1. SUMMER HOLIDAY TO PIE EATERS 1963-1965

"I think the first English record that was anywhere near anywhere was "Move it" by Cliff Richard. Before that there'd been nothing", John Lennon. 

I've spent all of my life involved in popular music in one way or another. I'm not a musician, I can't play a note, so I've always worked in behind the scenes roles. Its been a love/hate affair. I've had periods of struggle and times of great success. 

My obsession started in childhood. Bands, records and concerts were always more exciting than any other part of life. Nothing else has ever interested me in the way that old fashioned popular music does. 

I went from buying records to running my own record label. From watching the Woodstock movie to sitting on stage with Bob Dylan at Woodstock 2. From buying Led Zeppelin's albums to lunching with them in a London hotel. Or secretly listening to the John Peel show under my blankets at night, to buying him a pint in his favourite local. It is without question true to say that my life has been significantly richer as a result of my obsession with music. 

It began when I went to see Cliff Richard's "Summer Holiday" in 1963. I was young, in short trousers in my hometown Nottingham, and Cliff was still THE MAN.


I don't remember much about the film though I’ve seen it since – absolute brainless nonsense - but I did enjoy it and ran around singing the theme tune for weeks. This was early in the year, just prior to popular music really kicking off.

I mention it here as the starting point of my musical adventures for two reasons.

1) It was in the cinema. I would consume a lot of popular music and culture in the cinema that decade.

2) I only lived in Nottingham for a few more months after "Summer Holiday" was released. We were a one parent family and my mum got herself a new job as Head Mistress of a primary school, St Michael's infants in Wigan, Lancashire. So our summer holiday was spent relocating up north, which was good timing as a new sound entered my world. 

In August, "She Loves You" by The Beatles was released. From that point on, Cliff was relegated to the boring old farts bin where he has remained cemented to this day. (Though I do agree with John Lennon that "Move It" is a British rock n roll classic.)

Of course, I wouldn't watch "Summer Holiday" now if you put me in a straight jacket, strapped me to a chair, pumped me full of Valium and paid me hard currency into the bargain.

*******************************************************************

When I say I lived in Nottingham, we didn't live in the city. Years later, when I was in long trousers, I worked with a  colleague from Nottingham. When I told him I was born in Clifton, he looked down his nose at me, shook his head and said, 

"Clifton! that's rough". After my father abandoned us, we moved to the village of Radcliffe On Trent, a few miles outside of the city. We lived in Water Lane at first, then moved again, down the road to a hamlet called Holme Pierrepoint. 

You may have heard of Holme Pierrepoint, it was developed as The National Water Sports Centre some years ago and is a beautiful country park with amazing water based activities these days. 

sports centre                                  

(REMEMBER TO HIT BACK BUTTON IF YOU FOLLOW THIS LINK)

When we lived there it was very much a feudal hamlet, home to the Pierrepoint family since 1280 AD, with a hall, Pierrepoint Hall, and a church attached. There were a couple of farms, a lot of sheep and some housing that serfs like us lived in. 

There were no shops, no pubs, no schools, you had to go the couple of miles to Radcliffe for those. There were very few cars as well, only the well to do had motor cars then and we travelled about on bicycles, or walked.

We didn't have a television either until that summer. The earliest memories I have of hearing pop music were on the radio, Pick of the Pops with Alan Freeman and Brian Matthew's Saturday Club. The records I remembered best from those days were the comedy ones produced, I later discovered, by George Martin before he got his hands on The Beatles. 

"My Boomerang Won't Come Back" by Charlie Drake, 

"Football Results" by Michael Bentine.

and best of all, "The Court Of King Caractacus" by Rolf Harris.

Wigan is a town formerly reliant on coal mining. Its people are called "pie eaters". They are proud of this and the annual World Pie Eating Championship takes place in the town. However, the nickname is not thought to be because of the Wiganer's appetite for the delicacy. The name is said to date from the 1926 General Strike when Wigan miners were starved back to work before their counterparts in surrounding towns and so were forced to eat "humble pie".

