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y the time I got off the phone with Mikki that Sunday afternoon I was in a marvellous mood. I really was quite touched, both by the efforts the Sheffield crew had gone to in tracking me down and by the affection with which they clearly regarded me.

“We all thought you’d moved to Nottingham, that’s why I was asking after you in Fagin’s.” Were Mikki’s first words.

He continued.

“I made sure to call in at Danny’s place on the way home this morning and let him know we’d found you. Mötley Süe lives on his block now; she’s thrilled to bits and wants to know when you’re coming over to see her.”

I must confess this was tempting. I’d been a little starved of degenerate porno sex for the past few months and I did find the prospect of getting my teeth into Mötley Süe again rather appealing.

Mikki seemed to have read my mind.

“Before you get too excited about boning Sue I ought to warn you she’s not exactly a pretty sight at the moment. She bleached and crimped her hair so much that it all broke off and fell out. It’s not as bad as it was but she still looks like she’s got radiation poisoning.”

I often wondered how Sue’s hair stood up to the treatment she meted out to it. It was nothing unusual for her to dye it black, then bleach it peroxide blonde, then dye it pillbox red and then bleach it back to blonde again all over the course of a week, so to hear that it had fallen out hardly came as a surprise.

The apartments where Danny and Sue lived were in a recently erected block of housing association cluster flats on a cul-de-sac called Buckwood View which was near the Blackstock pub on Gleadless Road. These flats were six bedroom affairs with a shared kitchen, living room and bathroom and were designed and built specifically to accommodate doleys, the more capable care in the community cases and various other wards of the social services. Dumping grounds for human garbage in other words. There were a number of similar developments in and around the city and, not surprisingly, whenever plans were announced to build another it was enough to send the surrounding private property values into freefall and the local resident’s association into emergency session.

Sue had actually made up her mind to move into Sheffield shortly before I baled from her place in Conisbrough and I remembered her enthusing about the Buckwood View flats; according to a friend of a friend of hers who’d moved in a few months previously they were, and I quote, “… so posh them who live there don’t even piss in the lifts.”

Yes, that classy.

Mikki went on to tell me he was now heavily involved with a girl called Claudia and that they were spending a lot of their time in Nottingham because Claudia’s older brother, a guy called Simon, was a first year student at Trent Poly and would let them stop over at his place (even if he wouldn’t let them sleep together, Claudia would share his bed and Mikki had to make do with the couch). In fact they would be in Nottingham again the following Friday and wondered whether I might be up for a night out.

As it happened, I’d organised one of my periodic Rock City coach trips for the same date and we arranged to meet in Fagin’s before hitting the club.

“By the way,” Mikki said just before he rang off, “I almost forgot to mention it; if you fancy coming over to Sheffield you don’t have to worry about Tony, he says he’s forgiven you.”

How incredibly gracious of him I thought, what exactly has he forgiven me for – not being as mental as him?

Friday night soon came around and as Twiggy and I walked into Fagin’s and spotted Mikki’s party the first thing that struck us was how jaw-droppingly gorgeous Claudia was. She always reminded me of a real life version of the cartoon princess in those old Listerine mouthwash adverts. Claudia was a delightful, charming girl too and I really liked her (Twiggy was, to put it mildly, bewitched and once drunkenly confessed that she fuelled most of his onanistic fantasies).

Simon, Claudia’s brother, also resembled a cartoon character - but not quite such a flattering one. Facially at least, he was a dead ringer for Garfield the cat.

It was great catching up with Mikki again and, as usually happens on such occasions, the beer was going down so nicely that neither Mikki, Claudia, Simon, Twiggy nor I realised how pissed we were until we hit the cool night air for the short walk from Fagin’s to Rock City.

All five of us immediately lost the use of our legs and most of our capacity for intelligible speech.

I still managed to pull though.

Well, sort of.

By the end of the night I was so drunk that Debbie, the girl I copped off with, could tell I wasn’t going to be a great deal of use in such a state. Even so, I made enough of an impression for her to ask me over to Nottingham the next night to go to the pub and then - provided I stayed sober enough – back to her place to get up to all kinds of naughtiness. Debbie wrote her phone number on a piece of paper which she thrust in my hand as I got back on the coach, telling me to ring her the next afternoon to arrange where and when we were going to meet up.

The next morning, as the events of the previous night were gradually coming back to me, I remembered making some arrangements with a girl called Debbie but couldn’t find the piece of paper with her phone number on it. Mind you, I wasn’t too fussed; I would have struggled to afford another big night out that weekend anyway and as I was on a promise for Saturday night in Lincoln it didn’t really seem like such a big deal.

It was no big deal right up until I collected the photos from Boots later on that afternoon and headed back down the pub with them. There was one shot of this seriously tasty girl; slim, dark haired, a certain gothic ethereality about her – exactly the kind I swoon over.

“Phwoar,” I said out loud and to no one in particular, “Who’s she?”

Twiggy leaned over to take a look.

