he had the most Scottish name I've ever heard, which I'm not going to use, so let's call him Lachlan McMurdo instead, because it was along those lines.

Wee Lachlan stands out in my memory for three reasons.

1) We were once playing Kung Fu on a garage roof next to a school playing field. I Kung Fu-ed him off the roof and onto the field. It was only a short drop but, unfortunately, he landed in the middle of the biggest patch of nettles I'd ever seen, wearing shorts and a T-Shirt. He was instantly transformed into one screaming, puffy, carrot-topped rash. His mam blamed me when I took him home, which I thought was a bit harsh. You play the game, you run the risks, innit?

2) His dad once called round and threatened to chin me after I gave Lachlan his Action Man that I'd borrowed back, sans several fingers and his nose. I'll own up to absent-mindedly chewing the fingers off, but the nose was an accident - Action Man was in the grip of an evil villain who tortured him by scraping his face down our stair-bannister, and his nose done came clean off.
I had to give Lachlan my Steve Austin, Six Million Dollar Man figure to make amends, and also to stop his old man from kicking me all over.

3) Lachlan grew up to be a proper Goth weirdo, which culminated in him and his black-clad cronies getting nicked after they'd taken up tomb-raiding as a hobby, and also as a means of collecting unusual percussive instruments, such as human thigh-bones and skulls. As he was only 17, Lachlan avoided the spell of jail-time that everyone else concerned got, but it properly battered his head and he was never really the same again after the court case, falling into a long-term struggle with his mental health.

So let that be a lesson to you - don't be digging up dead bodies in order to obtain some zany drumsticks for your shonky Goth band, it'll only end in tears.

Fenham - top 70's playspots.

2009-12-05T06:35:00.000-08:00

Nuns Moor Park AKA Nunnzy Park, just down the road from my house. Boasted two or three bleak toilet-blocks covered in crude drawings of genitalia and messages like "meet here tues at 6 for a fat cock". I thought it was daft leaving messages like that.. were girls going to come into the Gents and read them? I couldn't see it, myself...
Also home to the splendidly-named Fenham gang, the Wreck Mad Mob, whose name was scrawled across, or carved into, pretty much every flat surface in the park.
Actually, I now strongly suspect that the Wreck Mad Mob was just one kid with a marker pen, a penknife and a lot of spare time on his hands, as I never, ever heard of anyone actually encountering them. Or maybe they just killed and ate all of their victims.
There were also the sprawling grounds of the Newcastle General Hospital directly opposite the park, and specifically, the Wall of Death.
In an early example of recycling, some kids had transformed around a dozen discarded hospital mattresses into a veritable kids paradise, simply by placing them in a pile under a very high wall.
The Wall of Death must have been fifteen feet, easy, and anyone who missed the mattresses would have surely broken bones, at least. No-one ever did, as far as I'm aware, although I did once manage to bite into my tongue when I landed, losing a fairly unnerving amount of blood in the process.

Nana lies, causes phobia

2009-12-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

So from around eight till ten, there seems to be a bit of a void in my memory. That's to say, nothing cataclysmic stands out. My parents continued to be divorced, and Saturdays out with my old man would inevitably involve visits to one or more of his female acquaintances, despite the fact that he was still living with K, the strident feminist, in Gosforth. I liked most of them, apart from the one we'll call K2, as she shared a name with the one I've called K, confusingly.

Dad had been 'friends' with her since I was about five but I never really felt the big love for her, she always seemed quite nervy and self-interested.

My mam dated blokes from time to time, but it's not like I had more uncles than any other kid in the street, to borrow a line from Kes. Thankfully,none of them nonced me up, and none of them stuck around long enough to exude any kind of paternal influence, either, so swings and roundabouts, I guess.

An honourable mention should go out at this point to my Nana, my dad's mam, who we would visit at her council flat in the Longbenton area of town every Saturday. She had the driest skin I've ever kissed, always smelt strongly of cleaning agents and fed us exclusively fried foods and huge chunks of Battenburg cake. Whenever she talked to my dad, she would preface practically everything she said with the exclamation "Eeh, our Stuart." An avid watcher of TV,she had the terrible horn for Bruce Forsyth - in my mind, the Generation Game is always on the telly round at Nana's.
She also had a missing fingernail on the pinky of one hand, which she claimed had been sucked away down a plughole while she was washing up once.
This blatant fucking lie led me to suffer from an aversion that bordered on phobia towards plugs, plugholes and all other things sink-related for about a decade, until I clicked on that she'd been talking right out of her arse, God rest her.
Mind, you can see where my dad gets it from.

Beginning to deviate.

2009-12-03T02:02:00.000-08:00

When I was around 10, I found a crumpled fiver under the sofa in the Gosforth house.
Bear in mind that my pocket money then was around 30p a week, so this was almost an insane amount of money to me.
"Hmmm", I thought to myself, "If I tell dad I've just found this, I'll be lucky to get a pat on the head and a Milky Bar out of it. But, if I take said fiver out when we go to the park later, I can 'find' it there instead, and then no-one can take it off me."
So that's what I did and it worked like a charm - everyone was really excited and pleased for me and the fiver went home in the pocket of my dung-brown trousers.
Unfortunately though, mam was waiting for me at home, peering down from her lofty perch up on the moral high ground.
She insisted that I share my windfall with others less fortunate, so this is how the money ended up being divvied up.
£1.50 went to Wor Kid, on account of him being my brother.
£1.00 went to starving African children, on account of them not having anything in for their bit teas.
£2.50 went to me, in recognition of the fact that I was the brains behind the caper. I blew the lot on Asterix books and basked in the illicit warm glow that accompanies acts of extreme deviousness.

76-77 punk rock education

2009-12-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

Given half a chance, my old man will mutter darkly at some length about how badly my last year at Junior School was structured, and how the school governors must have been mental to allow such a bizarre teaching set-up.
Looking back, it does seem a bit weird, mind. The way it worked was this: As we were a year away from starting secondary education, where you change lessons on pretty much an hourly basis, Wingrove decided that the final year of junior school would be open-plan. There were no structured lessons, and pupils could wander between two or three rooms, doing maths and english as and when they pleased, or some art, or just hang out in the library.
To provide some form of structure, pupils were meant to do maths and english tests using a chart ie Blue levels 1-5 followed by green levels 1-5 etc, etc. As long as you were up to date on these, you could just chill out, basically.
I suppose it must have worked for some kids because not everybody in our year grew up to be a drug-addled booze lord like me, but I just had a fucking laugh, pretty much all year round.
Every once in a while, a teacher would ask you what level you were up to in maths. As long as you had a vague idea what level you should be at, you were fine. "Yellow four, sir" you'd say, confidently, and he'd nod and wander off, usually. Once in a while, he'd ask you to come and find him with your exercise book that day so you could show your work, and this is where the animal cunning comes in.
Every time this happened to me, I would go to the book store, get a new book, fill in one or two pages with sums leading up to the level I was meant to be at and then take it to the teacher.

Having had the new book rubber-stamped by him meant I was now officially at that level, and had just leap-frogged six levels in one fell swoop. If it came on top and all else failed you could always 'lose' all your books and lie about level you'd been on, because they didn't have the first fucking idea.
As a result of all this chicanery, most of my memories of year four of juniors involve being slouched on a beanbag in the school library, steadily working my way through their extensive collection of Tin Tin adventures.
If the spirit of punk is indeed all about making your rules and doing whatever you want, then I think I was total fucking punk rock that year, despite the fact that my mam was still shopping for my clothes in Brown Town.
That's my year four picture above. I 'edited' it a few years back for the Friends Reunited website but they asked me to take it down due to us living in a Nanny State and them having no fucking sense of humour whatsoever, or something.

Hoo man, Hamlet, your uncle killed your fatha. Soz like.

2009-12-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

I've got this great idea for a play, right? What it is, right, it's Hamlet, okay, but instead of all that Shakespearian flowery-talking, I'm going to translate it into modern language, so everyone can understand what's happening easier. Oh, and I thought I'd get a load of ten-year old Geordie kids to perform it, and maybe add a gymnastics scene to the play. It's a sure-fire winner!

Mike Parkin was our main year four teacher and God fucking bless him forever for getting me involved with his school play, because it remains one of the best times I've ever had in my life.
I played the part of Polonius, father of Ophelia and confidant of the Queen. I got stabbed by Hamlet in Act III Scene III, lurking behind an arras* in the Queen's chamber. My costume was a floor length, gold robe with more than a hint of curtains about it, a head full of talc and a load of yak hair glued onto my chin.

Mike's translation of the play into English was something else. The 'To be or not to be' speech was rendered something like "Sometimes, I think I should just kill mesel', but then I think 'Naar Hamlet, that would be daft'. But if I was dead I would get some peace. Then I think I should mebbees kill me uncle, but I just divvent knaa."

Also, in a bid to be inclusive to all, he invented a new bit in the play where acrobats tumble for the King's amusement, in which the rest of the class who didn't have speaking parts lobbed themselves aimlessly around the stage.

Hamlet was played by Wingrove's very own version of David Watts, the dashing blond captain of the football team, loved by the girls, admired by the boys.

I wanted to be this kid so badly when I was young that it hurt, I felt sure that a glittering, golden career lay ahead of him in whatever field he chose.
As it turned out, he went straight from school to work at a dole office in Byker, and remains in the civil service to this day, I believe. Hellish though my life has undoubtedly been in places, I wouldn't swap him for his instead.

*Arras - a curtain. Gave rise to a thousand 'stabbed in the arras' jokes by luvvies all over the land.

Scottish Country Dance Puff-Shoes Trauma

2009-11-30T01:54:00.000-08:00

I'm probably painting you a picture of me being all cool and street when I was a nipper, I reckon. It's now time to blow that out of the water by revealing that I took Scottish Country Dance classes every Saturday for at least a year at around this time.
I suspect the initial idea for this might have been my dad's, being as though the church hall where lessons were held was just round the corner from his gaff in Gosforth, and it got me out of the house for a few hours each weekend.
The major downside was that I had to clad my feet in bespoke puff-shoes, exactly like the ones in the pic. However, in an environment like the dance class, where everyone had to wear them, they weren't that bad. Take them out of that environment, though, and they were liable to attract all sorts of negative attention, as I was about to discover, the hard way....
One Saturday, I was booked to play in a cub scout's football tournament a couple of hours after the dance lesson ended. (Yes, I was in the cub scouts, just couldn't be arsed to mention it earlier. 49th Pack, Newcastle & Borders, if you're interested.) I didn't actually have any trainers for this, and the plan was to dive into town and pick a new pair up on the way to the sports centre.
However, for whatever reason, my dad decided that we were too pushed for time to do this, and told me I'd be fine wearing my ballet slippers instead, despite my protests that I really wasn't sure that this was one of his better ideas.
I can still remember the wail of disbelief that greeted my arrival as me and my puff-shoes walked out onto one of the 5-a-side courts. I was then instantly surrounded by a couple of hundred laughing kids, all of them eager to ask me just WHAT THE FUCK were those things on my feet.
Now, I've been over this with my dad on several occasions, and he always claims that he was completely unaware of the effect that ballet shoes would have on my peers. This makes him a total dumb-ass fuckwit in my book, but I think I'd prefer him to be that than to dwell on the other possibilty, which is that he totally did it on purpose, for reasons best known only unto himself.

Jubilee celebrations, Mam-style.

2009-11-29T10:35:00.000-08:00

This one still rankles a bit, truth be told. Back in 1977, strange as it may seem now, a significant portion of the population actually quite respected and admired the royal family, possibly because they weren't all forever humping other people's spouses and sic-ing their bull terriers on commoners back then, I'm guessing.
Anyway, seeing as we lived on a corner and faced a hill, I had the choice of three street parties to go to on the day of the Silver Jubilee, and I was planning on visiting them all.
So where does my mam take me and Wor Kid to celebrate our glorious monarch's landmark event? Fucking Scotland.
Or, to be precise, a miserable, damp camp-site, somewhere on the west coast of Fucking Scotland, probably one of the few places in the Commonwealth and all of its colonies that had made absolutely no plans to make any merriment whatsoever on Jubilee day.
I tell a lie, they had a beacon up on a hill, my mam reckoned, one of hundreds that would be lit all across the land simultaneously, in a splendid orgy of fire, or something.
Except we couldn't find it. Went up hill in dark, no other people, or indeed, a beacon at summit. Came down hill, went back to tent, carved 'FUCK THIS SHITTY LIFE' into right thigh with penknife...
I made that last bit up for dramatic effect, but honestly, if any other kid in the UK had a more miserable Jubilee than me then they must have spent the day taking it all ways off one or more of their uncles.

TV fame with Mr Beardface.

2009-11-28T11:21:00.000-08:00

Just to add insult to injury, I was actually on the telly a week before the Jubilee, at a mocked-up street party in the Tyne Tees TV studios, showing the Geordie nation the perils that can befall a small child at such an event, and how to deal with them.
Allow me to explain. My aunt Helen - who wasn't actually my aunt at all but was a rather stern elderly wifey who lived near my Mam's parents - was head of the Red Cross in the North East.
The local news show, Northern Life, asked her if she would appear on the show along with a couple of children, in a short piece informing viewers how to cope with the sort of minor injuries that could possibly occur at your average Jubilee celebration.
And so it came to pass that me, my not-aunt Helen, Wor Kid and a luxuriantly-bearded young presenter by the name of Paul Frost (pictured) spent five minutes chatting stood around a trestle table full of plates of sandwiches and cakes. Every once in a while, I would fake a burn from a tea-urn (put a damp cloth on it), or Wor Kid would pretend to choke on a crisp (slap firmly on the back).
Here's a tip for anyone appearing on live television who may wish to watch themselves at a later date - make sure that you appear on TV in an era in which domestic video recording devices are commercially available, otherwise you're fucked.
So, not only did I attend the only make-believe street party happening in the North-East that year and also miss out on all the real ones, I never actually got to see my childhood five minutes of fame. Still, one of the kids at school the next day that said my urn-burn face was miles better than Wor Kid's crisp-choke mime, so that was some consolation.
I actually tried to track this footage down at Tyne Tees a few years back, but I was well pissed-up when I phoned them with my query (at ten in the AM) so I didn't get very far with it.
I bet you if I ran amok with a shooter in a playground they'd dig it out for the news fast enough, though. Mind, I probably wouldn't get to see it even then, would I? I've not thought this through properly...

Black Superman vs the Brown-Town midget

2009-11-27T02:37:00.000-08:00

Conversation in Wingrove Juniors assembly, circa July 1977.
"Guess who's coming to the West End Boys Club tomorrow?"
"Who, like?"
"Fucking Muhammad Ali, man!"
"Is he shite, man! You're proper mental, yee!"
And then the teacher announced that, yes, the Black Superman would indeed be visiting the club tomorrow for an hour or so, and we were all invited.
Now, I've long since pondered just what the fuck the most famous man in the planet at that time was doing hanging out in a dilapidated youth club in Fenham.
A little light googling reveals that he was in the UK to renew his marriage vows...in a mosque in South Shields. Again, if this was me, I'd have renewed them a little closer to home and not crossed the Atlantic in order to do so. I would probably have transported my entourage in something a bit less visible than an open-topped double-decker bus (pictured) as well.
Anyway, Ali arrived amid scenes of utter mayhem, with scores of kids hanging onto him, going "Haway Mohammad, sign this, man!"
It was quickly announced that he'd be signing one autograph only and we'd all get photocopies, which was a bit of a fucking swizz, frankly, but we were all allowed to queue for a handshake.
Like most of the kids, I queued, shook hands with the great man, then went straight to the back of the queue to get ready to shake his hand all over again. We all must have done it three times before he rumbled he was meeting the same kids over and over...
So, Wingrove School drew to a close with an unforeseen encounter with a proper legend.
The next time I encountered another uber-famous black boxer, he was desperately trying to get himself arrested as a protest against the war in Iraq, but that's ages away yet.

Ties that bind - Big School begins.

2009-11-26T03:19:00.000-08:00

First day of big school and I'm at home, half an hour before my first assembly, crying hysterically in front of a full-length mirror, and it's all my own stupid bastard fault.
Why? Well, I'd had the full uniform for a few weeks, but, because I was Born Sloppy, I'd neglected to work out how one goes about tying a tie, figuring it would be a piece of piss, which it totally wasn't.
Still, at least I was spared the trauma faced by every other kid starting that day, which was wondering which class I'd be placed in, because I'd been given a tip-off about this before the start of the summer holidays.
Apparently, my mam had seen my name on the new school library cards that were being made, and mine said that I was in the top form.
Now, exactly how an Art teacher happened to chance upon the library cards is a mystery, especially what with the library being on the other side of the school from the Art block. My guess is that my mam rifled through the new cards till she found the one with my name on it, but it was still a handy thing to know.
My ultimate secondary school Top Tip would be to arrive on the first day actually wearing your uniform. One kid in our year came in his civvies on the first day and was still pretty much universally known as 'Ginger Piss-Tramp' when he left five years later.
Rutherford Comprehensive school held about 1,500 pupils and was separated into two schools, joined together by a two-thirds of a mile long, dog-legged corridor that cut across the playing fields, known as the Covered Way - scene of a good 90% of all acts of violence carried out in the school. When it snowed, some of the more mental kids would remove side panels from the Covered Way, anyone not paying attention was liable to get an iceball in the face while passing one of these gaps.
In a bizarre effort to destigmatise the kids about whether they were thick or not, Rutherford came up with a weird way of numbering the classes.
The one I was in was called 1O1, followed by 1P1 and 1Q1. Then there was 1R, 1S, 1T and 1U. But then cunningly, the three bottom classes were known as 1O2, 1P2 and 1Q2, so the numpty kids wouldn't feel hurt by being down the bottom end of the alphabet, I presume.
So here I was in the top class, despite having taken totally taken the piss in the final year of Juniors. It wasn't even a new school for me as my mam had taught there for years, so I'd been round the building loads of times.
One unpleasantness that year was discovering that my metalwork teacher was a geeze that my mam had briefly dated a few years previously, but had bombed out on the grounds that he was a twat. He was certainly a twat to me, probably not helped by me being appallingly bad at all things metal and wood-work related. I remember him throwing a particularly crap coat-hook I'd made across the workshop one day and thinking, "Ha, it might be shit, but my mam totally bombed you out, mate."

Wagging dinners with Mice Fartin'

2009-11-25T05:13:00.000-08:00

In year one, my best mate was a kid called Bryce Martin, a big ginger lad who didn't mind too much that I instantly renamed him Mice Fartin'.
A couple of terms in, Mice and I discovered something that hundreds of other kids already knew; lunchtime was a whole lot more fun if you spent your school dinner money on pies and sweets from the shops up the road, rather than sit in the hall and eat mashed spud and brown stew.
This arrangement worked fine until the day I forgot my school dinner money. My mam got in touch with the school secretary to ask for my dinner on tick and was told that I was supposed to be having lunches at home, not school. A quick check of the register revealed that a certain Master Fartin' was also pulling the same stroke.
We both got strapped on the hand for that one by our year tutor, and give me a tap with a belt over a detention or the numbing repetition of lines any day.
"You've been bad" THWACK! "Don't do it again." Piece of piss.
(I think this was the last year they had corporal punishment in schools, because I never got the belt again, not even when I spray-painted 'BAN SCHOOL UNIFORM - DO IT NOW!!!' in orange paint all over the side of the school mini-bus about three years on. But, as you'll find out later, I was being mind-controlled by sinister anarcho-communists at the time, so it wasn't really my fault.)
Anyways, my friendship with Mice Fartin' ended the day after our year's first parent-teacher evening. He said "All the teachers told my mam and dad that you are a canny bright kid but also a totally disorganised radgie waste of space and I should knock around with someone else instead before you drag me down into your apathetic morass. Soz, like."
Bit harsh of Mr and Mrs Fartin', I thought. Then again, you call your bairn Bryce, who's to say what's going on in your mind?

Other year one stuff.

2009-11-24T06:46:00.000-08:00

I won a prize for being the best poetry-reciter in our year, a book token, I seem to remember.
I was also a member of the school table-tennis team, the only sport I was ever any cop at.
Also played a squirrel in our school's version of Toad of Toad Hall. I remember this because I had to attend every fucking rehearsal, of which there were many, despite the fact I was only in one scene, and in fact, only had one word to say in the entire play, which was "Here!"
As in, Judge Badger, who is swearing in the jury says, "Two squirrels?", and me and some other muppet with a mask made from a painted cornflakes box and brown tights on step up smartly and say "Here!". What a fucking waste of time.
Subjects I liked were English Language and English Lit, largely because I'd already read the books on the syllabus. Subjects I wasn't arsed about or downright loathed included everything else, but especially woodwork, metalwork, biology and physics.
I already knew that my future didn't involve designing something, working out its terminal velocity or cutting up a worm to see what it had for tea.( Here's a clue - soil. Every fucking time.)

Princess Margaret braves the Covered Way.

2009-11-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

I joined Rutherford in its centenary year of 1977, and major celebrations and much making of garish murals were afoot to celebrate this momentous event.
One day, the entire school lined the Covered Way down each side and stood to attention while Princess Margaret swept regally through on her way to the school dining hall, where a lavish dinner awaited her, her fellow dignitaries and the teaching staff.
As the Covered Way had been repaired prior to her visit, she was fortunate enough not to cop an iceball to the royal face on the way there.
My mam later told me that once she got there, the Princess then made everyone sit around starving for an hour-and-a-half, while she necked several G&T's and chain-smoked a load of fags before she decided to eat something.
Good work there, Your Majesty's dirtier sister.

"Hoo. Is your mam Mrs Scott the art tekka?"

2009-11-21T09:44:00.000-08:00

I got asked this question on pretty much a daily basis for the first three years of Rutherford, 'tekka' being a Geordie-ism for teacher.
Being at school with my mam had its good points and its bad ones. The main good ones were that older kids who liked my mam were nice to me, while older kids who didn't like her were happy to let me know what a cow they thought she was, but stopped short of kicking me all over, which wouldn't have been wise, what with my mam being a tekka and all.
The major downside was that whenever I worked my ticket in class, whichever teacher I'd pissed off would instantly grass me up to my mam as soon as they met in the staff-room, so I was constantly getting bollocked for stuff that every other kid was getting away with.
Also, around this time, I seem to remember that Wor Kid got quite a nasty beating after referring to a less well-off kid in school as 'Dust Bin Billy', which earned him several sharp kicks to the head.
Hopefully, this caused Wor Kid to alter his views on the class-system in the late 70s, but it also taught me a valuable lesson - Kids of tekkas are not invincible.

Jimmy Saville, swimming pool racist.

