CONTENTS

Information Page

1 – Anarchy In Timperley

2 – We Are The Mods

3 – On The Waterfront

4 – Ginger Rising

5 – Hurricane Gareth

6 – Garage Flowers

7 – You Are The One

8 – Notes From The Underground

9 – The Silvertone Affair

10 – The Big Gigs

11 – The Zomba Debacle

12 – Love Spreads

13 – Lethargy

14 – Second Coming

15 – Going Down

16 –A Resurrection … Of Sorts

Aftermath – A Distant Echo

Discography

1
ANARCHY IN TIMPERLEY

It began in Warrington, of all places – that strange, flat cusp where Manchester shades into Liverpool in a muddle of business parks and featureless housing estates; a meeting place for Manc and Scouse, Cheshire and Lancashire. Unpromising ground for a musical phenomenon perhaps, and yet it was Warrington which saw the introduction of a radical new music to the north of England, one which foreshadowed the invasion of rock’n’roll in the Fifties.¹ For it was at the local Birchwood Aerodrome, during the latter stages of World War Two, that off-duty American servicemen staged wild evenings of swing music, a magnetic maelstrom of sex, swagger and souped-up sound which drew in flocks of impressionable local girls, and frequently provoked violent confrontations with the comparatively unsophisticated local boys.

Ian George Brown, no stranger to violent confrontations himself, was born in Warrington on February 20, 1963, into an unpretentious, stable and loving family. His father, George, for whom Ian is allegedly a dead ringer, was a popular local joiner, laddish to a point but never one to lose himself in alcoholic revelry; Ian’s mother, Jean, worked as a telephone receptionist. Although today Brown describes his Warrington years as ‘grim’, he still harbours a couple of striking memories of his birthplace. For instance, if you are looking for an early indication of his infamous arrogance, his ‘punkism’, you might trace it back to the day he was unwillingly made ‘milk monitor’ at his primary school. “They gave me this title, milk monitor, and I think I was supposed to feel proud,” he recalls. “Took me about two seconds to realise that all it meant was that I had to hand all the milk out to all the other kids. I refused. Completely. Told the teacher that they should go and get their own milk. Damn right, too. I’m still quite proud of that.” Also, Brown recalls “… lying in some grass (aged four), staring at the sky, feeling belligerent. I had been taken out of school and this girl I was with, can’t remember who she was, was telling me that I was ‘bad’. I don’t know if I was proud or ashamed. But, from that age, yeah, I did have a rebellious streak.”

When Brown was aged just six, the family moved to leafy Timperley, in the soft underbelly of Manchester. This represented a slight social upgrading although to date, Timperley remains a curious place, where the sprawling council estate of Wythenshawe fizzles out into the plush suburbs of Altrincham. No wonder that for school children thrown in from the two social extremes – marked by big houses and little houses, gleaming BMWs and rusty Ford Escorts – the eternal jarring of class can readily give rise to conflict. Naturally perhaps, the kids from the rougher end of the scale – and Brown would fit into this category – would become the ‘cool’ ones, the ones driven to adorn themselves with the glittery prizes of social importance. (Which is why working-class school kids are traditionally regarded by their peers as the more stylish, the more streetwise, the more effortlessly hip.)

Brown had a younger brother, David, and a sister, Sharon, her name chosen by the young Ian in honour of Sharon McCready, the vivacious blonde from the Sixties’ TV show The Champions, and one of his first crushes. (His sister actually prefers to be known as Louise.) Though he chose to lock himself for hours on end in his poster-lined bedroom as a child, Ian’s early family life was uneventful and unproblematic, though those posters provide another clue to the Brown psyche. All of them featured the perfect, glowing figure of Muhammad Ali, the most charismatic sportsman of the century, a giant talent and a giant personality, a beautifully packaged dynamo with a wicked talent for wordplay. Brown adored Ali from the time when, only five years old, his young eyes first saw the great man on a television screen. The arrogance, the supreme power of self-confidence and the breathtaking style would all register and stay with Ian Brown, influencing his attitude to life and his style as a performer. He remains a boxing fan to this day.

And then there was the music. Music filled the Brown household. When he was eight, Ian’s aunt presented him with a stack of well worn seven-inch discs, inspirational slabs of plastic, which he would pile on his self-stacking Dansette, and listen to over and over again, soaking in their curious magic. Every dusty, scratched single was a classic: ‘It’s Not Unusual’, Tom Jones; ‘Help’, The Beatles; ‘Under My Thumb’ and ‘Get Off My Cloud’, The Rolling Stones; ‘The Happening’ and ‘Love Child’ by The Supremes. Each one brilliantly evocative, an inspirational vinyl experience, the power of which is unlikely ever to translate effectively onto soulless compact discs. Incidentally, three of those singles – ‘Help’, ‘Under My Thumb’ and ‘It’s Not Unusual’ were also stacked on the young Mick Hucknall’s Dansette, seven miles away, across Manchester. This revelation, which emerged in separate interviews, should not be too surprising – the power of the pop single in the Sixties and Seventies was far greater than it is today, when the impact of a song is muddied by the diversity of versions afforded by multi-formatting and the visual distractions of video. In an earlier era of pop, it was simply a question of sitting in the corner of a room and soaking up the sound of one golden track after another; for Ian Brown, music became education and inspiration.

