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he nights out were generally of such quality that they made the purgatorial languor of the rest of the week bearable. For those few hours on a Friday, Saturday, every other Monday and the occasional Wednesday night we were the heavy metal kings of the night time world.

The typical weekend began midway through Friday afternoon when everybody would gather in the café at the Crucible theatre to make a rough game plan and decide where and when we would be meeting up that evening. Should I have enough money to spare I’d also pick up a wrap or two of cut-price speed off a girl we knew as Debbie Does Drugs.

Once we knew what we were doing it was back home to lounge around for a few hours before preparing to hit town. Occasionally Danny and Mikki would come round to my place to get ready. This made sense from a hairstyle point of view as I lived closest to the city centre - the further you had to travel the greater the risk there was of a ‘flop’ occurring (more about that in a minute).

Preparations would begin in earnest immediately after the early evening meal with a trip to the local Co-Op to get some booze and cigarettes (I made a point of buying my booze and fags from the Co-Op because, ever the thrifty one, they gave dividend stamps and you would fill a book surprisingly quickly –

a full book of Co-Op stamps being worth the equivalent of a ten pack of Bensons).

The pre-pub tipple of choice for the discerning rocker about town was generally a bottle of Thunderbird which was held to represent the best compromise between alcoholic strength and price – even if it did taste like syrupy bleach and had the rather worrying effect of turning your lips and the inside of your mouth black (or was that Night Train? I find it hard to remember these days). Alternatively, and if there were a few of us all getting ready at the same place, we’d split the cost of a bottle of vodka and do slammers with it.

Back from the Co-Op it was ASWAD time. No, not the lightweight Eighties reggae act, but a multitasking visit to the bathroom involving ‘A Shower Wank1 & Dump’, although you’d normally do it in reverse order (but then ADWAS doesn’t trip off the tongue quite so nicely).

Once purged, the passions of one’s tortured soul temporarily assuaged and the residue rinsed away it was time to do your hair. The idea was to get it looking like Theatre of Pain era Mötley Crüe which was a messy and time consuming process involving liberal use of the crimpers, the best part of a can of mega-hold hairspray and up to half an hours worth of painful backcombing.

Getting your hair looking right was relatively easy; the tricky part was keeping it that way until you got to the pub. This could be quite a challenge were it raining or windy (which in Sheffield it normally was) and even a slight amount of moisture in the air would reduce it all to a shapeless mess – the aforementioned ‘flop’. As a precaution I’d take a plastic carrier bag out with me which I’d put on my head should it be necessary to guard against the worst ravages of the weather and once in the pub would do a quick hair-repair in the loos before making my grand entrance.

The penultimate task before leaving the house was the putting on of the pulling pants.

There is a clause in the small print of subsection three of the law of dynamic negatives2 which states that you’re more likely to get lucky with the ladies if you’re wearing filthy knickers; the filthier the knickers the greater that likelihood being. To apply this in our favour we had the specialised pulling pants. Mine were a pair of ancient briefs which, to the casual observer, would have looked more like a loop of perished elastic with scraps of grubby cloth attached at various points than an item of underwear. Donning the pulling pants – or perhaps applying them would be a more accurate way to describe it - could be something of a delicate operation as the nature of the things meant they were quite fragile and also rather tacky. Needless to say, the pulling pants were never washed and when not in use would be kept, festering away, in a sealed plastic bag at the back of my sock drawer.

Once the pants were donned there was just time for a quick application of eyeliner before heading off to the bus stop whence we’d swoop down on the city centre like a squadron of testosterone fuelled love Stukas.

Before we get into the meaty stuff implicit in the title of this chapter let’s pause for a moment to take a look at the make up of the Sheffield rock crowd This was a far from homogenous mass and included several distinct subdivisions. The following list, which admittedly I cribbed from an online obituary to the Newcastle Mayfair (which seems to have disappeared since this was written), just about nails it. In case you were wondering, my gang fell somewhere between the first two groups.

HEADBANGERS/METALLERS: Your ‘normal’ metal-head. The Joe Public, bread-and-butter [Wap, Yorkshireman, Rebels, Roxy going] rocker. Usually sporting long hair, fringed jackets, and in the case of the ladies, long boots and highlighted perms.

Bands: Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Kiss, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple.

Distinguishing smell: Whatever they had drunk last.

GLAM ROCKERS/GLAMMIES: Quite noticeable as they were always dressed in pink spandex and had really big crimped hair. Hard to tell the blokes from the chicks as both wore lots of make-up.

Bands: Poison, Mötley Crüe, Tigertailz, Mötley Rocks, Pretty Boy Floyd, Tuff.

Distinguishing smell: Insette Spiky hair-spray.

BIKERS: Not to be messed with. Apart from the huge beards and matching build they always wore club T-shirts, even if they could be parted from their biker jackets, their chapter T-shirts remained on!

Bands: Motorhead.

Distinguishing smell: Engine oil.

GOTHS: Also victims of big crimped hair, but never found wearing pink. Black was the order of the day and occasionally purple. They always wore white make-up, thick eyeliner, and heavy dark eye-shadow - and that was just the males! They came in two builds; very fat or very skinny.

Bands: The Mission, Sisters of Mercy, Fields of the Nephelim, Christian Deth.

Distinguishing smell: Patchouli Oil.

THRASHERS: Sometimes underage. Usually found sporting huge basketball boots, incredibly tight jeans and an Exodus T-shirt.

Bands: Metallica, Anthrax, Exodus, Napalm Death, Testament.

DEATH METALLERS: Always the more embarrassing element of the metal movement and definitely underage. These were usually the types accused of (and sometimes caught practising) Satanism. Always asked you to go to the bar in case they got asked for ID. Fortunately, they usually grew out of it by their 20s.

Bands: Anything that goes Rooooooooaaaaaarrrrrr!

Distinguishing smell: Drying blood from their self-inflicted attention-seeking lacerations.

CRUSTIES: Noticeable for brightly-coloured dreadlocks and wearing army surplus gear that had never been washed. Some interesting body piercings and tattoos in there too!

Bands: Levellers, New Model Army, Back to the Planet, Spacehog.