“That’s the girl you were talking to, the one who gave you her phone number.”

I was home within ten minutes and turned my bedroom upside down trying to find that number. I even pulled most of the padding out of my leather jacket, just in case it might have slipped inside the lining. But all in vain, I couldn’t find a trace of the damned thing and spent Saturday night in a major sulk.

For the rest of the time I frequented Rock City I kept an eye out for Debbie but she never turned up again – at least not on a night when I was there. I did find her phone number though – albeit sixteen years later.

Back in the heavy metal day, I used to stick my Rock City ticket stubs in a scrapbook – and I tended to do so as soon as I got home from the club and immediately before hitting the sack. When I was putting together the notes for this and the following chapter and needed to check certain dates I dug this old scrapbook out. Some of the ticket stubs had come loose over the intervening years – including the one from the night in question.

Would you believe it, there was Debbie’s name and phone number written on the back in eyeliner. And yes, I did call the number, I couldn’t resist it, but just got the unobtainable tone. Although what I thought I was going to say had someone picked up I have no idea.

I got another phone call from Mikki the next Sunday afternoon. Danny and Bez hadn’t been able to make it to Rock City and had asked Mikki to ask me if I fancied coming over to Chesterfield the following Thursday for the rock night at a club called Monty’s. A guy from Lincoln called Gary Evans, which was generally truncated to the nickname ‘Gev’, had recently taken over the DJ booth at the club and had already okayed it for me to hitch a ride to and from the place with him.

The night out in Chesterfield wasn’t a great success. I arrived to find Mikki, Danny and Bez sat in the pub, all pissed out of their skulls and under the mistaken impression that after Monty’s kicked out they were coming over to Lincoln to spend the weekend at my place. Regardless of the fact that I didn’t have the room to put three people up over a weekend, there was no way for them to get over to Lincoln that night anyway as Gev could only take one passenger. The reason he could only take one passenger was because of his ridiculous insistence on carrying his CD racks ostentatiously stacked up on the back seat of the car rather than putting them in the boot like anyone else would have done. Twiggy always reckoned – and I agreed with him – that Gev did this because he thought that people would see his CDs, realise he was a DJ on his way to a gig and be impressed.

With the last train back to Sheffield long since departed it meant that everyone had to go on a frenzied moose hunt just to find somewhere to sleep the night. This was tricky on a week night in Chesterfield as the place was always packed full of jailbait and the average age of the females on the local rock scene was somewhere around sixteen. The practical upshot being that any hanky panky would have to occur back at the male party’s place as the majority of the girls still lived with their parents.

Luckily, Mikki had a casual knock-off in Chesterfield and just had to ring her from the pub’s payphone and book himself in. Danny also managed to pull without too much trouble. Bez, though, wasn’t so lucky and as we stood outside the club at the end of the night he started whingeing on about being unable to get home. I felt so sorry for him that I gave him a fiver – and a fiver I could ill afford - towards the cost of a taxi.

“It’s not enough”. He whined – although he still took the money.

This was when I finally lost all patience with Bez and saw him for the ungrateful, grovelling bastard that he was and I really wished that I’d nailed his (now ex) girlfriend Bobbi when she’d offered herself to me the previous year.

When I got home that night I inadvertently slammed the front door which woke the newest member of my household. The couple who lived in the room below me had had their baby shortly after Christmas of 1990 and this made life absolutely impossible for the rest of us. The most annoying thing about it being that they seemed to think the child was some kind of collective responsibility and would regularly pin bulletins on the kitchen notice board, giving updates on the situation. ‘Okay team,’ I recall one of them reading, ‘I’ve just done a quick clean around the kitchen and bathroom and we all have to pull together on this’.

The next morning an enraged mother confronted me as I walked downstairs,

“If you come home drunk and wake that baby up again then I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

By this point the normally mild-mannered Dom had become so sick and tired of being kept awake at night by the baby’s crying and of having to tiptoe around his bedroom and keep his TV and stereo at a scarcely audible level that he had begun to lose his relaxed and easy going attitude towards communal living.

“If you deliberately bring a child into the world when you don’t have the means to accommodate or care for it then that’s your problem, not mine.” I snapped. “Not even I would be that irresponsible.”

These would be the last words we exchanged. They got their council house a couple of weeks later and moved out.

A small time drug dealer called Bernie moved in to the room shortly afterwards and stayed for the next few months. Once Twiggy discovered that the speed Bernie had access to was of considerably higher quality than he was currently making do with, my new flatmate very quickly became his main man.

The next Roxy night Twiggy and I took a trip over to Sheffield to get hopelessly lost in the tail end of the rush hour traffic. After doing several circuits of the area Danny lived in we happened upon Gleadless Road and picked up the trail again. We spotted the Blackstock pub and made the next left onto Buckwood View to find the party had already started and that there was an enormous crowd of people sat on the grass out front of what was obviously Danny’s block.

And there was Mötley Süe.