It was to be the same story for one of Brown’s neighbours, who lived two doors down on Sylvan Avenue. John Thomas Squire was born on November 24, 1962, in Broadheath. The meeting of these two is already immersed in pop legend, as befits one of the most significant songwriting partnerships in recent memory – the location a communal sand pit where the local children could play. The event is spiced further by John’s recollection that Ian was naked, save for a few patches of sand. Brown doesn’t dispute this, but adds, “If that’s how John remembers it, then maybe it was like that. I do recall the sand pit. Used to muck around in there a lot. I remember meeting John … probably quite a few times but we weren’t, like, dead close, because I had my own mates from school. But I do recall his shy stare, which was quite intriguing even then. There was something about him.”

They attended separate primary schools with Brown apparently the classroom joker at his. He was always the one to grab the lead role in the classroom plays, always out front, openly mimicking the teacher; indeed, his repertoire of localised impressions covered the entire teaching staff. “My best one? Mr Clarke, the maths teacher. He had a really gruff voice and when I did him I cracked everyone up,” he told Q in 1998. Brown is under no illusions as to his disruptive influence on the rest of the class. “A lot of the teachers were wary of me, ‘cos I was always quick to answer back,” he recalls, adding tellingly, “not that I was particularly naughty, but I did have an attitude. I have never liked people telling me what to do.” By contrast, John Squire’s primary school life saw him skulking firmly at the back of the class, dodging away from any trace of drama, deflecting any possibility of attention. His shyness masked a considerable intellect, a fact recognised only by the more perceptive teachers at his school. He excelled in art and, on games afternoons, would be allowed to mooch about in the deserted art room, quietly pursuing his creative instincts. Drawing sessions allowed him to display a striking faculty for concentrated work, and he spent many solitary hours developing his skills with the pencil even at the expense of friendships. At primary school he made few if any lasting friends, preferring to live in a semi-permanent dream state, much to the concern of his teachers.

It wasn’t until both boys reached secondary school age and joined Altrincham Grammar School that Squire and Brown finally got to know each other, the gregarious Brown finding himself curiously attracted by Squire’s distanced demeanour. As opposites, they bonded cautiously, walking to and from school together, avoiding fights, chatting about television and, inevitably, music. Brown was the more worldly, by far: by the age of thirteen he had already clocked up five years of travelling to Manchester city centre on Saturday afternoons, floating down to the Oasis coffee bar and watching the Crombie-clad legions gather on Market Street. Too young to attract serious attention, he saw the gangs of Salford, distinctively dressed in their stone-coloured parallels and cherry red Doc Martens, menacing teenage stragglers from Hyde and Stockport and, at times, he joined in with football related scuffles, pre-punk maelstroms of Northern Soulies, latterday Suedeheads and soccer thugs. Attracted, indeed, ‘intoxicated’ by all three youth groups, Brown readily staked his place in their ranks. He would boast about Wigan Casino as if he was a regular – he wasn’t, though he did sneak into a soul ‘all nighter’ at Droylsden’s Concorde Suite and was bowled over by the power of the music and the sheer energy of the dancing.

Significantly, around the same time, Brown began to nurture a growing wanderlust, a habit he retains to this day. His enthusiasm for travel was so strong that it infected his closest mates, and a gang of them, barely into their teens, would cruise the town centres of Leeds, York, Blackpool and Stoke-on-Trent. Brown’s group were style-conscious teenagers who wore the sharpest street fashions, purchased at knock-down prices from ‘Stolen From Ivor’ in the infamous Underground Market: parallels £5, Harrington jackets £7.50, Levi’s Stay Prest, £12.50. In the wild mid-Seventies, with soccer thuggery at its peak, and most city centres cowering at the chants from rival sets of fans on Saturday mornings, such gang travel was a dangerous occupation. But Brown’s bunch were young and thirsted for a bit of adventure. They talked a good fight while generally ducking away from the real action; with luck and a spot of street suss, they got by.

Brown began to share his experience of youth cults, and life-transforming new music with the more reserved Squire. The latter’s musical awakening was by now well underway courtesy of Sixties icons The Beach Boys and The Beatles, but John had as yet failed to latch onto the unparalleled swell of Northern Soul. Some achievement – Northern Soul soundtracked the lives of most teen scenesters in the north of England of the mid-Seventies. The phenomenon permeated from dance halls and nightclubs right down to the youth club disco and the Timperley Scout Hut.