Before I go any further, I am aware that some pie eaters are prone to getting defensive about their home town. So I have to state here that I am very fond of the place. My mother is a Wigan

Pie eaters get defensive for a number of reasons. The most prominent being a book by George Orwell, "The Road to Wigan Pier". Wigan is fifteen miles from the sea and has no pier in the seaside sense of the term. 

This is a fairly recent photo of Wigan Pier:

"The Road to Wigan Pier" is a sociological investigation of the bleak living conditions endured by the working classes in the industrial north of England in 1935. Orwell stayed in Wigan for one month and wrote one chapter about the living conditions of miners, which were very rough. For many people outside of the town, that book was the only thing they knew about old Wigan. Here's a paragraph of what George Orwell had to say:

"The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed 

by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the-embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her--her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen". 

Wigan was still rough in the 1960's, the skyline and the buildings were grimy with coal dust. The town centre was surrounded by coal heaps known locally as The Wigan Alps.  One route across town took you past a slaughterhouse and a very smelly glue factory.

The Wigan Alps, 3 Sisters

It was a culture shock after the rural isolation of Holme Pierrepoint, a point rammed home to me on the day we arrived. My brother and I took our association football to the local park for a kick about. A small gang of local youths took offence at our "soppy" southern accents and decided to mug us, sending me home in tears.

I seemed to do a lot of crying when I first moved to Wigan. Fighting is part of the growing up culture of young Northern men. I wasn't very good at it. I was "mard", I'd never learned how to fight and I didn't have a father figure to show me how to do it. 

The school yard pecking order was determined by violence. Who was the best fighter, the "cock of the class" and "cock of the school". And I was a big lad, so people were always picking fights with me. I'd burst into tears when they thumped me, which gave the other kids a great deal of amusement. That made them thump me even more.  

This was the way of it, certainly for the first year after I moved there and again, later on, when I went to the hell-hole they called Wigan Grammar School.

There were one escape from all of this pain. Pop music. 

We were three years away from getting a record player in our house, so my musical getaway was still mainly via the radio. This was the golden age of the pirates."199, Caroline", the all day music station. It attracted 23 million listeners at its peak and dominated the airwaves. 

There were three pop music television shows that became mandatory viewing, "Ready Steady Go", "Juke Box Jury" and "Top of the Pops". Its hard to imagine in the modern world of satellites, MTV, laptops and i-phones, but our choice was that limited.   

The Liverpool Merseybeat sound had swept the nation. The Beatles, along with Gerry and the Pacemakers and The Searchers, kept Liverpool at number one on the charts for 34 weeks of the year. 

Wigan is less than 20 miles from Liverpool. If you lived anywhere in the North West of England, you felt like The Beatles were yours. They belonged to you. You were a part of what was happening. And it was plain, even to kids of very tender years, that what was happening was a revolution and it was spreading. The following year, 1964, Merseybeat morphed into the British Beat Boom. New stars emerged weekly. The Rolling Stones, The Dave Clark Five, The Kinks, The Animals. Herman's Hermits, Manfred Mann, Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw all joined the number one party.

In July, The Beatles released their first film "A Hard Day's Night" and I got a small taste of Beatlemania. There were several cinemas in Wigan at that time, the ABC, Princes, The Ritz. I went to "A Hard Day's Night" in one of them, I don't recall which one, but it definitely wasn't the ABC. That came later.  

"A Hard Day's Night" blew everyone away. It was fresh, exciting, confident, funny. "Comic fantasia with music", as one critic drooled at the time.

But more than that, it was audience's reaction to the film that made it unforgettable for me. They responded as if it was a real concert and The Beatles were really in the room. Girls screamed hysterically, lads cheered, people swooned and fainted. There was hysteria in the movie house and pheromones in the air.

That was my taste of Beatlemania and my first real experience of the power of rock n roll. I was nine years old, still in short trousers and I was hooked. I'd decided, this was the life for me. Accept no substitute from here on in.   

