n Saturday n Saturday 29th September 1990 I arrived back in Lincoln with slightly less than a fortnight’s dole money and with all my worldly possessions which, with the exception of the stuff I had to abandon at Sue’s place and the clothes I stood up in, could just about fit inside two medium sized rucksacks. I arrived early afternoon, made a beeline for the Vaults and walked straight into the middle of a major scandal.

The last time I’d been in Lincoln, or had heard anything from anyone I knew there, had been three weeks previously and a few days prior to Sally’s departure for London and university. As I left the pub that day I’d sneered at Sally that with her safely out of the way I would be surprised if Stu managed to keep his love gun holstered for longer than a fortnight. He hadn’t let me down as I discovered, and had romped home in less than half that time.

A friend of Sally’s, a girl we’ll call Wendy, brought me up to speed on recent developments.

Although Wendy was probably closer to Sally than anyone from the Vaults crowd she didn’t like Stu. She had harboured a grudge against him ever since he’d seduced, abandoned and devastated another friend of hers, a girl called Phoebe, a couple of years earlier. As an example of the effect Stu had on his women Phoebe was a textbook case; prior to her involvement with him she had been a self-confident and vivacious girl who could always be relied on to be the life and soul of any party; for all the time she was with him she resembled nothing so much as an unusually servile Stepford Wife and when it was all over he left her an emotionally scarred wreck who was incapable of forming or sustaining relationships of any more depth than the occasional one night stand.

But back to the matter in hand. The weekend following Sally’s departure Stu had come strolling into the Vaults accompanied by a girl called Louise. Initially I had no idea who this Louise was as she had appeared on the Lincoln rock scene while I was living in Sheffield, but from what Wendy told me I understood that she had rapidly acquired a reputation as - and I’m trying to think of a tactful way of putting it - a high-spirited good-time girl. When the inevitable questions were raised about the nature of their relationship Stu had casually brushed aside any suggestion of impropriety by maintaining that Louise was just a friend (Stu being exactly the kind of guy who would form platonic relationships with notoriously promiscuous rock chicks).

However, there was rather more to it than that. A couple of the girls from the Vaults crowd knew Louise from school and they managed to get the full story out of her. Up until that point Louise didn’t know Stu and Sally were still together, she knew they had been an item but Stu had told her that when Sally got her college place he had presented her with an ultimatum: either she could go to university or she could continue seeing him. But not both.

There was actually a grain of truth to this. Sally had kept Stu in the dark regarding her collegiate intentions right up until she’d accepted the university’s offer (and mightily pissed off he’d been about it too); he had indeed made the threat but had calmed down after a few days and retracted it.

When Louise later tackled Stu he confessed that yes, he and Sally were still officially involved but only because he wanted to let her down gently (him being such a nice guy and all) and the opportunity just hadn’t presented itself yet. Once it had, he assured Louise, then they would be able to move in together, they would get engaged, eventually there’d be children etc – all the cheesy lies an unprincipled rake will tell to ensure a constant supply of sex from a woman he likes screwing but has absolutely no intention of ever committing to.

Sally was a very popular girl and there were many who felt an obligation to let her know what was going on. Within hours of Stu and Louise’s public debut the payphone in Sally’s halls of residence was ringing off the hook with news of events back home - news that was about as well received as a French kiss at a family reunion.

The word in the Vaults that afternoon was that Sally was currently winging her way back to Lincoln and would be coming down the pub to sort things out. I was assuming – as indeed was everybody else - that she was intending to give Stu a brutal and public tongue-lashing before dumping him and I was all but wetting myself in anticipation. I even stayed out all day to make sure I got a ringside seat.

No one, and I mean absolutely no one, was in the least bit prepared for what actually happened.

At around eight o’clock someone nudged me and pointed out that the girl who’d just walked in and sat at the bar was Louise. And Louise had been exhaustively briefed on how to conduct herself that night.

Sally arrived a few minutes later accompanied by Stu and sporting a face that could have curdled milk. She walked straight up to the table around which everyone was gathered and immediately started screeching about what a nasty, two-faced bunch of shit-stirring bastards they all were. In a display of cuckolded self-delusion that would have put Hilary Clinton to shame she proceeded to dismiss the testimony of her entire circle of friends as nothing but a pack of spiteful lies contrived to undermine her and Stu’s relationship. There was, she announced in a melodramatic aside to Stu, a vast conspiracy afoot to this end as everyone was so clearly jealous of their fairytale romance.

It was perfectly obvious that Sally was reciting a script Stu had written for her and while she was delivering her tirade he stood there, looking over her shoulder, arms folded and with a defiant and contemptuous smirk on his face. You could see that the control freak in him was really getting off on it all.

Just as I was thinking that Sally couldn’t possibly debase herself any further she swanned over to Louise and for the rest of the evening we were treated to the excruciating spectacle of her hammy and overblown attempts to give the impression that they were the best of friends.

Sally’s attitude didn’t do her any favours in the public relations department and managed to put quite a few noses out of joint. One girl, who was also a close friend of the aforementioned Phoebe and detested Stu with a vehemence at least equal to Wendy’s, was so incensed that she had to be physically restrained by her boyfriend. Wendy too, was rather irked as Sally’s last words to her before leaving for London had been a plea to ‘…make sure that you keep an eye on my man for me,’ a task Wendy had dutifully undertaken only to be called a liar for her trouble. From that point on, the general consensus among the Vaults crowd was that if Sally wasn’t prepared to believe them about Stu’s errant ways then there was very little point in telling her – particularly as it only made her think ill of them.

And neither was knocking off Louise the full extent of Stu’s extra-curricular activity. Wendy, in spite of Sally’s best efforts to keep her quiet, had regaled me with the details of another of his indiscretions.