At the same time, Brown was developing other passions. His Muhammad Ali posters had, by the mid-Seventies, been joined by pictures of pretty boy kung fu star Bruce Lee. Sneaking into the cinema at Sale, he had seen the double bill, Enter The Dragon & Fists Of Fury, two cultish, wholly over-the-top orgies of violence, featuring punches, chops and outrageous high-kicking bouts seemingly beyond the skill and speed of any human being. It was all fabulous fodder for an active thirteen-year-old brain, and Brown would return from the cinema deep in his own kung fu fantasy, feeling implausibly indestructible. Fantasy was enough for most kids, who were happy to let the kung fu dream fade as they rode the last bus home; the more pragmatic Brown ventured to the local karate class, where he undertook practical instruction in the martial art with a solemn determination. He was good, too, and even after the kung fu cult faded away he stuck at the lessons, cycling four miles to class and back, seven nights a week, from the age of eleven to eighteen, edging closer and closer to black belt supremacy. Brown’s dedication was so strong that he even harboured dreams of travelling to Japan, of learning stronger, stricter disciplines under a grand master. In contrast to his often belligerent attitude at school, Brown would glean enjoyment from the sheer discipline of karate. It was a paradox that would continue through the days of The Stone Roses where their hedonistic image would be balanced by Brown’s sober determination, the single-mindedness of a man on a mission to make glorious music; that single-mindedness would eventually push him through to achieving solo success in 1998. It is not difficult to imagine a young Ian Brown relentlessly practising karate kicks and chops, perpetually pushing himself towards some kind of limit, revelling in the demands of self-discipline. In the end, however, something prevented him from taking that final step, and three weeks before his black belt exam, Brown abruptly dropped karate.

His sudden decision highlighted another key personality trait – his stubborn individualism. Ian Brown wasn’t born to follow. “I still regret that,” he says, “I finally fell out with that discipline. I remember this kid, who was just fantastic … easily the best in the class. He was just awesome, but he had his own mind. He never took ‘O’ Levels and he just wouldn’t do his karate the way they told him. I sort of fell into that way of thinking as well. A bit of a punk thing, I think. That kid never got beyond a white belt. I think I took some of his attitude off him, which is why I eventually left the club. But I do regret it. It was a stupid thing to do.”

1976 proved to be a watershed year for music, with knock-on effects that would shape the futures of thousands of aspiring musicians, including Squire and Brown, though at the time they were barely into their teens. Not too far from Timperley, indeed within the scope of a half-hour schoolboy saunter, lay the moody sprawl of the Wythenshawe overspill estate. Vast and brimming with every angle of youth culture, it had provided Manchester, not just with a razor sharp music and fashion sense, but, since the onset of Merseybeat in the early Sixties, with a steady trickle of highly influential talent. True, the area was also responsible for a good deal of brainless football thuggery and drug-associated crime, but it’s true to say that without Wythenshawe, the Manchester scene before and after 1976, would simply not have retained its edge. Wythenshawe provided the pullback from student domination; it gave, and still provides, the city with a slab of unpretentious edginess. And Wythenshawe remains quite unlike Salford, or Hulme, or Cheetham Hill or Moss Side; it was born from the days of slum clearance, where working-class Manchester, still gritty from the residue of the industrial age, was shunted to the edge of rural Cheshire, en masse. Its displaced, idiosyncratic atmosphere lingers.

During the early to mid-Seventies, a streak of glam lay on the peripheries of Wythenshawe’s conglomerate of youth tribes. Not a teeny Marc Bolan-loving glam, but a darker, Iggy-esque strain that gradually became adopted by the more violent of football fans. It was a strange paradox to see the most glammed-up of young men dive down to The Roxy Room at Pips in the town centre on a Friday night, discussing the hooliganism of the day while applying make-up. This strange hybrid of blusher and boot boys had originally evolved from the skinhead movement of the late Sixties. (Slade, whose glam image was shot through with ballsy rock’n’roll, had briefly adopted the skinhead look, albeit only to attract attention to themselves, but the lingering image did them no harm.) Swiftly, these boys, had moved through the suedehead and soulie stages to emerge bedecked in lurex and eye liner, blood-red Bowie hair and, by day, gold-painted Doc Martens.

From this scene emerged a bombastic, musically inept gang of pre-punk strutters known as Slaughter And The Dogs. Inarticulate, bursting with youthful arrogance and strongly connected with the area’s ‘controlling forces’ (of which more later), the band acted as a natural magnet for all those who longed for the violent days of the skinheads to return. (Hence, the inspiration for the Dogs’ mini-classic, ‘Where Have All The Boot Boys Gone?’) Although, strictly speaking, Slaughter And The Dogs were up and running before punk exploded, they managed to embrace the punk movement with a natural ease that escaped their fellow Manchester punksters The Drones (who had started life as a sub-Slik cabaret boy pop unit called Rockslide). Slaughter And The Dogs were much more than Buzzcocks-punk naturals.² And Wythenshawe knew it.