Distinguishing smell: Special Brew, skunk weed and BO.

With such a crowd there was always going to be a level of internecine rivalry. This was most evident between our lot and a particular subset of the first group whom Nick used to call the Hard Rock Café Boys. This bunch were older than us, in their late twenties and early thirties, and were major Thunder and Little Angels fans who would monopolise the Rebels dance floor whenever a track by either of these bands was playing. Appearance wise they favoured shaggy, streaked perms, looked like they worked out regularly and wore a uniform of stonewashed Jeremy Clarkson jeans, Levis denim jackets and voluminous bold patterned shirts with either sleeveless tour T-shirts or Hard Rock Café vests underneath.

The reason our two gangs didn’t like each other was basically because we vied for the group alpha male position and access to the same pool of sexually available women.

I like to believe that we usually came out on top though. There was one time in Rebels when I’d been flirting with a girl called Mary (we’ll be meeting her shortly) and one of these guys, who I knew fancied her, had come butting in and asked in a stage whisper,

“Is that wanker trying to get in your knickers?”

“He’s already been in them darling,” She told him, “And he didn’t have to try.”

That put a smirk on my face for the rest of the night.

Although such factional squabbling was rife it never really came to a head or went much further than the odd bitchy comment. The heavy metal scene was pretty well behaved and actual fights were extremely rare. In fact I only recall two breaking out during my time in Sheffield – and I had one of them with a midget.

It was in the Mulberry Tavern one Roxy Monday night. That particular evening the place was even more packed to the rafters than usual and I was sat on a low stool with my back to what had effectively become the main thoroughfare. I’d been chatting away with the rest of the guys and gesticulating wildly to illustrate some point I was making when I felt my elbow bang into something behind me. I assumed it must have been the legs of someone walking past so I half turned around and blurted out a stock apology to no one in particular before turning back to continue talking. I couldn’t understand why everyone was suddenly looking so amused. I turned around again, this time fully, to find myself face to face with what looked like Lemmy’s Mini-Me whose drink I’d just accidentally upended all over him. My eyes were immediately drawn to the terry towelling headband he was wearing in what I can only assume was a desperate attempt to look rock ‘n’ roll. This was comical enough but when I noticed the spilt beer trickling off the ends of his moustache I just lost it.

He rather took exception to this and punched me square on the chin.

Now you tell me, what’s an acceptable response when a midget punches you in the face? The guy couldn’t have been much more than three feet tall and needed both hands to hold his pint glass - I could hardly swat him in front of a pub full of people could I?

As he took a second swing I stood up, which meant that he could only reach my waistline. By this time our antics had attracted quite an audience and after flailing about for a minute or so - and doubtless to spare himself further humiliation - my diminutive assailant stormed off in a huff.

I’m meandering off topic again, let’s get back on track.

The unholy trinity of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll was, as I imagine most readers have probably inferred by now, central to our lives.

Particularly the sex.

It’s no exaggeration to say that sex, of the juvenile, emotion-free, meat-grinding variety was the intended end result of practically everything we did. So much so that we made a tribe of Viagra popping pygmy chimps look like the Plymouth Brethren and considered a night out totally wasted if you hadn’t carved another notch on your bedpost by the next morning

I fucked a lot of women. And I mean a lot – a hell of a lot. I could tell you exactly how many, I could also give you their scores out of ten in a variety of different areas (yes, I did keep a record, we all did), but I’m not going to; firstly because scarcely anyone would believe it and secondly because it’s not something I feel particularly proud of anymore. In fact given my time over again I would move mountains to ensure my tally never advanced beyond…

…well, I haven’t quite made up my mind about that one.

A question people have often asked me – both back then and more recently – is how on earth did we manage to bury the beef bayonet with such frightening regularity, what was the secret of our success?

The answer is that we set out to and there wasn’t one.

You didn’t need any kind of superhuman attributes - or endowments - and you certainly didn’t need movie star good looks (although in my case it probably helped). All it really took was self-confidence and persistence. Provided you weren’t clock-stoppingly ugly, had a likeable personality, a sense of humour and could appear sure of yourself without being unpleasantly arrogant then away you went, there was nothing particularly difficult about it. And once you got a reputation it became easier still as like minded females would seek you out. Females like Gap Toothed Kerry (hazard a guess as to why we called her that) who had come up to me in the Roxy one night and told me she had just bet her mate a fiver that she could fuck me by the end of the night. I told her she’d won the bet so she’d better go collect her winnings to pay for the cab back to my place.

On the late Eighties and early Nineties rock scene, which considered sexual promiscuity a cardinal virtue, the girls were just as much the voracious sexual predators and every bit as debauched as the boys - sometimes even more so. And they weren’t afraid of people knowing it. I suppose you could say that in this respect heavy metal culture (if that’s not an oxymoron) was quite forward looking in that it anticipated the ladette era of the late Nineties and early Noughties.

Occasionally, when it got dangerously close to throwing out time and you were still empty handed, you’d switch into what was known in the vernacular as ‘moose-hunt mode’. What this entailed was staggering around Rebels, The Roxy or whatever sleaze pit you’d ended up in, slurring obscene propositions at all and sundry until you found a member of the opposite sex who was in a similar predicament - and there would always be at least one.

That’s not to say we weren’t choosey, our sexual partners needed to satisfy two vitally important criteria:

• That they were female.

• That they had a pulse.

Alright, alright, we weren’t choosy - in fact we’d stick our knobs in pretty much anything provided they had a reasonably good chance of coming out in one piece. But we weren’t the only ones. Outside the pubs and clubs we frequented it was nothing unusual to see guys resembling Greek gods (albeit pig-wimperingly drunk Greek gods) being carried into taxis by women who looked like Quasimodo in drag.

Although we may have been prepared to fuck anything it didn’t usually come to that. As I look over The List and cast my mind back attempting to put faces to names, it strikes me that only around twenty percent of my total were two-baggers or the result of a drunken moose hunt. In most cases I’d have quite happily presented my credentials stone cold sober and with my critical faculties fully functional.