2009-11-20T10:57:00.000-08:00

We had a swimming pool at Rutherford, which was a very big deal back then, and other schools from miles around would come to compete in big galas, whatever they are. Loads of swimming races, I'm guessing. Diving for rubber bricks, stuff like that.
The pool was closed for three out of the five years I was there, which made it a bit less of a status symbol for the school, but it was open in my first year there.
Just prior to our first lesson, we were lined up for a verucca inspection and a stern talk from the pool caretaker, a bloke with long blonde hair and a tracksuit who was was the spit of an aged Jimmy Saville.
"Now then, now then" said Sir Jimmy of the Pool, when he arrived at an Asian kid in the line, "I don't really like you darkies messing up my pool, so I want you to take special care in there", and moved on down the line, inspecting feet as he went.
That still gob-smacks me, that comment. That and the fact that no-one said anything about it, other than to laugh.
Weirdly, I can't ever remember seeing this bloke again. I think they just wheeled him out once a year to spit racist bile at impressionable first-formers and then chained him back up to the boiler till the next September.

No, no, no, yes.

2009-11-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

Around this time, my old man was seeing at least four different women, we used to spend our Saturday afternoons visiting them in turn. At one point, two of them lived on the same street... I'm reliably informed that he proposed to all four of them at around the same time and ended up marrying the one who said yes.
A shame, from my point of view, because I actually quite liked a couple of the others, whereas - as I mentioned earlier - I have never felt the big love for K2, the one who became my stepmother.
She had a daughter from an earlier marriage who was a few years younger than me and they all moved into a big, three-storey Victorian terrace looking onto the Town Moor.
Somewhat confusingly, the interior lay-out of this new house was completely identical to the one he had shared with K1 in Gosforth, and must have been designed by the same architect. It was well strange, and for a long time, it felt like my Dad had physically transported the fabric of his old life into his new one.
The first lot of reports I got from school in year one were mainly glowing, the second lot; distinctly less so. I settled into a routine of enjoying the stuff I was good at, ie creative writing, mostly, and treating pretty much everything else with a kind of half-arsed disdain. I didn't struggle with the work, I just didn't care about it enough to actually put any sort of effort into it.

So, that was 11 going on 12. What larks 12 going on 13 will bring; getting wazzed on Lady Esquire shoe-polish,becoming firm friends with The Evil Quabe, narrowly avoiding choking on my own vomit and becoming a hardcore junior activist for the far left. Well, shouting "Who killed Liddle Towers?" at passing police cars, anyway. If they had their windows rolled up...

Insect karma's gonna get you.

2009-11-18T16:01:00.000-08:00

When Punk Kev moved in five doors down from us, we quickly became mates. He was a year below me and the general joint-parental idea was that I'd show him the ropes and what gans on at Rutherford when he started at the end of the summer break.
He managed to totally scupper this plan by dropping a very heavy fireplace onto me and snapping my collarbone, two days before school was due to start.
Allow me to explain. You know how kids can be cruel, right? Well, Kev and I had spent the summer fucking-up assorted insects in an imaginative variety of ways - spraying hairspray on spider's nests and then torching them, drowning bees in actual human piss, laugh-a-minute stuff like that.
On the day in question, we were getting all biblical on the asses of a group of daddy long-legs we'd found in Kev's back garden.
Leaning against his garage wall was an old, tiled fireplace that Kev's dad had ripped out of his house.
Kev and I decided to place one of the daddy long-legs under the fireplace and then slowly rock it forward, thus crushing the insect horribly with its massive weight.
Unfortunately, this massive weight proved to be too much for Kev to support - while I was placing the daddy long-legs in the sacrificial spot, Kev tipped the fireplace forward, lost control of it and dropped it on me, which hurt like bastard fuck, unsurprisingly.
The end result of all this was a month in a figure-of-eight sling around the back of my shoulders, which was really uncomfortable and made my armpits all stinky. I also missed the first two weeks back at school, and Punk Kev had to find someone else to show him the ropes, which was probably for the best, on reflection.
And the moral of the story? The daddy long-legs has but a short time to live,anyway. Kill wasps instead, they're a right bunch of bastards who totally deserve it.

Tiny faux pas involving a swastika.

2009-11-17T16:36:00.000-08:00

Crucial Top Tip for anyone ever decorating a German exercise book at school: The swastika is emphatically NOT the national flag of Germany, alright?
Well, I didn't fucking know, did I? Looking back though, I do remember feeling vaguely uneasy as I drew it, especially when I put the crossed rifles underneath...
For comedy value, you've got to remember that I was absolutely terrible at art, so, not only did I present my teacher with a book with the Nazi flag and machine-guns drawn on it, the whole thing looked like it had been rendered by a war-hungry five year-old, which wasn't quite the striking image of Teutonic superiority that I was striving for in my head.
So, from the off, my German teacher loathed me and made me sit in a desk facing, and practically touching, hers for the rest of the term and every year thereafter.
Perversely, I decided to take German as one of my O-level choices a few years later, which meant two more years of mutual loathing and touching desks with Mrs Fattmunter-Wittch.
Hand on heart, the only German phrase I know now is 'Die katze ist unter dem tisch', or 'the cat is under the table'., and even then, I think I've got the syntax all fucked.
It's not a phrase I'll ever use, I don't think. Even if I was in a room full of Germans looking for a cat which I alone knew to be secreted under a table, I would just say 'THE CAT IS UNDER THE TABLE' slowly, repeatedly and in a loud voice, while pointing under the table, and I reckon that they'd suss it, easy.

the mystery of nicknames explained.

2009-11-16T17:35:00.000-08:00

'Rock-On' AKA my mate Tom. from 'Rock on, Tommy!' a catchphrase used by Bobby Ball of the shit comedic duo, Cannon and Ball.

'Pugsley, Wagsley, The Evil Quabe' AKA my mate Johnny. Pugsley because he looked like the kid from the Addams family, then later Wagsley, because he wagged school all the time and also still looked like the kid from the Addams family. No idea why we called him the Evil Quabe, though. Had a hilarious haircut that looked like a German helmet when he was a kid.

Gleen the Spleen AKA my mate Glen. His surname was Sitwell but everyone found it remarkably easy to resist the temptation to call him Shit-well because he was abnormally massive from a tender age and would have pulled your head right off your neck if you'd said owt like that to him.

'Pip Tomkinson' AKA something to call my mate Phil if you wanted to provoke a fight with him. Or you could just ask him why all the men in his family were circumcised, despite not being Jewish. ("Hygiene reasons", apparently. Phil's dad was quite possibly a little bit mental, he once slapped Pugsley hard in the face for not paying attention while he showed us the correct way to put a tent up.)

"Basil's Electric Snot" AKA Wor Kid, being a pun on Basil Ettrick Scott. Also later known as Elvis Costello, on account of his big black NHS gepps.

Aye, anyway.

2009-11-14T04:25:00.000-08:00

I had to make a business call the other morning. As the phone was ringing, I suddenly collapsed in floods of hysterical tears, straight outta nowhere. The doctor was called out and told me to calm the fuck down and not kill myself either, which was generally sound advice.
Basically, I've never had to deal with grief before so my brain thought it would shut down rather than trying to process all the crap that goes hand-in-hand with one of your best friends dying suddenly.
Rest assured that I will be finishing this - to leave it half-done would be the final proof that I was Born Sloppy and can't change that, and I don't believe that to be true.

1-2-3-4 Hallelujah Chorus

2009-11-13T06:24:00.000-08:00

Around this time, I started becoming aware of punk rock music.
Simon who lived up the road came round with a Stranglers album but it didn't really do much for me, principally because I thought that I Feel Like A Wog was a dumb-ass title for a song, and I didn't care much for the swirly keyboards either.
Hilariously, the fat, camp kid who lived around the corner had his own sensationalist take on punk.
He told us tales of a group called Blondie, whose singer would regularly strip naked on stage and then vomit into the audience, who would then fight viciously among themselves over who got to eat said vomit. God knows where he got that particular piece of pop trivia from, but I believed every bunch-of-arse word, and it freaked me right out.
And then Punk Kev from down the road played me the first two Ramones albums and verily, the motes did fall from mine eyes.
There's something so perfect about the early Ramones albums, it's like they're made from pure, distilled essence of young, dumb fun, and I fell in love with Da Bruddas from NYC instantly and forever.
There was also Wor Kid's record collection to warily peruse. In my humble opinion, Little Feat, Genesis and the Average White Band are all big, steaming bags of cack, but there were also albums by AC/DC and Thin Lizzy in there. Massive riffs and twin guitar solos, you cannet go wrong.
First record I bought? I've been known to claim it was Jimmy Jimmy by the Undertones, but that's a big fat lie I use to sound dead cool; it was actually Take On All The World by Judas Priest, which was utter gash, on reflection.

Bring me the head of the town planner.

2009-11-12T08:04:00.000-08:00

Alright, which genius decided to demolish the Handyside Arcade and put a big old load of bollocks in its place?
For those who don't know, the Handyside was a twin-laned arcade with a wooden balcony running round the top of it, that stretched from Percy Street in the city centre up to a back-lane near St James' Park.
The shops included the stinkiest pet store I've ever been in, a tiny, depressing joke shop and the twin majesties of Fynd and Kard Bar.
Fynd sold minging Afghan coats, patchouli oil, vile herbal fags, stuff like that.
Kard Bar sold a vast array of band-related tat, from scarves to posters to mirror badges. In later years, the owner jammed the rooms out with Space Invader and Galaxian machines in order to fleece the kids that gathered there out of their pocket money.
Every Saturday for around four years, I'd get to the Handyside around 10.30 in the morning and just hang out all day, along with hundreds of other kids.
Every once in a while, packs of skinheads would run through the arcade, kicking the fuck out of anyone stood outside. However, they were always thoughtful enough to chant football songs on their way in, so you had to be either deaf, crippled or shit-thick not to get out of the way in time.
Why they knocked the fucker down and built even more bits of Eldon Square shopping mall in its place, I'll never know. Possibly because it was a meeting-place and training ground for every dodgy little bastard in the city.
People talk of cannabis as a gateway drug, one that leads to harder things. I like to think of the Handyside as a gateway destination, because pretty much everyone I ever met down there started going to shit-spots like the Broken Doll and the Mayfair around five years later.

The last time I ever drank sherry....

2009-11-11T04:12:00.000-08:00

....Was also the first time I ever drank sherry, oddly enough. There are few certainties in life, but the chances of me ever going near a sherry again are definitely somewhat slim, as I rather spoiled myself with it first time around.
My mam took a summer job teaching art to adults at Loughborough University for two weeks in 1978, so Wor Kid and I went as well. While the adults were being taught how to paint and do pottery stuff, their kids took part in activities like archery, photography and lusting after older, completely unattainable girls, in my case.
The only bit about this holiday that stands out - apart from the sherry binge, which we're coming to - is a conversation that I had with a slightly older kid from London who had a somewhat negative view of the North. He claimed that we were so culturally impoverished, the film Jaws was released in London cinemas a full two years before it made it up to us in Newcastle.
I wasn't 100% on this, but I remember thinking that this statement was somewhat dubious.
"I can't hear you, mate, your mouth's full of shit.", as John Cooper Clarke once said.
Anyways, on the last night of the summer school, an open-air goodbye party was held in the college grounds.
One feature of this party was a trestle table heaving with glasses of sherry. I soon noticed that it could be better described as an unguarded, unmanned trestle table heaving with glasses of sherry, and decided that a glass or two wouldn't go amiss, what with it being a party and all.
I wandered off behind a tree, drained the two glasses I'd swagged and returned to the table to repeat the operation.
I repeated this move several times in around half-an-hour and rapidly got totally arseholed, a fact which was quickly brought to the attention of my horrified mother.
I was escorted/carried back to my room and poured into my bed as I had my first-ever attack of drunken remorse and kept mumbling that I was sorry that I was so shit.
When I woke in the morning, I'd puked in my sleep. I'd been lying on my side - if I'd been on my back instead, that would most likely have been Game Over for me, I reckon.
On the train all the way back home, I felt like death and had a banging head, but I also felt pretty cool, there was something about the hungover state that said I'd had a good time, a grown-up time, and now I was paying the price for my pleasure.

Anarchy Vs Mummy's cleaning lady.

2009-11-09T05:58:00.000-08:00

Some of the maddest kids I met hanging out at the Handyside were also some of the richest ones, privately-schooled black sheep kids.
Take a kid called PiL, for example. He was a glue-sniffin', Crass-lovin', parent-robbin' ball of gleeful chaos, whose old man had founded a very-well-known-indeed clothing company whose jackets are prized by mountaineers and charvers in equal measures. Lost touch with him years ago, last I heard he was a dreadlocked trustafarian who spent all his time wind-surfing and snow-boarding on daddy's dollar.
And then there was Orgazm, which was a much better punk name than his real one, which was Orlando. He lived in a huge, four-storey place just outside the city centre. I remember him once telling me that his own personal contribution towards Smashing The State was lying in his bed and gobbing greenies at the ceiling, which his mother's cleaning lady then had to wipe off. Punk as fuck, eh?
I Googled him recently and discovered that he and his brother (the mightily-named Phineas) are direct descendants of William the Conquerer and can trace their royal blood-line back over 19 generations. Again, punk as fuck.
There was also another kid (who I'm reluctant to name, in case he tracks me down )who just radiated bad vibes and negative energy from an early age. His folks owned a massive motor company in the North-East and it seemed like his own future was assured as being a rosy one.
Decades on, he's done time for killing a hitch-hiker in a car crash and also some heroin-related stuff.
No word of a lie, last time I saw him, I felt his presence first. I was walking through town about three years back when I became aware of something uptight and aggressive sending out waves of nasty energy somewhere on my left. I looked round and there he was, stood in a shop doorway, scowling at the world.
Without wishing to delve into the world of mystical hippy bollocks, I genuinely did sense him before I saw him, and it was a thoroughly strange sensation.
And no, I didn't stop for a quick catch-up on the good old days. I kept right on moving, trying my very best to look like someone who he didn't know.

Relegation, Resignation and spitting hate.

2009-11-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

Two greatly significant things happened in my third year at Rutherford. The first one was that I got dropped a class-stream, after two years of arsing about finally had a significant effect on my work.
The second thing was my mam resigning from her job after an incident in which a kid lobbed a chair at her in the classroom. She promptly threw it straight back and then went and resigned, as she could see it was only a matter of time before she ended up knifing some little scrote.
These two events gave me a massive sense of personal freedom. For one thing, I wasn't mingling with the chess-playing, violin-lessoning posh kids any more. And for another, as my mam wasn't there every day with me, my teachers could no longer grass me up instantly for even the slightest of rule-breaks, like they used to.
If they wanted to contact my mother, they had to go through the normal parent-teacher channels ie writing a letter home, and being teachers in an over-crowed inner-city comprehensive full of kids considerably more mental than me, they simply couldn't be arsed with it.
I started trying to form my first bands around this point. My initial effort featured me on vocals and Johnny AKA Pugsley AKA Wagsley on drums. We fell apart after about three hours following a heated argument about whether the band should be called Skotty and the Motherfuckers (my choice) or Johnny and the Motherfuckers (his choice).
Although we were only 13/14 at this point, there was a kid in our year called Trotter who was coining in about thirty notes a week playing the drums at come-as-you-please nights round the local Working Mens Clubs.
I decided to enlist him for a jam sesh in the school's music block, along with a new kid in our class called Eddie, who would play guitar - appallingly badly, as it turned out.
Our school's music room had a window about two feet square that looked out onto the part of the playing-fields where the hard kids all smoked. (Our school actually had two unofficial smoking areas - hard kids behind the music block, posh kids behind the metalwork block. You cannet whack a good bit of class division)
As we started our first 'song' - a composition of mine called Wet Dream Addict, which I'd totally ripped from Orgasm Addict by the Buzzcocks - the hard kids went totally mental and started crowding round the window, screaming abuse.
Then they started gobbing on the window. By the time the song spluttered to a halt, the window was completely covered in greenies and hockle, and we couldn't see a thing out of it any more.
I look back at that lunch-time jam session fondly as the day that I discovered that simply screaming into a microphone made me a focal point and also had the power to wind people up something terrible, and I was hooked. Fuck school, fuck work, I'm starting a rock'n'roll band and heading for the top of the world, Ma...

Hmmm, adult debate or spray-paint?

2009-11-06T08:30:00.000-08:00

Around this time, I started knocking about with a new kid from school whose parents came from healthy, raving Communist stock, posters of Lenin and Marx in the house, gourmet brown rice meals etc.
I won't name him because he's a bit of a Face in local government these days, but we were both drawn to a weird new magazine that had started being distributed outside our school gates, which went by the name of Blott.
I've searched the net in vain for any mention of Blott, but it was funded by the National Union of School Students, a totally sketchy organization who were themselves presumably funded by some faction of the hard left of the Labour Party, because the entire comic was one long anti-Thatcher diatribe.
Things I remember about Blott are: A full page headshot of Thatcher, which had "ONE MESSAGE, MAGGIE - FUCK OFF!!!!" scrawled across it in marker pen, the police only ever being referred to as 'THE PIGS', and, most hilariously of all, a po-faced article disseminating the lyrics of the song Jilted John by Jilted John, saying how awful it was that he should call his ex a slag for dumping him and refer to her new bloke as a puff, so don't buy the record etc etc.
Now, even at the age of 13, I was aware that this song was, in actual fact, a spot-on, two chord genius piss-take of the punk movement and not to be taken seriously by any means.
If you don't know it, here are the lyrics:
Jilted John
Jilted John

I've been going out with a girl,
her name is Julie
But last night she said to me,
when we were watching telly

(This is what she said)

She said listen John, I love you
But there's this bloke, I fancy
I don't want to two time you,
so it's the end for you and me

Who's this bloke I asked her
Goooooordon, she replied
Not THAT puff, I said dismayed
Yes but he's no puff she cried

(He's more of a man than you'll ever be)

Here we go, two three four

I was so upset that I cried,
all the way to the chip shop

When I came out there was Gordon,
standing at the bus stop

(And guess who was with him? Yeah, Julie, and they were both laughing at me)

Oh, she is cruel and heartless
to pack me for Gordon
Just cos he's better looking than me
Just cos he's cool and trendy

But I know he's a moron, Gordon is a moron
Gordon is a moron, Gordon is a moron

Here we go, two three four

Oh she's a slag and he's a creep
She's a tart, he's very cheap
She is a slut, he thinks he's tough
She is a bitch, he is a puff
Yeah yeah, it's not fair
Yeah yeah, it's not fair

(I'm so upset)

I'm so upset, I'm so upset, yeah yeah

(I ought to smash his face in.)

(Yeah, but he's bigger than me. In't he?)

(I know, I'll get my mate Barry to hit him. He'd flatten him)

(Yeah but Barry's a mate of Gordon's in'e?)

(Oh well, I don't care)

I don't care
I don't care
Cause she's a slag and he's a creep
she's a tart, he's very cheap
she is a slut, he thinks he's tough......

Getting pop stuff totally wrong aside, what really appealed to us about Blott were the frequent diatribes against the hideous shackles of the school uniform. Along with a couple of slightly older kids who didn't have the smarts to know any better, we decided to attend an NUSS meeting at an address that was given out with the comic.

The 'meeting' turned out to be in someone's mam's front room just down the road from my Grandparents, and the hosts were a few hippy, lefty girls and guys who were somewhat above school-leaving age already, which was a bit odd.

After a chat about the fascist bastards at Rutherford and what we, The Kids, could do to stick it to The Man, one of the groovy guys casually rolled a grass spliff - which was the first one that either I or commie-boy had ever seen - and passed it round.

I only had a couple of tokes, didn't really feel anything yet still managed to puke my ring out on the walk home, but I was at school giving it the big "I'm a cool junkie, me" the next day.

A couple of days later, commie-boy and I launched phase one of our uniform protest, which was turning up to school in civvies instead of uniform. Well, not entirely - we had blazers and shirts on, but no ties. Also, commie-boy had opted for brown corduroy trousers while i was wearing my super-tight elasticated black ones (which are getting their own blog chapter soon, as they were the first things I got to choose myself to wear that weren't fucking brown).

Our form teacher calmly told us to come in wearing the full uniform the next day or we would be suspended, and we meekly acquiesced...or so she thought.

That very night, we entered phase two of the operation. Along with the aforementioned numpty older kids, we hopped the school walls armed with a big can of orange spray-paint. Heady with revolutionary zeal, we sprayed "BAN SCHOOL UNIFORM - DO IT NOW!!!" across our white school mini-bus and assorted walls.

Obviously, the school sussed that it was us behind it in about two seconds flat the next day and we all got hauled out of the first class of the morning.

Now, if we'd pulled this stunt two years earlier, I reckon I'd still have the scars from being brutally punished, because I can clearly remember being stood in the Head's office stood alongside an apoplectic, ginger RE teacher - who also doubled as the school's mini-bus driver - who blatantly wanted to kick the fuck out of all of us.

However, Rutherford had abandoned corporal punishment by then, so our punishment was that we had to wash the school mini-bus, one night a week, for a whole half-term ie around six times - heavy trip, man.

We largely spent these punishment sessions fannying about and throwing water over each other, I seem to remember.

Did it teach me a lesson? Nooooo, I don't think so.

Max Wall turning Japanese.

2009-11-05T16:19:00.000-08:00

I used to get my hair cut at Ian's for Men on the West Road near the school. Best thing about this was that while you waited your turn, you got to read all the back copies of Titbits magazine - a sort of 70's version of Nuts.
Worst thing was that they couldn't really cut hair, at least, not beyond a schoolboy-special short round the ears.
I had longish hair at the time and quite fancied getting it cut like the bloke from the Vapors or Bruce Foxton from the ie Jam spiky on top, long at the back.
Two things - One: I've got quite a high forehead, like Ant off Ant & Dec. Two: I went to Ian's to get it done and they hacked far too much off the top.
I didn't appreciate just how bad this haircut was until a few days later. I was having a tab on a cold morning, round the back of the metalwork block. Suddenly, on the flat roof above us, a workman appeared, wearing a full-face balaclava.
"Fucking hell!" I shouted, "It's the SAS!"
The workman looked down at me curiously, then said, witheringly, "Fucking hell, it's Max Wall."

On Through The Shite.

2009-11-04T06:46:00.000-08:00

Technically, the first band that I ever saw was Stormbringer, but you've never heard of them, not unless you happen to be an aficionado of dodgy teen metal bands who played the youth club circuit in the west end of Newcastle in the late 70's, that is.
The first proper gig I went to was at the City Hall, a triple-header featuring Def Leppard, Magnum and Whitley Bay's finest purveyors of widdly-widdly arse biscuits, the Tygers Of Pan Tang.
Being entirely unfamiliar with the back catalog of every band playing, and what with them all being rubbish anyway, I didn't particularly enjoy myself. I do remember that Magnum were proper old blokes, even back then. They must all be pushing 90 by now, I reckon, and still out there rockin'. Spandex must be an unforgiving fabric if you're wearing a colostomy bag.

Also, I recall that Def Leppard's merchandise, which featured their debut album cover, were the most hideous t-shirts I'd ever seen. The Lep, as Kerrang used to call them, could only have been a few years older than us, and this was a few years before their elevation to world-conquering fanny rats, so the audience was around 98% adolescent boys and 2% fat bikers there to see Magnum.
Next gig I went to was John Cooper Clarke, also at the Hall, and it was about ten million times better. Wor Kid had had the good taste to buy one of his early EP's, and I was totally obsessed with him. (JCC that is, not Wor Kid. I liked Wor Kid, but it wasn't obsession.)