And so, apparently, did Timperley. At thirteen, Ian Brown was profoundly attracted to the local mythology of Slaughter And The Dogs. He even knew some of the lesser, younger notables of the burgeoning music scene at that time, though he didn’t make it to a remarkable local gig, at Wythenshawe Forum in 1976, featuring Slaughter And The Dogs and the older Wild Ram, an inane crew of rockers who would soon mutate into one of the maddest, baddest examples of full-blown lad rock that the UK has produced – the aptly named Ed Banger And The Nosebleeds. The stories of that riotous gig, however, permeated the Altrincham school yard which was, for some time, filled with tales of the strange weirdo who, in the Forum car park, tried to start a fight with local TV presenter and compere for the evening, Tony Wilson. The weirdo in question was named, for the duration of punk at least, Martin Zero; soon he would revert back to his real name of Martin Hannett.

With a foot still firmly in Northern Soul, Brown found himself drifting inexorably towards the polar extreme of punk, in particular its leading lights, The Sex Pistols, after a mate had picked up a copy of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ from Woolworth’s for 29p.³ Brown’s memories of the first time he heard the Pistols, that mind-juddering moment when Rotten’s manic chuckle leaped out of the speakers on the back of a searing stream of power chords, remain cornily vivid. As he noted, in 1985, to Muze Magazine writer Paula Greenwood, “That was the moment that altered everything, forever. I would do anything to be able to make a record like ‘Anarchy’.” He was, however, even more enamoured with the single’s extraordinary B-side, the chaotic ‘I Wanna Be Me’, a marvellous cross-blend of badly played Iggy and Small Faces, all wrapped up in a live production that, in its own inarticulate way, sounded the death knell for the prog rock pomposity which had held sway for so much of the musical decade so far. Howard Devoto, one of the original Buzzcocks, succeeded in getting the Pistols to play twice in Manchester in 1976, a factor which Tony Wilson believes is directly responsible for radically changing the kind of music which the city was producing.

Brown was smitten by ‘I Wanna Be Me’, especially by Rotten’s untutored attack and the sheer daftness of the ‘… cover me in margarine …’ lyric. Whether he realised it or not, the underlying message of both sides of this single was the classic punk DIY call-to-arms: ‘If we can do it, so can you!’ The same message came from Slaughter And The Dogs who overcame their musical limitations by sheer ferocity of performance – indeed, by making their very ineptness a feature of that performance. By exposing raw youth to skyscraping possibilities in this way, punk delivered the perfect pop paradox. Slaughter And The Dogs’ début single, ‘Cranked Up Really High’, a wild celebration of unbridled hedonism fuelled by speed (the punks’ drug of choice) and alcohol, became an immediate and lasting influence on Ian Brown. It was a yob record more than a punk disc, a hymn to scrapping and screaming, rather closer to Northern Soul than to the boozy London R&B from which The 101ers, Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band, and Dr Feelgood emerged. In Wythenshawe, if nowhere else in the world, ‘Cranked Up Really High’ held the frisson of ‘Anarchy In The UK’. Also, it had a big impact locally: the record was released on the Wythenshawe label, Rabid, managed by Wythenshawe gobshites Tosh Ryan and the aforementioned Martin Zero, who also produced the disc; even the Dogs’ fanzine, Manchester Rains, was written by a local ex-hippy hanger-on called Rob Gretton. Alas, the record met with public indifference and quickly joined releases by other sub-punk no-hopers from ‘77 in obscurity, but Ian Brown was smitten and would acknowledge its impact on him during the press for the release of his solo album in 1998.

During the heady days of punk, his relationship with John Squire intensified considerably. Indeed, it was Brown who ushered Squire into the punk era by taking records around to his house and excitedly slapping them on Squire’s Dansette. Hence, Squire’s bedroom, that had been previously filled with the sounds of The Beach Boys and The Beatles, now shook to Slaughter And The Dogs, The Drones, The Sex Pistols, and The Adverts’ mini-classic, ‘One Chord Wonders’. Indeed, for six months, it seemed that each weekend brought a new punk classic to that turntable, with Brown making regular Saturday morning forays into Manchester’s cosy hangout, Virgin Records on Lever Street, where Manchester punks would lounge, swap gossip, sell fanzines and slap Beefheartian messages onto the notice board. Brown would return from that welcoming nucleus, the antithesis of today’s ice-cold Virgin Megastores, with such definitive punk statements as The Buzzcocks’ ‘Spiral Scratch’ EP, The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ or The Clash’s début album, the record through which John Squire finally succumbed to punk’s magnetic pull.

Squire’s guitar playing, which had begun a year earlier with a hesitant run-through of ‘Three Blind Mice’, soon aspired to the spiky chord bursts of Mick Jones. He fell totally under the influence of The Clash: the entire Westway riot, the heavy slant to the left, the hint of dub and Rastafarianism, the hot dusty tension of Notting Hill Gate’s extraordinary summer of ‘76, the direct appeal of the ‘us and them’ mentality.⁴ The Clash were eventually to founder over such simplistic sloganeering, but for a good six months, in the mind of the talented, impressionable teenager John Squire, they seemed to conjure up a whole new world. Mick Jones’ distinctive guitar playing – undoubtedly born from Jones’ aversion to any traces of pub rock – were to be a key influence on Squire’s own style. (Ironically, Strummer’s 101ers, quite the archetypal pub rockers, would also influence Squire’s style.) To this day, even in The Seahorses, who are not without their own pub rock leanings, traces of that first Clash album can still be glimpsed. Moreover, Jones’ playing, in stark contrast to Page, Clapton, Kossoff et al, represented a sound and style that seemed attainable to a teenager with a thirty quid guitar. And that, more than anything else, was the true spirit of the punk ethos.