Notwithstanding my earlier comments about the ease of getting laid regularly, I think my gang did have a competitive edge. For a start we looked like a band – and that’s always a good way to impress the girlies (even if Bez and I were the only ones who could be more than superficially convincing on that score. Bez was the drummer in a band who, as far as I was aware, had never actually played any gigs - even if they did rehearse religiously - and I had more than enough experience to walk the walk and talk the talk in my sleep). To this end – and I can’t remember who came up with the name - we would tell people we were a Dogs D’Amour tribute act called the Dogs D’Amoose.

Another arrow in my love hunting quiver was that I was apparently known as ‘The Thinking Woman’s Bit of Rough’. This was a title I was accorded by my ‘sugar mummies’, as Mikki had dubbed a certain group of thirty and forty-something professional women who, for some reason, couldn't get enough of, or do enough for, their long-haired and perpetually horny toy-boy.

I never knew these women had a pet name for me until I bumped into one of their friends a few years later and couldn’t resist asking her something that had always puzzled me: what exactly was it about an irresponsible, penniless, philandering piss-artist that attractive, successful and intelligent career women found so alluring?

I never quite figured out whether I should have been flattered or insulted by her answer.

Apparently I oozed raw animal passion and had just enough of an air of danger to be exciting in a rip-my-knickers-off-and-take-me-roughly-from-behind-in-a-bus-shelter sort of way but with the reassurance of knowing that pillow talk would consist of more than monosyllabic grunts and that they wouldn’t wake up to discover their video and credit cards missing.

And there I was thinking it was me doing the exploiting.

Now I realise the boot was on the other foot I feel so used!

Equally puzzling was that I seemed to attract an endless procession of nurses. Probably seventy percent of my more involved casual relationships and all of my serious ones were with women who were - or who later became - nurses. Exactly why is something that has baffled me for years and given the numbers involved it can’t just be coincidence. The only explanation I can think of is that I must possess qualities which are irresistible to the kind of women who feel an overwhelming desire to tend the mentally unbalanced and helpless.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what those qualities might be.

Unlike many of my contemporaries I never employed practiced lines when going out on the pull – apart from anything else I’d never have been able to keep a straight face delivering them. What I did was to assume the guise of an amiable drunk, usually introducing myself via some off the wall remark. A few memorable examples being:

• I like your nose.

• You have nice cheekbones.

• What hairspray do you use?

• I’m Dom, you’ve probably heard of me.

If this provoked an encouraging reaction (i.e. a smile and a verbal response) I’d then use a combination of intuition and body language to tell whether it was worth pursuing or not. This never took more than a couple of minutes to suss out and should I achieve missile lock I’d drop the drunk act and wing it, relying on my natural wit and charm to do the rest (oh dear…).

Although this was a reasonably successful modus operandi others had different approaches.

Twiggy, who was a mate of mine from Lincoln and looked like a heavily tattooed version of Sebastian Bach (singer with the then popular beat combo Skid Row), never had the slightest trouble pulling women – in fact he scored every single time he set out to and the girls he got were invariably lookers.

Something I could never understand about Twiggy was why he didn’t scare his women off. He was well into his speed and would go out wired to the gills, his eyes looking like they were about to give birth and sporting the kind of deranged facial expression that always put me in mind of a serial killer immediately before they plunged an axe into some poor bastard’s head.

Twiggy had an unusual technique, although when you gave it some thought it did make perfect sense. He figured that every girl in Rock City, Rebels, The Roxy etc would have to go to the toilet at some point during the night and so if he loitered around near the girl’s loos he’d be in the best position to make a choice before moving in for the kill.

Twiggy and I often compared notes and I remember we arrived at a number of similar conclusions, chief among them:

• It was far easier to pull if you were supposed to be seeing someone.

• Posh birds were always the dirtiest.

• If they had attended a private school doubly so.

• If they had attended a private Catholic school they’d be up for pretty much anything.

• If a sixteen year old girl’s parents had recently split up then she’d definitely fuck.

In the case of the latter there was a knack to wheedling out this information without giving the game away.

“So, have you got your own place or do you live with your parents?”

“Well, I stay with my mum during the week and go see my dad at weekends.”

Bingo!

Get talking to a sixteen year old posh bird who’d been to a private Catholic school and was from a broken home while you were seeing someone and you could chalk up another before you’d even offered to buy her a drink.

The oddest pulling technique I ever saw routinely employed was that of an unctuous, shrew-like creature from Lincoln called Sad Lenny who was - until I started working at Royal Mail at least – probably the most pathetic specimen I’d ever come across. Lenny was absolutely excruciating company and carried such an air of gloom and despondency around with him that it was impossible to be near the guy for longer than a few minutes without descending into a monumental depression. It was so bad that whenever he sat near me in the pub I’d find an excuse to move to another table.

Lenny’s pulling technique basically involved getting women to feel sorry for him, which was absolutely fascinating to watch and, astonishingly enough, sometimes worked. His other trick was moving in on girls who had just split up with their boyfriends. You could guarantee that whenever a relationship fell apart amongst the Vaults or Lazers crowd then Lenny would be straight in with weasel words of consolation for the female party. How he managed to avoid getting regularly beaten to a pulp by their enraged exes I’ll never know. Once, when Sally and I had had a very public row, Lenny tried to make a move on her which prompted me to inform him – and in no uncertain terms - that were he to persist then I’d take him outside and do him an extremely physical discourtesy.

Something I couldn’t help musing on as I was assembling this chapter was how the safe sex message totally failed to penetrate heavy metal circles. In fact it might as well not have existed for all the notice we took of it. Perhaps that’s not surprising given the whole live fast, die young ethos which underpinned the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Then again maybe it could have been a subconscious backlash against the government’s AIDS awareness campaign of the late 1980s. I’m sure we all remember those nightmarish, Bergmanesque infomercials that managed to temporarily convince everyone between the ages of fifteen and thirty that they had AIDS.

If you woke up one day with a sore throat then it must be AIDS. An unexplained rash. AIDS. If you were a little run down. AIDS. If you felt out of the ordinary in any way whatsoever. AIDS.