At that time, tiny button badges were all the rage at school, but I'd blagged one from a record company exec that was about three inches wide, bright green and with a JCC verse on it - MAU MAU LOVERS COME AND GO, DREAMBOATS LEAVE HER BEHIND. A BABY DOLL TO GO MAN GO ON THE SLOPES OF THE ADULT MIND. Worn to school and combined with my Bruce Foxton/Max Wall haircut, it only helped to enhance my growing reputation as being some kind of frickin' weirdo.

27/28 years on from that gig, and I'm still of the opinion that JCC is one of our greatest living Englishmen. Exactly how he's still living, I'm not sure, because he had a prodigious skag habit for a good couple of decades.

Some people might be turned-off by this aspect of his life, but the guy's a pure fucking poet, man, that's what they're meant to do, get off their nappers and write down their visions for the wider world to marvel at. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that I believe that all British poets with drug habits should have their addictions fully sanctioned, supported and paid for by the State.
It's only fucking right, when you think about it.

DRY RAT - SHIT BAND, SHITTER NAME.

2009-11-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

Oh, fucking hell, I'm going to have to write down some of my first lyrics for this one, and what a big, steaming pile of pap they were.
My first proper band weren't proper at all, we were utterly shite. Settling on the name Dry Rat after a brief period where we were known as Scum Of The Earth, the band was entirely based in posh Jesmond, apart from me, probably because they were the only kids I knew who could afford instruments.
The line-up was me on vocals, Orgazm/Orlando on three-string bass, Eddie from school on one guitar, a tiny kid called Simon (who was about 11) on the other guitar, and his brother Phil on drums.
Rehearsals were always a pain in the arse to sort out, as for some reason, despite the fact that they lived in a big house and both went to private schools, Simon and Phil's house didn't have a telephone, so we were forever schlepping round there with all the gear and hoping they were home.
At this time, the Metro system was just about to open in Newcastle and Phil and Simon knew someone whose dad worked at HQ who had swagged them a load of big stickers that said 'SORRY THIS DOOR IS OUT OF USE' , which we adapted by writing DRY RAT over them in marker pen, and then clagged them up all over Jesmond.
I then wrote a song called Metro Misery for the band, which catalogued some of the grumbles the public had about the fledgling system.
Thankfully, I can only remember the first verse, and it went like this:
"Sorry this door is out of use/only the disabled can use the lift/always stand on the right-hand side/and you can't find a toilet anywhere/It's Metro misery, Metro misery"
The only other original composition I can recall was called Weekend Heroes, which made Metro Misery look like high art.
Again, my brain has blocked out everything but the initial verse, which went:
"You wake up early on a Saturday/the sun is shining and you feel okay/let's go down to the Handyside/strut like peacocks full of pride/take the piss, act the fool/don't be formal, you're not in school/we're the weekend heroes/oi oi oi/weekend heroes/oi oi oi."
It's the bit about fucking peacocks that gets me...
The only other song I can remember us doing is an avant-garde version of Boris the Spider by the Who. It was avant-garde in that I was the only member of the band who had actually heard the original, so I used to just shout the lyrics while the rest of them made a mad noise behind me.
Despite being totally cack, we booked a gig in a Jesmond church hall and roped in some other bands that friends of friends knew.
The line-up on the night was (headliners first):

PRETENTIOUS DRIVEL
MUSTANG
DRY RAT
DELICIOUS BOOKS.

Delicious Books stand out in my mind only because they had a song called Wank Till You Bleed, Mustang were a shit metal covers band with a fit bird singing and Pretentious Drivel had a mad, fat lad on vocals who threw himself off the stage and danced like an epileptic among the somewhat sparse audience.
All I remember about our performance is that I stood stock-still and hunched over for most of it, a la Johnny Rotten. Oh, and there was a bit of a barney backstage about how the money should be divided up. I seem to remember that Pretentious Drivel scored the lion's share, possibly on the grounds that they were bigger than the rest of us.
Not long after this gig, Eddie moved to Yorkshire and Orgazm/Orlando became a proper anarcho-punk (albeit a rather blue-blooded one) and the first person I ever saw in Newcastle with dreadlocks, and that was the end of the mighty Dry Rat.
A few years later, I discovered that there was now a real, proper, gigging and touring punk band called Dry Rat. I couldn't believe that someone else had managed to pick what may well be the shittest band name ever.

i'm on the train!!!!

2009-11-02T10:43:00.000-08:00

fuck knows if this will work, lost Word on my laptop so the plan is to C+P from notepad to blog. let's hope it doesn't go tits up, otherwise I'll have wasted a lengthy train journey.
I was meant to be interviewing Lou Reed today, but that's been put off so I can go see shitdisco in peace tonight without having to discuss the utter bollocks that is Metal Machine music with a miserable, crap-haired bloke.
Anyways, I was talking about then, not now, then being 79/80ish.
Me and punk Kev had a parting of the ways after he started going steady with a girl who I did not like. I suppose that if you're 15 and getting your hole on a regular basis, that's more important than your mates, and I fully understand that.
Mind, he ended up marrying her when he was 18, which was just plain dumb-ass, if you ask me. The marrriage lasted less than a year and ended amid some acrimony, I believe. The fact that she was regularly flattening the grass with other gadgies can't have helped matters much. I checked her out on Friends Reunited a few years back and she was bragging about the fact that she was now married to a professional Bon Jovi impersonator. Way to go, easy chick...
Anyways, I started knocking about with some other kids my age who lived down the road. Some of them went on to be my closest friends, some went on to have crippling booze and coke habits, and some of them just died.
Glen is worthy of special mention for a few reasons. One: he was leader of our gang, on account of being a good foot taller than everyone else - in his last year of Junior School, I can clearly remember seeing him walking up the road one day in his uniform. Very short trousers aren't really a good look when you're five-foot-ten with a bum-fluff tash...Two: Glen was obsessed with Sargeant Bilko and all things scam-related. He was always happy to lend money to the rest of us, but his interest rates were exhorbitant and accumulated daily. I seem to remember owing him around half the value of my mam's house at one point, which was a bit steep, considering the original loan was probably for 10 Benson or something. Three: Glen was the youngest sibling in a big Catholic family, and most of the rest had left home, leaving him with loads of room in the house.
He had a full-size pool table in his front room and a spare bedroom upstairs had been turned into his 'office', where we would gather to skin up before taking his dog for a walk.
Then there was Phil, who was just plain odd. Hyper-intelligent and at the private school up the road, Phil built a working computer from a kit when he was around 13, wrote a space invaders programme and then charged the rest of us 2p a game. Phil once told me that, from the age of around seven, he hated being a kid, hated everything about it and couldn't wait to grow old, which he never really did, ironically. Phil died aged around 35, found drowned in a reservoir near Sheffield. The last time I'd really seen him was about eight years before that, at a mate's super-posh wedding at a Country House hotel. Phil threw several people into an outdoor swimming pool, seriously pissing them off in the process, and then dived into the shallow end of the pool by mistake, scraping his not-inconsiderable nose along the bottom and taking all the skin off it. I thought I had burst my spleen laughing at him that day.

A new royal family, a wild nobility...and glue.

2009-10-31T11:01:00.000-07:00

"WE ARE THE FAMILY, WAY-YAY-YO!"

Totally Pavlovian, can't help myself, and God knows I've tried, but every time I hear the opening line of Kings of the Wild Frontier by Adam and the Ants, I have to shout out the second line, no matter where I am.
I've been doing it for nearly 27 years now, ever since I saw Adam and co performing Dog Eat Dog on Top of the Pops back in September 1980.
Orgazm AKA Orlando was totally gutted by Adam's chart success, he'd been into the Ants since the early days, before the Burundi drumming and make-up, and he wasn't at all happy about this new, chart-friendly Adam, preferring the old songs about bondage and situationism, or whatever the fuck they were about.
"I wanna go to Paris with you/see what the French boys do" does nothing for me, whereas "I feel beneath the white/there is a red skin, suffering/from centuries of taming" is a totally mental statement of intent that says 'underneath it all, I am a noble savage', and shit like that impressed me when I was 14 going on 15. He quickly lost it after the the 'Kings...' album, like.
I'm happy to say that I never went out with a white stripe over my nose, but in the year of the Dry Rat, I started experimenting ,sartorially speaking.
I bleached my hair for the first time, got it done in the old wifie's salon down the road. The trainee did it. I later entertained erotic fantasies about her, especially after Wagsley told me that his cousin had shagged her up against a tree on Nun's Moor. But I never did get to shag her, not against a tree or anywhere else. Arr well.
Anyway, I came out of the hair salon, walked up the road home and encountered my mam, who totally failed to recognise me until I said hello, at which point she let it be known that she was very disappointed in me. Fucking done now, mam, innit?
To go with the hair, I got my very own Adam-style, Victorian officer's style brocade jacket.
I later found out that his was worth daft money and he rented it from a film company's costume department rather than buying it outright.
Mine cost me fifteen nicker from Fynd in the Handyside, and I strongly suspect that it was the former property of some juvenile jazz marching band of the sort popular on council estates in Newcastle back then. (Sorry if that sounds classist, but I genuinely can't ever remember seeing gangs of girls in matching, spangly uniforms and twirling batons in the more affluents parts of Newcastle.)
My Ants jacket was red velvet, short in length and a little too tight for me. It also had heavy gold brocade over the chest, and some chunky, fringed epaulette/shoulder pad things. Also, it had no pockets at all, which made it less than practical as a jacket for regular daily use.
Shoes? Badly-scuffed, brown six-hole Doc Martens, the kiddie-size ones. (I was still only about five foot tall at this point, with proportionate-sized feet.)
Trizers? Jeans, super-tight, as Eddie from Dry Rat had shown me the magical skill of taking pants in by tacking the inner leg.
Bear in mind that my bleached hair was quite long when I got it done, and I was still growing the Max Wall fringe out, the over-all effect was Little Lord Fauntleroy joins a down-at-heel Dickensian circus. On glue.
I probably sniffed glue, or Tippex, or Lady Esquire shoe cleaner, or lighter gas, or a cleaning substance called Dabitoff, for around six months, nine months around this period, not on a heavy basis and mostly with Jesmond posh kids, around half a dozen of us, mostly boys, one girl, who snogged everyone but never properly got them out for anyone, if you want me to be crude.
She was nice though, and it's good to have a girl around when you're on the old gluebag, it stops the company getting too rowdy, just like in social situations everywhere. Ladies, eh? You gotta love them.
I'd hesitate to recommend the inhalation of noxious substances such as though I've mentioned to anyone, as they can instantly kill without warning. It doesn't happen very often, mind, but it does happen.
I had a great five minutes on Dabitoff once, when I briefly thought I was the second half of the alphabet ("Nozz, man! I AM the letters N through to Zed! I proper fucking am, man!" as I said to my companion, Nozz, at the time.), but other than that, glue was a bit crap, really. A bit seedy, stinky and messy, and it gave you headaches a lot. Plus, I'd seen proper, hardcore sniffers hanging round the Handyside and Leazes Park and they were all nasty, fucked-up mongs. "Giz two bob", that was their catchphrase, or "give me two shillings or ten pence in new money, my man, there's a good fellow" if you were Raffles, and not some spacked-out glue mong. (Sorry, re mong: I really shouldn't use it, but it was the parlance of the times, ay? Allow me some authentic leeway here, please.)
So I dipped my toes into glue, as it were, but I don't think that I got them too sticky. Thankfully, it wasn't the Drug of Choice that was I was looking for, which is just as well, because after 15 years on the glue, I'd most probably be scrawling my life story on the wall of a padded cell in my own shit by now, and that would never work out well.
They probably clean them cells once a month or so, and I'd end up rushing it. Imagine if you were writing in your own shit and you ran out of poo? Major crisis. Although, you could probably get a lend of some in a Mental Hospital no bother, I'd have thought. Writing using someone's else's shit must be REALLY nasty, though. Urrggh.

"Did you see that puff on telly last night?"

2009-10-29T03:56:00.000-07:00

That was the question that reverberated around the classrooms of Rutherford the day after Soft Cell first appeared on Top of the Pops. Yes, I saw it, but to call Marc Almond a puff would be massively missing the point...the man just oozed sleazy sexuality and all right-thinking Englishmen wanted to rip his fucking head off for it, but I was totally sold.
Here's a great story about how inept Soft Cell's record company were. If you release a single, the B-side picks up 50% of the royalties from sales. So, if you're going to release a cover version of someone else's song - like Soft Cell did with Tainted Love - be sure to stick one of your own songs on the flipside, or you won't make any money out of it.
Sadly, nobody at Some Bizarre, the band's label, was aware of this, and so it came to pass that Soft Cell's biggest selling single was backed with Where Did Our Love Go?...another cover version.
This schoolboy error must have cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds, as they only ever got performance royalties from the song. Tainted Love has been reissued a couple of times since then, and you can be damn sure that the re-releases featured a Soft Cell-penned B-side.
The album, Non Stop Erotic Cabaret, was even better, pure glitter from the gutter, with downright nasty songs like Sex Dwarf ("luring disco dollies to a life of vice") and Chips on My Shoulder ("Misery, regret, self-pity, injustice").
Soft Cell discovered E pretty much before anyone else in the UK and very quickly went mental and fell apart. They even called their second album The Art of Falling Apart. Initial copies came with a 12" single called Martin, which I still think is the finest thing Soft Cell ever did - "Martin is a boy with problems, Martin has a family history" is how it starts, and then it gets much, much darker...
Years later, I shared a house with a bloke totally obsessed with all things Marc Almond, he used to hitch around the country, following his tours.
I never took it that far, but respect is due to Marc (and Dave Ball) for teaching me that you can wear what you want and say what you like, and, beyond some knuckle-dragger wanting to rip your head off for wearing eye-liner, there aren't too many bad things that can happen to you.

The fine art of non-attendance.

2009-10-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

The first time I wagged off school was with some older, slightly numpty kids who were big on the likes of Rush,Yes and Genesis and lavishly embroidering their denim jackets with the names of said bands. I remember one of them embroidered a big whale on the back of his, in honour of the Yes "classic", Don't Kill the Whale. Wankaaaa....
Always, always hated Yes and their meandering, Prog Rock arsing-about. Funniest thing ever about Yes was when two blokes left and the pop duo Buggles (Video Killed the Radio Star) were assimilated into the band to replace them. The Prog kids at our school were gutted about that.
But I digress. I got collared the first time I wagged school, and it was all the fault of the Prog wankers.
We were in a record shop and I saw a kid who was in the sixth-form with Wor Kid, so I put the hood up on my parka so he wouldn't see me. But then, the fatter Prog kid (who looked like Private Dobermann from Sgt Bilko, but with a curly scouser wig on.) sneaked up behind me and pulled my hood down.
The kid grassed me up to Wor Kid, and Wor Kid grassed me up to my mam, the pair of grassing bastards.
My mam went mental radge when she found out, but wagging school was about to become a way of life for me, especially since Wagsley had joined when we were 14, having wagged off the Catholic school down the road so much that they'd eventually mutually decided to part company.
It would be wrong for me to write about myself without pointing out that I used to be a bit of a thieving little scrote at around this point, mainly dipping my mam's purse and my old man's wallet for the odd fiver, and, usually, blatantly getting collared for it, coz they soon got wise to my thieving ways.
I'd started smoking fags regularly by then, but that's no reason to be robbing off people, .and honestly, I feel dead bad about it now, but it happened.
Wagsley joined Rutherford in the top stream and full of bright intentions, but they soon faded, like the autumn leaves that were on the trees that September. By the time the leaves started falling, so was Wagsley's attendance rate, he said, all poetically.
Another hardcore wagger was Rock-on, who didn't go to our school, but I'd met him in the Handyside and he knew all the same kids as me in Fenham.
Rock-on attended the same private school as Phil, until he was around 14, at which point his life went spectacularly wrong and sad. His dad always seemed to be out, and the kids all roamed around the big, bare house, all on the wag from school and beating each other for their dinner money. His dad used to bulk-buy food for them, but weird items. I can recall Rock-on eating about 20 Weetabix out of a pan, because that was the only food in the house - dozens of boxes of Weetabix.
Eventually, Rock-on moved in with his mam and her beau, Alien. (actually called Alan, but Rock-on reckoned he looked like an alien. Later, he would grow an Abraham Lincoln chin-beard and have his name changed to Abe-lien by Rock-on.)
Moving from a big house in the leafy suburb of Jesmond to a crowded council flat in the badlands of North Kenton must have been a proper head-fuck for Rock-on, and he responded by completely stopping going to school, despite all efforts to get him there, pretty much finishing his education at 14.
It's a testament to his strength of character that Rock-on wasn't completely fucked-up by all of this, and is now a well-adjusted, happily married dad of two with a lovely house in Brighton, and one of the nicest blokes that you'll ever meet. I do love a happy ending...

Raffles and Wagsley ,Valium a go-go.

2009-10-27T15:34:00.000-07:00

One fine school day, finding ourselves at a loose end and not at school, Wagsley and I burgled Phil's mam's house.
Actually, that sounds terrible. It was canny bad and I'm not defending our actions, but 'Wagsley and I entered Phil's mam's house via an open window, necked some of her valium and then wandered about, looking at stuff'' would be a more accurate description, we didn't actually rob anything (apart from the pills, obviously...)
Anyway, she came home and collared us, master thieves that we were. Not at all happy with our explanation that we were waiting for Phil to come home and we had found the front door open, she threw us out and then phoned the Dibble.
Off our tits on the valium but still fully aware that life was about to get very bad indeed, Wagsley and I wandered around town for a few hours in a haze, and put together a cunning plan of action to evade capture; we would each return home, steal items of value and then move to a vacant caravan that Wagsley claimed to know of near Hexham (some 30 miles away). Once there, we would break in, and then set up home and live off the land, and off selling our stolen-from-home items of value to passers-by. Genius.
Sadly, the first thing that happened when I wobbled through the front door at home soon after putting our cunning plan together was my mam phoning the cops and informing them of my arrival home, and they had a car down about two minutes later.
I can remember laughing when the policeman read me my rights, because it was just like the telly and seemed absurdly clichéd, somehow. My mam duly added to the general sense of high drama by bursting into tears as I was told that I had the right to remain silent and the rest.
Wagsley and I both totally 'fessed up to our crimes, and were bailed pending further action from Phil's mam.
I celebrated my freedom by going home and necking loads of pills from the medicine cabinet, and then instantly informing my mam of said overdose, just in case she was, like, planning on sitting down and relaxing after her stressful day, or something.
Handily, we only lived about five minutes walk from Newcastle General hospital, so, in no time at all, I was drinking some vile, tar-based brew that makes you puke your fucking ring out, sharpish.
Next morning, I woke up in the gaily-decorated children's ward, surrounded by really ill younger kids and collages of Disney characters. I got dressed, went to the toilets, locked myself in a cubicle and then squeezed out of the window and away, straight back home, where I arrived approximately five seconds before a squad car, which promptly returned me to the hospital.
Once back in hozzy and under watch, I was assessed by a child psychiatrist, who quickly realised, as I did, was that I wasn't mental, I just hated school a lot. He also told me that breaking into houses is a proper shitty thing to do, and I should heartily apologise to Phil's mam. I took his advice to heart and she decided not to press charges, and the police said 'do it again and we'll fuck your shit up, homes', but in police-speak ie a formal caution, and we never burgled anyone else's mam's house, or indeed, any houses at all, ever again.
Phil was a bit pissed off with us both for a while, but mates is mates, innit? And anyway, it's not like we had a shit on his bed or anything.

Waggers reunion cancelled due to orange fight.

2009-10-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

At the end of one term in the fourth year, Rock-on decided to host a wagger's reunion bash at his dad's house.
Unfortunately, this was cancelled after Rock-on's dad bulk-purchased a boxload of oranges for the kids, which led to a full-scale orange fight, which led to broken windows and bits of orange all over the house, which led to Rock-on's dad tracking him down in Fenham, dragging him into his car and slapping the shit out of him.
Undaunted, Wagsley and I held a reunion for two in the afternoon at his house, once his mam had gone to work.
I seem to remember we were drinking ready-mixed bottles of Sangria from the local offie. Whatever it was, Wagsley totally passed out, so I covered his face in biro and make-up and then legged it.
I encountered a somewhat irate Wagsley in the street a few hours later, hell-bent on revenge. He pulled my head down and tried to kick me in the face. Luckily, he was still mullered, so he didn't do much damage, missing with most of his kicks. Happy days...
Around this time, I started looking at the possibility of going to another school, because I wasn't happy at Rutherford. It's not that I was getting bullied, well, not beyond older kids occasionally taxing my cigarettes, that is, I just hated all of the stuff that I didn't like.

Here's a rundown of my O-level choices (and the compulsory stuff), and my thoughts about them.

MATHS - I've decided that, beyond basic mental addition (which I'm pretty good at anyway, possibly because my dad was the Maths Wonderboy of Byker) then I don't need to know algebra and all that other shite, so I don't really bother with it. Also, the teacher is a Neanderthal-looking bloke who started shouting on day one, which left him with nowhere to go but more shouting, which gets very tiresome very quickly. I bumped into him in Rosie's Bar in the town years after I left school. He was totally pissed, and confided in me that he often fantasised about murdering his wife, which was a trifle un-nerving.

ENGLISH - Really like it, try not miss it. The teacher susses on that I am dead good at creative writing but crap at just about everything else, which encourages me to write more, and better.

RE - Really enjoyed this as well, but only because our RE teacher for the last two years was our English Teacher moon-lighting to earn some extra cash,, and we did little in the way of religious education. Instead, he used to tell us stories about going on the piss with the lads in Spain the year before, which was far more entertaining. Before he taught us, RE was mainly learned from some ancient text-books that had been horrifically defaced by generations of Rutherfordians. The one I clearly remember is a print of a painting of Cain, who has just slain his brother, Abel, and therefore looked distraught. It had been altered by the addition of a speech bubble, which said "OH SHIT! I FORGOT TO WASH THE CYANIDE OFF MY COCK!!!"

BIOLOGY - Not even sure why I chose Biology, probably because I thought it might be a skive. Which it was, for me, as I refused to dissect rats and frogs on ethical grounds. I didn't mind eating animals, I just didn't want to be cutting them up. Having said that, doing Biology meant I got to go on the most mental school trip EVER in the fifth year, but I'll get to that in a bit.

HISTORY - Torture, death by toe-curling boredom. Long lessons; Tuesday morning, all morning, and Thursday afternoon, all afternoon. The teacher was proper old-skool from when Rutherford was a Grammar, and dull as fuck. He'd been copying the same sets of notes for around 20 years, horrible, lilac-coloured print that smelt like sugary vomit when he'd just run them off.

FRENCH - Didn't mind French too much. The teacher was soft as shite, but a lovely woman all the same, very tall and slightly nervous a lot of the time. There was one kid called Barry who flatly refused to read aloud in class, but she never challenged him about it, she'd just forget, then ask him again a few lessons later. Their conversation always went exactly like this:

Her - Barry, can you read the next paragraph aloud to the class, please?
Barry - Narr.
Her - ....Okay...Simon, can you read the next paragraph aloud to the class, please?