Squire’s infatuation was absolute. Brown was astonished, one day, to wander into Squire’s bedroom and find an entire wall covered by a mural that Squire had just completed, celebrating Joe Strummer. Squire’s blending of art and music had begun. Consumed by these two passions, Squire would paint and play, play and paint, edging closer and closer to the standard laid down by his heroes. In such times as these, when you didn’t even need a band, or even an instrument to climb on to the stage and grab punk notoriety – cf. Jon The Postman, The Negatives, John Cooper Clark – it seemed that it was only their extreme youth that was holding Squire and Brown back.

Life in Timperley, wandering to and from school, through leafy suburbia and the vast, deadening Sixties estates of Timperley and Sale, or along the endless arterial highways, wasn’t exactly the most romantic backdrop for two young punks. Timperley and its big sister, Altrincham, produced little in the way of local music. As 1977 became 1978, on a good night one might find plucky local popsters, The Freshies, grasping their pink painted guitars and slashing through their inspired but generally ignored set of sardonic love songs. They were too clever to catch the attention of the music press, and too nice, perhaps, to seriously attract Brown and Squire, who searched hard for some kind of scene that might hold more interest than hopelessly parochial band nights in rustic halls. The Bowdon Vale Youth Club might not sound (and certainly didn’t look) like any kind of antidote to this predicament, but, throughout 1978, it produced a string of inspired gigs that, although barely grabbing one line in New Manchester Review rock section, seem like positive stunners in retrospect. Ian Brown experienced his first live gig, on March 14, 1978, in this unprepossessing venue. He had already missed out on recent appearances by The Electric Circus, Rafters, The Squat and The Band On The Wall until, accompanied by a friend and the friend’s little sister, he set forth, aged 15, to sample his first taste of live rock’n’roll. And what was it? Incredibly, it was Joy Division.⁵ Not that Joy Division were particularly good that night: they weren’t, they were dopey and Ian Curtis gave the impression of having listened to rather too much Throbbing Gristle but, nonetheless, to see the most important rock band on the planet at that time, in a youth club in soft plush Bowdon, was, to say the least, a unique experience. And Ian Brown, by chance, stumbled unwittingly into this extraordinary event. To this day, I doubt he realises just how privileged he was to walk into such a baptism.

The front of the stage was patrolled by Joy Division’s omnipresent manager, Rob Gretton – bear-like, even then. Curtis launched into the mind-crushing intensity of ‘She’s Lost Control’, a song which when delivered well, provided the most disturbing, impassioned implosion in rock. And that night, on that particular song, the band were very, very good. (Though they made little impression on Bowdon rock journalist, Record Mirror‘s Mike Nicholls, latterly of Hello! magazine fame, who stood aloof and unimpressed.) And Ian Brown, a kid at the front. A kid with a mate who had brought his tiny twelve-year-old sister to the show. The latter, showing considerable front for one so young, pushed through the post-gig liggers, to ask Ian Curtis for one of his badges. Curtis, jokingly one hopes, replied that she could have it, “… for a blow job”. Understandably, Ian Brown was appalled, and the trio hurried from the venue. Brown wasn’t impressed with the gig either, though in Joy Division’s defence, he did only have Marc Bolan TV shows to compare it to …

His next live gig proved to be Slaughter And The Dogs’ second live showing at Wythenshawe Forum. It was a less wild, far less violent and suspiciously more ‘showbizzy’ affair than any of the Dogs’ shows during the punk era, but Brown enjoyed it nonetheless. The Dogs, we can presume, were closer to his psyche than the somewhat insular and, at that point, terribly hip Joy Division. Brown: “I never felt hip. That was always a big thing in Manchester … all those Factory bands. It was all so insular and I never even felt close to any of that. In fact that is why I was attracted to Slaughter And The Dogs, because they were just kids on this estate … and they never tried to be anything else.”

Nevertheless, Ian Brown was hip enough to be drawn into darkest Gorton, to the infamous crumbling wreck known as The Mayflower Club – once the low-brow, druggy Stoneground, the ultimate pre-punk hippy hangout – to catch Manchester’s biggest act of the punk era, The Buzzcocks. Led by one of the most distinctive songwriters of the time, Pete Shelley, The Buzzcocks – in a radical volte face from the more familiar punk themes of riot and revolt – actually dared to sing love songs, albeit off-kilter punk-pop love songs about frustration and disappointment. Brown warmed to the band, although the hint of pretension in their esoteric musical approach made them less of a prospect for hero-worship than the full-on blast of The Clash.