When it became obvious that people didn’t have AIDS (i.e. when they didn’t start dropping like flies and when this supposedly apocalyptic plague failed to live up to the standards set by the Black Death and Spanish Flu) everybody went back to doing what they’d always done. And who can blame them? Hardly a week goes by without ‘experts’ and ‘leading scientists’ trying to scare the bejabbers out of us with some fanciful health scare or other, why should anyone have believed that AIDS was any different?

I know I’m sticking my neck out by saying this, but I’ve always suspected that the risk of picking up an HIV infection - at least for non-intravenous drug using heterosexuals who manage to resist the urge to regularly perform unprotected anal intercourse with sub-Saharan African prostitutes - has been exaggerated. I didn’t know, nor did I know anyone else who knew, a single straight person who’d become HIV positive through promiscuous sex. Considering the carnal proclivities of my extended peer group – a group which covered probably a quarter of the country - there should have been at least one.

Personally I can’t stand using condoms; I think they’re the most clinical, unerotic and passion killing device ever invented. I mean, at what point are you supposed to put the thing on without completely ruining the flow?

“Can you amuse yourself for a few minutes love? I just need to turn the big light on while I fiddle around rolling this thing over my willy.”

Regardless of my aversion to condoms I was never so irresponsible as to refuse to wear one when circumstances demanded it. Mind you, that didn’t really happen too often as practically all the sexually active rock chicks were on the pill; contraception was the primary concern here and I certainly don’t ever recall consciously using a rubber as a protection against STDs.

There was also the expense to consider; a pack of three from the machine in Rebels’ loos cost as much as another can of Red Stripe. You could get condoms gratis from a sexual health clinic that operated just out of the city centre but queuing up alongside the track-marked junkies and emaciated, porridge-complexioned prostitutes3 who comprised its clientele was something I was always too snooty to do. And besides, it seemed like so much wasted effort using condoms on sexual health grounds when you were risking a scabies infestation collecting the things.

However, when you fuck around with such reckless abandon then, sooner or later, you are going to catch something and the lesser STDs were considered an occupational hazard.

The first person of my acquaintance to be so afflicted was a guy called Steve who drank in the Vaults back in Lincoln. In the summer of 1987 he’d caught herpes during a drunken coupling at a local bike rally. Steve had realised something was wrong with him almost straight away but was too embarrassed to seek medical help. By the time he plucked up the nerve his todger had become so scabby that it looked like a scale model of the Elephant Man (or so I heard) and going for a piss had become so painful that the only way he could manage it was to sit in a warm bath for ten minutes beforehand. The doctors had never seen anything like it – at least not in Lincoln - and had taken a series of photographs for the hall of fame.

Later that same year, when my band was enjoying it’s ascendancy and when I was taking advantage of my new found celebrity status by slipping the fish to as many starry-eyed groupies as I could physically manage, I picked up a dose of genital warts.

I’d been lying in bed one morning and admiring my dawn horn when I noticed what looked like a cluster of miniature brussel sprouts under my rim. As I’d never heard of genital warts I immediately assumed it must be cancer and in that moment came the closest I’ve ever been to shitting myself in sheer terror. Imagine it, twenty three years old and stricken with cancer of the bell end! I decided there and then that I would rather die than let them amputate.

Luckily one of my housemates had heard of genital warts and managed to calm me down. Later on that day – and when I eventually stopped shaking - I paid my first visit the infamous Clinic Ten at Lincoln County Hospital.

I don’t know how it goes nowadays, but back when I attended the clap clinic - which was a long, long time ago I hasten to add – everything was done anonymously. You reported to the reception desk, were quizzed about your general medical history and asked to provide the first names of all your sexual partners from the past three months (I remember the receptionist giving me a disapproving look when I consulted a notebook). You were then given a numbered card and went to sit down until you were called.

I’m not sure what I was expecting to see that first time I walked into the waiting room - hordes of drooling Cosmo Smallpiece look-alikes in dirty raincoats probably – it certainly wasn’t the mundane looking cross section of society I actually encountered.

I’d just taken a seat when a lad called Spike, who was another Vaults regular, had come walking out of the treatment room. He spotted me and yelled across,

“Alright Dom, what’s dropped off this time?”

Getting rid of genital warts was an ordeal and a half. In all it took six weeks – and that was six weeks during which I wasn’t allowed to have sex. Every Wednesday and Friday afternoon I’d go and have my gentleman painted with industrial strength Compound W which would smoulder away for a few hours before having to be washed off. To amuse myself at the clinic I’d keep an eye out for first-timers who were easily spotted on account of their anxious expressions and the way they fidgeted about nervously in their seats (doubtless as a result of hearing all kinds of nonsense about the ‘umbrella treatment’ and other nonexistent tortures). Whenever I clocked one of these guys I’d make a point of walking out of the treatment room with an exaggerated limp, clutching at my nether regions and wincing.

The look of horror on their faces was always priceless.

Something else I remember from the Lincoln STD clinic was that there was an electron microscope picture of a crab louse on the wall behind the doctor’s desk. Have you ever seen an electron microscope picture of a crab louse? They’re scary as hell, all bristling with hooks and claws like something out of Starship Troopers!

But enough of my twittering, let’s meet some of the girls.

We’ve mentioned Mary briefly already so we’ll start with her. Mary was my favourite sugar mummy. She was forty one years old in 1990 but didn’t look a day over twenty five - I had actually refused to believe how old she was until she told me herself. She was something special too; clever, charming, sexy and with a figure that women half her age would envy. As well as finding Mary very attractive I couldn’t get enough of her company and was content to just sit talking to her. That she had such a civilising effect on me was quite unsettling.

Mind you, Mary did find my devil may care attitude exasperating and was constantly berating me for being unable to take anything seriously.

“Mary,” I once explained to her, “Try to understand, I’m married to rock ‘n’ roll. I’m the timeless prince of passion. I’m a rebel on the run. I’m a psychotronic love commando and I take no prisoners. I’m a fuel injected sex machine. I am the dandy highwayman who you’re too scared to mention.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” she said, “And it’s such a shame because I could really fall for you.”

I found it even more unsettling when Mary was like this because I knew she was talking sense and I could never think of a smart-arsed retort.