Her hair didn’t look as bad as I had been expecting it to and just gave the impression she’d had a close crop rather than chemotherapy. Even so she made a habit of wearing a baseball cap until it grew back to a reasonable length.

After greeting Danny and co I struck up an awkward conversation with Sue.

“So, are you seeing anyone then?” I asked her.

“I’m supposed to be with this lad called Pete and he’s staying at mine at the moment.” She replied. “But he’s a right boring bastard. There were this lad from Bradford who I met in the Roxy. Now he were really nice, he gimme it up the shitter on the first night and I didn’t even have to ask him.”

Never let it be said that Yorkshiremen lack the romantic touch.

Having chugged my way through a four pack of lager during the journey over from Lincoln I excused myself and went to take a long overdue piss. As I came out of the loo I walked straight into Sue, who was standing in the corridor and wearing the faux sweet and innocent expression she always adopted before doing or suggesting something utterly depraved. She pushed me back inside, locked the door, deftly whipped my gut stick out and reminded me who gave the best blowjobs on the planet.

It certainly turned out to be a night to remember. For a start it was round one of that years Miss Glam Rock competition and Sheffield’s favourite transsexual glam rocker Jeffrey – or Jemimah as he was now calling himself - not only entered, but actually won the heat.

Since I’d last been in Sheffield Jeffrey/Jemimah had been doing the full sex change thing, was necking female hormones, having the counselling sessions and had taken to wearing women’s clothes as a matter of course. A girl from Lincoln called Sukie, who was doing her journalism training in Sheffield, had seen an opportunity here and had very enterprisingly written an article about him/her/it which she subsequently sold to the Daily Sport (for the benefit of overseas readers the Daily Sport is a prurient trash tabloid).

There is one tale about Jeffrey which has since entered into Sheffield folklore and seems to have grown considerably in the telling. The story goes that Jeffrey used to tape his tackle up before donning his lady pants and heading off to Rebels or the Roxy to snare an unsuspecting bloke. Once back home and ensconced in his boudoir, he would dim the lights and tell his artless victim that he liked it from behind and up the wrong ‘un.

Now I was never quite convinced about this. I can believe that Jeffrey may well have succeeded in luring drunken men back to his place but for them not to notice a set of male genitalia – no matter how hormonally withered - on a sexual partner they’d have to be so far off their face that raising a semi, let alone a stalk of sufficient rigidity to successfully prise open the Star Wars door, would have been out of the question anyway.

I think this particular urban myth was most likely an embellishment of a story Mikki and I uncovered that same night Jeffrey made his celebrated debut at the Miss Glam Rock competition.

We’d been doing the usual pre-Roxy thing in the Mulberry Tavern and had got talking to a gang of lads from Leeds who had only recently started coming over to Sheffield and who couldn’t stop going on about how much they liked the place. And they were particularly enthusiastic about the women. The previous weekend, they told us, two car loads of them had come over and they had all managed to pull. One of their number, who wasn’t with them that night because he was working the night shift, had apparently copped off with this leggy blond called Jemimah who had gone back to his car with him and gobbled his nuts dry on the back seat.

“Are you going to tell them or shall I?” Mikki asked me.

The guy in question, we heard later, refused to believe his mates when they broke the news and thought they were just winding him up. However, when he was shown the photograph that accompanied Sukie’s piece in the Daily Sport he was almost suicidal.

Although Sue had come to the Roxy with her alleged boyfriend, at about one in the morning she gave him the slip, grabbed hold of me and dragged me outside for a quickie up against the wall in the Roxy car park. Aside from being reminded of what a staggeringly good fuck Sue was, the occasion was memorable for a couple of other reasons - not least because we got caught at it by a security guard. The poor guy was far more embarrassed than either of us and couldn’t apologise enough as he backed away with his hands over his eyes. Sue actually found this hilarious – and for a moment I was worried she might ask him to join in.

I was also convinced that I could hear cheering whenever we changed position, got a particularly enthusiastic shunt on or when Sue insisted on going down on me (she really did have an oral fixation – I don’t think the girl could manage more than five minutes without a cock in her mouth). I assumed that the sound must have carried from somewhere nearby - a gang of drunks waiting for the night bus on the nearby Fitzalan Square perhaps - and that the timing was just coincidental.

Four years later I found out the truth.

At the end of my first year at Sheffield Hallam University I got a summer job working at the Royal Mail sorting office which at the time (1995) was situated on Pond Street directly opposite the Roxy car park. Being utterly broke and up to my eyes in debt I volunteered to work nights as often as possible as not only did it pay considerably more than the other shifts, it also kept me out of the pub.

The sorting office canteen was on the top floor of the building and had a roof top patio where, on a warm summer night, it was quite pleasant to sit. On the first Thursday I did a night shift I was told by one of the lads I was working with to make sure that I was on the roof at break time for the Grab a Granny Night show.