Over the summer Stu had been getting it on with a distant cousin who lived somewhere in the Welsh valleys (apparently they’d become intimate on a recent family holiday). Sally had found out when she discovered a series of steamy letters from this girl and had angrily confronted Stu with them before storming off to seek solace from Wendy.

I thought this most amusing as although I may have strayed while Sally and I were together at least I could be trusted to keep my hands off my own relatives.

Following Sally’s huffish exit Stu had rushed round to her parent’s house, hoping to catch her there and protest his innocence. Finding no one home except Sally’s older sister, he had pleaded his case to her, begging her to believe him that Sally had simply misinterpreted what she read in the letters. At one point he even fell to his knees and burst into a fit of crocodile tears to underscore his sincerity.

I thought Stu absolutely excelled himself with this one and in spite of myself I had to admire his nerve. Not even when I was at my most cynical and exploitative worst would I have had the gall to even think about trying to pull a stunt like that.

Nevertheless, Sally was entirely taken in by it.

Although I never had the slightest problem understanding why Sally was attracted to Stu (she was one of those girls with a mortal weakness for dangerous men and could no more have resisted the allure of a charismatic rogue like him than a moth could resist a candle flame) it did puzzle me why she had accepted his version of events so unquestioningly. Granted, Stu was a devilishly convincing liar; he could turn on the charm, seem magnanimous and genuine and spout the most brazen bullshit in such a way that you found yourself wanting to believe him.1 But given the weight of evidence in this case - and despite her frantic posturing to the contrary - Sally must have realised what was going on. She was far too intelligent not to have done. Love, or whatever perverted sense of devotion it was that Stu inspired in his women, may have been blind but to have believed it was also deaf, dumb and possessed of a remedial level IQ was stretching the bounds of credibility a little. The only explanation I could think of was that Sally must have been, and for whatever reason, more concerned with maintaining the illusion of an unshakeably solid relationship than the reality and was less bothered by Stu’s philandering than by having the details of it hammered home.

Then again maybe she simply couldn’t bear to accept that she’d dived headfirst, unthinking and against all good advice, into another ill-conceived relationship with another lying, cheating bastard.

Of course one part of me, the part that yearned for a squealing blood sacrifice as recompense for the humiliation Sally had visited on me the previous January, was absolutely lapping it up and was regarding the exhibition she was making of herself with great delight. I couldn’t help thinking of that wonderfully ironic coda to her final communiqué:

‘…I think I deserve someone who’s going to treat me a little bit better than that, don’t you?’

But then another more considered and sober part of me was disappointed. I’d expected more from Sally and was actually angry with her. I wanted to take hold of her and shake her and demand that she conduct herself in a more dignified fashion and stop behaving like such a credulous little drip.

Predictably enough though the dark side won out in this mix of emotions and when time was called at the Vaults I staggered off to Lazers nightclub with a huge beaming grin on my face.

Shortly after I arrived at the club a giggly young girl called Shelley introduced herself and, with much fluttering of heavily made-up eyelashes, told me that I looked like some kind of mishmash of Blackie Lawless and Alice Cooper. Being in such a haughty mood I had absolutely no trouble taking the encounter to its logical conclusion. After Lazers kicked out we went back to the place I’d arranged to crash that night to indulge in what turned out to be a frenzied sexual marathon on the couch, the living room floor, the dining table, the stairs and several of the kitchen fittings. As a result of this liaison I achieved the milestone figure I’d been aiming for on that particular leg of my quest to fuck every sexually available woman within reasonable travelling distance of Lincoln.

The next evening I went down the Vaults to brag about it. Or rather I was bragging about it - right up until someone informed me how old Shelley was. The rest of the night was spent running around making sure I had an army of witnesses who stood ready to swear that they saw me pick this girl up in a nightclub and that they’d heard her telling me she was eighteen. It came as a further shock to discover that, contrary to what Shelley had told me, she wasn’t on the pill. Until the all clear sounded a couple of weeks later I had, to put it mildly, rather an anxious time of it.

Finding somewhere to live in Lincoln didn’t turn out to be anything like as difficult or traumatic as it had been in Sheffield. It took a little over a week of dossing on various friends’ couches before I answered an ad in the local paper and secured a rented room in a shared terraced house on St Barley’s Street off Monk’s Road.

I fell on my feet with this place; it was a ten minute walk to the pub in one direction, fifteen minutes to my parents in the other and as an added bonus the utility charges were included in the rent - which meant that I wouldn’t have to do a moonlight flit after six months when the final demands had piled up to the extent that disconnection was being threatened.

I was in the front bedroom, next door to a young lad called Damien and directly above a recently married couple who were expecting a child and were waiting for a council house to become available. These two were a peculiar pair, for a start they were both on the dole and I couldn’t understand why anyone as level-headed and well adjusted as they appeared to be would get married, let alone conceive a child (and it had been deliberately conceived), while they were out of work and living in shared accommodation. They certainly didn’t strike me as the type to abuse the benefit system.

The landlord, or rather the landlord’s lackey who collected the rent, was a shell-suited wide-boy called Kevin who looked exactly like one of the scousers off the old Harry Enfield Show and I didn’t like this sneaky bastard one little bit. He had a really annoying habit of rudely waking everybody up by coming round at the crack of dawn to collect the rent cheques (for some reason our landlord wouldn’t have the council pay him directly). Whenever anyone complained about this he would just shrug it off, telling us we should be grateful that there were people like him around to provide people like us with somewhere to live. Patronising as this was I suppose he did have a point.