Leaping back to the present day for a moment, I often find myself lingering wistfully over the handful of photos I have of Mary. It’s another of those bitter ironies which beset the path of my life to such a depressingly regular degree that I’m convinced it must be being ordained by some higher power with a warped sense of humour that the 1990 vintage Mary would, by contemporary standards, be as close to Miss Perfect as I could ever reasonably hope to get. Absolutely no doubt about it.

It must have been something I did in a previous life.

Angie was another top sugar mummy; she was also forty one but, unlike Mary, she looked it. There was always an undercurrent of needy clinginess about our Angie and I couldn’t help thinking that were you to dig then you’d discover that she didn’t so much have issues as entire volumes.

But I didn’t really do empathy - or sensitivity - and I certainly wasn’t interested in depth. What concerned me was that she was a wildcat in bed, gave an absolutely untold blowjob and was a screamer. When she was approaching an orgasm she would announce so in an ear splitting shriek and one night when we’d stopped over at Tony’s flat Angie had been making such a row that she’d woken him up. Unable to get back to sleep he’d spent the next twenty minutes relaying the sounds of our frenzied rutting to Sheffield’s CB radio community.

Angie was obsessed with me to a degree that often made me feel uncomfortable. One night in Rebels she’d come up and pulled me away from the girl I was hitting on while whispering in my ear,

“I’m not wearing any knickers Dom, does that turn you on?”

She took hold of my hand and guided it up the front of her miniskirt where I discovered that she wasn’t wearing any pubic hair either (and that was still considered kinky in 1990 - rather than compulsory as it seems to be today).

I definitely enjoyed the sex with Angie and she did have quite a shapely body but, to put it as politely as I can, she was starting to get a little ropey around the edges (at least from the vantage point of someone who was still bedding seventeen year olds on a regular basis) and was starting to develop a bit of a leathery complexion which meant that whenever we ended up in bed together I’d find an excuse to turn her over and service her doggy style. Not that she ever complained about it.

Angie even offered to buy me a £900 Gibson Explorer guitar I’d been drooling over in a local music shop. Okay, I may have been perfectly happy to let her supply my drinks all night and pay me into Rebels but not even I could bring myself to take advantage of someone like that.

Then there were goth girls - and fit goth girls give me the horn like nothing else in the universe (I put it down to overexposure to Hammer horror movies during my formative years). One thing I discovered about goth girls was that they always seemed to have bizarre sexual kinks – and I mean bizarre in the sense that they were just odd rather than what we generally perceive as sexually perverted.

There was Lorraine from Chesterfield who, almost as soon as we’d got down to it, had produced a cuddly rabbit from beneath her pillow, clamped the thing in her mouth and had started growling and thrashing her head from side to side. Awkward as I feel to admit it, I did find this quite a turn on – so much so that I had the Elvis trembles within half a dozen strokes.

Olivia came from South London and was a student nurse (surprise, surprise) at the Northern General Hospital. I liked this girl a lot - I especially liked her irrepressible coquettishness. During the post-coital cigarette back at her place she had insisted on reading me extracts from a copy of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. I have no idea why, but for some reason I was stood to attention and raring to go again by the time she was half way through the second story.

The next weekend, when we slept at mine, Olivia didn’t have a light for her cigarette and had knocked on Ben, my tragic, sexually frustrated and middle-aged divorcee flatmate’s bedroom door to ask for one – this while clad only in a fishnet body stocking, the mesh of which was large enough to leave absolutely nothing to the imagination.

As Ben didn’t come out of his room until the next day - and also because I noticed that his window was steamed up when I came back from walking Olivia to the bus stop - I can only assume that the sight of a real life, firm-breasted and semi-naked nineteen year old goth girl standing within arms reach must have inspired him to try and wank his knackers flat.

Sometimes the choice was more limited and you had to take what was available. One weekend, when Tony was away roadying for some old punk band, he had asked me to look after his flat. A load of us had gone back there after Rebels kicked out - including a girl known as Mel the Mega Moose who I’d netted after a desperate last minute trawl.

I was under strict instructions from Tony not to fuck anyone in his bed but seeing as the entire place was heaving with people there was nowhere else to do it and I had to let him down. Tony’s bedroom was in a converted loft reached via a covered staircase in the corner of the lounge which had a door at the bottom opening outward. Before he left the next morning Liam had wedged the couch between the door and the facing wall so that it was impossible for me to get out. I discovered this about ten seconds after I woke up and saw what was lying next to me - and what I’d presumably shafted a few hours before. With trembling hands, a spinning head and a tongue badly in need of a shave I pulled on my jeans, gathered the rest of my clothes in a bundle and went tiptoeing downstairs to watch TV until my guest woke up and left.

I was not in the slightest bit amused when I tried to open the door. To add insult to injury a note had been shoved under it which read,

“Dom, how could you empty your sacks on such a Croco-rhino-piga-froga-moose?”

Had I been trapped with a vaguely attractive girl - or one who had anything remotely interesting to say - then it wouldn’t have been so bad. As it was I had to spend the best part of four hours pacing up and down and pretending not to pick up on Mel’s hints that we might as well start screwing again to pass the time. I was dying for a piss too and eventually had to relieve myself into a plastic carrier bag which I emptied through the gap in the skylight - when I later mentioned this to Liam he said it was a shame I didn’t need a shit.

The bastard left me in there until the pubs closed that afternoon, which was when he came back to let me out accompanied by the rest of the crew who all found it as funny as he did.

Although I would make a very loud noise about being ready and willing to do anything to anything I never really enjoyed sex unless it was with women I actually liked and who I knew liked me. Okay, I would go through the motions when I felt obliged to - or when I found myself pining for Sally and needed to convince myself I wasn’t really bothered about her - but to be perfectly honest I found it no more satisfying than masturbation. I was always turned on by feisty, self assured women and submissive doormats just did nothing for me. Which was why I was never interested in making a play for girls like Suicidal Sarah.