If you were inside the Roxy car park during the hours of darkness the way the lighting was arranged, with fluorescent tubes all around the perimeter, meant that you couldn’t see out of the place too clearly for being dazzled. However, if you were looking in from outside then everything was lit up as if in the beam of a searchlight. Furthermore, the patio of the sorting office canteen provided just about the best viewing platform you could possibly wish for. By the time we came on our main break on a Thursday night there were always a dozen or so copulating couples to be seen scattered about the car park, which would prompt enthusiastic applause, wolf whistles and yells of encouragement from their audience of posties across the road. I then knew exactly where the cheering had been coming from on that Monday night in 1991.

At the end of the night Mikki went home with Claudia to her parent’s house and Twiggy and I jumped in a cab with Danny to sleep at his. Or rather I slept at his; considering the amount of speed he was doing, Twiggy had more or less given up sleeping and would just sit there all night, eyes wide open, staring into space, looking mental and quivering.

The next morning Sue came round to Danny’s to ask me if I’d like her to come over to Lincoln for a few days. As soon as we got back to mine we leapt into bed and spent the next forty eight hours fucking each others brains out. Sue ditched her boyfriend shortly afterwards and every other Sunday I’d drive over to Sheffield to enjoy a four hour long, full-throttle, no holes barred, deep-dicking fuck-fest with a wet, nasty slut who was such a cum-guzzling, cock-crazed nymphomaniac that it was nigh on impossible to quench her constant thirst for hot fuck action – and believe me, an afternoon spent hanging out the back of Pervy Sue would put a glint in my eye and a spring in my step for the rest of the week.

I considered this an ideal arrangement – porno sex just often enough for it to be a treat but not too regularly that it became as boring as it had done the previous summer.

I was able to drive over to see Sue because my old man had recently bought a beat up Morris Marina van to use for his decorating jobs and had put me down on the insurance. This was an absolute Godsend and immediately solved the problem of both transport to nights out and finding somewhere to sleep afterwards. Independent mobility is something people too readily take for granted and don’t appreciate nearly as much as they should – at least not until they’re denied it.

Before I had access to the van we often had to utilise decidedly undesirable ways of getting to Rock City and other out of town destinations.

Mad Mack did the Nottingham run just about every Friday but was always annoyingly late setting off and was forever throwing babyish sulks and leaving early whenever the girl he had a schoolboy crush on this month got off with anyone.

If Mack was always late setting off then his polar opposite was Gev who, as well as the Thursday night gig at Monty’s, also provided the sounds in the back room at Rock City. For some bizarre reason Gev would head off to Nottingham at six o’clock in the evening which meant that if you went over with him you’d arrive just after seven and wind up sitting in an empty pub until people started coming out a couple of hours later. There was absolutely no need for him to leave that early as all he had to do until Rock City opened to the public at half nine was to plug his CD players into the mixer and assemble his CD racks in the DJ booth - which took all of five minutes. There were a couple of occasions when I’d gone over with Gev and we’d got to Rock City before the bar manager had even turned up to unlock the place.

A girl called Ami, who we mentioned in passing a couple of chapters back, would do the run most Fridays too but I only went with her if I had no other option. Ami could be a really obnoxious mare and more often than not would spend the entire journey hectoring everyone about how grateful they should be that she was giving them a lift. She also had an annoying habit of buggering off without telling anyone when she pulled and had left us stranded in Nottingham more than a few times.

There were also opportunistic one-offs like the ride to Nottingham that Fergie and I got off a lad called Roman who was one of the peripheral indie kid/goth types on the Vaults scene and who drove an ancient camper van. Now I’ve been on some hairy car rides in my time, in a selection of decidedly unroadworthy jalopies, being driven by people in various altered states of mind, but I have never been as fearful for my life as I was that night. It probably gives some illustration of how bad a driver Roman was to point out that he was stone cold sober and never took the van above forty miles an hour (although I don’t think it could actually go any faster than that). His most terrifying habit was drifting across the centre line and onto the opposite side of the road and only realising when an oncoming car sounded its horn or flashed its lights. And how the van passed its MOT test I will never know. There was a foot or so of give between the cab and the sleeping compartment at the back and I was convinced the thing was going to split in two at any moment. When we arrived in Nottingham, Fergie and I sprinted to the Tap & Tumbler where it took us a good three pints before we stopped shaking. We caught the train back to Lincoln the next morning as we didn’t think our nerves would have stood another journey with Roman at the wheel.

But neither transport nor finding somewhere to crash the night were an issue any longer. We’d sling a double mattress and a few sleeping bags in the back of the van, head off to any venue within reasonable distance, park up in the nearest twenty four hour car park and we were ready to rock ‘n’ roll all night..

Having re-familiarised myself with Sheffield I began to see anew why I always preferred the place to Nottingham; essentially it was the people. The Rock City elite always came across as a little standoffish and unapproachable in a way that the Sheffield crowd never were (okay, I stand to be corrected there and I’m perfectly willing to accept that I may have got the wrong impression - but it always looked that way to me. I also suppose there’s the chance that Nottingham’s heavy metal hierarchy annoyed me because my ego couldn’t handle the fact that I wasn’t one of them).