Something else that pissed me off about Kevin was the way he would try to stiff us by pretending we owed more rent than we actually did. A council rent cheque only covered about eighty percent of the total and you were obliged to find the rest yourself. Kevin would let this portion accumulate for a few weeks in the hope that we’d forget how much we owed and then turn up, claiming the amount was twice the real figure and demanding immediate payment. The first time he tried this on with me I knew exactly what he was up to. I’d had more than enough experience of slumlord crooks to be able to tell when someone was trying to shaft me and I called his bluff, telling him he was wrong, that I’d been keeping the counterfoils off the rent cheques and that I didn’t owe anything like that much. After another couple of attempts (when I actually did keep hold of the counterfoils and physically produced them) he realised that I’d sussed out his game and he stopped playing it.

“I can see I’m going to have to watch out for you.” He jokily informed me.

“No you’re not,” I corrected him, “Just don’t assume that because I’m on the dole it means I’m some kind of gullible idiot who you can rip off.”

Being on St Barley’s Street was something of a homecoming within a homecoming as I’d lived there before, in the mid Eighties when it seemed like a local ruling was in force stipulating that to reside in the area you had to be either a dope fiend, an alcoholic, a sexual deviant of some description, clinically insane or all of the above.

There is a popular urban myth in local circulation which holds that it is a proven fact that you are more likely to bump into a certified lunatic on Monks Road, Lincoln than anywhere else on the planet. Where this came from is a bit of a mystery; one guy I spoke to claimed that he’d read it in an old copy of Bizarre magazine, another said it was in FHM, another in Maxim and someone else reckoned they heard it on a late night radio show, but having lived at several address on and around Monks Road I can well believe there might be something to it.

Lincoln always was teeming with mentals (these days it seems as if psychiatric nursing, social work, drug counselling and otherwise ministering to the many and varied needs of the hopelessly fucked up have replaced agriculture and manufacturing as the basis of the county’s economy. So much so that you can hardly throw a stick out of your front door without hitting a mental healthcare professional – or one of their clients). Thankfully though, they tended to be the more sedate, basket-weaving variety rather than violent, dangerous maniacs like my erstwhile flatmate Tony. No one seemed to be able to explain why either. Perhaps it’s something in the drinking water - or the local gene pool - or maybe it’s just that growing up and living in a place like Lincoln (or indeed the prospect of same) is enough to tip certain people over the edge. In any case it would make for a cracking PhD dissertation.

The Monks Road part of town really was like a zoo back then and the chimp’s tea party was held on St Barley’s Street – at number 29 to be precise - in a house owned by a colourful art college dropout called Ian ‘The Disgusting Person’ Hill. I first met Ian in 1984 when I moved into a squat with a friend of his and we’d called round after the pub one night. Ian was a couple of years older than me and used to be a professional cameraman but had given it up so as to have more time in which to drink himself to death. He was still a keen – and very talented - photographer and had converted the cellar into a dark room where he would lock himself away for hours on end. Although essentially harmless (or so I thought until recently) he had some disturbing habits, walking around the house naked for example, and when there was nothing on TV he often took the opportunity to entertain everyone by performing depraved sex shows with his fruitcake girlfriend. And I once called round to discover that he’d taken a series of photos of his dick in various states of arousal and had pinned them up all over the front room and hallway.

I always imagined Ian to be more of an eccentric and drunken degenerate than an out and out loon but when he started eating bars of soap in the early part of 1991 I began to suspect there might be something a little more seriously amiss. Ian cracked up spectacularly a year or so later and has been in and out of mental institutions and sheltered accommodation ever since. At the time of writing he languishes at HMP for attacking and threatening to rape a nurse at the local hospital’s psychiatric wing when she wouldn’t supply the drugs he demanded.

Ian had a lodger called Tim who was an acid casualty and had gone round the twist after dropping one too many tabs during the late Seventies. The amount of dope Tim smoked didn’t exactly help his condition either; he would go out and score a quarter ounce deal and then sit by the fire skinning up spliff after spliff until he’d chugged down the lot and reduced himself to a gibbering blob.

Like his landlord, Tim was possessed of the artistic bent and spent much of his time on his oil paintings. Most of these would just be puerile, sub-pornographic garbage but every once in a while he’d paint something that really reached out and grabbed you in the way that only art produced by seriously disturbed people can.

Being insane, Tim got more dole money than the rest of us and I once asked him what I had to do to convince the necessary authorities I was mad.

“Don’t even think about it,” he told me, “If you’re not crazy when they get hold of you then you will be by the time they let you go.”

Once a fortnight Tim had a nurse visit to administer a shot of what I assume must have been some heavy-duty anti-psychotic or other which kept him relatively together. Every so often the nurse wouldn’t turn up - or Tim would be out when she did - and he’d start losing it.

Sometimes this could be quite comical, like when he broke into the city museum, stole a sword and spent the night charging around a local park, stark naked and convinced he was King Arthur. Then on other occasions, when he was curled up in a corner of the room, shaking uncontrollably and sobbing it wasn’t in the slightest bit funny.

And Monks Road wasn’t the only place where nutters were to be found.

When I couldn’t afford to go boozing in the Vaults all day long I’d hang around in a record shop called Hemispheres which was diagonally opposite the pub. Hemispheres was owned by a business studies graduate called Andy Macklin, or as we had dubbed him, Mad Mack McMad the Mega-Mental Metal Muthafucker (also known as Mad Mack, Bastard Son of a Million Metal Maniacs). We’d given him the nickname for much the same reason that you might call a Chihuahua ‘Killer’, i.e. because he was about as far removed from the image that conjures up as is possible to get, looking very much like a buck-toothed version of Rowan Atkinson on his original Blackadder outing. As well as having an odd appearance Mack could be a cantankerous so and so and was amusingly prone to Fawltyesque outbursts. He once snapped at a customer who paid for a ninety nine pence single with a twenty pound note that people without the right change should be killed.