GERMAN - Burn in hell, you fat fucking witch. I hated her, she hated me, pretty much from day one. I saw her in the Hotspur in town about five years after I left. I was speed-sick, wearing eyeliner and looking twitchy, waiting for The Man. She was muttering to her friends about how I seemed to be reaching the Bad End that she had predicted for me. While, I wish her no real ill, if news ever reached me that her fanny had exploded in some bizarre gardening accident, I'd be a happy chappie.

SPORTS - I think it was Wagsley who made the vital discovery that the Sports teachers made a new register at the start of every term, not every year. Therefore, all you had to do was miss the first lesson of the term and your name wasn't put on the register. Used to go sometimes. In my head, I'm quite good at football, but in reality, I'm actually quite shit at it. There was Rugby as well, but fuck that for a game of soldiers. Rugby - AKA Revenge of the Fat Kids Who Couldn't Play Football - was just like street-fighting in sportswear at our school, and I always gave it a wide berth whenever possible.
True story about our Rugby teacher; wound up before a lesson, he shouted "Come on, let's go! I'm gonna break someone's neck today!" Five minutes later, he breaks some kid's leg in a rough tackle. As the kid is being stretchered off and the teacher looks like he's on the verge of shitting himself, a voice pipes up with "Are you still after a neck, or will a leg do you?"

Jeez Louise and Junky Joe from Meh-hee-ho

2009-10-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

Rude of me not to mention Louise by name till now, because she was one of my best mates when I was growing up. Still is, although we don't see each other nearly enough. (She called me "The Angel Of Death" a couple of years back, coz I only ever ring her when someone that we both know has died. Here man, I'm not the one who married a Mackem and moved to Sunderland, am I? )
She joined our school when she was 12 or 13, when she moved down from that Scotland with her family. She had two sisters, one a couple of years younger than her and one who was just a baby. "the cuckoo in the nest", as her dad used to call her.
Louise, then. One of the little people, what with both her folks being on the short-arsed side. Olive skin, a mouth that a cruder man than I would describe as featuring 'blowjob lips' and a completely massive arse, totally out of proportion with the rest of her body. She still has the skin and lips, but the massive arse has now gone, slimmed down to a more acceptable arse-size.
I went out with Louise briefly when I was dead young, after a chance encounter with her and her mate - the divine Tania Glen - at Fenham Baths. I asked her out via Tania and she said yes, again via Tania. (Louise later told me that Tania had advised her "I would if I was you, but I wouldn't if it was me." Aye, cheers for that, like...)
I think we split up about a week later, but I've never been an arse man anyway, and we stayed good mates over the years, so it's all good, eh?
Louise's parents had had her when they were still in their teens, so they were much younger than everyone else's mam and dad, and proper hip with it; her dad worked for CBS Records, so there were always loads of promo freebie records and badges to listen to and blag round at her place.
Just down the road from Louise lived JoeJoe, who would later be nicknamed Junky Joe From Mexico, partly because of his vaguely Mexican-sounding surname, and partly because of his youthful thirst for all things heroin-related.
Like Zammo from Grange Hill, but considerably hairier (JoeJoe had a proper hairy back when he was about 13. I've still not got hairs on my back. Not that I want them, like, but still...) JoeJoe once told me that the local skag rats had asked him to stop calling round wearing his school uniform, because they were worried that the neighbours might think they were supplying schoolchildren with heroin, which they were, and so had every right to be paranoid...
Actually, now I think about it, my first ever brush with the law came in JoeJoe's company. We were each necking a bottle of Brown Ale behind the local Co-op when a passing dibble chanced upon us. The fucker could have easy let us go, but he radioed for a car to take us both home instead. And then the cheeky twat started talking about music, telling us he was 'really into Led Zep', like we gave a shit.
I can't remember my mam being over-fussed about me being caught in possession of one bottle of Dog, but JoeJoe's parents went mental and barred him from associating with me. Not that we ever paid any attention to that, it just meant that I wasn't allowed round to his house. Anyway, me, a bad influence? I'm not the hairy-backed fucker who looked old enough to buy booze when I was 13, am I?

So, that was the fourth year...

2009-10-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

Started a band, burgled my mate's house, stopped going to school, dyed my hair, experimented with solvents, took a dramatic overdose, spray-painted the school mini-bus, smoked weed for the first time and appreciated the scuzzy genius of Soft Cell.
You can just see this all going badly tits-up, can't you?
Also, at around this time, I'd started wagging school at a house actually on the same street as the school, which was inhabited by a shadowy group of older youths from the Ashington area, who we collectively knew as The Students.
Actually, I say shadowy, but they were as boring as fuck, and hippies to boot, but they let me, Wagsley and a few other people hang out at their house while we should have been at school, so that was nice of them, albeit in a socially irresponsible manner.
The three Students were Dave: a ginger hippy with glasses, a nervous laugh and a mouth full of shit. Once,he caused himself horrific injury to his belly button after striking a match on his jeans' zip while topless. The match head flew off and landed in his navel, causing a nasty phosphorus burn. He also told me that, on the day he found his dad dead in bed at home, he hoisted most of the cash out of his wallet before he phoned the police and ambulance. Not the world's nicest chap. As an amusing aside, the only time I ever heard of him getting any lurve action was when a girl from Ashington Tech had a one-nighter with him. Next day, she put a card on the college notice board, announcing that " Dave ******** is the worst shag I have ever had in my life!!!"

Then there was Pete AKA God - a hobbit-like hippy, who had fine, straight hair that everyone said looked like a wig. He spent a lot of his time in his room, especially after his terrible secret was revealed.

Finally, there was Sean, a tall, boyishly-enthusiastic young chap from Blyth with all the tiresome zest for life that you'd associate with a Top Shop trainee manager in the early 80s, which is what he went on to become. All side parted mullet and pleated leather trousers.

I hung out at the students for at least a year. They had some weird mates from Ashington, especially Bus Driver Ed, who liked a toke, and they enjoyed the odd game of Dungeons and Dragons but they were a canny bunch of lads on the whole. Apart from Dave.

Writing this, I've just remembered the night that a biker-type bloke called Les from Ashington turned up well after closing time one Friday night looking for a place to crash, announcing his arrival with the immortal phrase, "I'm pissed, I'm stoned, I've had me hole off a dorty lass behind Fenwicks...and I've got a job!!"

It all went a bit terribly wrong for me at The Students when we decided to host a joint party. They invited their hippy mates from Ashington and I invited...pretty much the whole fourth and fifth forms of Rutherford, seemingly, because that's who turned up.

I decided it was time to leg it when the entire house became standing room only, and mostly filled with radge kids that I'd normally cross the street to avoid.

Next day, I heard that some proper hard lads from the council estate had turned up and an almighty fight between them and the Ashington hippies broke out in the front street. In the fracas, someone grabbed God by his wig-like hair and his terrible secret was out...it was actually a wig, not just wig-like, and got ripped clean off his head by his attacker.

Obviously, I started hanging out at The Students a bit less after this disastrous event, and God moved back to Ashington a few weeks later.

The Otterburn Hall Experience.

2009-10-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

Otterburn Hall is a big old mansion place that's now a hotel/conference centre. It's near the village of Otterburn in Northumberland, which is basically a catering facility for the nearby Army firing range with a busy road to Newcastle running through the middle of it.
Anyway, my mam blagged a gig teaching Art to hotel guests, two weeks, right at the end of the summer holiday and spilling over into the new school year, which meant that I missed the first week back, but to be honest, I'd have probably wagged at least two days out of the five anyway, so it's not like I was being deprived of an education. .
The place was billed as a hotel with 'activities', and learning to paint was just one of them, there were also croquet and table tennis tournaments, and all other manner of fannying about. I definitely remember a coach trip out somewhere, and whole families excitedly taking part in sporting competitions, in order to win cheap, plastic pens with OTTERBURN HALL stamped on them. There was even a special prize presentation at the end of the holiday. I won one, but I'm fucked if I can remember what for; 'Most blatant underage smoker' is a possibility, though.
While I was there, an older woman in her late 50's or early 60's took me under her wing, and proposed that we make a short film together, along with her husband.
I'll stop you right there. I'm not about to pop my cherry to a woman old enough to be my grandmother while her husband records the happy event for posterity, grunting and masturbating furiously, causing the film to come out all shaky, just in case that's what you're thinking.
What basically happened was that this rich old wifie had just got a film camera and wanted to make a short movie, with me as the lead. Here's your basic synopsis:
A rebellious, rich kid (me) runs away from his family mansion (Otterburn Hall) following an argument with his grandad, who stands shaking his fist in the mansion's doorway. He gets a tent from somewhere, and is seen existing on a diet of digestive biscuits and Schweppes' Russchhian ( a now-extinct, tonic-based vodka mixer briefly in vogue in the late 70's early/80's). A hunter is in the woods (played by another bloke from the hotel) and shoots the kid. He holds the dying kid in his arms, while saying "Oh no, I can't believe I shot a kid!!" BUT...the kid wakes up in the tent, rubbing his eyes. "Phew", he says, "It was all just a dream..." End.
I finally got to see it about two years later, when she'd finished in the cutting room. Her booze lord cousin came and picked up me, my mam and Jeez Louise and took us to a house somewhere in darkest County Durham for the screening. It was total wank, like. Badly shot, badly edited and featuring truly dreadful acting from all concerned, but I still loved it, largely because it was the only time I'd ever seen myself on the telly.
My mam later told me that the cousin who gave us a lift had asked her out, but she had nixied the idea, based on the fact that he had empty whisky bottles rolling about on the floor of his Austin Princess, and so was possibly not ideal boyfriend material.
He creeped me out a bit, anyway, all fake laughs and nervous grins. In fact, although I have not a single shred of actual evidence of any wrong-doing on his part and am basing my opinion purely on my instincts, I now feel sure that he was, in fact, a DIRTY paedophile short-eyes bastard NONCE, and it's a good job I've got not the first fucking clue what his name and address is and he's probably moved house in the last 27 years or is dead from liver failure by now anyway, otherwise I'd post his vile personal details on here and we could start a mob and BURN THAT EVIL BASTARD OUT OF HIS HOME.

Ahem...forgot about burgling the NUFC.

2009-10-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

Rewind to age 13: The house I was brought up in was less than a mile from Saint James' Park, which wasn't the spiky, alien-looking fortress that we know today, more of a huge, corrugated iron shed with 'NEWCASTLE UNITED FOOTBALL CLUB' painted on the Barrack Road side in whitewash.
It was also piss-easy to break in to. Why, even a small child could manage it. Hop over a wall above a stinking gents' toilet, climb a seven-foot gate (that handily had a bar across the middle) take the steps up to the terraces and then down onto the pitch; two minutes, tops.
It wasn't my idea, Punk Kev suggested the caper one night, he knew two brothers from our school who'd been in before and were up for doing it again.
As we stood on the pitch, the brothers and Kev began using a word, I hadn't heard before, which was 'shan', but I quickly realised by the general tone that it meant to be scared, afraid, shitting oneself, basically.
The conversation went a lot like this:
THE OLDER BROTHER - I'm proper shan, me, like. Are yee shan?
PUNK KEV - Aye, I'm canny shan, like.
THE YOUNGER BROTHER - I'm feelin' geet shan, me. Are yee shan, Skotty?
ME - Err...yeah, I'm feeling really shan as well.

Having established that we were all as shan as they come, we climbed back up the steps (we didn't actually need to go down to the pitch, but if you're in a cathedral, it's rude not to visit the altar, even if you are turning the gaff over) and arrived at our destination, a small changing room with a bar above all the seating, which the two brothers knew about.
Once inside, we forced a open cupboard with dreams of a major booze haul, only to be confronted by about twenty mini-bottles of Schweppes Ginger Ale, which we shoved into a sports bag, regardless.
Then we heard a noise on the other steps from the room, the ones that led down to the ground's internal road, and we all legged it out of the door.
Once we got back to the gate, we saw that the security Land Rover was on the other side, but it was empty as they'd gone up the fire-escape stairs to the room we'd just been in, so we monkeyed over the gate, jumped the wall and legged it up Barrack Road, completely rushing on the shan fear of it all.
Okay, so it's not on a par with Sir Les Ferdinand 'fessing up to vandalising the Blue Peter gardens, but it was still wrong of me and I would never do it nowadays, partly because the place now looks like the home of the evil Emperor Ming rather than a big shed, and 23 CCTV cameras would track your every move, but mainly because I stopped getting thrills from vandalising and stuff when I moved on to the glue and the drugs; a pattern not uncommon among yer classic adolescent deliquents, I'm pretty sure you'll find.
PS - a few years back, I emailed the older one of the Burglar Bros. via the Friends Reunited website. I marked the email 'I KNOW YOUR GUILTY SECRET' and went on to remind him of our youthful having it away with the Toon Army's mini-mixer bottles, but he never replied, funnily enough.
Mind, he was called Andy, and if you've read this blog from the start, you'll know that I loathe that name above all others, and this denial of his past only serves to support my theory that it's a name for charlatans, knaves and all other manner of twat-mongerers.
You've got to embrace your past stupidity and learn to laugh at being a daft wee bastard rather than pretend it never happened; that's just in-shan-ity.

Keyzee, Oxo and Stoff.

2009-10-19T03:30:00.000-07:00

Keen though I am to move this tale along to the point where I start getting my hole on a regular basis and also find a reliable weed connection, I keep on remembering other people and other stuff, and since it all helped to shape the person that I am (or rather, the person that I was before I realised that that person needed to calm down or die very soon), it's got to in, really.

Keyzee's bedroom was identical to Glen's office in terms of room-shape, because it was the exact same room in an identical house further down the terrace that Glen lived in.

But Glen's office was tidy and tastefully decorated, whereas Keyzee's bedroom
was a graffiti-covered shitpit, and really crap graffiti at that. Badly drawn rendition's of Rush's 2112 gatefold sleeve and other hippy tat.

Keyzee was a couple of years above us at school. He and his companions - the barrel-chested, mustachioed, denim-waistcoated Oxo, and the pigeon-chested, buck-toothed son of the local Fishmonger, Stoff, were into their Prog rock in a big way, mostly Genesis and Rush.
They even had their own Prog band. Actually, that's a lie, as none of them owned any instruments or had any musical ability, as far as I'm aware.
But what they did have was a name, and a logo, which they showed me once. They were called Epillion, which they claimed meant 'a small miracle', but I've just Googled it now, and does it bollocks, it means nowt. I seem to remember telling them that it would be a small fucking miracle if their band ever got past the logo-designing stage and actually acquired some instruments and learned to play them, which didn't go down too well.
Those Proggers in full, then.

Keyzee: thin, fine blond hair, pointy nose and a facial expression that was never far away from twisting into a cruelly-amused sneer. A very dry sense of humour and a keen interest in golfing combined to make him seem him appear much older than his 16 years.

Oxo: One of them kids who never shaves off their first bumfluff 'tash, I'm sure Oxo had his from around the age of 10. Quite big and muscly, and liable to start blindly swinging his fists when he'd overdone it on the Brown Ale, you had to be a bit wary sitting next to Oxo, especially at the weekend. Checked out his Friends Reunited entry a while back, he was on about "meeting up over several pints of foaming ale", which is very Alan Partridge, I reckon.

Stoff: An ugly kid with a kind heart who knew a lot about fish, in a nutshell. I once squirted a big syringe full of actual human piss at him when he walked through the door one night, which I still feel bad about now. Keyzee and Oxo's idea, my own actual human piss. I actually liked Stoff the most out of the three of them, but bless him, he wasn't half fucking boring and talked endlessly about assorted marine life, and how quickly you can shift them in a Fishmongers.

Our little gang sort of became persona non grata at Keyzee's after Glen had a quick snog with Jeez Louise there one night. Keyzee fancied her something terrible and couldn't cope with being beaten to the chase in his own graffiti-covered shit-box, so he barred Glen from his house, the snakey fucker.

What I took from the Prog kids was a heightened loathing for all things Prog - I turned down an interview with one of Rush earlier this year, entirely on the grounds that I believed I'd get about five minutes in before I started shouting "YOU BASTARD, YOU'RE SHIT-AH!" down the phone, and that's never a good stance for an interviewer to adopt.

(Since I wrote this, a kind person has informed me that 'Epillion' actually means mini-epic, and is a word used to describe a type of poem. I still hate Proggers, like, it changes nowt.)

The lexicon of tabs.

2009-10-18T05:23:00.000-07:00

When I was around 15, whenever you lit a tab around your mates, the following would instantly happen. One person, or more likely two, but one fractionally quicker than the other, would shout "Fog-on ya!", which means "Give me the last portion of your cigarette, my good fellow."
Then, someone else would shout "Couple off!", which means "May, I take two draws from your cigarette, my fine chum?"
If you did not trust that the gentleman making this request would limit his inhalations to two, you could reply "Oot me mitt", which means "I shall retain a hold of this cigarette whilst allowing you to take two short inhalations, for I believe you are a rapscallion who intends to make away with my cigarette, or at the very least, take three huge draws and put a poker end on it."
Also, the recipient of the fog-on could request that his fog-on be "Aal white, nee shite", which meant not to smoke the cigarette too fast, thus flooding the filter with nicotine.
And finally, the receiver of the fog-on would be implored to give out a "last blast" to someone before the cigarette burned into the filter. And thus, at least three people, often four, got a share in each cigarette that we lit.
Phil always gave out shite, small fog-ons though, the tight bastard.

Royal Wedding Celebrations, Wagsley and Raffles-style.

2009-10-17T05:46:00.000-07:00

The 29th of July, 1981. Crowds of 600,000 people filled the streets of London to catch a glimpse of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on their wedding day.

The couple were married at St Paul's Cathedral before an invited congregation of 3,500 and an estimated global TV audience of 750 million - making it the most popular programme ever broadcast.

Britons enjoyed a national holiday to mark the occasion. Wagsley and I celebrated it by catching a bus to Wylam in Northumberland and taxing my uncle Bruce's wine cellar (actually in his garage) of several bottles of fine wine, and half-a-dozen cans of crap lager.

I do believe that a certain Bilko-esque character of our acquaintance had arranged to buy some of the fine wines from us, and indeed, already had a further buyer lined up in the form of one of his many older sisters, but we got mullered on the rest.

My uncle Bruce rightly sussed that my thieving hands had been at work, and was quickly on the phone to my mam, although I flatly denied it in the high-pitched, indignant manner of all crap liars.

"Who do you think it was then, the fairies?", he asked me, rhetorically, I know now.

Last year, in a fit of remorse common among people who have spent years necking booze and then stopped, I sent him a letter of apology and a cheque for fifty sheets to buy some nice wine with.

He sent the cheque back, ripped in half, with FUCK written on one side and OFF on the other.

No, I jest. He wrote a jolly nice letter saying that we all do daft things when we're young and thanks for buying him some new wine, and I felt a warm glow inside, like brandy, but free. Well, it cost fifty fucking sheets, so not free at all,when you stop to think about it.

How to fiddle a report card.

2009-10-15T16:05:00.000-07:00

What a report card is, right, is this system they used to have at our school to foil persistent waggers and misbehaviourers, by giving them a card that each teacher had to initial and then mark at the end of each lesson, and the marks meant the following.

1. You had been good.
2. You had been alright.
3. You had been bad and were in trouble.
4. You had stabbed somebody and were in big trouble.

(I did stab somebody once, now I think of it, but only with a compass, not like a proper chibbing or anything. It was a freakishly tall kid who was winding me up in a Geography lesson. The fucker wasn't so tall sitting down so I stabbed him in the neck with my compass.
Honest, it wasn't as bad as it sounds, he didn't have to go to the hospital, or even the school nurse, he just had a little round hole in his neck for a few days, and luckily, I wasn't actually on Report at the time it happened, 'cause I would probs have got a 4 for that, I reckon.)

Report cards were quite easy to fiddle, especially with teachers who hadn't been there long. Don't actually mention you're on Report was always a good one, then casually hand it to them at the end of the lesson and ask them to initial it. Providing you hadn't been disruptive, you generally got a 1, and I wasn't a disruptive kid at that point, I just didn't like going to the lessons I didn't enjoy, which was most of them.
Note that I said that the teachers initialed the cards rather than signing them. Therefore, once you had a full set, it wasn't hard to wag selected lessons and then craftily initial the card yourself, before returning to school at the end of the day and presenting it to your year tutor. I only got collared doing this once and that's because I'm so cack-handed, I even managed to bollocks up forging initials. But hey, what were they gonna do, hang me?
True to form, though, my German teacher used my report cards to pass comment on my ability to learn German, rather than my actual behaviour in the class, which was always no problem, being as I sat with my desk touching hers for four years, at her insistence.
Looking back, that woman definitely didn't like the cut of my jib at all, it would be fair to say. She once gave me a 3 on the Report card purely for badly failing a test, at which point, I, like, totally lost the Report card. Honest, Sir, I've looked everywhere...Ha, essen meine scheise, or however you say 'Ha, eat my shit' in German.

First brush with the Dibble (slight return)

2009-10-14T06:57:00.000-07:00

Every bloody time I write something down about my dubious past and claim that it involved my first ever contact with the Coppers, the Cozzers, the Bill, the Filth*, the Bill, the Old Bill, the Peelers, the Bobbies, the Pigs, the Man, the Dibble, the Boys in Blue, the Fuzz**, the Tit-Heads, Cunt-stabbles, call them what you will (but don't call them unless it's an emergency), I remember that it wasn't the first time at all, and I've forgotten about something earlier that involved someone ringing those unlucky three 9's re: me.
But I'm pretty sure that the first time I ever got pulled involved a lot of wine and cider, Orgazm and another rich punk kid, and fencing with snapped-off car aerials on a very affluent street in the Gosforth area of Newcastle, late one Sunday night when I was about 14.
An irate bloke with a toothbrush 'tash legged out of his big house and grabbed all three of us in a bear-hug, then dragged us into his gaff until the Dibble arrived minutes later.
Top tip for yer young juveniles: if you're going to cause damage to cars, try to make sure that you do it with rich kids whose parents are totally fucking minted, because their mater and pater will instantly offer to pay for any damages and no charges will be proffered against you.
On the downside, if you're from a less-well off part of town, mater and pater might well decide that it was all your fault and ban their offspring from associating with you, which is what happened to me with the Richie Rich in question.
Having said that, one of his hobbies was stroking cats in the street and then kicking them, and people who do nasty shit like that generally turn into 10-wanks-a-day serial killers, so I was probably best off well away from him, I reckon.

* Best Blockbusters answer ever.
Bob Holness - what F is a slang word for the police?
Contestant - Filth.
Fuzz was the answer they were looking for, which leads me to **, a crap joke from my childhood. Two prostitutes having a chat.
Proz #1 - have you ever been picked up by the Fuzz?
Proz #2 - no, but I was swung round by the tits once...

bleeurgh

2009-10-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

My diet in full, then, from last Friday morning to Sunday night.
Mucus: several pints of, constantly trailing down from my filtrum into my mouth. nice...
Tempazepam: taken as and when i got sick and tired of being awake, which was often.
Snide Valium from Egypt. taken as and when my muscles ached, which was constant.
Half a fried egg sandwich.
Some kind of smoothie that the packaging claims will make you feel like a New Man who's just had an invigorating shower/ blow-job combo.
Try the man-flu diet: you too could have a body like mine.