Of course this was most vexing where the women were concerned. There was one girl, whose name I now know thanks to her photo being prominently displayed on the Nottingham Rock Remembered website, who I absolutely fancied the pants off but, considering the gang she hung around with, it never even crossed my mind to try to make a play for her.

There was also the American accent thing, which seemed to be especially prevalent in Nottingham. During the late Eighties it seemed that in order to maintain your rock ‘n’ roll credibility you had to make a pilgrimage to Los Angeles. It was very much like a heavy metal equivalent of the Islamic Hajj, almost as if there was a religious obligation on the part of every able bodied rocker who could afford the journey to visit the Rainbow Bar & Grill at least once during their lifetime. And with annoying regularity they would come back talking in a stupid attempt at an American accent. I never quite figured out who was supposed to be impressed by this.

Rock City was teeming with these prunes1 but there were none of them in Sheffield. And for good reason too. Had one of the locals come strutting into the Wap after a three week sojourn to California and started talking like Nikki Sixx they’d have been laughed straight back out the door. Had they persisted with it then they’d have been given a good slap.

But these were relatively minor irritations, Rock City was still the best weekend rock night to be had and there was no shortage of women who were approachable. In particular, and during the early to mid part of 1991, there was Pregnant Janie (as she was referred to in order to differentiate her from Non-Pregnant Janie who was another girl in the middling echelons of the Rock City crowd).

I can’t remember how I ended up with Janie sat on my knee - but I’m glad I did because half an hour before closing time she dragged me into a cubicle in the girls loos where she gave me an almost Mötley Süe standard blowjob. Neither can I remember who gave me my lift to Nottingham that night, but I do recall that it was someone who didn’t normally go and that they wandered off to get a kebab after the club kicked out. This provided Janie and I with a twenty minute window of opportunity to perform a dog’s marriage on the top floor of the Royal Centre car park. Unfortunately I was so pissed that I lost wood just as I was getting the jester’s shoes and spent the entire journey back to Lincoln doubled up in agony with my plums throbbing like they were about to explode. However, as Janie had invited me over to see her mid week, I was soon to be afforded ample opportunity to empty them.

There were a couple of things I wasn’t aware of when I arrived at Janie’s place the following Wednesday. When I very responsibly asked what we were going to do about contraception she told me,

“Don’t worry about that, I’m already pregnant.”

Neither did I realise she was profoundly deaf. As our first bout of wanton fornication reached its climax I flopped, gasping and drooling, on top of Janie and reflexively pulled her towards me. My cheek had pressed up against her ear while doing so, making her hearing aid squeal with feedback which absolutely freaked the shit out of me and had me leaping off her like a scalded cat.

I was genuinely fond of Janie and not just because the sex was so good, I used to really enjoy the post-coital cuddles and play fights too, which was previously unheard of with my more casual women. I’d even go so far as to say that it often got quite tender and affectionate.

We continued with our every other Friday night/Saturday morning liaisons for the best part of three months but the fact that Janie was pregnant meant there was a time limit on it - I certainly wasn’t ready to handle something like that back in 1991. Things came to an abrupt halt one Friday night when we were due to meet in Rock City and when I arrived so off my head that I copped off with another girl thinking it was her (well, they both had dyed pink hair). I didn’t realise it wasn’t until we were actually shagging in a recessed doorway in the Rock City staff car park.

‘That’s odd,’ I remember thinking to myself, ‘Janie’s pubic hair has grown back since last week and her boobs have got bigger. It must be pregnancy hormones or something’

The last time Janie and I exchanged bodily fluids was in the summer of 1991 by which time she was so heavy with child that we were restricted to doing it doggie style and I was seriously worried that I might give the baby a black eye if I started pumping a little too vigorously.

In mid 1994, and a good eighteen months after I’d last been to a Friday rock night, I happened to find myself at Rock City for a Manic Street Preachers gig and bumped into one of the old crew who told me Janie had been killed in a traffic accident shortly after her baby had been born. Apparently she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid which meant that she didn’t notice the oncoming car until the very last moment and had used the precious time available to throw her child out of the way. Even though I hadn’t seen Janie for almost three years - and probably never would have done again anyway – it really cut me up to hear about this.

As for women in Lincoln, and not to put too fine a point on it, I had amassed something of a harem since my return the previous September.

First off there was Molly Richards who I was officially seeing for a few months and casually sleeping with for the next year or so. Molly had apparently fancied me since she was fourteen years old and used to follow me around town with her school friends, maintaining a cautious distance and giggling. This was never going to go anywhere though. Molly was a cute little thing, with a sweet, gentle face and I did have quite a soft spot for her, but she wasn’t exactly blessed with the most sophisticated problem solving faculties and while it wouldn’t be fair to call her fat, she was never going to be asked to model Victoria’s Secret lingerie. A more worrying concern was her single-minded determination to have me get her pregnant – which she presumably imagined would oblige me to marry her and settle down to a life of domestic bliss. When I caught Molly holing my rubbers with a safety pin one night I knew it was time to back off.