Mack didn’t drink, so he never had a problem with being the designated driver on nights out and would do the Rock City run most Fridays. That said, grabbing a ride with Mack was a last resort for me (and Twiggy) as he was always hopelessly late setting off and we’d never get to Nottingham much before half ten, meaning that there wasn’t enough time for a decent pre-club trout-scout at The Tap & Tumbler or Fagin’s.

A mate of mine called Kieran worked in Hemispheres and dedicated much of his time to winding Mack up - but then he knew he could get away with it. Mack’s name may have been on the lease but it was Kieran’s authoritative and up to the minute knowledge of the contemporary rock scene which was key to the shop’s success. People would come from all over Lincolnshire - and sometimes beyond - to browse the latest American and European imports that Hemispheres specialised in and Kieran was famed for his one line reviews which he would write on a sticker attached to the album’s dust jacket. Such a thumbs-up was more than enough for people to buy a record without even hearing it.

Occasionally Mack tried to assert his authority by ignoring Kieran’s advice on what stock to get in. One time he famously ordered fifteen copies of The Sign of the Jackal, the debut album by a thrash outfit called Damien Thorne, purely on the basis of the band’s name, which he thought was metal and satanic enough for the kids to go mad for them on its own. Kieran had pleaded with Mack not to be so rash as one of his American pen pals had sent him a demo tape of the band and they were absolutely awful but Mack was having none of it.

“You’ll see, they’ll fly out and you’ll be eating your words.” Mack had assured him.

Sure enough the Damien Thorne episode became a standing joke as to the quality and insight of Mack’s ordering as five years later the only person who had bought a copy was a Garth Merenghi look-alike known as Dan Death - and Mr Death bought a copy of every thrash import that Hemispheres got in.

To get back at Kieran, Mack had to content himself with administering petty torments such as assigning him gherkin detail first thing on a Monday morning. Hemispheres was situated a few doors down from the city centre branch of MacDonald’s and en route to the bus station; it was at the exact point where people who were on their way to catch the last bus home after a night’s boozing and had got a burger would pull the gherkin out and drunkenly fling it at the nearest window where it would stick, limpet like, to the glass. By Monday morning the entire shop front would be covered in what looked like a crop of verdant acne and Kieran had to use a paint scraper to get them off.

For some reason – Kieran was always adamant that it the way Mack looked - Hemispheres was like a whacko magnet in Lincoln city centre and every passing loon would feel its irresistible tug.

And God only knows why, but they seemed to have a thing about Gary Moore.

One guy, who was apparently called Billy, would sniff the album sleeves. Every other Thursday afternoon our man would walk into the shop and head straight for the Gary Moore section. He would fidget about for a few moments before looking straight at Kieran, smiling sheepishly and then burying his face inside each of the covers in turn and inhaling deeply.

Sometimes, when he was in a mischievous mood, Kieran would tease Billy by hiding the covers behind the counter. When he came in and discovered them missing he’d run around the shop like a headless chicken.

“Oh no,” he’d cry out in distress, “It’s not a good day.”

Another guy who, judging by his wild-eyed expression and the sweat pouring off his face, was always flying high on amphetamines would leave notes addressed to Gary Moore in the album sleeves.

‘Dear Gary’, they’d usually say, ‘I’ll meet you on Sunday afternoon in the usual place’.

We never established whether these two knew each other.

Smelly Barry was also a regular visitor to the shop (and he hadn’t come by the name for nothing, he absolutely stank to high heaven – sometimes it was so bad that you could still smell traces of him the next day). I’d known Barry – or rather I’d known of him - since the early 1980s. Back when Lazers had been called Trilby’s they held the rock bashes on a Thursday night and a Saturday afternoon. Barry would regularly turn up, bare-chested under a sleeveless denim jacket, looking for all the world like an extra from The Warriors, and bop about in front of the mirrors that surrounded the dance floor admiring himself. Sometimes he’d bring a cardboard guitar along and the sight of him jerking around like a palsied Angus Young is something I will never forget.

Barry was constantly badgering Mack to give him a job.

“You know I like music don’t you Mack?” He would say. “Come on, there’s got to be something I can do here.”

Futile though this may have been it was admirable inasmuch as it was a lot more than I was doing to find work.

Work (of a sort), however, found me. My old man had recently taken early retirement and to supplement his pension would do decorating jobs on the side. As he only charged a fraction of what a professional painter and decorator would cost word soon got around and he was always very much in demand and always had at least two or three days a week when I could go and lend him a (cash in) hand. While this didn’t exactly catapult me into the super-tax bracket it did mean that I now had much the same disposable income as most of the people I knew who were working full time. Consequently I could always afford the Friday night Rock City trip.

And Rock City was back at the centre of my social life once again, just as it had been before I moved to Sheffield. Rock City on a Friday was a much better night out than Rebels, there was never any doubt about that,  but it wasn't that much better that it justified the hassle and expense of getting there and back. In the nine months of my initial spell in Sheffield I only made the trip twice; once in April when someone had organised a coach and again in July when Mötley Süe had persuaded her idiot ex-boyfriend to drive a load of us over.

As far as my social life in Lincoln went the top night out was the cheap ‘n’ cheerful student/indie do at a club called Vienna’s on a Tuesday night. The main attraction being that the draught beer was only fifty pence a pint meaning you could get safely paralytic on a fiver (provided that you stuck to drinking cider, the lager and bitter both tasted like piss and were about as potent).

Vienna’s had opened way back in 1981 and had gone through several name changes during it’s chequered history. For the first couple of years the place had been quite successful, even if it had a bit of a hairy reputation as the favoured weekend hangout of the more loutish towny elements. Attendance started dropping off around 1984 and the club had mysteriously burned down. The management immediately made a front page statement in the local paper, assuring the public that their competitors weren’t going to put them out of business and that they’d be back even better than before.