School Trippin'

2009-10-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

Vital lesson about writing, one I'm always trying to impress upon my daughter - WRITERS WRITE. For one reason and another, I've been feeling proper shite these last few days and have let this vital lesson pass me by. I haven't even been sat at the keyboard staring blankly, I've been avoiding the bloody thing altogether.

But really, there's no such thing as Writer's Block, at least I don't think so; it's just varying degrees of how much you can be arsed to do it and to say that I've been blocked would be a total cop-out, I just haven't been arsed with it. Sometimes, I don't feel too happy in my own skin and I let things that are out of my control get me down.

So yeah, I'm 42 and life hasn't turned out quite like I planned, but whaddaya gonna do, open your wrists or open another bottle? Neither seems too attractive an option right now, and wallowing in self-pity gets really fucking tiresome after a while - there's a Manics lyric that goes "Self-disgust is self-obsession" which has always resonated in me - you can spend your days curled up in a foetal ball if you want, but you'll get fuck-all done and you'll most likely end up with a curvature of the spine, so think on...

So anyway, what I've been meaning to get around to writing about was our Biology field trip to London when I was 15, and the drunken stupidity, foiled attempts to buy drugs and vomit-tasting that ensued.

God forbid that you, dear reader, ever have to take a huge crowd of teenagers to London for 36 hours, but if you do, here's a couple of handy hints, concerning stuff that you definitely shouldn't do.
Hint #1 - Location, location, location - pick your hotel very carefully. The one we were in was smack-bang next to the statue of Eros in Picadilly Circus, which, at the time, was Rent Boy capital of the world, and a kick in the arse away from the flesh-spots of Soho. Short of actually housing us all in a brothel, I honestly don't think that the school could have picked a worse location.

Hint # 2. 15 year-olds and mini-bars do not make for a winning combination, so make sure that the hotel has removed/emptied them from ALL of the rooms that your kids will be staying in, otherwise you're just fucking begging for some bother. I didn't have one in my room, but Wagsley did - can you guess which room got a visit from the hotel's security guards sometime after one in the morning?

Hint # 3. If you're a teacher, especially a male one, keep at least half an eye on the lads in your party and don't just hole up in your room with the other teachers and all of the girls on your trip. Yes, you'll have a civilised evening, but you're not there to be civilised, you're there to make sure that none of your party leave the hotel at midnight and try and blag their way into Soho strip clubs where they will be charged £50 for a half of lager and nearly get kicked to fuck off some massive Maltese bouncers following a dispute over pricing policies.

Hint # 4. Be sure to take along a vomit-taster, because their comedy value is priceless. Picture the scene: one kid throws up in the sink in one of the rooms, to the general disgust of all those present. But then, another kid dips an index finger into the puke, licks it, then pronounces "Hmmm, you've recently eaten cucumber, ham, crisps and chocolate." You'd have put money on someone as twisted as that growing up with their name down for Durham Prison from birth, but you'd be way wrong. The hyper-intelligent kid in question went on to become President of Oxford University Student's Union and is now minted after finding a cunning new way to split atoms, or something. But James Congleton, if you're reading this, I still think that you're a horrible, dirty little bastard, albeit one with a unique talent, alright?

Hint # 5. Don't take along any grasses, or anyone that might actually want to do any work. A few weeks after we got back, it nearly went badly tits-up for all concerned after one kid - who had a keen interest in dinosaurs rather than beer and strippers - told his mam some snakey stuff about the other kids, and she told our year tutor. However, his investigation was soon abandoned after being met with a stock reply of "Narr, sir, don't know what you're on about", from all concerned.

Hint #6. Actually, this is less of a hint, more of a guide to anyone interested in buying drugs in an unfamiliar location - DO NOT GIVE YOUR MONEY TO A STRANGER TO GO AND BUY YOUR DRUGS. HE WILL NOT BE "BACK IN A MINUTE", HE WILL SIMPLY FUCK OFF WITH YOUR SPENDS AND YOU WILL NEVER, EVER SEE HIM AGAIN,YOU MUPPET. Are you listening, M*rk W**nwr*ght?

So, that was my first visit to London. We even got to spend a couple of hours fannying about looking at dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museum the next day, but that was proper rubbish, unless you happened to be a snake-in-the-grass kind of kid that liked boring shite like that, in which case, you probably thought that this was the best part of the trip, you knob-jockey.

Hair-related extreme fuck-wittery

2009-10-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

I've done some dumb-ass things in my time, oh yes. Taking eight grammes of speed in one night because I was too paranoid to sell any of it is one that springs to mind, spending the night with a fat Goth lass who looked like a pit-bull with a Siouxsie Sioux wig on is another, but I think my actions the night before our year started their 'O' levels have to take the biscuit in terms of sheer, unexplainable fuck-wittery on my part.

In the lead-up to the exams, it would be fair to say that I wasn't entirely confident, in fact, I knew I was doomed to fail pretty much everything. I wasn't there too much in that final year and when I did go, I would invariably just fanny about. I already knew that, barring several miracles, the following academic year would be spent doing 'O' level re-sits at a local tech college, so I'd done sweet bugger-all by way of revising for them first time around.

Top tip for anyone feeling apprehensive on the eve of something momentous - do something to distract yourself, go for a walk, maybe watch some telly, something like that. Taking your mind away from the upcoming task can be done in a wide variety of ways, but please don't do what I did. Actually, there's not too much chance of that, unless you too are a little bit mental and haven't yet fully grasped the concept of cause and effect.

So what did I do? Quite simply, I gave myself the worst haircut that anyone I knew had ever seen, or so I was reliably informed by several hundred people in the following days and weeks after I did it.
At the time, I had straight, brown hair. Quite long, maybe just past my shoulders. For reasons that to this day I do not still fully understand, I decided that my 'do' could be immeasurably improved by simply shaving one side of it completely bald, like that fella out of the Human League but more extreme, more home-made looking and generally more shit all round.

Add to this the fact that I still wasn't much past five foot tall and my main coat at the time was a dark blue gaberdine flasher's mac I'd picked up in a charity shop, twinned with super-tight, self altered jeans and knackered DM boots, the total 'look' made me look like a refugee seeking shelter from the great New Romantic Wars of the early 80's.
On reflection, I think that even if I'd written 'I am a cock-end' across my forehead in permanent marker, I probably wouldn't have looked any worse.

Around this time, if you'd looked up 'long-suffering' in the dictionary, I reckon you'd have found a picture of my mam, wearing the exact same expression that she was wearing when she clocked my new, some would say radical, hairstyle for the first time - A deeply furrowed brow, pursed lips and eyes that seemed to express the phrase "Way to go, you insane little shit-bag who is no son of mine."

And so to school the following day, where I was greeted by dropped jaws, audible gasps and caused scenes of downright hilarity wherever I went.

Where I didn't go, though, was the hall that the exams were being held in, as the powers-that-be decided that my haircut was so distracting, anyone sitting in my vicinity would be dazzled by its crapness and would therefore be unable to concentrate on their work, thus causing them to fail all of their exams.

This still strikes me as being a bunch of old bollo, but whatever the reason, I ended up doing my exams completely alone, in a small room next to the school secretary's office.

Actually, I wasn't always completely alone - for the first three or four days, I was visited by practically every teacher in the school coming to have a gawp at me, as tales of my extreme tonsorial stupidity spread throughout the staff. Every hour or so, a teacher would walk into the room, gaze at my crap hair incredulously, shake their head and then walk out again.

Being alone did give me opportunities to cheat, though. In fact, I was fairly confident that I'd passed the French paper, as I took a French-English dictionary in with me. I still managed to fail it, though, along with everything else.

I remember that I scored 8% in the Maths exam, and how I even got that, God knows, as I had decided to answer every question with the answer '27', unless it was a fraction-based question, in which case, my stock answer was '2.7'. At least I answered them, though, unlike Wagsley, who drew cartoons of people skate-boarding all over his paper, he later told me.

The only other exam that stands out is the German oral one, and that's because it was toe-curlingly, embarrassingly bad, largely on account of my not being able to speak German, or, indeed, to understand it when it was spoken to me.

Life is packed with regrets and things we wish that we had said or done, and I profoundly regret that I didn't take the time to learn the following phrase parrot-fashion in German.

"I hate you and you hate me, you fat witch. But this exam marks the end of our time together and then me and my shit hair are out of here forever. I hope you catch fanny-crabs and/or burn in hell. Danke Schone."

Hairdressing, mainly for lasses and puffs.

2009-10-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

Actually, before all the exam/hair-related drama came my week of work experience, worthy of mentioning only because it shows that there didn't seem to be anyone out there watching my back or looking after my best interests.

I think we've now established that the only thing I enjoyed and/or was any cop at was English. Therefore, it might have been nice if someone had pointed this out, maybe suggested a week's work experience on one of our three local papers, because I didn't seem to have a fucking clue myself, which is why I plumped for hairdressing.

My logic ran thus - 'You like experimenting with your own hair - why not be a hairdresser?'.
The answer is, of course 'Because it's a shit job, and you've got about three years as a trainee where you get to wash people's hair before they get it cut, and most of them will moan on about you not washing it properly, to the point where you will want to drip shampoo into their eyes, accidentally-on-purpose. Also, perming solution smells fucking vile, and you will have to work with it, all day, every day and for the rest of your life'.

So aye, I did my week in a salon that was part of Fenwick's, a huge department store in Newcastle, and sussed on that I'd made a big mistake re work experience after about, ooh, fifteen minutes or so. Still, I got a free 'do' out of it and skived one-and-a-half days of the five that I was meant to be there, so it wasn't all bad. Actually, now I think of it, another reason I plumped for hairdressing was because I reckoned that there'd be loads of lasses doing it and all the other male trainees were likely to be a load of puffs, thus leaving me shooting fish in a barrel, fanny-wise.

I think this was because I was a 15-year old virgin and didn't yet know that sex in your head is almost always better than sex in real life, unless you are doing it with someone who is dead good at it, and that in itself brings a whole new set of problems into play, as we shall see in three or four years time, when I attempt to set up home with the World's Most Promiscuous Young Woman...

The Boy James.

2009-10-09T14:49:00.000-07:00

I met my dearest friend and future best man, The Boy James, for the first time around about now. I know this because I asked him about it the other day and he recalled that I had half my head shaved, which pinpoints it pretty well, as believe me, it wasn't a look that I persevered with for very long.
The Boy James and I first encountered each other on the number 12 bus from the town to Fenham. He was on his way home from his private school on the coast and I must have been on my home from wagging school/exams and sitting in the Handyside arcade all day.

James' folks lived in the same street as Wagsley and Glen, but further down the road, where the houses stop being terraces and start being big, three-storey affairs that back onto Nuns Moor.
Although I'd met richer kids than James, I think he was the poshest kid I'd met up to this point, coming as he does from proper blue-blooded stock where talking like Lord Haw-Haw, shooting wildlife and laughing like a horse were all considered acceptable attributes in a person.

Tricky one, this, as I'm aware that James may well be reading this blog, so describing him in terms that may amuse some readers is possibly likely to offend him...but fuck it, let's go for it.

Imagine Mr Punch sporting a dishevelled, curly blonde wig instead of that bonnet-type thing he normally wears and you have just imagined the essence of The Boy James - geet big pointy nose, geet big pointy chin. Pointy in general, really. Even had a geet long pointy tongue that he could stretch up and insert into one of his nostrils for a high-quality party trick. Not sure how often he does it these days, mind.

Can I just redress the balance here and point out that while James has the face of a Greek jug, he has the body of a Greek God, or at least, a body that I would willingly trade for my own pigeon-chested husk?

In fact, I firmly believe that a man with my face and James' body would make for one of the most legendary fanny-rat Casanovas of all time.

Unfortunately, a man with a combination of James' face and my body would most likely be hunted down by angry villagers carrying flaming torches, determined to exterminate the foul monster that they have found living among them.
Swings and roundabouts, innit?

Piss Shite.

2009-10-08T16:03:00.000-07:00

Handy tip if you're gonna hang out with a narky little bastard like what I was back then, try not to have a name that rhymes with a swearword, and definitely don't have two names that do, otherwise you're totally fucked.

And so it was that Chris White - an affable, polite young chap who James introduced me to - became known forever more as Piss Shite.

Even now, over 25 years after I first dubbed him thus, James will start off a conversation, saying "I saw Piss Shite the other day", and I honestly don't think that he knows he's doing it.

He's still a good friend of James', and I'm sure he never calls him that to his face, but I can see us in our 70's, giving it "I saw Piss Shite getting his meals on wheels delivered the other day" and so on.
Having said that, the fucker still calls me 'Andrew' every time I see him, despite knowing full well that that hasn't been my name for at least a decade, so if he thinks he's gonna stop being Piss Shite any time soon, he's sadly mistaken, I'm afraid.

By the way, I've used a pic of Paul Calf to illustrate this post as the normally affable Mr Shite went through a bizarre period in his early 20's where he had the same hair and same tash as him, and also got into drinking vodka alone in his house and then roaming the streets of Fenham looking for students to beat up - as this was pre-Calf, I like to look at it as a classic case of Art imitating Life.

Eli Wallach, Cunnilingus, CND and me.

2009-10-07T14:05:00.000-07:00

For years, I couldn't eat pussy without thinking about Eli Wallach.
Conversely, even now, I can't look at a picture of Eli Wallach without thinking about eating pussy; just getting one for this blog had me muttering "mmm, pussy" to myself, like some sort of Porn Homer Simpson.
Whaddaya mean, you don't know who Eli Wallach is? The head baddie in the Magnificent Seven, and loads of other Westerns where he generally played head baddie, as far as I can remember, that's who. Him, man, the bloke in the picture there.
I'll get to the explanation of the equation Eli=Cunnilingus in a bit, because it's all tied up in the weird world of lefty politics in 1982, the year that I left school.

Here's a bit of poignant imagery for you that sums up the early years of Thatcher's Britain for me: When I was a kid and up until the year before I left school, there was a medium-sized factory on the West Road opposite Rutherford School. It was called Windows, but it didn't make windows - that was the name of the family who owned the business, they still run a big music store in the Central Arcade in Newcastle, so I presume they made either records or musical instruments there.

Whatever, it closed down around 1981, and then reopened...as a dole signing-on office. I guess that they'd spotted that unemployment was about to become a big growth market, especially in places like the West End of Newcastle.

There's long been a strong Labour-supporting element on both sides of my family; one of my uncles wrote a book about Dennis "Massive Fucking Eyebrows" Healey when I was younger, and I can remember going leafleting and door-stepping people on really scary council estates with my Dad when I was tiny as well, probably to reduce the chances of him getting an Alsatian set on him, I reckon. I also have a memory of delivering "Common Market - vote NO!!!" leaflets on behalf of my mam in Fenham.

Anyway, Wor Kid had upheld this family tradition by becoming Treasurer of the local branch of the Labour Party Young Socialists, and I started going to their weekly meetings as well. They met in a tiny council flat near St James' Park, that was occupied by a severely-disabled and wheelchair-bound young Scottish woman called Karen, and her bloke, Russ, a quiet chap who was the spit of the long-faced, 1920's silent movie comedian, Buster Keaton.

Also living in the flat was another Scottish girl who was employed as Karen's helper, and I can't for the fucking life of me remember her name right now. The only person who'd know is Wor Kid and it's gone eleven bells on a school night, so he'll be in the land of Nod by now. For dramatic purposes, I shall call her Beth, because it's easy and quick to type, mainly.

Beth had big, black punk rock hair, was three or four years older than me and I fancied her something terrible from the off. When business at one of the meetings turned to an upcoming coach trip to support a CND march in London, I quickly put my name down, once I'd learned that Beth would be going, along with Karen and Russ.

I can remember the coach leaving at around midnight, and then getting to London at Stupid O'Clock in the morning. I'll say one thing for London, even a person of restricted growth with half his head shaved doesn't merit much more than a passing glance from most people, unlike in the Toon, where my shit hair was fast becoming a skinhead-attracting hazard.

I can't remember too much about the march, other than it ended in Hyde Park, and then we went off to some Labour-sponsored disco somewhere and then dossed down in someone's living room for the night, from where I hoisted a rather fine Polish 'Solidarnost' (Solidarity) badge shaped like a shield with a double-headed eagle on it. Sorry about that, my Cockernee Comrades.

I didn't get anywhere with Beth on that trip, but a couple of nights later, I went to see her at the flat when Karen and Russ were away somewhere.

Around ten at night,we were watching some crappy Western with Eli Wallach in, and I started making the point that he crops up in nearly every Western you'll ever see, when I noticed that she was slowly, but definitely, edging across the sofa towards me. Nervously, I continued with the shit Eli patter...and then she pounced.

Roughly 23 seconds later, I was head down in a lady's special place for the first time, trying to find the little man in the boat - unsuccessfully, I'm almost sure - while Eli growled "Badges? We don' need no steenking badges!" or some such on the telly.

Sadly, this was to be a one-off encounter, as Beth quickly decided that cradle-snatching a crap-haired short-arse with amateur-level oral sex skills probably wasn't the way forward and promptly bombed me right out the next day, much to my hot-cocked dismay.

She quickly became engaged to another young Trot her own age who went by the name of Sandy, which is only one letter away from Andy, and if you've read this from the beginning, you'll know that that's a perfectly adequate reason for me to hate the fucker instantly and forever.

Sex and politics, man, it's a heady mixture...

How Wor Kid Went Mad.

2009-10-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

This bit might not be entirely accurate. I suppose I could check it, but seeing as this is all about my recollections and memories, it's probably best not to.

Anyways, whether I'm 100% on fine-tuning the details or not is pretty much irrelevant, because the end result would always be the same ie Wor Kid Goes Mad.

So what I recall is this: Wor Kid was expected to get around 6 or 7 GCE passes, but he only got one or two. Then he went to resit them at the local tech college, and again, didn't fare very well.

I've not mentioned up till now that when my mam resigned from teaching, she then spent several years retraining as a psychotherapist, which led to her having faith in all sorts of analysis-related swag.

After Wor Kid had flunked out for a second time, my mam decided that he must have some sort of mental block when it came to being in an exam environment, and came to the conclusion that a few sessions with a hypnotist/hynotherapist geeze might just unblock him.

The way I remember it, Wor Kid reacted to hypnotism in much the same way that someone with latent mental health problems might react to a hefty dose of LSD, which is to say that he totally flipped his lid and was never the same again from there on in.

He seemed to spend the whole summer in the same blue and white stripy pajamas, rarely getting dressed or leaving his room. When we had meals together, he would constantly mutter under his breath, arguing with the voices in his head.

For what seemed like weeks, he would repeat "Agree, disagree, agree, disagree, agree, disagree" over and over, like a badly-scratched record.

Right at the end of the summer, I went away on a short notice holiday in Scotland with Jeez Louise and her family, touring drizzly campsites on the West coast of Scotland.

Actually, that sounds really fucking grim, but I can remember it being a good laugh, on the whole.

Looking back now, though, I suspect that my presence on someone else's family holiday may well have been a put-up job and involved a certain amount of collusion between Louise's parents and my mam to get me out of the house, as I returned home to discover that Wor Kid was now a resident at Saint Nick's, Newcastle's infamous, sprawling, Victorian mental hospital.

It took a lot of trips to hospitals and psychiatrists and endless experimentation with hardcore anti-psychotics before Wor Kid's madness finally got given a name: Schizophrenia.

Although I had no desire to trade places with Wor Kid and be properly mad instead of just fucked up, for years, I carried around a kind of guilt around about this: It didn't seem at all fair that the quiet, studious brother should be the one who goes mad, while the little radgie one who was already slightly loopy anyway gets to bludgeon himself with drugs and then drown himself in booze for years and yet come out of the other end with his sanity remarkably intact.

Then I realised that that's just how the dice fall, and, like the rest of this life, you never know who's going to get the snake eyes.

Having said that, I have taken the odd step to safeguard my sanity. I've taken LSD twice in my life, both times when I was a teenager. While it didn't exactly kick down the doors of insanity, it definitely took me to places where I didn't want to stay for too long.

Also, no fucking way are you ever getting me in a room with a hypnotist, bunch of evil mind-freaks that they are. I've tried all sorts of ways of giving up the fags and failed miserably thus far, but I'd rather be coughing big bloody chunks of my lungs up than suddenly be feeling very sleepy and then waking up mad.

"I'm a virgin...but I'm not bothered."

2009-10-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

Somebody came into my work a couple of years back and gave me a photo of me circa August 1982.

As you can see, the half-shaved look has grown out. Sadly, as soon as it did, I gave it a crappy home bleach job, which turned it a nasty shade of orange and made it all wispy - imagine Art Garfunkel dressed to attend a Sham 69 gig and you're there, pretty much.

The Jewish Princess in the pic goes by the name of Rebecca Ossleton, who I knew from the Handyside and fancied for years... without any returns whatsoever, unfortunately.

September 1982 saw me enrol to do resits at North Tyneside College, which was situated in the truly fucking terrifying Battle Hill suburb of Wallsend - once home to fat-lad-with-no-money-sense darts player, Jockie Wilson, fact fans.

From my point of view, the refectory was easily the best part of college, as I spent most of my time there drinking coffee and hanging out with like-minded folk with ludicrous hairstyles.

I can't for the life of me remember what resits I was meant to be doing there, because I only ever went to English and completely fucked the rest off, which meant that I never actually completed a full term before they kicked my rubbish ass out of there, but I digress.

It's weird how the mind plays tricks. I've always assumed that I got my hole for the first time the night after Wagsley, Phil, Glen and I did a load of mushrooms and watched Threads, an in- your-face, harrowing programme about what would happen if England got nuked, but I've got that all wrong - Threads wasn't shown till a couple of years later, so fuck knows what I was actually doing, but it definitely involved 'shroom abuse.

I met my first bed-partner (not that we ever had sex in anything as passé and traditional as a bed) via the traditional teenage "My mate fancies you" route one day in the Handyside.

Having heard that I was fancied, I got to the Handyside bright and early the following Saturday, where I was introduced to Liza with a 'Z', who did indeed fancy me, so much so that she had her tongue jammed down my throat around 20 seconds after our initial introduction. After spending the day feverishly necking, we arranged to meet in Jesmond the following night.

The following night saw us all over each other like a bad rash, stood in the doorway of the Masons' Lodge in Jesmond, with me desperately trying to ram my hand down her knickers. It was at this point that Liza informed me that "I'm a virgin...but I'm not bothered", and, if there's a more erotic sentence that anyone could utter to a blue-balled, uber-horny 16-year old, I never got to hear it.

After Liza had revealed her laissez faire attitude towards the Gift That Just Keeps On Giving, the pair of us set off for the Youth Club at St George's Church in Jesmond, with me limping badly all the way there.