By mid-1979, Manchester’s restricted music scene had thrived and died several times since the birth of punk, giving rise to all manner of diverse fads and cliques, from the Bowie clones at Pips nightclub to AC/DC-adoring metalheads; from the trendy young new industrialists clad in suits stolen from their fathers’ wardrobes, to latent soulies and parochial punks. And so it was until the inspired commandeering of the funky West Indian Russell Club, in Hulme, by the Factory gang who, exploiting the prevailing air of menace and gloom – the club lay deep in the shadows of the infamous Hulme Crescents housing estate, Valium City to BBC2 documentary makers – created the perfect, shadowy showcase for the whole mess of experimental post-punk bands.

2
WE ARE THE MODS

It was the days of the punk comedown. The afterworld, where pretentious post-grads would attempt to install a sense of modernistic style into a thin synth-powered noise backed by a drum machine, a tape loop and a selection of holiday snaps. Or, equally disturbingly, where bands who had barely mastered the three chord thrash would attempt – sometimes with genuinely inspired and edgy results, viz A Certain Ratio and The Pop Group – to climb into areas of funk generally reserved for the tasteful dexterity of black bass players from Harlem or Chicago. The paradox of asexual white ex-students pushing a rash simplistic polemic across a back-beat based on the act of pure sex, was simultaneously the most entertaining and the saddest aspect of 1979.

The fact that punk was the catalyst that caused a million kids to grab guitars and climb on to a stage has been universally celebrated as a positive move. But those of us who cowered in front of endless thrashing dullards blessed with all the innovative foresight of pub cabaret and no musical deftness whatsoever sometimes tend to disagree. Especially as these same groups would gain acres of coverage in the music press, a music press that had started to genuinely baffle Brown. “I reacted against all that,” he says. “I mean, we were still out there with The Clash. That was fun. I didn’t like it when all these bands started taking themselves really seriously. As if they were creating these monumental works of art. The thing is, they had notions of being great artists or something and yet, so clearly, didn’t have the talent or the sense of real commitment. The music press was at fault because it encouraged them too much … made them feel like stars before they were ready, often with disastrous results. I was young, but I could see all that. I wasn’t particularly interested in becoming part of it.”

The fickle nature of the music press might have rankled with Ian Brown even then, but the act of making music itself was fast becoming a priority. John’s guitar playing, and sundry in-house gatherings involving mates, had evolved into a group of sorts. A band of outcasts, who clung to the social edges of South Trafford College – the latter a box-like further education college which, in those days, doubled as a deadening Formica-covered hangout for those who hadn’t jumped from school into low-key employment. The college system, refreshingly lax after the rigours of Altrincham Grammar (at which Squire and Brown had each acquired a modest fistful of ‘O’ Levels), allowed huddles of kids to gather in the refectory, or skive off to the cafés of Sale or Altrincham. Almost without effort, a band, called The Patrol, formed in 1980, their moniker instantly stating their allegiance to the local scooter-gang scene, towards which Ian and John had both been steadily gravitating.

Ian, in particular, yearned for a Kerouacian open road, for something beyond the strangulatory grip of a job, a marriage and a mortgage. He was still prone to wandering off on his own through Manchester and occasionally even further afield, sometimes to Blackpool. Strange to note that, although John Squire was the quieter of the two by far, and surely the one who could lay greater claim to cultivating an existential detachment, it was Brown who would spend more time drifting from the pack. He acquired a bass guitar but lacked any serious enthusiasm for the instrument, his rudimentary playing skills already languishing some way behind Squire’s increasing confidence and ability on guitar. But with Simon Wolstencroft, later of The Smiths, The Fall, Colourfield and The Ark, on drums and Andy Couzens on vocals, The Patrol were a full band. Another mate, Pete Garner, who showed negligible musical aptitude, took on the role of ‘hanging about’, looking slovenly.

Couzens’ entry to the band was one worthy of Sid Vicious himself. Ian had become aware of this young skinhead hanging around college, though he had never made a strong impression. But Brown’s curiosity was well and truly aroused one afternoon in South Trafford’s featureless refectory when Couzens decided to end an argument he was having with a boy considerably larger than himself by beating the living daylights out of him and hurtling him over one of the tables, where he lay supine and defeated. The incident gained Couzens considerable local kudos; Brown was impressed and with a conscious nod back to tales of McLaren and The Sex Pistols, strode purposefully over to Couzens and asked him if he wanted to be in a band.

After receiving the affirmative reply, Brown asked, “Can you sing?” Couzens didn’t know the answer to this but, his enthusiasm undimmed, that night duly trooped down to rehearsals at Simon’s parents’ house. For Couzens, it was immediately terrifying: four lads he didn’t know all pumping away on their instruments. Edging into position, his nervousness overwhelmed him to the extent that he had to turn his back on the rest of the band – which they found wildly impressive – before starting to screech into the microphone. The resultant cacophony was unbearable, but nobody there seemed to mind. The Patrol had been born and Couzens, himself a Clash fanatic, wholly devoted to the notion of ‘being in a gang’, slotted neatly into place.