The place had reopened a few months later with a new name and paintjob, was moderately successful for a while, started to lose money and mysteriously burned down.

The management immediately made a front page statement in the local paper, assuring the public that their competitors weren’t going to put them out of business and that they’d be back even better than before.

The place had reopened a few months later with a new name and paintjob, was moderately successful for a while, started to lose money and mysteriously burned down…

Does anyone else notice a pattern developing here? If so the chances are you never worked for the club’s fire insurance company.

Most of the rest of the time when I had money to spend you would find me pissing it away in the Vaults - or at Lazers on a Saturday night.

The Vaults was presided over by a terrifying martinet called Beth (no surname, just Beth) who had been drummed out of the police force following a drink driving conviction. I have never seen anyone handle troublemakers as fearlessly or as effectively as this woman and she would have the most formidably sized thugs in an arm lock before they even knew what had hit them. Not that there ever was much trouble though, it was well known that Beth was an ex-cop and on the extremely rare occasions when things did kick off badly the police would arrive in an impossibly short time.

Something I’ll always remember about the Vaults is the Ayingerbrau Pils lager they had on draught (it was also the house beer at The Tap and Tumbler so if any of the old Nottingham crowd are reading this then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about). The brewery stopped making this stuff in 2005 which is a crying shame because it was like getting pissed on nothing else I’ve ever known. Although it got you absolutely bollocksed it wasn’t a harsh kind of drunkenness like you get from, say, Stella (which contains monkey chemicals and can turn even the most genial of people into aggressive, incontinent hooligans by the fourth pint) it was a much more sublime although no less potent brew that would creep up on you; one minute you’d be holding a sensible conversation and then, all of a sudden, you’d fall off your seat totally plastered.

So who exactly drank in the Vaults you’re probably wondering? While the overwhelming majority of the regulars were rockers there was quite an eclectic mixture of other left-field and bohemian types who frequented the place, none of whom had the numbers to be able to support a pub of their own. I actually spent a Sunday afternoon constructing a Venn Diagram to represent the various groups and inter-group relationships but gave up when the thing became so complex and so enormous that there was no way I’d ever cram it into an A5 sized paperback – at least not in enough detail for it to be legible or to make any kind of sense. So instead, here’s a précis of some of the more prominent groupings and the stand-out personalities within them.

First and foremost (obviously) there was my gang, the Kröss Köunty Karpet Kissing Krüe - or the K₅ for short. Kieran had coined the term in a fit of drunken inspiration at the end of a particularly full-on session the previous year. We were basically the ones who did the Rock City run on a Friday night and preferred to spend our time and money there rather than in the Vaults and Lazers.

Twiggy, we’ve already met, ditto Kieran and Mad Mack. Kieran’s brother Dave and his mates Terry and Sean were in there too as was a guy called Marty who was now at university in Nottingham (which provided a place to stop the night after Rock City should it be necessary).

There was my pal Webbo, who I’d known from junior school, and his best mate Ricky - although by the autumn of 1990 they were both in semi-retirement. Webbo was heavily involved with Wendy and spent most of his time with her in the Vaults and Ricky was working for some company that provided security for business conferences and spent a good deal of his time away from Lincoln.

Also away from Lincoln for a lot of the time was a guy we’ll call Fergie, who worked as a stage hand on various theatre productions around the country and was very rarely in Lincoln for more than a few days at a time – although when he was he certainly made up for lost drinking time. Indeed, in Vaults parlance a full-on drink and drugs binge was known as ‘A Fergie’ precisely because of this.

And the K₅ wasn’t an exclusively male club either; there were the sisters Kirsty and Francis Thompson who were usually referred to as the Thompson Twins. These two and their mates Ami, Alice and Kelly called their particular subset of the K₅ whole The Pirates of Men’s Pants and were as salacious and depraved a collection of Jezebels as you could ever hope to meet. Ami was the only one of them who could drive and had access to a car at the time and mostly they went to Rock City with her. When she wasn’t available the others would cynically use the fact that Mack fancied Kelly2 to get him to provide transport. Having got to Nottingham they would immediately abandon him and go charging off looking for men to pull.

Then there were the Dodgy Goths. The Lincoln gothic herd had thinned out considerably since its mid Eighties heyday, when there were more than enough of them about to have had a reasonably good go at re-sacking Rome. By 1990 though, their numbers were down to no more than a dozen or so, practically all of whom drank in the Vaults. The numero uno among this crowd was a guy called Wayne Goodyear. Wayne’s claim to fame was that he was the kiss of death where the tenancy of a rented house was concerned. Whenever he moved in anywhere it was a fairly safe bet that the entire household would be kicked out shortly afterwards. One time he’d even made the front page of the local paper when his former landlord had contacted them about the state of the place he’d just evicted Wayne and co from.

When I first arrived back in Lincoln, Wayne shared a house on Savage Road with three other lads and I’d stayed there for a couple of nights before I got the  room on St Barley’s Street. A few weeks later everyone had to do a runner when Wayne broke into the house next door by going in the attic and removing bricks from the adjoining wall.

In early 1991 he moved into a house on Shrimpton Terrace. Getting kicked out of this place was actually quite an achievement as the guys who lived there were running some fiddle whereby they were getting two lots of rent cheques (even if I can’t remember the details of how they set this up). The Shrimpton Terrace house was famous for the vast Scalextric circuit which took up nearly every square inch of floor space and required three separate transformers to power it. Practically the only time Wayne ventured outside was when he went into town to shoplift some more cars or lengths of track and as he couldn’t be bothered to go and sign on, his dole money - and consequently his housing benefit - got suspended. He was also too idle to go down the dole office and sort this out and the rent arrears built up to such a degree that they all got evicted.