Once there, we knocked the dancing-like-a-gimp-to-Soft-Cell part of the night on the head, in favour of sneaking off to a small office adjoined to the Church Hall, where we stuck bits of each other in each other in a state of some feverish excitement.

Liza and I stayed together for a couple of months after that, until I decided, pretty much out of the blue, to knock it on the head. God knows why, like, coz I was getting laid on a regular basis, and it's not like I was beating other lasses off with a shitty stick or anything.

Looking back and putting a spin on it, it would be easy for me to say that I ended it because we just weren't suited - she went on to Oxbridge and became a doctor, while I went on to cannabis and became a junkie - but that's bollocks.

Truth be told, I blew her out because she was really excited about going to a filming of The Tube to see fatty Boy George and his Culture Club, and I thought that they were completely shite and was less than thrilled about going, so I didn't - I went home instead, and then ended it all a few days later, despite the fact that a large portion of my brain was saying "Howay, you dumb fuck, you're getting laid here, man."

Dedicated follower of (shit) fashion.

2009-10-04T03:48:00.000-07:00

Were I somehow able to time-travel back to late 1982, the first thing I'd do is sit my 17-year old self down and ask him just what the fuck does he think he's wearing, because he looked like some sort of short-arsed, day-glo parrot, on reflection.

Being surrounded by people with even shitter hair than my own gave me the confidence to start raiding the dressing-up box. Glen, with a keen, Bilko-esque eye on the situation, offered to sell me a load of clobber that one of his sister's had worn in the early 70's - at a hugely-inflated mark-up, obviously.

Top to toe circa November 1982, then.

Black beret, worn at a jaunty angle.

Hair - Spiky and a lurid orange. It was meant to be pillar-box red, but such are the perils of getting one's 'do' done by college trainees. Once they'd bleached my hair and put the dye on, it felt like someone was pouring a kettle of boiling water on my head, so they had to rinse it off sharpish, leaving it several shades away from the desired one.

Jacket - Black,multi-zipped number from Boy, on unsanctioned, long-term loan from a Gosforth rich kid of my acquaintance.

Jumper - Tight-fitting, stripey and multi-coloured. Really fucking horrid, now I look back at it.

Trizers - Skin-tight black velvet affairs, tucked into black DMs, with fluorescent socks folded over the tuck. Sometimes, in an heroic bid to look even shitter, I would wear one pink sock and one green one.

Accessories - Nail varnish, self-pierced ears, eyeliner, sunglasses, Walkman playing the first Bauhaus album.

Hoo man, if the lady wants a baby, I'm the Cock of the North...

The Great Baby's Cock Swindle of '82.

2009-10-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

I had a bit of a falling-out with Glen, Wagsley and the rest of the chaps in Autumn 1982, and it was all over a daft little baby's cock.

Don't worry, we're not about to enter the realms of hardcore infant-noncery here; in the parlance of the 1980s youth of Fenham, a 'baby's cock' is a small joint using only one Rizla, for those times when you need a cheeky toke in a hurry.

Example:
Fenham youth #1 - I'm tekkin' the dog oot for a walk in a minute.
Fenham youth #2 - Aye, sound, giz a second, I'll just knock up a quick baby's cock.

We had acquired a semi-reliable weed connection, albeit one with a couple of drawbacks. The first of these was the fact that he still lived with his mam, which was hardly ideal. The second was that he only would only sell us tiny amounts of weed at a time - two pure grass baby's cocks for a quid was his maximum. this meant that I was in and out of his house all the time, running the gauntlet of his mam's disapproving glare at least three times a week.

One day, he told me that he had rolled the cocks thinner than usual, so he gave me three instead of two.

"Hmmm", I thought to myself, "I'm running all the risks picking up the gear all the time, and for what? I think I shall just pocket this extra baby's cock and say nowt to the lads about it.", so that's what I did.

Unfortunately for me, Wagsley bumped into the pusher-man a couple of days later and he mentioned that he'd given us three last time around as they were thinner - well and truly fucking rumbled.

There was major uproar at this betrayal of my fellow smokers. Luckily, this didn't lead to Glen jumping up and down on my head, as I feared that it might. They just told me to fuck off for a while instead, which was vastly preferable - getting sent to Coventry by your mates might not be much fun, but at least I went there with a full set of teeth, eh?

Best job interview EVER.

2009-10-02T05:26:00.000-07:00

I finally got kicked out of college in November 1982, after disregarding several warnings about my crappy attendance record.

I was rather hoping that this would lead to a lengthy spell of sitting about on my arse and doing nothing, but my mam wasn't having that and packed me off to the Job Centre bright and early one morning, instead.

They asked me what my ideal job would be, and I said "Working in a theatre", quite possibly because they were waiting for an answer from me, as it certainly wasn't a career that I'd ever given any thought to, up until that moment in time.

Much to my surprise, I got a phone call at home from the Job people a couple of hours later, telling me that there was indeed a job going at a theatre in Newcastle.

Sadly, it wasn't a proper job in the strictest sense of the word; it was a six-month placement on the Youth Opportunities Programme, or the YOP scheme, as it was commonly known.

For the uninitiated, the YOP scheme was basically set up so the Tory Party could mask the true youth unemployment figures of the time. Trainees got £25 a week, which was about a tenner more than the dole was back then. Crucially, the government also gave the YOP's employer £25 a week, so there was an incentive for them to take on otherwise unemployable, fuck-witted school-leavers.

My interview time was set for 2.30 that afternoon, at Live Theatre's base on the Quayside. Their secretary ushered me into a small room, where I sat and waited for my interviewer to arrive.

At around ten to three, the door crashed open and a small, unshaven, bespectacled bloke in his early 30's wearing a black leather jacket stumbled into the room.

"Aargh, I've just fucking got up!", it said. "Hello mate, I'm Shark. Can I just pinch one of your ciggies there?"

After lighting up, he informed me that I was Live Theatres new YOP, or 'Winky-pop', which was the term that they preferred to use, should I fancy the post.

The good news was late starts, not till 1.30 PM most days. The bad news was late finishes - by the time you'd stripped the stage, packed the set away (Live was a touring theatre company) and gone for a pint after the show, you'd be lucky to be finished by 11 at night, so you didn't get much time for a social life.

Having just bumped my mates and had away with an extra baby's cock, I didn't have much of a social life anyway at the time, so I accepted the post of Winky-pop Assistant Stage Manager, due to start the following Monday.

At this point, my mam informed me that £16 of my £25 would be going straight to her for board and lodgings. Naturally, when I heard this, I became super-keen to move out and get my own place, quick-smart, but she wouldn't let me, and, as I was still under the age of 18, there was sweet-fuck-all I could do about it.

I mean, God bless my mam and all, but she's about as tight as two coats of paint, and that's a fact.

Snow White in the Black Lagoon.

2009-10-01T04:04:00.000-07:00

It might seem hard to believe when you look at Newcastle's regenerated Quayside now, with its glittering nightlife, blinking eye bridge and the futuristic, giant armadillo that is the Sage Music Centre, but for years, nobody went near the Quayside unless they worked there or were buying broken biscuits at the Sunday Market.
There are salmon and otters in the Tyne now, but back in 1982, the river was a slimy, greeny-brown slurry that responded to raises in the ambient temperature by emitting an almighty fucking stink whenever the weather got even slightly warm. Imagine a two-weeks-dead dog liberally coated in rotting fishpaste and stale vomit and you'll be getting close.
Live Theatre was (and still is) situated in an old warehouse about 20 yards away from the river.
These days, it's a proper, state-of-the-art theatre and rehearsal space, incorporating a rather fine restaurant and a swish art gallery, but back then, the building was an empty, dusty shell with a couple of offices attached to it, and Live Theatre was exclusively a touring company with no performance base of their own.
It was panto time when I joined Live, and they were touring with a play called Snow White in the Black Lagoon, written by a bloke called Peter Mortimer.
I've just Googled the panto now and discovered that, while Mr Mortimer has written some 16 plays in his time, you won't find any mention of his Snow White anywhere on the net, which is doubtless the fate that it deserves, coz it was proper fucking shite, like...
Here's a couple of snippets for you, so you can make your own mind up.

1) The panto's opening scene. The narrator comes onstage and, to the tune of House of the Rising Sun, proclaims "There is a place all folks shirk from, where the sun can't hide the moon, so pack your trunk and do a bunk if you're near the Black Lagoon."

2) To the tune of Blue Moon, several of the cast sing "Black Lagoon, you saw us standing alone. You gobbled up Jean and Joan, don't make us go there, groan,groan."

Proper quality, eh? My main task was operating the follow-spot (it's a spotlight that moves and follows people, if you happen to be shit-thick and unable to work it out), and each night, I'd find myself hugging the hot light as I cringed at the ropey dialogue coming from the stage.

Pete Mortimer came to see the show early on in the run and declared himself quite chuffed with it. About a week later, the radge American director (who I'm not going to name in case he's Googling himself, coz he comes from some shady diplomatic/political background and he might well track me down and shoot me in the face if I take the piss too much) decided that the panto was getting a little stale and wrote in several new characters, including a Vietnam war veteran who suffered from 'amusing' flashbacks, thus making an already shit panto even more shitter.

Unfortunately for the director, the writer turned up at a show unannounced a few days later, and was understandably not at all fucking happy that his panto had been fannied about with something terrible. Very heated words were exchanged backstage and that was the last that our audiences saw of the 'Nam vet and his hilarious shell-shock shenanigans.

That bloke in the pic I've used is the late Sammy Johnson, or Ronnie to his friends, as Sammy was his stage name. He played the part of Puddles the footman in the panto (and had a dog called Piddles - see the witty wordplay going on there?) and out of all the people working for Live, he was the one I got on with best, no contest. He later found TV fame in Spender, where he played Stick; Jimmy Nail's dodgy sidekick.

Also, see that really visible scar that links his eyebrows? He got that from running into a cow in a field in the dark, while being chased by some kids who wanted to kick his head all over when he was a teenager.

Tragically, Ronnie died of a heart attack while jogging in Spain in 1998. When I heard the news, I was about a month into my last ever drink-binge (which lasted around four or five months) and was just too fucked-up to attend the funeral, which is something I still feel awful about, because Ronnie was always good to me, and I couldn't even get it together to say goodbye to him, but aye, let's not start getting all fucking maudlin, eh?

Loathe as I am to be quoting the legendarily uber-humourless Jimmy Nail, when he said that "Ronnie epitomised everything that was good about Geordies, he was blessed with a mix of humour, loyalty, kindness and fun", I have to admit that the big-nosed, ugly fucker was bang on the money.

I am an Alcoholic.

2009-09-30T07:05:00.000-07:00

My name is Ettrick and I'm an alcoholic. I know the plan was to write this in chronological order, but since I spent last Sunday shitting all over my life from a great height, it only seems right and proper to mention what's going on .

I picked up a drink again around eight months ago, having made the dumb-ass decision that I had power over alcohol, instead of the other way round.

I could go to great lengths to justify this, point the finger at shitty people and shittier events that were going on, but that would all be a big old load of bollocks.

People and events didn't order me my first drink - I did that all by my big-and-clever self.

What astounds me about it is just how quickly I moved the goalposts to accommodate my newly-discovered thirst for the booze. Although I didn't start off drinking where I left off all those years ago ie evil white cider for breakfast, I escalated things over eight months to the point where morning drinking looked inevitable.

At first, I promised myself that I'd only drink on press trips when I was out of the country. I very quickly altered this to include press trips to London, then altered that to include drinking at gigs, and then I justified being able to have a Jack 'n' Coke on the way home from work every night.

If I'd given myself a couple more weeks, I'm sure I would have thought it was okay to have a drink if the day of the week had a Y in it...

Anyways, to cut a long story short, I had a bit of a cold on Sunday and didn't really want to go to work. I could have done, mind. I could have stood at the front and taken food orders, wrapped cutlery, etc. There are those who say that's all I ever do anyway, these days, and they're probably not far wrong.

But I told the mrs I was too ill to come in, and she told me I was sacked. Within two hours, I was holed up in some shitty forty quid a night hotel armed with two bottles of Jack and two grand that was set aside to pay the quarterly VAT bill that I'd robbed from the house. Then I got lonely and started phoning assorted people, announcing my spectacular plummet from the temperance wagon.

And then I phoned my wife, told her I'd been drinking for eight months, told her I didn't love her anymore, told her it was all over. I excel myself sometimes, I really do.

Cutting a long story short, I've left Rachel devastated, depressed and in pieces. She's just celebrated ten years of sobriety and feels like I've betrayed her, and let's face it...I have, and very badly.

I don't know if we'll be able to recover from this, we've had fifteen years together and this is as bad as things have ever got. Do I love her? Like I love air, but there's only so many times you can say 'sorry' before you end up sounding like a frog testing the limits of its vocal abilities.

I'm currently in the spare room. I've got no keys, no money and no job. I'm going to AA meetings every day, and slowly becoming aware that I might be going to them for the rest of my life.

Yesterday, I met a really scary bloke at one who had tattoos all over his hands, throat, ears etc. Normally, I'd have crossed the street to avoid him, but when he told me he was six months clean, I realised that this made him a better, stronger person than me - I've got four days clean right now.

Before I picked up again, not a drop of booze had passed my lips for over seven years, and it was fucking great to be able to say that. Now I'm back to square one, I feel twitchy and raw and the world suddenly just got a whole lot more daunting and darker.

I even missed the debut performance of my short play the other night coz it was on in a pub and I couldn't trust myself to go and not drink, so I went to a meeting instead, with only my busfare in my pocket in case I got tempted by one of the three pubs I had to pass on my way there.

My play is all about the very bad things that can happen when one drinks too much, if anyone wants to be nourished by feasting on a rich, meaty slab of irony...

So aye, I'm feeling like shit warmed over right now. It would be piss-easy to retreat into self-pity - "Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink" as they say in the AA, but that ain't happening. Yes, I've crashed and burned spectacularily, but I'm not dead and I'm not drinking, and that ticking clock is ticking away and bringing on the future.

Loads of people now think that I'm an utter cunt-bubble after this episode, and they're doubtless bang on the money. If there's one thing good to come out of this, it's that Rachel has realised just how many people love her and are looking out for her.

What I will say to those loads of people, though, is that if you feel that I have personally let you down in some way with this episode, then I apologise unreservedly and whole-heartedly. But then, I'm likely to ask them if they've ever somehow fucked up in their own lives by drinking too much, and in most cases, the answer is going to be "Yes, of course I have."

Right now, I'm a long way from being perfect and I've done a dreadful thing that will have repercussions in my life for years, in all likelihood.
But, y'know, if there's a queue of people out there armed with half-bricks to chuck at me, can you talk amongst yourselves beforehand and see if you can find one of your gang who is without sin to throw the first stone? Cheers, like...

On with the show...

2009-09-29T06:09:00.000-07:00

Right, now we've established my credentials as a proper rebel booze lord on the edge, totally 4 Real and not some poncey dilettante when it comes to being tortured by demons called Jack and Jim, can we get on with the fucking tale?

I'm totally pappering myself that I'll find happy-clappy religion at the AA so I need to press on with this before them sinister fuckers suck out my soul and leave some bland, platitude-spouting husk behind.

And before you start, yes, I am taking this desperately seriously - the rest of my life is at stake, after all - I just find great solace in approaching matters of grave import with flippancy and humour. Don't like it? Stop reading me.

So aye, back to my time with Live Theatre. Specifically, back to New Years Eve, 1982. We'd been staying up in Carlisle doing the panto for a few days, and I returned home about seven at night on NYE, where I was somewhat startled to find Bullshit Dave of The Students fame sitting chatting to my mam.

Apparently, and according to him, he was now a psychiatric nurse. Funny that, coz I'd last seen him about a year earlier, and at that time, he was an unemployable ginger bullshitter. I guess he must have been fast-tracked in the wacky world of mental health, eh?

Utter shite about jobs aside, it was nice to see Dave, and I invited him to an NYE party my dad was throwing.

Arriving in Jesmond a bit early, we decided to nip into the Lonsdale for a swift one. Sitting in one corner of the boozer were a hippy-looking girl and a goth girl. The goth was spectacularly falling-over pissed, the hippy had flashing eyes and a naughty grin. Oh, and a crackin' pair of norks on her as well.

We approached them and instigated a conversation. What with her being a hippy, I thought she might know where a man might pick up a wee bit o' weed, so I said "Excuse me, do you know where I might be able to score around here?", at which point, she slapped me in the face, hard.

It turned out that she knew fuck-all about drugs and thought that my question meant "Do you know where I might meet a young lady more attractive than your good self for some greasy in-out, in-out sex fun?", hence the hard slap to the face.

And that was my first introduction to Gillian, or 'Jillyian' as she preferred to spell it, and I was totally suckered and in love, instantly. We spent all night wrapped around each other in various Jesmond parties, much to the chagrin of Bullshit Dave, coz her mate was way too far gone to be copping off with him. He was on his toes about an hour after we got to the pub, and that was the last that I ever saw of him.

17 years old with a job in an achingly-hip theatre company and a mad, Catholic schoolgirl hippy chick blessed with top-notch titties on my arm = best New Year's Eve I ever had, by some distance.

Oh aye, in case you're wondering just how fucking hot I looked that night, I was wearing an army surplus t-shirt that I'd customised with a zip that exposed one of my nipples, and was sporting a haircut known as 'the funboy 3', which was a number one crop at the back and a birds-nest explosion on top, brown with orange streaks in, courtesy of blagging a free 'do' from the hairdressing company that the theatre used.

Hotter than Georgia asphalt, I'm sure you'll agree.

Snow White, that's gonna need stitches.

2009-09-28T07:52:00.000-07:00

Let's not dwell on the fact that despite the fact that I was deeply in love with Jillyian, I still found it necessary to scuttle a sixth-former doing work experience at Live Theatre on the floor of the costume room about a week into the new year, eh?

It was terribly wrong of me, I know, but when you're 17, blood rushes straight to your dick, circumnavigating your brain altogether.

In fact, I got a flier from the all newly-refurbished Live Theatre the other day - for only £150, you can get a brass plaque for one of the seats, inscribed with the message of your choice.

Although it would be lovely to get one on the new balcony that says "Skotty got his hole roughly in this spot off the work experience lass, January 1983", there's probably better things I could spend the cash on, even if I'm hard-pushed to think of something right now.

As is traditional among theatre folk, we celebrated the end of the panto run with a massive blowout party at Live Theatre. At one point in the proceedings, a bloke called Devo, who was the lights-and-sound-fella, raided the costume department and got togged up in the Snow White outfit, to much hilarity from all assembled, principally because he was a skinny, bearded hippy and the costume actually fitted him, despite the fact that it was made for a very small woman.

I was a bit short of spends that night, so the theatre thoughtfully set up a bar tab for me. Unfortunately, I made a serious dent in a bottle of tequila and spent most of the party in the bogs, blindly puking my ring out.

I'd been in there about an hour when I heard the door open and Devo informed me that we had to go to hospital.

"Nar, Devo, I don't think I'm that bad", I reassured him.

"Not you, you daft little fucker!", he replied, "Me! Fucking have a look at this!"

I turned my head away from the bowl and looked up, and discovered that Devo was bleeding profusely from his forearm, which had a huge chunk of flesh dangling loosely from it, nearly gouged completely out...he'd just fallen through a window.

So, off to hospital it was, though not by ambulance or taxi. No, a pissed-up Devo decided that the best course of action would be to commandeer the theatre's three-ton truck and drive us up in that, instead.

Cue much staggering about a practically deserted hospital at three in the morning, looking for casualty.

Devo got seen to as soon as we arrived. Sitting waiting for him, I began to feel queasy again and asked the nurse for a receptacle to vom into.

As I heaved up the last of the tequila into a stainless steel kidney bowl, I could hear Devo's doctor talking to him behind a screen on the other side of the room.

"Now sir", he said, "If you could just lift your skirt and drop your tights a bit, I'll give you a tetanus booster."

The Night of the Snapped Suspender...

2009-09-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

...was the title of the second play I was involved in at Live Theatre.

Again, I've just Googled the title and came up with nothing, but I can tell you that it was written by one Leonard Barras, who has been described as "North Shields' finest surrealist", although not by me, I hasten to add. I'd probably go for something altogether more succinct and pithy, like "Fucking rubbish."

A brief synopsis of the play, then: A determined DHSS benefit fraud investigator goes undercover in a variety of disguises (including a Chinese waiter in full Mandarin costume, complete with dangling moustache made from shoe-laces) in order to prove that an aging thespian couple who claim to be living together are, in fact, married, and thus have been overpaid on their entitlement.

Surreal? Not even slightly. Total wank-splash? Now you're getting warm, if you'll pardon the uncomfortable juxtaposition of 'wank-splash' and 'getting warm' there.

For authenticity, Live Theatre drafted in an actual aged thespian to play the main role, a cut-price Mickey Rooney called Eddie Angel, although I'd bet some real big bucks on that not being the name that he was born with.

If I remember correctly, not many of the cast and crew at Live exactly warmed towards Mr Angel, he was a real old luvvie full of tales of days gone by, the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd etc, and they were socially-aware, young, hard-drinking groovers taking real theatre to real people, innit.

Annoyingly, I've just this minute discovered that there's some American guitarist fella called Eddie Angel these days, and furthermore, the recent love-child of Eddie Murphy and Scary Spice is called Angel, both of which which make it really tricky to search for the bloke I knew to get a picture, so "really small tubby fella with white hair, oft accompanied by a considerably younger wife" will have to do.

I have found a picture of the ac-tor who played the role of the dole snoop, though, a fine, upstanding gentleman by the name of Brian Hogg, who I talked to only the other day. He was wearing a totally battered, bright yellow straw hat and an equally distressed brown leather jacket. At a funeral. You can't buy cool like that. (He's on the left in the pic. The bloke on the right seems to be playing with himself through his trousers, giving it the old pocket billiards.)

For the play, in a bid to 'feel' his way into the character of a DHSS investigator, Brian shaved a huge semi-circle out of his hair, so it looked like he was balding. Or a monk. Or a bit mental. Whatever, it rivalled my shaved-on-one-side-long-on-the-other do of a year earlier in terms of looking all crap and weird. Mind, he was getting a weekly wage for his having his hair like that, which makes mine infinitely more noble and superior, I reckon.

I mention Brian because his role in the Nenthead -to-Newcastle road race between a three-ton truck and a mini-bus full of horrifically hungover actors (we'd had a stopover) was one of the finest real-life comedy moments that I've ever seen.

I'd already hurt myself laughing in the mini-bus when one of the actresses threw up out of the window while we were stopped at traffic lights. Some of it splashed onto a small dog that was waiting to cross the road with its owner.
She looked down and said "Fucking hell, I don't remember eating that."

Eddie Angel was travelling in the truck with Brian, who was doing the driving. We stopped at a pub not long after setting off and a race was proposed. Brian asked if I fancied getting in the truck and 'having a laugh' with Eddie. Sounded good.