I was still seeing Molly when Jenny, my former teenage squeeze whose old man had forbidden from having anything to do with me on pain of grounding, availed herself once again. I never put my finger on quite what it was that I liked about bedding Jenny but I never could resist it.

Jenny was a mate of Molly’s, which would have complicated things but for the fact that she seemed to have some pathological need to fuck her pal’s boyfriends. I was always amazed that she didn’t get punched out a lot more than she did and more amazed still that she actually had any friends left.

There was one time when Molly had turned up at my place unexpectedly and on a night when I had arranged for Jenny to sleep over. Jenny arrived an hour or so after Molly, let herself in and came walking into my bedroom to find us both sat on my bed. There was an awkward silence before I had the brainwave of picking up the horror novel I was reading (Swansong by Robert R McCammon as Jenny recently reminded me) and woodenly announcing:

“Here’s the book you wanted to borrow Jenny.”

“Thank you Dom,” she replied, just as unconvincingly. “See you later.”

The next evening Molly was talking to Jenny in the pub;

“I’m sure he’s got someone on the side,” Molly intimated, “I just can’t figure out who it might be.”

Jenny later told me she didn’t know where to look.

There was Penny Michaels who lived on the Ermine estate with her twin sister Pandora and their two pre-teenage daughters. Penny was three years older than me and had only recently started frequenting the Vaults (although I vaguely remembered her from the Falstaff days of the early Eighties as the girl with crimped hair who used to hang around with Dicko’s then girlfriend). Penny and Pandora both worked as care assistants in residential nursing homes - the kind of places where people park their geriatric relatives when they get sick of them pretending to be deaf, complaining about the darkies and obsessing about the consistency of their stools. This was hardly the most psychologically healthy working environment and both Penny and Pandora were at constant pains to stress that if they were ever reduced to the same pitiful state of dependency as their charges then they hoped they had friends or family who could be relied upon to pull the plug. When your working life revolves around people who are just waiting around to die – and with such a pathetic lack of dignity - it does engender a rather morbid disposition. So much so that Kieran and Mad Mack used to call Penny and Pandora The Sisters Grim.

Nevertheless I liked Penny a lot, she always had something interesting to say and was one of the most genuine, kind-hearted and thoroughly decent people I’ve ever met. I used to spend at least a couple of nights a week with her and aside from anything sexual we connected on plenty of other levels too. There were many occasions when we didn’t even get around to doing the dirty deed and would just fall asleep after having talked into the small hours.

One thing I particularly empathised with Penny about was her dysfunctional upbringing and the way her life chances has been hamstrung in a very similar way to mine. Let’s just say that we both knew how much of a freakish outsider being the kid with the weirdo parents makes you feel and how that feeling follows you into adulthood.

In early summer of 1991 I joined Khaybar as a stand-in bass player. Although my opinion of them as a musical force hadn’t changed, I liked the lads in the band and helping them out until they found someone to fill the position permanently seemed a more worthwhile use of my time and energy than sitting in the Vaults pissing away every penny I had. It was to prove an exasperating experience though. No one seemed to be in charge of Khaybar and although the urge to take things in hand often came over me I never felt I had that right. I also used to find it frustrating that they would find excuses not to play my songs. Call me arrogant if you like, but it really pissed me off that they insisted on rehearsing to death all their insipid, worn out numbers when they had my awesome song writing talents at their disposal. There were any number of tunes I’d been working on since the Lovechild split and although they weren’t as good as the classic Dom/Scratch compositions, even the most mediocre was in a different league to anything Khaybar had in their repertoire. Eventually they relented (more, I think, to shut me up than anything else) and we rehearsed a number called Victim of my Love, which I’d written while Lovechild were still on the go but which we never got around to performing live. Ironically enough, this song became the highlight of Khaybar’s live set and they continued playing it long after I’d left the band.

But it wasn’t all carefree frolicking as 1991 progressed; Twiggy’s amphetamine habit was beginning to get portentously out of control (it wasn’t as if there hadn’t been any warning signs either; the previous year, when his father had given him £1,000 for his 21st birthday, Twiggy spent every penny on getting loaded and when he exhausted these funds he took to ‘borrowing’ his mother’s cash card and siphoning her bank account). Even Bernie, my drug dealing flatmate, was starting to get a little anxious about the quantity of speed Twiggy was taking off him and one night had asked me whether he was using it all himself or buying in bulk to sell on and subsidise his own habit. When I told Bernie that every last bit was for Twiggy’s personal use he started having major reservations about selling to him. Bernie was canny enough to know exactly where Twiggy was headed – even if I don’t know whether this had any bearing on his decision to move out a short time later.