There was a long established squat on Newland which had been up and running for as long as I can remember and which was getting tantalisingly close to the twelve year possession point (when the hippie couple who had been there since the start intended to turn the place into a commune). The rightful owner had apparently left the country a few years previously and no one knew where he was; Wayne moved in and within a matter of weeks he had reappeared complete with a repossession order and everyone was out on the street.

There were the BLTs, and they weren’t so called because of a fondness for a certain type of sandwich, but as a contraction of ‘Barely Legal Teenagers’. I was the one who came up with the name and had refined it from something somebody said way back in late 1987 when this gang of school leaver aged rock chicks had started hanging around in the Vaults and Lazers. Following a Lovechild gig in early December of 1987, my flatmates and I had thrown a party and had invited these girls along. Rock chicks being what they are, they were all anxious to shag at least one of Lincoln’s heavy metal in-crowd that night and for my part I was only too happy to oblige. In the pub the next day someone had commented on ‘…that bunch of barely legal teenage girlies’ and it kind of developed from there. Not only did the name stick but the BLTs adopted it themselves.

The neo-BLTs, for want of an original title, were another gang of rock chicks of the same age group who’d picked up their namesakes baton round about the time I made my return to Lincoln (the original lot were now all unambiguously legal so the name wasn’t really appropriate any more). Shelley, the girl we met earlier, belonged to this gang, as did a mate of hers called Jenny with whom I embarked on a short but torrid sex fling throughout November/December of that year. It would have gone on longer too, had not her old man threatened to ground her unless she stopped seeing me.

I was initially attracted to Jenny because of her cherubic features which made her look so mouth-wateringly sweet and innocent and hence irresistibly ripe for defilement. She also wore white ankle socks in bed which lent her a further air of corruptibility. With Jenny however, appearances were deceptive and as for corrupting her I was seriously late for that particular party.

The Pettibone Road lot were essentially the ex-members, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends and entourage of two of Lincoln’s pre-eminent - although by the time of our story long since defunct - heavy metal bands: Legs Akimbo and Loose Talk. One of their number, a guy called Steve ‘Spoony’ Spooner owned a house on the corner of Pettibone Road and Faith Street where they would all gather pre-pub to drink and take drugs and post-pub to continue drinking and take even more drugs.

They’d often get up to late night mischief and by far their favourite trick was launching home made hot-air balloons fashioned from dustbin-liners, coat hangers and firelighters. On a still night these contraptions would reach an impressive altitude and remain visible for as long the firelighters continued to burn. In the winter of 1986/1987 they had caused their own War of the Worlds type panic when, after a particularly hearty booze and drugs binge, four separate groups had synchronised watches and set out for the top floor of the four multi-storey car parks which bordered the city centre. At precisely three o’clock in the morning four squadrons of eerie lights rose majestically into the air before catching the breeze and drifting with silent menace across the Lincolnshire countryside, looking unnervingly like the vanguard of an alien invasion fleet.

I was in the Vaults the next afternoon when the first of those responsible waltzed in with a copy of the local newspaper bearing the headline,

JETS SCRAMBLED TO INTERCEPT UFOS

Apparently several concerned members of the public had phoned the police to report strange lights in the night sky. As these were clearly visible over most of central Lincolnshire yet had no radar signature, two fully armed Tornado fighters were sent to investigate. But by the time the jets were airborne and being guided into position the mysterious lights had vanished. I imagine there’s probably a manila file somewhere with the word UNSOLVED stamped across the cover.

I could never make up my mind about the Pettibone Road lot. Individually and when they were sober, they were mostly perfectly sound guys and I got on well with them but when they were all together and had been boozing or smoking blow or gobbling mushrooms they could be a bunch of arrogant, self-obsessed dickheads. Still, pot, kettle, black and all that stuff.

There were other lesser groupings that habituated the pub like the handful of skinheads and a similarly sized pack of crusties. The local chapter of the National Chopper Club would pop in from time to time and there were the barflies who you always get in places like the Vaults. These included The Man With The Permanently Surprised Expression On His Face (do I really have to explain why we called him that?) and a postie who was an absolute dead ringer for Pablo Escobar, the Columbian cocaine baron. Other celebrity look-alikes included a guy who bore an amusing resemblance to Baron Greenback from the Dangermouse cartoons and a crotchety old duffer we called Harry Cross because of his resemblance to the character in the old Liverpudlian soap Brookside. Harry was usually accompanied by his foul-mouthed missus Violet, who looked like Humpty Dumpty’s overweight sister, and whom we called Big V. He took a particular dislike to the pub’s biker clientele and would sit there muttering insults under his breath as they walked past. One time he made the mistake of doing this to a huge, bad tempered grebo who’d just split up with his wife and got lifted out of his seat and pinned to the wall by his throat. Another time a gang of bikers were winding Harry and Big V up by asking what Big V’s tits looked like, so Harry had her show them. I was walking past at the time and got a full, unrestricted eyeful. If the Sheffield bag lady’s soiled period pants from chapter three were the most unerotic thing I’ve ever seen then Big V’s tits ran them a close second and put me right off sex for, ooh, a good half hour at least.

Although we were undoubtedly the grooviest of these groups we weren’t first in the Vaults pecking order. That honour went to a bunch we disparagingly referred to as the Flat Earth Society or FES (pronounced ‘fezz’) for short.

This lot epitomised everything that was so exasperating about the attitude of people in Lincoln and I have never known people whose social lives were so regimented, inflexible and unadventurous. They would sit in exactly the same places, at the same table on the same nights of the week, week in week out and trying to get them to do anything out of the ordinary was a frustrating exercise in futility. Their steadfast refusal to go to Rock City, for example, was way beyond neurotic. I could never understand this, they were all into rock music and liked to get drunk and were always going on about what untameable party animals they considered themselves so why they wouldn’t go was totally and utterly incomprehensible. It was like some point of principle that they wouldn’t. They knew we mocked them for it but all that did was to engender a kind of militancy whereby they’d dig their heels in even further. During the late Eighties I would organise regular coach trips to Rock City and not only would the FES refuse point blank to go but they would arrange a pub crawl around Lincoln’s towny bars for the same night.