A couple of minutes after we set off, Brian pulled a full bottle of vodka from inside his jacket, swigged down about a third of it in one go and stamped on the accelerator, weaving all over the road and cackling like a witch on poppers. Eddie instantly turned white and clutched for something to hang onto as we hurtled along the twisty B road.

Except, as he told a by now visibly-shaking Eddie a bit later on, it wasn't really vodka in the bottle; it was water. When we'd stopped at the pub, Brian had asked the barmaid for an empty vodka bottle he'd seen in a bin and filled it from the tap in the bog. What larks, Pip!

(As I was writing this bit, I remembered another Live Theatre vehicular-related jape I'd completely forgotten about till now. Devo once narrowly avoided crashing down a ravine in Kielder Forest late one night in the mini-bus, while we were playing a game of Blindfold Driving, as in "put yer hands over me eyes then give uz directions". Totally fucking Radio Rental, the lot of them.. )

Radiator + OAP piss = big old pong

2009-09-26T04:24:00.000-07:00

I managed to get lobbed off the Snapped Suspender tour after sleeping in one morning and missing the pick-up to go to Lincolnshire for a few days. I was a bit gutted about this when it happened, but I've just visited Lincolnshire for the first time recently and it's one of the most depressing places I've ever been; all endless flat horizons and potato fields as far as the eye can see. It was like being in the Man Who Fell to Earth, but with more yokels and an abundance of root vegetables.

Anyway, getting chucked off the tour meant that I got a promotion of sorts, as I became stage manager on a two-month tour of old peoples homes, with three actors banging out such well-loved classics as We'll Meet Again, Roll Out the Barrel and Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me (No, No, No).

It was a tiny production compared to Snapped Suspender - all the actors, staging and costumes fitted into a mini-bus, and normally, they wouldn't have needed a stage manager at all.

However, a week before the production started, one of the actors had got caught up in a mass brawl in Shieldfield Social Club and had punched a wall as hard as he could when the bloke he was trying to hit wisely got out of the way.

This injury involved several metal pins being inserted in his hand, which meant that he couldn't carry any gear or make the costume changes in time, which is where the need for a stage manager arose.

So, for two months, we did a show at lunchtime and then another one somewhere else in the early evening, going to every state-run old folks' home in the North-East, pretty much. After about a week of entering strip-lit buildings that reeked of disinfectant and piss, a slightly hysterical siege mentality gripped everyone on the tour, with all of us fervently hoping that the next place wouldn't stink quite as bad as the last one did.

Highlights of the tour included:

1) Being greeted at nearly every home by a manager/supervisor saying "You're not from that Skin And Bones theatre company, are you?" We quickly discovered that this was because Skin And Bones had recently been touring old peoples homes with a laugh-a-minute short play about death and dying, taking a full-size coffin on stage with them and generally freaking the shit out of the oldies. What a bunch of luvvie bastards.

2) Going into a home where 150 of yer elderlies had just finished a lunch of steamed cod, resulting in all four of us stinking of fish for two or three days, despite frequent bathing and changes of clothing. About a week later, we entered another place where they'd just dined on steamed cod, and the actor with pins in his hand went straight to the home's manager and informed him that the show was off as he had to go and get his dressings changed. So much for that actor's maxim, 'the show must go on', eh?

3) Halfway through one show in a stiflingly-hot room, an elderly lady pissed herself and then sat on one of the up-full-blast radiators to dry out. Cue the room rapidly filling up with the sick-making stench of hot pensioner piss.

4) Raiding the Theatre's props room, kitting ourselves out as a camera crew and spending two afternoons pretending to interview people for Channel 4 in the centre of Newcastle. At one point, a passing old woman was so desperate to get into camera-shot that she started walking backwards and then fell over.

5) Getting mobbed by around 100 Down's Syndrome sufferers in South Shields, all desperate to get our autographs. Actually, I still have bad dreams about this one sometimes.

6) One of the actors entering a cafe in Newcastle, wearing a stuck on Hitler tash and asking the waitress for 'Jews on toast' (can you tell he was starting to lose it by this point?).

7) Taking my mate James along to see the show one night, and being stopped by an old woman who said to me, "Ooh, you've brought your mam along. That's nice."

8) A dementia sufferer disrupting one show by shouting "Where's Alec? Alec, I'm in North Shields!!!" for the entirety of the performance. (We were actually in Cruddas Park, which is some 10 miles from North Shields. Crud Ass Park - never was a place more aptly named. If you've ever been there then you'll know that I speak the truth.)

What can I say? It was an experience, it messed up the heads of all concerned and it properly fucking stank. Even today, if I happen to chance upon the whiff of stale piss when I'm out and about (it happens: I go to some nasty pubs sometimes), my head takes me back to the Geriatric Wreckin' Crew tour of 1983...

Skag Trendy

2009-09-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

After six months, in June 1983, my Winky-pop scheme at Live Theatre came to an end.
Sadly, they didn't say "Come and work for us, you are the best winky-pop we've ever had!", or anything remotely along those lines. They just said "Cheers, catch you later", pretty much, and I was back on the Nat King Cole, Rock'n'Roll, The Nash, Social Security, Benefits, call them what you will, but don't call them unless you've half an hour to spare waiting for the right department to pick the bastard phone up.

Jillyian and I split up around this time, after about six months together - her stupid idea, not mine. I was quite gutted for a few months. I even wrote some alas-poor-me stanzas of poetry, I seem to recall.

Jillyian changed quickly; in six months, she'd gone to looking like something out of Woodstock to something out of the Batcave, the tumbling, reddish-brown curls and Gypsy dresses having been swapped for a harsh black mohican and layers of grey rags. She still looked fucking hot, like. So hot, in fact, that she wanted to go out with slightly older blokes... and not me.

Devastated, but with a great new stock of mental images for the wank-bank is the way you've got to look at these things, I now know.

Crucial tip for anyone looking around for a best friend - try to pick one with a lovely mam who won't mind you lounging round her house all summer long. Also, if you can choose a bloke with a younger sister at a private girls' school, chances are that you'll be beating off eager posh birds with the proverbial shitty stick, so aye, cheers for all the digestive biscuits and over-friendly minge, James and family, it was top.

The fact that James' family was slightly posher than everyone else's was evidenced by the fact that they ate dinner at seven, not tea at five like everyone else. Also, they sat around the table to do it, and somewhat sinisterly, they would turn the TV off before the meal and actually talk to each other over dinner - what the fuck's that all about?

As well as James, I was spending a lot of time with Piss Shite, and also another chap I won't be naming, mainly because he once injected himself with lager and lime as a dare, and I couldn't tell you that and his name as well, that would be a bit snakey. He was a bit of a daft cunt, though, in case you hadn't picked up on that already.

Heroin was dead cool back then. I knew half a dozen kids under the age of 16 who had either taken it or really wanted to.

I partly blame Christiana F, a popular youth culture film of the time, despite being German and only available as a badly-dubbed video, or one with subtitles.

Based on the book, Wir Kinder Vom Bahnoff Zoo (We're Kids From Zoo Station), it's a harrowing tale of smacked out 14-year olds in 70s Berlin.

Unfortunately, all the kids in it look really street and cool, even when they're puking up over themselves while trying to find a vein.

Actually, especially when they're puking up over themselves while trying to find a vein, now I think about it.

Also, David Bowie's in it, and it's one of the few films he's in where his acting isn't so wooden, you think that someone's thrown a chair onto the set. This is entirely because they wisely just got him to sing a few songs, instead of trying to thesp it up and dropping a massive bollock.

Assorted Phil stupidity early 80s.

2009-09-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

Lying in bed at my mam's house one night around one in the morning, I heard this car going up the hill opposite, making a really horrible scraping sound, like one of the tires had come off and it was being driven on the wheel-rim.

The next day, I discovered that was indeed exactly what I had heard, and it had been Phil driving back from Snake Lake* in his mam's car, the front of which was now totally fucked and missing a tire - Phil had driven the seven or eight miles back with sparks coming off the rim, totally off his tits on some Benylin-based, medicine cabinet 'cocktail'. His mam was away and had no idea that he could even drive. Which he couldn't, evidenced by the fact that he crashed into a tree.

Waking late the next day, Phil had a banging head and a horrible feeling in his gut that something had gone badly tits-up, he later told me. A quick glance out of the window at the badly-mangled Mini Metro confirmed that he was about to enter a world of shit, what with him not having a license of any sort.

He managed to beg his sister's ex to say that he'd been driving the car while giving Phil a lesson, and had somehow crashed at high speed and written off the front right wing. He had to work in the Gosforth Park Hotel for months, washing dishes to pay for the repairs, though.

And then there was the time he stepped off the catwalk on a glass garage roof, fell through the glass and then through the roof of a wardrobe stored in the garage below, so he ended up inside a locked wardrobe, bleeding profusely from a gash under his chin, and also with a broken leg.

Errrm, the time he knocked up one of James' neighbours at midnight, asking them if they knew anything about a bottle of magic mushroom wine that their son was said to possess. The kid wasn't happy, but he was a child TV star, sometimes wore a fez and had a pair of jeans with 'jeans' written on the leg in biro, so the fucker had it all coming, I reckon.

The night around Xmas at James' house when, upon being greeted with a cheery hello by one of James' uncles as they passed on the stairs, he somewhat tersely replied "Fuck off."

The time he seriously expected me to buy hash for him from that evil, neck-tattooed West End nutter's drinking den of choice, The Greyhound. It wasn't the buying it that was the real problem, like - he wanted me to go with a set of scales to ensure that I got the correct weight. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ...get bent, numb-nuts. That would have been sure suicide, like wearing bespoke puff ballet shoes at a kids' football tournament, or something.

*actually called Bolam Lake, but known as Snake Lake among many of the kids that I knew in Fenham. Something to do with someone picking/eating magic mushrooms there and becoming convinced they were surrounded by snakey Red Indians, 'snakey' being Geordie slang for sly.

Skag trendy #2

2009-09-22T15:25:00.000-07:00

Turning 18 was a fairly unremarkable event. By then, I'd been forgiven by the chaps over the unfortunate baby's cock incident, and they all came round on my birthday for a dinner party - my mam's idea, I should point out. I'd have been happy just getting fucked up doing hot-knives and then watching Minder with the lads and a couple of bottles of Old English cider, but she thought it would be civilised. I fucking ask you, who wants civilised when they're 18?

In my head I was the Fonz, but in her head I was Richie Cunningham, or worse; that Pottsie cunt. Always, always hated him, with his over-eager manner, all-American teeth and just generally being as thick as pigshit in every episode. Anyways, if the Fonz was so cool, why did he have his office in a toilet and hang out with a load of young kids,eh?

Much more entertaining was James' 18th a few months later, where we all got into a barney over a bill in a restaurant - after one of the waiters had called someone in our party a stupid bastard after bumping into them and spilling some wine, whereupon we refused to pay the service charge on the bill. Punk rock, man.

This led to the waiter claiming that "I didn't call you a stupid bastard, I called you a stupid", possibly the worst attempt at lying that I've heard so far in my life, and it had us all pissing ourselves laughing at him. I've still not gone back to his wanky eaterie, despite the fact that it's changed hands and been under new ownership at least three times in the last 24 years. I'm a man of principle.

James ended the night back at home with an admirable display of balletic projectile vomiting, spinning round in a full circle and puking all over about 15 coats and scarves hanging up in a little room next to the downstairs bog. It really was a privilege to behold, although what Mrs Cook, his family's cleaner/faithful retainer made of it next morning, I shudder to think. Still, why employ a cleaner if you can't spew your ring all over the place and then get them to clean it up once in a while, eh?

The big upside of being 18, though, was that I got to choose where to live, and I swiftly chose to move out of home, sharpish, like.

At the time, we'd started scoring hash from a total dude called Steve, who was a couple of years above me at school. He played the guitar well and used words like "yo" and "ciao" without any irony whatsoever. He also weighed his dope out on scales in front of you, which made a change from standing outside someone's flat while the kid who was inside scoring bit a big lump out of it in the toilet before handing it over, which used to happen a lot before we approached Steve.

Anyway, Steve shared this two-bed flat with another smoker, a Ronnie Wood-esque bloke called Sean, about half a mile away from my mam's house. I'd been 'visiting' this place for a few weeks when I asked Steve if I could crash on the sofa there for a while.

He told me that I could, as he was moving out, although a bloke called Alan was moving in, so I'd still be on the sofa. He also told me to be careful, as lot of people coming to the flat were using heroin, although he only sold hash.

When Steve moved out, Sean took over his dope business, but Alan brought heroin with him, and heroin brought radgie bastards with tattoos all over their necks and hands, West End burglars and legbreakers popping in all day, every day, often for as little as a "quid chase".

Once Alan learned that I hadn't really taken smack before - I'd had a couple of tiny puffs, but daft little amounts I got nothing from - the first thing he did was offer me a big fat chase, which I accepted.

While it numbed me, I didn't really feel relaxed, and I certainly didn't get that wrapped in cotton wool feeling that junkies always go on about. In all honesty, if it had been the Velvet Underground on the stereo instead of Queen, I might have been seduced by the seedy glamour of it all, but it's hard to look or act elegantly wasted when you're sitting on on a beanbag and listening to the fucking theme tune from Flash Gordon.

Bastarding Prog Rockers, man, they even make impossibly glamorous, class A drugs seem shit.

Ellesmere Road Part 1

2009-09-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

After two or three weeks sitting around until two in the morning waiting for a load of smack-rats to vacate the living room before I could get some kip on the sofa, I decided to bite the bullet and go back home for a bit instead.

I don't really count this brief excursion as the first time I properly left home; it was more like going on a lengthy camping trip, but with a load of West End burglars dropping by to buy and smoke heroin and also to rob my electric toothbrush and my Walkman, the dirty bastards.

I only took heroin that one time I mentioned earlier, and it wasn't the drug for me. Anyone that's only met me pissed might find it hard to believe that, by nature, I'm quite introspective and quiet, but it's true, and I didn't see the attraction of a drug that accentuates those qualities. I wanted something to make me loud, confident and a bit radge. Speed and booze is the winning combination, but I didn't know that yet.

I quite liked the sound of speed, but the first time I tried to buy any involved unsuccessfully trying to track down a bloke called Snake on the mean streets of Crud Ass Park in a horrible winter blizzard, which was a bit of a bummer.

While I had spectacularly cacked up my O-levels and was now wandering around in snowstorms trying to buy drugs off people called things like Snake, James had got about eight passes and was in his private school's sixth form, doing his A levels. And then he just left, having decided that a life of academia wasn't his thing.

And then he fucked off in the middle of a really shitty winter, up to some frozen farm in the wilds of Northumberland, where he helped tend to the newborn lambs or something, Getting up at stupid o'clock in the frozen morning every day. He's hardcore, James.

Anyways, not long after he came back from his big sheep adventure, we started looking for a flat - a not uncommon practice among young dole-wallas in the 80s, as Housing Benefit paid all the rent, as long as it wasn't too exorbitant, which our place certainly fucking wasn't.

Unless I'm wrong, the rent on our two bedroom, ground floor flat on Ellesmere Road, Benwell was £40 a month each.

Our landlord was a Mister Iqbal, who lived in the flat directly above us, along with his wife and kids, who we never actually saw all the time we lived there, now I stop to think about it.

Iqbal would never knock on the door when he wanted to talk to us. Instead, he'd wait till one of us went to the shop and then come out and pretend to fiddle with his car, capturing us in a conversation on our return journey.

Iqbal had a lot of respect for 'The James', as he called him. 'The James, he come from good family, too good for round here, they bastards", he would say to me, in passing.

He once caught me sitting on the front step, checking out these two blonde girls with cracking arses who lived down the road. 'No, no, Skotty, they bad girls, very bad girls, no go, no go'.

Very bad girls was exactly what I was looking for, but they were seemingly not looking for me. I had a brief fling with a smallish girl of a slightly rotund nature for a few weeks. My dear friends christened her 'The Egg' due to her shape, and endlessly took the piss because I had 'laid an egg at Easter', apparently. Hoo man, fuck off.

It's late, I'll get to this another time. Some people get threatened with having their faces bitten off, and one person actually sets his face on fire, so I don't want to rush it.

Ellesmere Road Part 2

2009-09-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

Confucius, he say 'When the school psychopath goes loco in your flat and threatens to bite your face off, and you are also visited by a plague of bluebottles, verily, it's time to fucking move back to your mam's."

I can't deny that we had some good laughs in that flat, but there were definite downsides to living in a ghetto full of burglars, charvers, the great unemployed and other assorted mentals.

In terms of sheer spectacle, the very biggest belly laugh was had on the night Rock-on set his face on fire. Unless you were Rock-on - he didn't laugh at all, but he shivered like a shitting dog quite a lot immediately afterwards. That would have been the shock, I reckon.

What the future local government senior IT consultant did was this - filled his mouth with petrol, spat it out onto a lighter. Somehow, he got away with it first time, which encouraged him to take a bigger swig and try for a spectacular.

Unfortunately, he dribbled petrol all over his chin and then spat the rest into the lighter's flame,
and the whole bottom half of his face caught fire.

We watched him jumping around on fire in the living room , jaws dropped, for around two seconds, before James leapt up and put the flames out by slapping Rock-on repeatedly about the face. He's hardcore, James.

Rock-on had this weird plasma stuff coming out of his cheek, and it looked like a nasty burn, but he got some homeopathic remedy off of Louise's mam and it cleared it right up, so no real harm done and a top night in with the lads for all concerned.

One big downside, though, was getting burgled a lot - three times in four months, if my memory serves me correctly. The last time, we'd stashed James' ghettoblaster under a load of blankets in a cupboard, so they nicked all of the cassettes instead, along with some tins of food and other stuff worth practically nothing. "They bastards" noted our landlord, Iqbal, each time it happened, doubtless thanking Allah that he lived in an upstairs flat, which were a lot harder to screw.

A less than top night in, and what directly led to us moving out, was the time that one of Fenham's top nasty bad lads totally lost the plot one night (after a tiny amount of hash, the big scary girl) and threatened to "bite the fucking faces off the lot of you", after he decided that we were - and I kid you not - flicking V-signs at him while he was watching the telly.

I didn't invite him round, nor did James. I long-time hated the bloke from school, and his mates who usually came with him.

He came via a sketchy acid-head we'd met, who we referred to as Crazy Mad Len. CML was just about alright, but he had a habit of calling round unannounced, often with other people in tow, and that's how the nasties got into my flat for the first time.

This nutter from school and his two bum-chums had started turning up all the time begging bits of hash off us, as he had a flat in the next road. We had fuck-all dope to spare, but it's hard to say no to a psycho, and he was definitely working that angle.

Anyway, the three of them came one night, just after I'd gone to bed, but James was up with Phil, Wagsley, Junkie Joe from Mexico and his bird.

I was just off to kip when I heard a rumpus in the living room, with someone shouting "Joe, get your lass out of here now!", so I opened the door to find two of the nutters out in the hall, bustling Joe and his girlfriend out...and promptly got punched in the face.

I ducked into the living room to find the biggest nutter yelling at everyone else, then the other two came in and pulled him into the hall. He tried to pull me out of the half- closed door but I was having none of it.

And then he was back in the room, going totally mental, screaming, trying to headbutt everyone in turn (quite tricky, as were all sitting down), we were all fucking dead and he was going to bite our fucking faces off for being cheeky cunts, that was the general jist of the largely one-sided conversation.

And then he was gone, along with Phil's bike, leaving us all slightly bruised and very shaken. We later found out that the reason that his mates had briefly pulled him out of the room was to disarm him of the fuck-off massive hunting knife that he was carrying, so I think we got off pretty lightly - we wouldn't have been the first people that he'd stabbed, put it that way. It was like coming face-to-face with a very upset Begbie, a good decade before Trainspotting.

Guess what, though? The very next day, we got burgled, that's when all the tapes and the food went. Someone call Sherlock fucking Herms, eh?

It was the actual plague of flies that finished Ellesmere Road for me, though. Late one night, we noticed there were suddenly three or four bluebottles in the tiny kitchen. Twatted them with a paper and thought no more of it, went off to bed.

Next morning, I was woken by James, who was screaming in the living room, and that was because he'd just discovered that the kitchen was suddenly like something out of the Omen, in that there were around 500 newly-hatched bluebottles lazily buzzing around and covering every surface. I honestly hope that you never hear the combined buzzing noise of 500 bluebottles, man, proper skin-crawling, hairs-up-on-your-neck-job.

We legged to the shop, got a load of fly-killer and then emptied the aerosols into the kitchen at arm's length. After that, we shovelled them out into the yard, there were literally big piles of them.

Dunno what it was, something dead behind the cooker, maybe? Whatever, I pretty much made a snap decision that, what with the mentals, the burglaries and now the flies, it was time to move on.

Well, not move on; move home, which is a move backwards, when you think about it. But at least nobody was going to bite my fucking face off there; there's no way my mam would stand for that sort of nonsense in the house.

Facebook diversion/exploding cocks.

2009-09-19T03:37:00.000-07:00

(A thousand apologies to anyone who was wondering if I'd fucked up or anything. I hadn't, well I did a bit, I found Facebook and it's like crack to a man like me, currently researching his past. I'll try and get back with the biog programme.)

So aye, moved back home for a bit following the Ellesmere Road experience. Started drinking regularly at weekends in a pub called The Brandling, which was (and still is) a magnet for all the just under-age drinkers from the many private schools in the area. I celebrated my 19th birthday there, notable mainly for a barman refusing to serve me as he believed I was under-age, despite the fact that I produced five or six cards wishing me a 'happy 19th birthday', the daft twat.

A couple of months after my birthday, I left home for the final time, following fights about me smoking dope, thieving money and just generally being a little punk rock radgie bastard.

I moved a good half-mile down the road, into the spare room of the sister of a kid I knew (he was called Stig, Phil fell through his dad's garage's glass roof once), a girl called Karen, or Kaaaaaaaren, if you were to use her pronunciation, as she talked in a drawl, like a very camp man would. Talking of very camp men, her boyfriend, Affaz, (Affaaaaaaaaz) was just moving out, having discovered that his true sexual orientation involved blokes, and not lasses after all, so it was just me and her in the flat.

I didn't stay there for too long, though. I've had some top laughs with Kaaaaaren over the years and she'll figure in this more a bit later on, but for now, I moved out when she met a kid I knew called Yorkshire (he moved to Newcastle from Yorkshire as a small child, apparently. Top nickname, eh?), he moved in, I moved into his flat, which was also home to Junkie Joe from Mexico and a big, martial arts obsessed fella with rubbish hair, who went by the name of Bun.

So there was Joe with his tin foil, Bun with his nunchakas and Yorkshire who was never there because he was away shafting Kaaaaaren....or so we thought.

The truth was a little more painful than that, as Kaaaaaren told me one night.
Just before I moved into his flat, Yorkshire had to go to hospital, a minor operation on his kidneys was what he told everyone.
A minor operation on his cock would have been a truer statement - he'd gone in for a circumcision, following problems with an over-tight foreskin. Ouch.

Unfortunately, he hadn't mentioned this to Kaaaaaren. On their first night together, they were necking and gettin' frisky when Yorkie suddenly leapt up from the sofa, screaming and grabbing his crotch - yes, he'd got an erection and split all his stitches, and now had blood pouring from his groin area. Double ouch, at least.