Granted, I was never a slouch when the opportunity to ingest recreational pharmaceuticals presented itself but until I did my first hit of ecstasy at a dance club in Sheffield over the summer of 1995 (and had to be peeled off the ceiling when the place closed) I never found a drug that I liked and which was also enough of a practical choice to make a habit of.

I loved cocaine, and I mean I loved it. The first time I did coke was backstage at a certain gig by a certain band and at a certain venue a load of us had managed to blag backstage passes for. We were ligging in the dressing room when one of the Hell’s Angels the club used as security had walked in and produced a flick-knife and a plastic bag of white powder out of his jacket. He dug the knife in the bag, scooped a load of the powder up and stuck it under my nose.

Well, it would have been rude to have refused.

‘Fuck me’, I thought. ‘This is nice. And what decadence. Here I am, backstage, snorting cocaine off the end of a Hell’s Angel’s flick-knife. How rock ‘n’ roll is that?’

Unfortunately, considering how much the stuff cost and how deliciously moreish it is, cocaine would have been the most impractical choice of all. Indeed, one of the very few compensations of my failure to achieve rock stardom is that I got to live past the age of thirty. Had my band got a record deal in 1987 I seriously doubt that I’d have made the Nineties with anything to separate my nostrils or without a spell in rehab.

Like Twiggy I was partial to speed but for some reason – I guess it must be something to do with my metabolic rate (which I also blamed for my inability to gain weight no matter how much I ate) I needed twice as much as anyone else and it simply wasn’t economically viable. To get suitably buzzing on whizz would take at least two ten quid wraps and I could have paid for another good night out with that.

Acid and mushrooms I couldn’t do because every other time I took either I would have a horrifically bad trip (one time I ended up being chased around Boultham Park by Cenobites, which was not a pleasant experience) and apart from anything else I knew perfectly well that it was no coincidence that regular users of psychedelic drugs always end up as gibbering mental cases.

I did use to smoke a bit of blow every now and again and if I was in the mood but I was never really that bothered about it. Neither did I like the way that habitual use subtly alters a person’s character (as anyone who recalls my chapter one rant will already know). I could never get on with the way that cannabis gradually turns capable, interesting and intelligent people into stupid, self-obsessed hippies who think the government is listening in on their phone calls and who find it impossible take even the most heavily dropped hints that you can’t stand their mind-numbingly boring company. And I don’t care what anybody says, the stuff is addictive – or at least habit forming to the extent that it might as well be. One obnoxious moron I was obliged to share a flat with for a few months in early 1997, told me I was talking bollocks about this.

“Of course it’s not addictive,” he scoffed. “I should know, I’ve been smoking it every day for six years.”

The most worrying development with Twiggy’s habit was that he was routinely cranking the stuff straight into his veins rather than snorting it - he had even taken to shooting up iced water between fixes just to replicate the initial tingle. His tolerance had built up to a frightening degree too, and to the extent that whenever we went out of town for the night he always took three capped and loaded syringes to see him through. When we were planning to stay over, he’d take an extra one just to get his heart started the next morning.

Twiggy definitely had a major problem and I was always a little conflicted as to what my response should have been.

Maybe I should have just walked away and left Twiggy to crash and burn. I’m sure there are plenty who would have done. There’s no quick and easy fix for people with chronic substance abuse issues and in the overwhelming majority of cases they have to hit rock bottom before they even think about picking themselves up. Moreover they have an alarming habit of taking those closest to them along for the ride.

But Twiggy was my friend, I value my friends and I cut them a lot of slack – in fact I cut Twiggy so much he’d have been able to make a three ring circus tent with it. I was even prepared to humour him when he was rattling and he was just about intolerable at these times, a barely coherent, paranoid mess, and the temptation to tell him to fuck off until he sorted himself out was almost too much to resist.

Then again maybe I should have done more to try and help him. Unfortunately I didn’t have a clue how to. I know that might sound like a cop-out but it takes quite some skill and experience to get through to a person in Twiggy’s condition and even then it’s a Herculean task to get them to admit they actually have a problem, let alone to be able to motivate them into doing something about it. The most prominent family trait of the problem drinker, the problem gambler and the problem drug user is the ability to rationalise their habit. The gambler is just waiting for the One Big Win to clear all his debts and after which he’ll have no need to gamble; the drinker is just doing it to be sociable (or in my case, is driven to drink in a desperate attempt to numb the agonising pain of genius) and the speed freak just needs the gear to prevent him getting tired and bad tempered – which was always Twiggy’s rationale.

And the weakness lies with the individual, let’s make that crystal clear. The media driven notion that there’s some inevitable spiral of decline involved with drugs, that if you catch one whiff of dope smoke then within six months you’ll be a needle scarred, HIV positive junkie who has to get bummed in phone boxes off German businessmen to fund your habit, is bullshit. Some people can handle their gear and some people can’t – and in a ratio which vastly favours the former.

The normal reality of recreational drug use is three or four years of regularly getting hammered which tapers off to abstinence as real life takes over, the responsibilities of adulthood impose themselves and a person finds themselves with neither the time nor the inclination to take drugs.