Suicidal Sarah was an attention seeking sixteen year old who came over from Doncaster most Saturday afternoons and caught the late train home had she not found somewhere to stay the night. She got the name because she was always offering herself to guys from Sheffield’s heavy metal in-crowd and then threatening to kill herself when, after having slaked their lust a couple of times, they didn’t want anything else to do with her.

Sarah insisted on being called Sass, she said because that was what everyone in Doncaster called her. This came as a surprise to the people we knew from that neck of the woods. According to them she had told the Doncaster lot that it was everyone in Sheffield who called her Sass. This just made us all the more determined to keep calling her Sarah.

But I suppose you could forgive an impressionable sixteen year old for believing she’d gain some kudos by inventing what she imagined to be a snappy nickname for herself. It’s not as if she was old enough to know any better.

We could be quite nasty in the way we mocked this girl too. During one Saturday afternoon boozing session in the Frog & Parrot, Sarah had imposed herself on a very tipsy Danny and me, almost tearfully imploring us to tell her why we didn’t like her and why we were always taking the piss.

“It’s not that we don’t like you, it’s ‘cos you’re a moose,” Danny slurred.

Mikki, who had been talking to some people on another table, seemed to recognise Sarah and came staggering over to ask her,

“I know you from somewhere; is it Sally? No, it’s not Sally, it’s Sarah, I remember now.”

Apparently Sarah was a friend of a friend of Mikki’s sister and he’d met her at some house party a couple of weeks previously.

After a few minutes of making amiable small talk Mikki took a deep breath and announced,

“By the way, Danny’s right. You’re a moose.”

That same afternoon Danny, Mikki and I had, at Danny’s insistence, gone for a drink in a pub called The Hornblower which used to stand at the end of Division Street before the area was redeveloped. The Hornblower consisted of one open plan bar room with décor so contrived as to give the impression you were on the deck of a sail ship (classy eh?).

The place was reasonably busy and had a clientele consisting mainly of students and indie kids, meaning that we fitted in about as comfortably as a yarmulke in a mosque.

We got our drinks and found somewhere to sit down. Mikki and I were chatting away when Danny got up and wandered off. After about ten minutes I asked Mikki,

“Where the hell has Danny got to?”

The answer was partially provided by a barmaid who came rushing past us and blurted to one of her colleagues,

“There’s a couple at it in the girl’s loos. I can hear them!”

The staff, who looked to be students too, had obviously never been trained how to deal with a situation like this and just stood around in a state of confused embarrassment. Mikki suggested to one of them that a bucket of iced water thrown over the top of the cubicle might help defuse the situation.

More and more people kept coming out of the toilets saying much the same thing and eventually the entire pub’s attention was focussed on the door.

Danny and Sarah subsequently emerged, looking suitably bedraggled, and were greeted with an enthusiastic round of applause from the patrons.

Danny yelled over to Mikki and me,

“You won’t believe this, but the daft bint’s got ‘Sass’ tattooed on her fucking arse!”

Girls like Sarah weren’t exactly thin on the ground and there were any number of teenage spinners around Sheffield at the time (as indeed there were in Lincoln, Nottingham and - I dare say - every other place with a well developed rock scene) and I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning her but for the fact that she pops up again, right at the very end of our little story and in the very last place I would have ever imagined finding her.

But like I said, I was never interested in such girls. I always liked the brassy ones.

Like Cathy.

I picked Cathy up – or rather she picked me up – with the corniest line in the book. It was in Rebels on a Saturday night and a few minutes before chucking out time when she came up to me and asked,

“Have you got the time love?”

As I was exceedingly drunk, was coming down (badly) from an amphetamine high and couldn’t even motivate myself to go on a moose-hunt I sarcastically slurred back at her,

“If you’ve got the energy darling.”

“I have as it happens. Would you’d like to fuck me?”

Get in there!

Cathy was an out of towner from somewhere near Liverpool (well, I assumed so as she had a grating Scouse accent) and was over in Sheffield for the weekend with a gang of people who were staying with friends at the university. She had come to Rebels on her own as she was the only rocker in the gang and all her other mates had decided to spend the night in the SU bar. We got to sleep on a sofa bed in the front room of one of those big student houses on Witham Road.

As we clumsily undressed and stepped through the drunken foreplay by the numbers routine something became horribly apparent; I was so pissed and had such a chronic case of whizz willy that I couldn’t get wood. Cathy discovered this when she reached down and tried to guide me inside her and immediately started sobbing that it was her fault because she didn’t turn me on.

I tried my best to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault and that she did turn me on it was just that the colossal amount of booze and drugs I’d imbibed was cancelling out any effect that should have had, but with no luck.

Cathy was making such a wailing racket that I panicked and went charging off to the downstairs bathroom to try and manually raise a stalk before she woke the entire street up. I was tugging at the damn thing, slapping it against the sink, trying my hardest to think of sexy things; the Richard Avedon photo of Natassja Kinski and the python, the singer out of Lush, Clare Grogan circa 1982 - I even resorted to rubbing toothpaste on my knob-end as I vaguely recalled someone telling me that it helped get you stiff (it doesn’t).

Finally, and it was more through a supreme Nietzschean effort of the will than anything else, I cultivated a tepid hard-on, charged back into the front room, leapt on top of Cathy and managed a perfunctory shag before rolling off and passing out.

When I woke up the next morning I discovered that for the first time ever I’d gone home with a girl I had assumed was a dog and had woken up with a fox. Cathy was a serious babe, with an hourglass figure, lovely pert boobs and a gorgeous snub nose mounted on the kind of angular facial features that never fail to make me melt. I spent several very pleasurable minutes just ogling her naked form and wishing I’d been clear headed enough to have enjoyed a proper bonk - especially as it seemed highly unlikely that I’d ever see the girl again. Cathy woke up, smiled and asked me if Mr Floppy was feeling better (he was in rude health as it happened). She leaned across to kiss me and we were just about to become entwined once more when her friends banged on the door and told Cathy to stop shagging and get dressed as they were leaving for home.

As we groped around for our clothes I discovered that my pulling pants were missing – which was puzzling as I distinctly remembered shoving them in one of my cowboy boots.