Obviously, Yorky swore Kaaaaren to secrecy over this, so it was at least three days before everyone knew about it.

The moody, dramatic pic of me here was taken in the living room of the flat by Rock-on and it remains the best picture that I've ever had taken of myself. He's wasted in local government, that fucker.

Pulls self out of torpor and talks about tha Girls.

2009-09-18T06:17:00.000-07:00

Just before I moved in with Yorkie and Bun, I had started seeing a Jolly Nice Girl who I met in the Brandling one night. In retrospect, I didn't really fancy the JNG that much and never actually consummated the relationship, which may have led to her bombing me out a few weeks later, who knows? Anyway, a few months after we split she took up with Bun, and any bird prepared to put up with him and his relentless nunchaka practice must have been a wrong 'un, I reckon.

Luckily, on the very same day that she sacked me off, I met another girl in the Brandling, a foxy, drunk one with bleached blonde hair and a punk rock thing going on. It was a proper eyes-meet-across-a-crowded-room moment. I've done some drugs in my time, oh yezz, but that rushing sensation of "Fucking hell, I've just pulled!" before either of us had spoken a word matches up to any of the scuzzy narc thrills I've experienced. Which cunt said I can't do romantic?

I walked her back to her mate's house that night and arranged to meet her in town next day.
And the next day, she told me that she was called Joanne, (actually, she probs said that the night before) that she had a boyfriend, who I shall call Cockmaster, coz he was a right one, and that she was soon moving to Hong Kong for several months.

I knew something of young Cockmaster as he was chums with the JNG. Two words; Hooray and Henry. One of yer braying, private school rugger types, loads of wedge, car at 17, the Brandling was full of twunts just like him.

I stole a carnation from a vase in a café for her, told her she had no business mixing with posh arseholes and beseeched her to dump the fucker and properly be my girl forever, like. Or until she went to Hong Kong, anyway. And she fell for it, hah.

Master Cockmaster didn't take the news wonderfully well, it has to be said. In fact, he offered me outside the Brandling a few days later, in order to "pull my facking head off", apparently.

Leaving the pub, I took off my studded belt for to twat him with, which led to his rugger chums squawking "He's got a weapon! He's got a weapon!" like I was gonna chiv him or something.

A bizarre, Mexican stand-off of words then kicked off. He was considerably bigger than me and I knew I was on a hiding, so I told him that if he chinned me now, I intended to make it my urgent business to go to his big house and totally fuck up his car in the very near future. I may have even used the phrase "I fucking well swear down I will, man, right?."

This obviously rattled him, being from the good side of the tracks and not being used to little Fenham radgies fucking swearing down, right, that they will destroy his shiny pride and joy.

We then came to a mutual understanding. In return for him not kicking me all over for blatantly stealing his bird, I promised that I would therefore not need to retaliate by pimping his ride with painstripper, matches and a breadknife.

Easily the best fight that I've ever been in. I think we even shook hands on the deal.

hippies,metallers, junkies and dealers #1

2009-09-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

It all starts getting a bit dense around this period, what with my social circle expanding and all, mainly through a mutual interest in soft drugs and signing on.

Kids I met around this time include The Hippies: Hennaz and Marky, who lived a couple of roads away. Hennaz was the spit of Neil from the Young Ones, down to the Army greatcoat and Lionel Blairs, while Marky was like a lankier, stretched version of Marc Bolan.

Actually, that's not quite right. If Marc Bolan had been lanky and also suffering the effects of having been recently twatted with a coal shovel, he would have been just like Marky, because he wasn't entirely all there, on reflection.

(I last saw him about ten years back. He looked like a taller, fatter Marc Bolan: his hair had remained frozen in time since 1985 but his gut had expanded enormously, and he had become an avid collector of coloured glass 1960's ashtrays, he was telling me. Farkin' hell...)

I watched Live Aid at the Hippy flat. I don't remember feeling like a part of history, but I do remember it being a bit of an ordeal, because there was hours and hours of pop shite on.
Also, Black Sabbath and Led Zep both sucked a big, bloated rock ass, so the Hippies were a bit gutted.

I'd been romancing a dirty Catholic schoolgirl who was best mate's with Marky's girlfriend, (Joanne had gone to Hong Kong, but I think we'd split up before then, anyway.) and she vanished from the Hippy flat late on the night of Live Aid.

I eventually found her back at my place, watching Dylan, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood making massive tits of themselves in front of billions of people. Sadly for me, she was watching it in Yorkshire's bedroom, with Yorkshire, and there was a definite vibe going on, so I left, somewhat peeved.

He swore down later on that he hadn't shagged her, but I found this somewhat hard to believe, as I had been initially attracted to her by her awesome reputation (which proved to be true) for viewing penetrative sex as a vital part of any first date. (Nowt wrong with being an easy lay, mind. Some of my best friends are totally slack old boilers who have flattened whole fields worth of grass in their time, and good on them, I say...)

The Hippies knew the Metallers in the next street. The Metallers were mainly a Jagger-lipped kid called Little Johnny and a floating cast of assorted hard rock fuckwits, all hanging out in a flat covered in marker pen graffitti and Judas Priest posters.

One particular arsehole who stands out was a kid called Turl, who Johnny had met somewhere and invited to stay. He was into Slayer, and once confessed to a room full of dope smokers - he didn't partake himself - that he liked to get his kicks by pushing over tombstones in cemeteries. Like, duh. Please please please be dead or doing time, mate.

Little Johnny, though, soon discovered the Doors,Hawkwind, the path of excess and the joys of excessive use of make-up and mental hair, and quickly turned into a speed-crazed fanny rat drug addict cyborg transvestite biker and shoplifter from the 25th Century - imagine the singer from Sigue Sigue Sputnik trying not to draw attention to himself as he robs packs of tapes from Boots the chemist, while sporting a silver and blue mohican and green eyeshadow...

Oh, and Shorty. He was about eight foot tall and up for any kind of stupid, dangerous shit going. I once saw him shoot up neat vodka, the doss cunt. Not that you'd ever try it at home, kids, but what happens is that you're instantly fall-over pissed, then you get a stinking hangover around fifteen minutes later - if you're fortunate enough not to die instantly with blood gushing out of your eye sockets and nose, that is, because I'm told that that does happen quite a lot to people who inject spirit alcohol into themselves...

Crucially, 1985 saw me reaching for the bleach bottle for the first time, and first sporting the ludicrous hairstyle (pictured) that I would keep for the next five years - the Billy Idle. Blondes have more fun? You don't know the fucking half of it. It was the 80s, man, if you were a feminine sort of bloke, especially one who dabbled in hair dye and make-up, you had filthy Goth birds all over you like an unholy rash every time you went out your door.

hippies,metallers, junkies and dealers #2

2009-09-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

Earlier in this adventure, I listed a load of daft stuff that my friend Phil had done in his time.
I forgot to mention the time he lost his first year's student grant trying to buy weed.

Allow me to explain. After a year of washing dishes in a hotel to pay for fucking his mam's car up, Phil decided he would fund his first year in Sheffield by dealing weed to his fellow freshers.

Trouble was, most of his weed connections (ie me and, via me, the hippies and the metallers) were decidedly low-level and had trouble getting hold of a £20 deal at the best of times, and Phil wanted a geet big £500 bag of the stuff.

Little Johnny failed to set him up via some older kids he knew out in the sticks, but was told that it could happen soon, next few days job. So Phil, who seemed to be missing something important in his head that affected his basic common sense functions, decided to leave the cash round at Johnny's place, where it stayed, for around three days, until some kid who was crashing there could bear it no longer and nicked the lot, fucking off to Scotland, never to be seen again.

And then Phil phoned the police to report the theft of his drug money, which can't happen too often in the criminal narcotic underworld, I'd have thought. To say that little Johnny was a bit peeved about CID turning up unexpectedly at his flat would be something of an understatement, and, when his door came crashing in a few months later and he got done bang to rights, he always traced it back to this incident.

And what excuse did Phil give for having left £500 at a virtual stranger's flat to the police, I hear you wonder?

Well - get this - he told them he got really excited when his grant came in, because he'd never seen that much money before so decided to get the whole lot out in tenners. And then, finding himself at Johnny's flat prior to going out for the night, he decided to leave the money there, rather than take it to the pub, despite the fact that his house was less than ten minutes walk away.

I know coppers are meant to be thick and all, but surely that just blares "FUCKWITS DOING A DRUGS DEAL THAT HAS GONE WRONG!" to any casual observer, let alone the Old Bill?

hippies,metallers, junkies and dealers #3

2009-09-15T07:59:00.000-07:00

After several incidents involving our Muslim landlord, Sarnie, who lived downstairs, me, Yorkie and Bun moved into a new flat, albeit a practically identical one some 400 yards away from where we'd been living.
What he principally objected to was our habit of going up a ladder and sunbathing on the flat roof of the kitchen extension, usually with the stereo rigged up there as well, blaring out the Who and Generation X.

Courtesy of Yorkie's record collection, I'd gotten bang into a punk 'supergroup' called Lords of the New Church, who were, on reflection, totally shonky shite. Featuring former gonks from the Damned, Dead Boys, Sham 69 and, erm, Barracudas (who are ya, who are ya? etc), the Lords peddled a kind of apocalyptic rock - 'the Americans are gonna kill us all with nuclear war, so let's all get the drugs out and party hard' was pretty much the vibe, and narco-thrills suckers like me were well and truly suckered by their proto-goth preachings.

Three or four times around this period, I'd stay up all night doing speed, then catch the Metro up to the coast just as it was getting light to stare moodily at the waves for a couple of hours, chainsmoking and wearing matching black trilby and eyeliner, dreaming about starting a band and being able to afford to be a proper, hardcore drug haddock.

When we moved the 400 yards to the glitz and glamour of 116 Croydon Road, we left with a fair amount of Mr Sarnie's furniture, and we also owed him a couple of hundred quid in back rent, so when me and Bun bumped into him and his massive mate in the Central Station in Newcastle about a month after we'd legged it, it was panic on and babbling bullshit to the fore.

A note to any creditors who may encounter their debtors in the street. If the person who owes you money happens to be a skinny punk rocker with bleached blonde hair and badly-applied eye-makeup on who looks suspiciously like he's either slept in those clothes he's wearing or, more likely hasn't actually slept at all, do not believe him when he claims to be about to pay you back as he has recently taken employment as a porter in the Fish Market....Christ knows where my brain got that one from, I just heard my voice - a good octave and-a-half higher than usual - saying "It's okay, Sarnie! I'm a porter in the Fish Market now! You'll have your rent at the end of the month!", and then we moved on, sharpish, like, never to cross Mr Sarnie's path again.

Our new landlord was a Mr Lally, a rangy, tough-looking Asian in his fifties with loads of properties in the West End of Newcastle. On the first of every month, despite our frequent requests that he please stop doing that, he would let himself into our flat bright and early and then hammer on everyone's doors, shouting "Boys, boys! First of the month, come on and gimmee your rent now!", which was mildly annoying, to say the least, but at least he didn't bother us the rest of the time.

Bucking the trend in an era of mass unemployment, Yorkie got a job at the punk clothing emporium, Phaze, in town. Loads of people applied for it but turned up for interview in their street gear, while Yorkie put a shirt and tie on, which got him the job.

We celebrated Yorkie's new found fortune by plundering the shop's stock whenever possible, and we were soon the best-dressed punk rock dole wallahs in town, kitted out in free mohair jumpers, rubber trousers and patent leather brothel creepers.

Sadly, as ever, we took it too far. Not long before Yorkie got his P45, he'd started leaving binliners full of clothes by the bins, which me and Bun would then collect.

Bun's contribution to the house was a big colour telly. Sadly, it was in his bedroom, which was the smallest room in the house, and stank of Bun sweat from his constant nunchaka training.

The telly was a course of constant paranoia to Bun - he'd acquired it while drunk one night, by breaking into a DHSS hotel that he'd stayed in when his parents first threw him out. He was convinced that the owners would track him down; the day he got the telly was the day he stopped answering the front door altogether.

Yorkie also stopped answering the front door once Phaze gave him the heave-ho, sure that the Dibble would make the theft of 20 Lou Reed T-shirts and some dodgy two-tone jackets a top priority.

Bring me the head of the town planner #2.

2009-09-14T04:07:00.000-07:00

If you're ever in Newcastle, take the laughably-named St James' Boulevard out of town and head south for the Redheugh Bridge.

On the left side of the road, about a hundred yards before you hit the bridge, you'll see a mini National Express Coach Station with one of them shitty gullwing roofs that are already a blight of 21st Century architecture.

The area in between the coach station and the main road is where the Broken Doll once stood. You may notice that they could easily have built the new bypass and left the pub standing, coz there's more than enough room, but that was never gonna fucking happen. Quite simply, the Broken Doll was Bad News, and it was always going to go the distance, despite the petitions, and the magnificent protest T-Shirts that bore the -very Doll-esque - slogan 'FUCK THE BYPASS, SAVE THE DOLL!'

The Doll was the place where the disenfranchised tribes of Newcastle met, although that sounds a bit poncey. It was always full of a mix of punks, bikers, assorted musos and old Blues blokes, gaggles of drunk girls from private schools and very shady people pretty much openly selling and buying drugs. In a word, magnificent...

My favourite Doll moment would have to the time that laughable US shock-rockers Christian Death turned up to play the venue in a tourbus that would have probably held more people than the room they were gigging in.

They looked totally horrified but put on the full show anyway, using radio mics and smoke machines in a room where they had to shift the pool table to one side to get the audience in. Total Spinal Tap, and I robbed one of their Christian-baiting T-shirts from the merch table, too.

Other highlights would have to include the night a rather butch girl with a blue mohican got concussed after being twatted by a falling chandelier, shaken loose by an audience going mental in the gig room upstairs. These days, Health & Safety would have shut them down sharpish for that, and the mohican girl would be suing the Doll's ass, but I think the staff just gave her a free pint and then took the piss out of her for weeks afterwards, instead.

I wonder where all the 11th Street Kids are today?

2009-09-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

Nah, I don't really; I've got a pretty good idea. One's a postman, one's a roofer, one's a cameraman on The Bill and the fourth makes proper feature films and also does stuff for MTV, or so I'm reliably informed.

11th Street Kids is a song by possibly the greatest gang of good-time gonks ever, Finland's finest lipstick junkies, Hanoi Rocks.

Hanoi imploded mid 80s when their drummer, Razzle, died in a car accident just as they were on the verge of a breakthrough hit. There's a school of thought that says that, if Hanoi had kept going, there would have been no need for Guns ' n' Roses to ever exist, but I digress.

I kept seeing the 11th Street Kids (as I mentally referred to them) at a bus stop in Fenham every morning. Like me, they obviously owned at least one pair of crimpers between them, and also had easy access to ladies make-up. Also, given the fucking clip they were usually in, they were seemingly no strangers to the rigours of the up-all-night-and-then-the next-night amphetamine sulphate lifestyle.

There were four of them, and I'd been bumping into them for a couple of weeks before a mutual friend introduced us at some girl's flat one night.

"Fucking hell, it's the kid from the bus-stop", said the rubber-lipped, impossibly tall one, who looked like an emaciated, stretched version of Mick Jagger wearing a Tina Turner fright wig.

"Hallo, man, I knaa yee from the Handyside years ago, don't I?", said the Gothic-looking, slack-jawed one with the cheekbones, skull tattoos and ripped Jim Morrison T-shirt.

"Should we gan to the Doll later? La la la play pool, drink beer, it'll be cush, man! There'll be lasses and that! Should we gan, should we gan?", said the especially manic-looking one with the bleached white haystack plopped on top of his head.

".......", said the one who looked like a young, male Brigitte Bardot fronting a Just Say No Campaign, staring dreamily off into space, basking in the confident knowledge that ALL the girls he ever met wanted to fuck him, the jammy twat.

We'll call the Lurch-alike one Hazey, from a big family, some of whom had been known to get a bit tasty with shooters and what have you. A little bit lairy, but fun with it.

(Much as I hate to dip into the future, I feel that I have to tell you that Hazey is now a postman, and I have to tell you this because, when he told me what his job was when we met by chance a few years back, I got to tell a joke that I'd been waiting for about 35 years to get a chance to use, to wit:

Me - What you up to these days?
Hazey - I'm a postman, it's proper shit.
Me - Well...it's better than walking the streets, I suppose.
Hazey - ....Fuck off.

Made my fucking year, that encounter did. Almost as good as the time I was in a geet posh hotel and I said "Your job must have its ups and downs, eh?" to the lift attendant. Oh, how we laughed...)

The Gothic-looking one (and I don't mean he looked like a Goth - he looked like he wrote intense poetry, kept snakes and had sleep-deprived cannibal fantasies, which was true on all counts, as it goes.) we shall call Maddog the Flycatcher, due to the slack-jawed thing.

I had indeed known Maddog several years earlier, when we were both wagging school in the Handyside, and both unsuccessfully hitting on the gorgeous shop girl in Fynd (who was, coincidentally, the daughter of 'famous in a region of around five square miles' Northern comedian, Bobby Pattinson.)

The bleached haystack in black leathers was Mr Level, an apt surname for one so often given to acts of extreme unsteadiness. Level loved beer, speed, girls and loud music, in no order of preference whatsoever, but often, and to excess. Top company, Mr Level, I have to say.

The panda-eyed Bardot Bloke was Sam, and he said little, but twiddled his hair lots. I was consumed by instant jealousy of Sam, coz he was totally cool for cats and all the girls said so yes indeed. My green-eyed envy wasn't helped when, a few months later, a girl I knew shagged him and said he was hung like a particularly happy horse.

I mean, I'm no slouch in the inches arms race myself, if you know what I'm saying, but there's nothing quite like listening to a woman in raptures about another bloke's cheb to make a man feel insecure, innit?

Anyways, I mention all them chaps because they all start turning up quite regularly in this thing soon, apart from one of them, who goes on to embrace the darker, shittier side of Hair Rock (Poison, Motley Crue) and starts wearing a Stetson to nightclubs, which is unfor-fucking-givable in my book, like.

The road of excess leads to the palace of crap sex.

2009-09-12T08:52:00.000-07:00

Fuck knows why weird details stick in your head, but they do. I'm having trouble remembering whether I sent some invoices off yesterday but I'm 100% certain that, when I bumped into Joanne in the Jubilee pub after she came back from Hong Kong in 1985, I was wearing a Damned 'strawberries' T-shirt, with a big photo of a pig on the front and a massive cartoon strawberry on the back, robbed from the punk rock clothing emporium that my flatmate Yorkie worked for.

(Actually, I don't really rate the Damned that much apart from Machine Gun Etiquette, but I did rather like the T-shirt. I'm shallow as fuck like that; as I type this, I'm wearing a Soledad Brothers T, another band I'm not overly-arsed about, but it's got a wicked pic of a cougar on it. Not as good as a big old pig, granted, but still well cool. I draw the line at buying Ramones T-shirts from Top Man, though. Or buying anything at all from Top Man, come to think of it. It's a regular cunt's paradise in there, and no mistake.)

Joanne and I picked up better than we'd left off before she'd gone to Hong Kong - which I put down to the awesome sex power of my spikey bleached hair and purloined punk haute couture - and we quickly retired to my grotty boudoir in Croydon Road for several days of rabid shag action.

If I'm being honest, and it appears that I am, Joanne couldn't have landed back in my life at a better time, because two days before she turned up again, I'd had a bit of a crushing blow to the ego after drunkenly failing to have sex with the hottest woman I'd ever seen in my life, after she propositioned me and invited herself back to my flat.

I genuinely can't remember her name, so let's call her Julie. I was out at a rather low-rent club called Tiffany's with the 11th Street Kids, who were passing round a bottle of poppers, which was a first for me, so I got well stuck in.

Poppers, AKA Amyl Nitrate AKA the bumluv drug, is an instant head and heart-rush of a kick. The high only lasts around 30 seconds, but you feel like you're in some bizarre, futuristic sit-com where everyone can read your thoughts just by staring into your eyes, or maybe that's just me.

It gives you vile headaches if you go bang at it all night, like, but a couple of quick sniffs never killed anyone. At least, I don't think so.

Anyway, I was getting a bit spannered on a combo of the amyl and pints of snakebite when a rather portly, orange-haired glam rocker called Kef, who was a year above me at school, came over to our table.

"Just come to tell you that you've got an admirer", he said, pointing out a woman across the dancefloor who I would never have even bothered tapping up under normal circumstances, because I know when I'm punching above my weight, and Julie was a total fucking knock-out.

She was a good two or three inches taller than my five-foot-eight, wearing a backless red dress that was slashed at the front and fastened at her neck in a choker. Her hair was a short, jet-black bob and she had a devilish, almost face-wide smile,like a pissed-up, horny alligator.

Now, I'm totally crap at tapping up women, always have been, so I decided that staying put and trying to look enigmatic was probably the best course of action.

Eventually, she came over to our table and said "Why do you look so fucking miserable?". I started trying to explain that the look I was striving for was enigmatic, actually, and I wasn't miserable at all, but then she just stuck her tongue down my throat, which sort of put paid to any conversation for a while.

Top tip for you all: If an impossibly hot woman ever asks you the "my place or yours?" question, always plump for hers because, let's face it - lasses gaffs are nearly always smarter, aren't they? Especially if you happen to share a small flat with two other blokes, one of whom is constantly honking out the place building up a sweat with his relentless nunchaka practice sessions. (By this point, Bun was so advanced in the way of the nunchuk that he could bounce the sticks fast off his groin without whacking himself in the knackers, which is canny impressive to watch, and also just a little bit strange...)

Oh, Julie, Julie, if I could turn back time, I would say "let's go to yours", even if you had just moved in the day before and didn't have the leccy on yet. We could have made sweet love all night by candlelight, and you would have realised just what a hard-lovin' enigma of a man I really was,and not just a little misery-guts with gonk hair.

However, being as I lived about half a mile closer to the club than her and we were walking, I decided we'd go to mine.

Actually, it wouldn't have mattered at all whose flat we went to, because as soon as we hit the fresh air outside I instantly became about five times drunker than I had been in the club and properly had the wobbly boot on all the way home, with Julie propping me up, and looking less thrilled with every passing minute.

To cut a short story shorter, I briefly passed out during a short, frenzied petting session on the sofa back at Croydon Road.

Julie roused me and suggested going to bed. As soon as I hit the bed, I was out for the count, and doubtless spent the night snoring like a knackered moped, as is my wont when I've been on tha booze.

Next morning, Julie was up, dressed and out the door in around 30 seconds flat, bumping into Yorkie on the stairs on her way out.

He stuck his head round my door and said "She was fucking gorgeous! How did you get to fuck that, you jammy bastard?", which didn't make me feel a whole lot better, I have to say.

As a postscript to this, I did actually get naked with her at her place about six months later, and we didn't have sex then, either - we'd been in a food fight at a party and were covered in stinking garlic mayonnaise, which we both found to be more than a little off-putting. I never did get a third crack at it, funnily enough...