Drugs are, no matter how enjoyable it might be to take them, for people who have something missing from their lives - people who want to escape from wherever they are. A confused and rebellious spirited twenty something might feel the need to get out of it all the time but a reasonably well balanced and responsible adult doesn’t. Or at least they shouldn’t - if they do then I suggest that there are deeper issues to be addressed.

People who get fucked up on drugs are, ninety five percent of the time at least, fucked up to start with. Again, this is something they share with their contemporaries who get fucked up on booze, the horses, lottery scratch cards or any of those other harmless vices which add some spice to people’s lives and which most of us can enjoy without going off the rails.

Twiggy was definitely fucked up to start with, there was never any question about that, and when factored in with his whizz habit and self-destructive tendencies it all made for a disaster waiting to happen.

And one area in which he was especially fucked up was where his women were concerned - in fact he was the only person I ever met who took rejection harder than I did.

Shortly before I moved back to Lincoln, Twiggy had messily split up with a girl we’ll call Tara who he had been seeing on and off for the past nine months or so. I must confess I always had trouble warming to this girl, she struck me as more than a little stuck-up and aloof and I couldn’t shake off the suspicion that she had some kind of Lady Chatterley thing going on with Twiggy - a suspicion which was compounded by her subsequent string of rough ‘n’ ready boyfriends.

But I digress.

Almost as soon as Tara had fixed herself up with a new bloke Twiggy had cornered the guy after the pub one night and absolutely panned the shit out of him. Not satisfied with this he had gone home, had dug out a photo of Tara and scrawled the words ‘DIE, YOU FUCKING CUNT BITCH’ across the back in his own blood before sticking the needle end of a blood filled syringe through her face and then calling round her house in the middle of the night to drop the whole potential Turner Prize winning ensemble through the letterbox.

Now I’ve been known to come a little unhinged when my relationships go tits up but even I was shocked rigid by this.

I didn’t know until recently that it wasn’t actually Tara who got the police involved, rather it was her overzealous busybody of a supervisor at work who rang them on her behalf when she saw Tara showing a colleague the offending artwork. Tara told the responding officers that she wasn’t bothered by Twiggy’s admittedly deranged actions because she knew him well enough to know that he could never bring himself to physically harm her (himself maybe, but not her). The police, however, were insistent she at least make a statement and let them have a stern word or two with Twiggy which, they assured her, would be enough to scare some sense into him and avoid any repeat of the incident.

When the cops arrived at Twiggy’s place they caught him in mid fix, with another syringe hanging out of his arm and immediately busted him for possession of controlled substances as well as threatening to kill.

It was Twiggy’s good fortune that his father knew a shyster lawyer who deftly played the ‘my client is also a victim’ card and signed him up for some addiction treatment programme which was all that kept him out of jail before the trial (his family were middle-class enough that he was deemed to have been ‘experimenting’ with drugs and in need of help - as opposed to using them because he was congenitally stupid and didn’t know any better, like people who live on council estates do).

Twiggy still had a nasty habit, which he was no nearer to kicking than he had been before, but he was now provided with a weekly counselling session, got free, sterilised works and was given as many condoms as he could carry - although he would only use the black ones as he was convinced that black condoms made your knob look bigger.

When the case eventually got to court Twiggy landed a heavy fine and community service. That he avoided a custodial sentence was nothing short of miraculous - especially considering that the police had appended an extra paragraph to Tara’s statement saying that she was terrified of him and thought he had every intention of doing her serious harm.

Something that made me hate Stu with a renewed passion was the way he used Twiggy’s addiction to keep him in line regarding the band. Twiggy was definitely the star of the Spring Recoil show; he was a first-class guitarist, looked the part, had bags of stage presence and there were plenty of other combos who would have loved to poach him. In short he was a valuable asset and Stu always protected his assets.

Stu didn’t buy the drugs for Twiggy, he was way too shrewd to dirty his hands to that extent. What he did instead was to buy everything else – drinks in the pub, guitar strings, Twiggy’s share of the rehearsal room rental, nightclub admission fees, petrol for car journeys to wherever Twiggy had a girl he was screwing. This allowed Twiggy to spend literally all of his money on speed and meant that Stu had him dancing on puppet strings that he alone could pull.

The obligation Twiggy felt towards Stu because of his cynical largesse would have consequences for me when Sally set her little charade in motion over the coming Christmas and New Year period, but we’ll get to that in due course.

By the summer of 1991 though, things were looking up. With love nests in Sheffield, Lincoln and Nottingham I was spoilt for choice when it came to women. Thanks to my old man’s constant supply of decorating jobs I was no longer terminally short of cash and I had transport, meaning that my social life was as groovy as it had ever been.

Things also began looking up on a more responsible and grown up level when I discovered that our local further education college was due to start running a university access course that September and duly enrolled myself on it.

Oh yes, things were certainly looking up.

They started to look even better when something I’d been anticipating for a long, long time happened.