From then on I had to rely on my reserve pants, a pair of love-heart patterned boxers. These weren’t quite as filthy as the main pair – basically because they hadn’t been worn as often – but were in a similar state of disrepair, the crutch, gusset and seat all having long since rotted away.

I did see Cathy again as it turned out, about six months later in the Tap & Tumbler, which along with Fagin’s, was one of the two main feeder pubs for Rock City in Nottingham. Our eyes met across the room and she excitedly grabbed her companion and pointed at me.

“That’s him, that’s the one I was telling you about,” I lip-read her saying.

Thinking I must have performed a lot better than I remembered and assuming I must be well in for round two, I made a mental note to watch how much I drank that night and strutted across to discover Cathy and her friend bent double with giggling hysterics.

“Those pants!” were the only words I could get out of them for a good five minutes.

Apparently Cathy made a habit of keeping the underpants of her sexual conquests as trophies which explained why I couldn’t find mine that morning.

“I saw those pants,” her friend gasped between gales of laughter, “Jesus, they were absolutely crawling.”

In order to retain my few remaining shreds of dignity I made my excuses and left.

And then The Fates decreed that I meet Mötley Süe, the ultimate sex crazed good-time girl, the one who put all the others in the shade.

The first time I encountered Sue was in the Wapentake on a Saturday night towards the end of May. We were all pumped up as usual, getting ready to hit Rebels, when out the corner of my eye I noticed a girl talking to Danny. She kept nodding in my direction and leered suggestively at me before heading off to the bar.

I asked Danny who she was and what she had wanted.

“That’s Mötley Süe,” he said, “She wants to know who you are and if you’re seeing anyone. Believe me, you don’t want anything to do with her. I fucked her at a party once and she’s a right slapper. She’s got fat ankles and liquid tits.”

When I asked Danny what he meant by ‘liquid tits’ he said,

“Grab hold of them and they trickle through your fingers.”

Sue came back from the bar, headed straight over to me and came out with one of the weirdest opening lines I’d ever heard.

“What does your bedroom look like? Mine’s got red walls.”

She had come by the moniker ‘Mötley Süe’ because she was mad on the band Mötley Crüe and had their logo tattooed on her upper arm. In time she would become better known by the more self-explanatory title, ‘Pervy Sue’, mainly thanks to my tales of her depraved sexual habits, tales which, through a series of Chinese whispers, were embroidered to the point where it was widely believed she used to stick a broom handle up my behind and walk me around her flat on the end of the thing (she didn’t).

I remember nothing of what we talked about – it was almost half ten and I was pretty well cut – but Sue did mention she was banned from Rebels so I could hardly see any point in pursuing her as we were all heading up there just as soon as we’d finished our drinks.

I obviously made something of an impression though because we’d been in the club maybe forty minutes when a girl who’d just arrived came up to me and said she’d been asked to deliver a message; Sue was waiting outside and I had to go and see her - and I had to pretend I was her cousin.

Danny turned to me and said,

“Don’t do it Dom, you’ll get laid good style but she’s a right dodgy moose.”

I had a choice to make and what decided it was the fact that it was an off-giro week. I could go for a dead cert right now – which would leave me with enough money to come out again on Wednesday, the official doley pauper’s meat market night - or I could take my chances on pulling in Rebels where I’d definitely spend everything I had and consequently be broke until my dole cheque arrived the following Friday.

No contest.

As I suspected, Sue wanted me to come home with her. Unfortunately she lived in Conisbrough, a small town which was practically a suburb of Doncaster - well outside the night bus range and forget about it price (for doleys at least) in a taxi. So, after the rest of us left the pub she’d busied herself finding some lad with a car, had conned him into thinking he’d pulled and told him she needed to pick up her cousin (me) from Rebels before they could go back to hers.

When we arrived at her place she apologised to the dumb bastard and told him – quite unconvincingly - that I was an epileptic and was having one of my turns, which meant she needed to stay with me all night. She slammed the door in the guys face and by the time the echoes had died away she had my jeans around my knees and my dick in her mouth.

I didn’t get dressed again until the following Wednesday – and only then because I had to go back into Sheffield to sign on. Having done so I bunked the first available train back to Conisbrough and was up to my pods inside Sue before you could say give it to me hard and fast you horny bastard.

With the benefit of maturity one realises that sex without love is essentially an empty experience (although I’m with Woody Allen when he said that as empty experiences go it’s probably his favourite) but if we discount such sentimentality and merely concern ourselves with the vulgar mechanics of the act then Sue was in a league of her own, no one even came close – ever!

In fact Sue still has an effect on me today. She used to wear a very distinctively scented body oil - all her clothes were steeped in the stuff and her skin tasted of it - every now and again, when I’m walking through town or doing my shopping or out for the night, a girl will wander past wearing the same stuff. My reaction is always the same. I immediately go half mad with lust and get such a stonking knob-on that the only way I can get rid of it - short of attaching a shoal of medicinal leeches to the thing – is to rush home and crank open the sluices by hand.

Spending time at Sue’s flat was uncannily like living in a Seventies porno movie (except minus the moustaches, blue eye shadow and gold medallions - and without the local basketball team arriving unexpectedly). It was nothing unusual for me to call round and say, find Sue in the kitchen making something to eat. By the time I’d hung my jacket up she would be on the table, legs spread apart, pleasuring herself with a cucumber (or any other appropriately shaped object which was to hand) and cooing,

“Ooh, you dirty pervert, ooh, give me pervy sex.”

You could almost hear the tacky music start playing and I’d glance aside raising an eyebrow and smirking - as if for the benefit of some imaginary audience - before clambering aboard her.

Without realising what I was doing I’d find myself saying – in that wooden manner typical of low rent porn - things like,

“Ooh yeah you dirty bitch, you love it when I fuck you like that don’t you, don’t you bitch?”

To which she’d reply in a giggly whimper,

“Fuck me, ooh yeah, fuck me like the dirty little slut that I am, slide it all the way in big boy!”

Sue was the girl from every hairy-palmed teenage boy’s fantasies made flesh – the girl who’d do anything, anytime, anywhere and would love doing it. Within a week of meeting her I’d performed every twisted, perverted sexual act I could think of - and with a wildly enthusiastic partner who suggested plenty more, some of them so gross they would have made Max Hardcore blush.