I can only assume that this must have been some kind of act of defiance.

And I didn’t even bother trying to coax any of them over to Sheffield; I’d always let it be known there was an open invitation should anyone fancy coming across for a night out but I never kidded myself that they would take me up on the offer.

The limited horizons of their social lives was one thing, but their insularity, which bordered on a kind of group solipsism, and their aversion to strangers, which was almost Royston Vaseyish in its intensity, was like nothing I’ve ever known. Whenever any of us had our out of town mates over I used to find it amusing to introduce them to the FES, who would immediately fall silent and refuse to make eye contact. Should our guests make the effort to engage them in conversation they were lucky to receive single word replies and most of the time just got inarticulate grunts.

Even the FES’s sexual relationships were kept strictly in-house and every few months they’d swap partners like some kind of incestuous clan. I know I was hardly the most clean living of people but there was always something about this practice that I found uncomfortably sordid.

Maybe I’m being overly harsh (but then I’m not very well practiced in writing complimentary prose) as they did vary the routine and mix with people they didn’t know twice a year; once in August when they’d go to the Castle Donnington Monsters of Rock festival and again at Christmas when they’d go to a guy we’ll call Dean’s rugby club fancy dress party.

Dean, or King Dean as he was better known, was a few years older than the rest of the pack and liked to think of himself as a kind of father figure/mentor to them. Even though most people who drank in the Vaults tended to humour him, he was generally regarded as an oafish and sexually frustrated buffoon. And a large part of his sexual frustration stemmed from his attitude towards women which was like something out of the Thirties; when it came to gender roles and the division of labour Dean’s attitude made Borat look like a progressive. The one relationship I do remember him having ended after a couple of weeks when the woman involved got sick of being his nursemaid.

As well as being a chauvinistic throwback Dean was also a vocal – and extremely tiresome – homophobe and with this I always caught a distinct whiff of overcompensation. Every Saturday afternoon Dean played rugby and in the evenings, when he got to the Vaults, would thrill everyone to bits with tales of the oh-so hilarious post-game antics. These always seemed to involve the entire team getting uproariously drunk and then inserting foreign objects into one other’s behinds.

That’s not in the slightest bit gay is it?

Okay, I never thought Dean was a bad person as such, he wasn’t malicious or vindictive or anything like that, he could just be boorish and pig-ignorant (especially when he’d been boozing, which was most of the time) but then so could I and most of the people I knocked about with.

However, when I think of The Tape, I don’t think there’s a penance of suitable severity to atone for it or a circle of hell low enough in which to damn its author.

Back in those days the Vaults didn’t have a jukebox and when there wasn’t a band playing the music was provided by an auto-reverse cassette deck behind the bar. Some time in the mid Eighties Dean had recorded a compilation tape of rock and punk standards that he’d very generously donated to the pub. Immediately upon arrival he would put this tape on and it would play over and over until the place closed. Should anyone ever try to put anything else on Dean would go turn it off, put his tape back on again and then stand guard until they’d got the message. It used to drive everyone crackers and thinking back on it I can’t understand why someone didn’t just smash the thing to pieces. Even though I actually used to like some of the songs on it, hearing them on a non-stop loop for five fucking years has ensured that there is not a single one I can bear to listen to today.

And I wasn’t the only one who found the FES exasperating. On the last Friday of November 1990 Dean had taken a carload down to London to see the band Thunder at the Hammersmith Odeon. They were stopping the night with a girl called Jackie - another Lincoln émigré who lived in Islington – and as an afterthought had all arranged to meet Sally after the gig to go to the Astoria nightclub on Charing Cross Road where there was a Friday night rock do.

Unfortunately, varying the weekend routine a mere three months after the last time they’d done it for the Castle Donnington festival had taken so much out of them that after the show they didn’t feel up to a nightclub and after meeting Sally and putting her back on the same bus she’d just come in on, had gone back to Jackie’s.

The following night, when the FES expeditionary force had returned to base and were recuperating in their reassuringly familiar seats in the Vaults, Stu came storming into the pub and angrily confronted Dean. I was at the bar at the time and although I couldn’t quite hear what was being said, it looked very much like Stu was going to drop Dean any moment, his body language certainly suggested so.

Apparently, on the bus home the previous night, Sally had been the only passenger on the top deck when a gang of drunken louts had got on and made their way upstairs. Having noticed Sally they had surrounded her and started touching her up and telling her in lurid terms exactly what they intended to do to her. She was only saved, or so she claimed, by a pair of ticket inspectors who boarded the bus further on down the line and allowed her to escape. As she made her getaway one of these yobs had allegedly yelled after her that ‘…next time darling you won’t be so lucky’.

When I heard about this every gauge on the front panel of my bullshit detector immediately leapt into the red and I just knew she’d made it all up - doubtless in a fit of pique after having travelled halfway across London for no reason (Sally’s college to the West End was quite an involved and expensive trek on public transport and in the middle of the night). The reason I was so convinced was because it was exactly the same kind of thing I’d have done and judging Sally by my own juvenile standards usually yielded pretty accurate results.3

For the remainder of 1990 and into early 1991 life in Lincoln carried on in its dull and entirely predictable fashion with the Friday run to Rock City providing the big night out. The rest of the week was basically spent killing time until this came round again. With Lincoln being a much smaller place than Sheffield there was no equivalent of the Peace Gardens and the dole stroll was more limited. If the weather permitted it Twiggy and I would sit on the wall at the St Benedict’s Square war memorial, looking for all the world like a real life Beavis and Butt-Head, shooting the breeze and poking fun at passers by.