They punched and plucked away, to little effect, rehearsing in a scout hut in Sale. Though Brown would later dismiss the band as of secondary interest (“just something to do for a while, it meant little to me”), The Patrol, like most, if not all embryonic bands, spent too long, deep into the bitter fuelled haze of ‘band meetings’, planning ahead, dividing up royalties that would never arise, collectively dissecting the music press and looking longingly from afar at the Manchester music scene which was evolving rapidly without them.

The Patrol’s sound was, as one might expect, highly derivative. Their song titles – ‘Jail Of The Assassins’, ‘25 Rifles’ – are very much symptomatic of the vaguely political stance adopted by many bands born in the aftermath of punk. Musically, The Patrol were a noisy splicing of rather badly executed soul and The Clash. The latter were loved to death by John and Simon, who travelled the country to catch the band – and the harder edged punk of The Angelic Upstarts, The Meteors and, rather surprisingly, The Stranglers, Ian’s faves. The Stranglers, despite being adopted as ‘mates’ by sycophantic local punks, The Drones, were never really accepted in Manchester, their slide from pubby prog rock to ageing punks always deemed too dubious to be true; one reason why Ian, ever the individualist, was drawn to them. They also stayed in Manchester a lot and, coincidentally perhaps, had a habit of partying in Sale.

It wasn’t The Stranglers but, strangely enough, The Clash, who provided The Patrol with their first sniff of rock’n’roll glamour. Ian and Pete Garner were aware that the punk icons were recording in Manchester so, taking a chance, they made their way through Manchester’s elegant Granby Row, to the infamous Pluto Recording Studios, and waited. Sure enough, The Clash duly turned up for a recording session, which was to result in their dub-influenced classic ‘Bankrobber’. The awestruck duo did some fast talking and, incredibly, were allowed to enter the studio as fringe members of The Clash’s entourage. It was to be a day that would be etched into Manchester rock mythology.

The Clash were never a band who suffered from a sense of their own self-importance, and often allowed fans to sit in on their sessions (“It keeps us alive,” Strummer once perceptively noted, during the recording of ‘Capital Radio’). They were more than happy to allow the young musicians to simply ‘hang out’. Brown and Garner were transfixed, just a pair of doe-eyed fans, crowded in the studio corner. Topper Headon chatted to them like old mates and Jones, despite his obvious rock’n’roll-isms, made time to talk also. Curiously enough, it was only Joe Strummer who remained aloof, acting the archetypal withdrawn artist, crouching, cross-legged beneath the studio’s grandfather clock, clicking his fingers to the beat of the track. Brown was less than impressed: “He was a hero, of sorts … more to John and Si than me, but it was a bit of a let down. I thought he was a bit of a dick, to be honest.” Incredibly given the depth of his devotion, John Squire was elsewhere that day, and so missed out on meeting the man he had immortalised in a mural.

The Patrol’s own career continued on a hesitant trajectory. They did succeed in gaining a peppering of local dates in youth clubs, though the gigs were tiny and all too frequently a faction in the audience seemed bent on some juvenile violence. It didn’t help, perhaps, that The Patrol performed with two hopelesly obscure Stretford punk bands, Corrosive Youth and Suburban Chaos, whose names spoke volumes about the music they played. But at least they were playing; early dates included Stretford’s Lostock, at the Sale Annex and – this must have been a classic – Hale Methodist Church.⁶

The Patrol’s one brief stab at fame came when they chanced upon the crumbly Mayflower Venue in Gorton where the highly agitated promoter had a hall full of discontented local punks and no band, Adam And The Ants having broken down on the motorway. Wanting to avoid a riot, he needed to put a band, any band, on that stage as swiftly as possible. The Patrol remained blissfully unaware that the last time Adam And The Ants had played The Mayflower, just fifty people had turned up and the whole event had degenerated into an ultra-violent scrap between the sparse audience and Adam And The Ants’ roadies, and that there was a contingent in this audience who might well be bent on a spot of revenge. All things considered, it is to their credit that The Patrol actually went down well with the crowd and the gig passed off peacefully.

In Brown’s mind, The Patrol were perpetually crumbling away from any kind of career path, or musical direction. Despite Squire and Garner’s enthusiastic practising, the band still lacked heart, Brown as much as anyone. His muse was absent, and he felt himself drifting away from the music ‘scene’. The band’s final date, and this author remembers it well, was a dire local band pile-up at South Trafford College, depressing music performed artlessly to a room full of beer-numbed girl-chasing braggarts who spent much of the gig arguing about football while all around lay a sea of plastic beer cups. There was no spark, no remote hint of a scene, no positive vibe. Stockport band Alien Tint slashed through a Ramones-like version of ‘Fireball XL5’, unencumbered by charisma or style. Ditto The Patrol, who came across that night as an archetypal sub-Garry Bushell outfit, though at least they had the good taste to finish their set, and their existence, with a cover of The Sweet’s ‘Blockbuster’, although ‘Ballroom Blitz’ would have been more appropriate. The gig was notable for one other detail, though – their closing number saw Ian Brown take over on vocals for the first time, Pete Garner deputising on bass.