I’ve never known a girl have so many orgasms; you only had to brush against a vaguely erogenous zone to have her come like a howling banshee and she was always - and I mean always – randy. So much so that I was convinced it must be some kind of psychiatric condition. Even in the pub she’d insist on me servicing her, we’d be sat there and all of a sudden she’d lean over,

“Ooh,” she would purr into my ear, “Ooh, Mrs Hedgehog wants feeding with hot Lincolnshire sausage.”

We’d then have to go for a quickie in the nearby car park or in one of the cubicles in the girl’s toilet.

And by Crivens could Sue give blowjobs! She was totally and utterly un-fucking-believable in that department and could have sucked a golf ball through a ten foot length of hosepipe no trouble at all. Looking down at her in action I often wondered where she was putting it all (there was an occasion a few years later when three of us, who’d all had the pleasure, happened to find ourselves in the pub together and drunkenly raised our glasses to South Yorkshire’s undisputed Deep Throat Princess 1990 through ’94).

Meeting Sue had an added bonus in that it largely solved the problem of what to do when my dole money ran out. When I was down to my last couple of quid I’d leap on a train and go stay at her place where we’d spend days at a time fornicating with such vigour that it would have registered on the Richter scale. Having worked up a sweat in the bedroom we’d go for a shower and end up shagging up against the wall in the shower cubicle. Then on the bathroom floor. Then in the hallway. Then back in the bedroom. By this time we’d be all hot and sweaty again so it was time for another shower etc, etc.

Sometimes, for a change of scenery, we’d go walking in the nearby countryside and commit al fresco perversions. One sunny evening Sue even insisted that we entertain the homeward bound commuters by getting in on by the side of the railway track.

It’s difficult to be sure what I felt for Sue, it was something, something like the affection you might feel for a spirited and mischievous stray cat perhaps, but it wasn’t anything to do with love (even if I did love fucking her). I think it sums it up to say that it was an ideal set-up considering my 1990 frame of mind. I definitely didn’t want any kind of emotionally involved relationship – particularly not as I was still smarting badly from losing Sally - but I did want a lot of perverted sex. And that was on tap 24/7 - even if Sue had a rather disconcerting habit of calling me ‘Daddy’ and telling me she’d been ‘…a bad little girl’ while we were screwing.

There was the added bonus of my public image. When we went out Sue looked just the part to compliment me, she was the consummate rock chick and could get the make-up, the clothes and the hair down effortlessly. She was also banned from Rebels which left me free to go on panty raids with the lads over the weekend.

Sorted, as we used to say back then, sorted big time!

Unfortunately there was a down side to appearing in public with Sue in that more often than not she was an embarrassing handful. She was coarse, aggressive, shameless and foul-mouthed. She made the Fat Slags look like finishing school alumni and you could be forgiven for thinking she suffered from Tourette’s. It never seemed to occur to Sue that people might find this objectionable – or maybe she just didn’t care that they would.

She was hardly packing the cerebral firepower either and I never could stomach her bottom-feeder friends who were even worse and possessed all the personality and conversational sparkle of a crop of root vegetables.

When Sue had been drinking she really came into her own. There was one incident I remember all too well. A load of us had been in the Wap one Roxy Monday afternoon and come closing time, had all piled back to my place to grab a bite and get ready for the evening. We got on the packed rush-hour bus and Mikki and Danny had started drunkenly teasing Sue with comments about her sexual preferences, to which she responded by announcing at the top of her voice,

“Ooh yeah, I right love it when I’ve got a cunt full of hot spunk.”

A hush immediately descended, broken only by a group of schoolgirls sniggering nervously a few seats ahead of us and some silver-haired old ladies tutting and mumbling about ‘young ‘uns these days’.

Sue seemed confused as to what she’d said to provoke such a reaction and with faultless timing topped her previous remark by announcing,

“But I prefer having a nice stiff cock slid up me arse - don’t I Dom?”

The entire bus turned to look directly at me – as if they were awaiting some kind of confirmation.

As spring gave way to early summer I became firmly established as one of the faces on Sheffield’s rock scene. Throughout that same period Tony kept trying to persuade me to move into the spare room in his flat. This wasn’t exactly an idea that appealed to me. As well as being a four mile trek outside the city centre the place was in a bit of a dodgy area - and you had to traverse some even dodgier ones to get there. Aside from the geographical and security angles there was the issue of Tony himself. I didn’t mind hanging out with the guy and he was usually good fun but there were other times when it could be uncomfortable to be around him. For some reason, which he would never elaborate on, he absolutely hated Nick and was always ranting on and on about how he was going to batter him to within an inch of his life as soon as the opportunity arose. Nick, I had it on good authority, was well aware of this and had publicly offered Tony outside several times yet was never taken up on it. The reason became clear as I got to know Tony better.

Although Tony was an intimidating sight he wasn’t a hardcase. He was a bully. And like all bullies he was essentially an insecure coward who only pushed around those people he felt sure he could harass with impunity. I can recall several occasions when people he’d picked on had fronted up to him and each time he’d backed right down once it became clear they weren’t frightened.

He also had a really creepy obsession with Nancy. Shortly before I arrived in Sheffield Nancy had, rather unwisely, gone home with Tony one drunken Roxy night - something she had regretted the minute she sobered up. Tony seemed to think this meant he had an exclusive claim on her favours and he would mooch after her and do his best to give all the men she was involved with a really hard time. Amusingly enough, Nick would have a fling with Nancy later that summer and when Tony found out he pitched such a demented duck fit that I thought his head was going to explode.

I never intended to move into Tony’s place but I did in the end. What persuaded me was the incompetence of the council’s housing benefit department. One morning I’d checked the mail to discover that instead of sending my back rent to my landlord, as I’d specified on the claim form, they’d sent it to me. I found myself looking at an uncrossed cheque for close on £400 that I could walk into the Co-Op bank on West Street and cash.

I simply could not resist the temptation and was installed at Tony’s place by noon that day. And I was blind drunk and/or speeding off my tits for most of the next three weeks.