Mostly though, and when I wasn’t working for my old man, the daily routine revolved around the Vaults and Hemispheres. Either that or lying in bed indulging in the pleasures of the palm.

A few weeks after my return to Lincoln I starred in a porno flick (and I cannot for the life of me remember what the thing was called). Well, I had a bit part. You couldn’t really call it porn either - it was one of those movies you ordered out of the back pages of the Sunday Sport in the days before the internet rendered the obscenity laws unenforceable. In fact had it been much tamer it would have made the average Benny Hill sketch look hardcore.

A load of us were sat in the Vaults one weekday afternoon, nursing the one pint each we could afford, when a sleazy looking middle-aged guy in a ponytail and Sunday Sport t-shirt walked into the place accompanied by a pair of scantily clad girls and a film crew. He came over to our table and asked if any of us might like to be extras in an adult movie. We told him we would if he got a round in.

The scene involved me and the male lead sitting at the bar when all of a sudden a leather clad dominatrix would appear and drive her love interest through the pub, past the dumbfounded patrons and out of the door with lashes from her whip. I actually took direction during this and immediately after the action had to turn to the camera and look shocked.

We did several takes and on the last one I was told to look directly into the camera and keep dropping my mouth open as they could edit the best one in later. They didn’t bother as it turned out. When we eventually got hold of a copy of the finished product and fast-forwarded it to the relevant section the girl got her guy and the action then cut to a shot of me doing a ten second goldfish impression.

On 22^nd November, at long, long last, Maggie-Maggie-Maggie was finally Out-Out-Out and every mockney-accented alternative comedian was suddenly without material. The reviled harridan who had caused so much damage by rescuing the country from decades of stagnation and economic decline, restoring national pride and effectively creating modern Britain was replaced by the political colossus who brought us the Cones Hotline and the Dangerous Dogs Act.

Although there was celebration in all the predictable quarters I always thought the whole thing felt curiously downbeat. It was like hearing that the kid who used to bully you at junior school had been run over. But then the days when I was young and angry enough to want to overthrow Thatcherism and naïve enough to believe there was anything worth replacing it with were long behind me. I think the Spitting Image sketch, which had Thatcher’s puppet wandering around an empty House of Commons before yielding a resigned sigh, caught the mood most effectively. What’s more it was almost respectful, like a salute to a vanquished but worthy foe.

On Christmas Eve 1990 I was sat in the Vaults as the afternoon session was drawing to a close when I noticed some girl - who I’d never seen before - looking across the room at me and smiling. “You’re nice.” She told me.

Within half an hour we were back at my place going at it like rabbits.

Having noisily crashed the yoghurt truck, I rolled onto my back, lit a cigarette and asked her name (I know, I know - beneath the callous exterior I’m really an incurable romantic).

“It’s Carla,” she said, “You’ve probably heard of my sons.”

She then told me about her sons, who included Michael Jackson, Jason Donovan and Mahatma Ghandi.

I’d copped off with Crazy Carla - and much to the amusement of several people who’d seen us leaving the pub. I was always a little ill at ease about the fact that I’d unwittingly shagged a mental. You can moralise all you like about my sexual predations but every female who went to bed (or alleyway, or car park, or nightclub toilet cubicle) with me knew exactly what they were getting; I made sure they did. What’s more, and if you want to look at it in such terms, they were exploiting me every bit as much as I was exploiting them. But if someone is non compos mentis then doesn’t that render the whole issue of consent questionable? This did weight on my mind somewhat. When I expressed my concerns to Twiggy he was insistent that we first establish whether bedding a schizophrenic should count as one or two on the score sheet.

On January 17th 1991 Operation Desert Storm kicked off and we all thought it was absolutely first class entertainment. The difference in time zones plus the fact that all the air strikes were conducted at night meant that the first reports would start hitting the TV news about half an hour after we got in from the pub. The timing was especially fortuitous as Prisoner: Cell Block H had just come to the end of its run and we were stuck for something to watch that late at night. For the next six weeks we were treated to the best war mini-series we’d ever seen. With the real time reportage, exotic setting and sexy, hi-tech weaponry it was far better than the dreary Falklands War had been - even if it didn’t have anything like as good a soundtrack as Vietnam.

In early February, Twiggy and I had been obliged to bum a lift to Nottingham with Mad Mack and as soon as we walked into Rock City Marty and his housemates had come rushing up to tell us that a guy called Mikki had been in Fagin’s earlier on that night asking people if they knew ‘Dom from Lincoln’. Mikki had apparently got it into his head that when I flitted from Sheffield I’d moved to Nottingham. For my part I’d been unable to contact any of the Sheffield lot because in my rush to get away from Sue’s flat one of the many things I’d left behind had been my address and phone numbers book.

When Mikki discovered that Marty knew me and that I would probably be in Rock City he had asked him to pass on the message that he was staying the weekend in Nottingham and would be in Fagin’s again on Saturday night if I fancied meeting up. Unfortunately it wasn’t giro week nor had I done any work for my old man recently so I couldn’t afford to. However, Marty and co were going to be out on Saturday night so I gave them my parent’s phone number along with instructions for Mikki to give me a call sometime on Sunday afternoon.

Before we catch up with Mikki, Danny and the rest of the Sheffield gang we’re going to head off at a bit of a tangent and have a quick look at Lincoln’s heavy metal band scene; partly because it helps to provide context and explain some of the relationships and groupings within the Lincoln crowd (particularly why I hated Stu with such intensity); partly because it’s a story that merits telling while there’s still someone around with enough functional brain cells left to tell it, but mainly because it affords me further opportunity to vent.