Although Squire and Garner still hoped the band might continue after the gig, Brown knew the truth. Allergic to musical stagnancy as he would be to any form of inertia, he quit, sold his bass guitar for £100, and purchased a genuine love machine: a scooter. And not just any old scooter. A Lambretta J 125.

The late Seventies’ scooter movement in north-west England was both patchy and reactionary. It was, of course, a revival, a desperate stretch back to a time of violence, naïveté and freedom. The period between ‘68 and ‘73 had been Lambretta boom time, covering the period of skinhead to Northern Soul. Giant packs of scooter boys surged out every Sunday from the big Lancashire towns – Rochdale, Bolton, Wigan, Oldham and Swinton – avoiding the faster, dirtier motorbiking ‘greasers’ and clashing with each other in Blackpool and Southport. These were days of Crombie coats and two-tone ‘tonic’ trousers, of brogues (Royals) and Barathea blazers, of smartness, neatness, in clothes as in music. The whole shebang was soundtracked by snappy two-and-a-half minute blasts of Motown, Ska and ninety-mile-an-hour Northern Soul. And the most in-demand accessory? The mighty Lambretta. White LI 150s, sporty SX 150s or, king of them all, the Lambretta GP 200, golden yellow and gleaming, two black stripes along the side panels and, most important this, the name of the owner’s favoured US city painted on the side; Detroit, Denver and, for sophisticates, Des Moines. It was the great post-mod scooter age, eventually killed off not by punk’s raw blast, but by the all-conquering soundtrack of disco: Ford Capris blasting out Barry White and his treacley smooth Love Unlimited. Disco changed the larger world outside the punk explosion, transforming the clothes, the vehicles, and the attitude of a generation.

As such, the scooter revival of the late Seventies was something of an oddity, and difficult to pin down. It was, indeed, a cult and one that wasn’t even centred on the mod revival. The scooter owners were more concerned with the machine – the mechanics, the practicalities – than the look. This time around, scooter fanatics favoured bulky bomber jackets, khaki trousers and Doc Martens. Although Northern Soul was still dominant, scooter boys’ listening habits spread across a disparate mass of cult skin and punk bands, from Ian Brown’s beloved Angelic Upstarts to the dread Bushell-hyped Cockney Rejects and the entire nasty Oi collective. Only in the late lamented Sounds music paper could this non-pretentious, profoundly working-class upsurge be glimpsed. The scooter scene was just one tiny aspect of it, but it served usefully to counteract the growing intellectualism of the post-punk ‘industrial’ bands … and the NME. It is highly significant that Ian Brown, desperately seeking some kind of camaraderie, and burning with a traveller’s urge to freedom and the open road, should find solace in a local scooter gang rather than a local rock band. The selling of that guitar was symbolic.

And he really did join the throng too. Drifting towards the north Manchester soul scene rather than the more rock-orientated scooter clubs of South Manchester and Cheshire, he joined several clubs, and spent long afternoons sitting on the driveway, fiddling with bike parts, polishing and adorning his machine with badges. His passion would see him own five scooters during this period, most famously, a pink, ‘chopped’ Lambretta GP 200 with extended forks, banana seat and no leg shields. It was a strikingly skeletal vehicle which Brown christened ‘Sweet and Innocenti’ and it boasted the legend ‘Cranked Up Really High’ on the side. If you caught him riding through Stockport, at first glance he would look, rather paradoxically, like a trike riding biker. (And never have the scooter boys and the bikers seemed so close to each other as at that time. So close, in fact, that it was known for them to hold joint rallies. Unheard of in the Sixties and early Seventies.) Undoubtedly, the scooter scene was a serious concern, not just a fashion statement, and Ian Brown was fully immersed in it. Another prize possession was a Vespa Rally 200, emblazoned with the line ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’, though it remains debatable whether the inspiration originally came from Jimmy Cagney or Jimmy Pursey.

It was the era of scooter rallies. Long, arduous treks down to Brighton, Yarmouth and the Isle Of Wight, or up to Scotland. Devotees burned along the A roads, swaying in the wind, hindered by the scooter’s low centre of gravity, and gathering together for fish’n’chips and frolics, on seafronts, or burgers in designated fields. Some camped en route, while others would find cheap B&B.

It took two years for Ian to entice John into the scene, taking him down to the Manchester Arms, in Stockport, or the Black Lion in Salford for scooter meetings, prising him away from his beloved guitar. For a short while, ear-bashed by Ian and tempted by the rush to purchase scooters post-Quadrophrenia (the overrated film, not the overrated double album), Squire neglected his music in favour of assembling his own Lambretta, a GP 200 re-built from the frame. Scooter culture was all-enveloping and required inexhaustible dedication. Mercifully, and despite the rather savage nature of the punk thrash bands who muscled into the scene (daft King Kurt, the power rockabilly combo, The Meteors) violence wasn’t a key factor in this scooter revival, apart, perhaps, from the odd ruck down at The Beehive in Eccles, where the scooter lads would clash with the locals. Ironically enough, these locals included future members of Happy Mondays, who would hang around, looking for some bother and picking out scooter lads as prime targets.