"What was the first gig you saw?"

Extract from my own memoirs, published for my family

When I was fourteen, Paul Grant introduced me to a friend of his called Gary Thompson. I’m not sure how they knew each other, maybe from junior school, but Gary was a strange one. He was tiny, and skinny, with a hoarse, asthmatic voice, and he had dirty blonde hair that fell way below his shoulders. He had an amazing imagination, a very sarcastic sense of humour, a sparky self-confidence, and an incredible sense of theatre. He hated school but was very smart. He and his elder brother Dave would run three-day-long Dungeons & Dragons games that loads of us gathered to play.

A year or so later, we all got into guitars, and once again, Gary’s big old house on Greenbank Avenue was the centre of this. His parents were often out, so Paul and I would spend a lot of time in Gary’s bedroom. He had nothing in there except a mattress with no sheets, a wardrobe, and, crucially, two cheap electric guitars and an amplifier.

His parents didn’t mind how much noise we made in there, so we really did. We spent hours learning chords and bashing out versions of old Beatles songs (which Paul and I liked) and new punk songs (which Gary preferred). We were all learning how to play, but Gary was streets ahead of me and Paul. For one thing, he’d been playing a lot longer, but he also had help from his oldest brother Wayne, who was a famous session player in London. (It turned out Wayne wasn’t famous at all, and probably not very successful as a session player, but we all went along with the legend for years).

Gary played well: confident and aggressive, which worked well for the music at that time, and he could work out most songs very quickly. By the time we were seventeen he was playing bass in a band with two of his own friends from school: Andy Seldon, who was a flashy lead guitarist, and a rhythm guitarist called Rob, who admittedly did wear specs but nevertheless pounded out a driving beat on acoustic guitar. They were called The Third Light, and they’d written all their own songs.

Paul and I went to watch them rehearse a few times, both of us seething with envy, and over the Easter holidays of our lower sixth year I borrowed Grandpa’s big cassette recorder to record them a demo-tape in Paul’s dad’s shed.

Using that tape, suddenly, miraculously, they got themselves their first gig. Real, big-league stuff. It was in the upstairs room at a pub in the town centre called the Pestle and Mortar, well-known as the toughest pub in the whole of Grimsby, noted for violence and being repeatedly shut down by the police.

Paul and I went to watch the gig. We were utterly impressed, knowing they were going to be superstars, but we were also nervous about being in the P&M. We were only seventeen or so after all. The band played it cool, acting like this little gig was just a stepping-stone to Top of the Pops, but you could see they were nervous too, even though Andy had done lots of gigs in a working men’s club with his dad’s band. So for a while we all stood around, sipping our lager shandies and pretending we were hard Grimsby men who often had fights in pubs.

The time came, and the three of them got up on the stage, plugged in, tuned up, and then, with amazing bravado, launched into their first song — at which the whole bar just took off. 

Maybe it was because they were so young that no-one expected much. Maybe the fact they had good songs and had real energy amazed people. Whatever caused it, by the end of the first song everyone in the room was up and dancing.

They played brilliantly and people loved them. Their biggest problem was that they only had about seven songs, and because it was the days of punk each song was about two minutes long (or less). Their set went by in a flash. They were forced to do an encore, playing two or three of the songs again, and still it wasn’t enough. The last song they had was about a minute and a half long, a real little rocker, not much more than a verse and two choruses, and everyone in the audience was up and dancing. It seemed so cruel when it stopped. Luckily Andy had the presence of mind to begin the song again from the beginning and the audience carried on dancing without noticing.

They came off stage to massive cheering.

We all had celebratory drinks – maybe real lager this time – and began to pack their stuff away.

Paul and I were helping them carry things to the exit when Andy came running up the back stairs yelling for help. Two men were trying to get into the van to steal the equipment. I must have been enjoying my real lager a great deal because I didn’t hesitate to launch myself down the stairs to get involved. Between us we scared the thieves off.

We drove Gary and Rob home, dropped off the amplifiers and the van around midnight, and Paul, Andy and I then spent an hour or so stranded in Cleethorpes. All the pubs were shut, and we didn’t have money to get into Clouds night club. It didn’t matter, that night we walked the streets like heroes.