******************************************************

The Rolling Stones landed in Wigan on Saturday October 2nd 1965. The bad boys of rock n roll had a punishing schedule, constantly touring the world. They played two shows a day, a matinee for the young ones, then an evening show for the adults. There was no such thing as a day off. They filled the breaks in between shows with TV appearances, interviews and recording sessions. Bands today would faint at the thought of honouring this kind of schedule, but The Stones did it year on year back then.

Stones schedule 1965

(REMEMBER TO HIT BACK BUTTON IF YOU FOLLOW THIS LINK)

They were different to The Beatles. They were dirty, raw, juvenile degenerates. The Beatles had become clean cut kids who collected MBE's from the Queen by then. These were the days of "would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?" hysteria.

would you?

(REMEMBER TO HIT BACK BUTTON IF YOU FOLLOW THIS LINK)

They urinated in public, they grew very long hair and they beat up newspaper reporters. As Tom Wolfe famously put it, "The Beatles want to hold your hand, but The Stones want to burn your town."

I'd got my ticket for my first live gig a few months earlier when my best friend Paul Peakman had dragged me out of bed one Saturday morning. We rushed across town to get in the queue. I have been in his debt forever for getting me out of bed that day. Paul was an outsider in Wigan too. His family had moved there from Birmingham and I guess we bonded because neither of us seemed to fit in. We'd got tickets for the evening show. I was eleven years old by now and in my last year of primary school. 

ABC Cinema, Wigan

October 2nd was a full on day. Wigan played Castleford at Central Park in the afternoon and we went to the rugby league match before the Stones gig.

Paul Peakman was a bad boy and extremely unlucky. He gave me my first lessons in 60's drug culture. He knew where to score them. He first showed me cannabis and later, pills. The cannabis was in a joint he had. It was actually a butt. He'd been smoking it down an alleyway at the back of Central Park the night before I saw it when he saw a policeman coming. He'd thrown the joint behind a lamp post and we went there next day to find it. The butt was still there. He dismantled it in the palm of his hand and pointed out the little black specks amongst the tobacco to me, the hashish. He made a new joint out of it, but I didn't try it at that point, it was several years later before I started taking drugs. 

Paul got pills too. Speed. They called them pep pills and he showed me a handful during the milk break at school one day. He was always up to no good and when we got to the turnstiles that afternoon, he turned to me and said, 

"I'm not paying, I'll bunk in, see you inside". 

programme

(REMEMBER TO HIT BACK BUTTON IF YOU FOLLOW THIS LINK)

I paid the rate at the gate, bought a programme and took up my position on the big terrace behind the goalposts. A few minutes later, Peakman appeared. He'd bunked over the wall all right, but he'd snagged his hand on the barbed wire on top. He'd ripped it quite badly and it was weeping blood. It needed stitching. A medic saw him, a St John's Ambulance worker and immediately dragged him away. Peakman didn't want to go, he wanted to see the match, but he was dragged out of the ground protesting and taken away for treatment. 

ABC Cinema (right) Wigan Casino (left)

That evening I queued in the street alone, waiting to get into the ABC cinema to see the greatest rock n roll band in the world. The ABC was across the road from the legendary Wigan Casino. Paul Peakman didn't show up. 

"Are you waiting for your friend?" the girl behind me in the queue asked. I'd bought a Stones poster from a tout on the street and I started talking to her about it. We were getting along fine until she asked me what school I went to. 

"St Michael's", I replied. 

"St Michael's", she exclaimed, "That's a junior school, how old are you?" 

"Eleven". Her friends started shrieking, 

"Cradle snatcher". The girl was outraged. 

"I'm fourteen!", she shouted, "Fuck off you shrimp". 

Inside the cinema, the air was thick with anticipation. The show was a package tour, with a large line up of acts who performed two or three numbers, their latest hits, before the main act appeared. I've read somewhere that The Moody Blues were on the bill that night but I don't remember seeing them. The Spencer Davis Group certainly came on prior to the Stones and sang their soon to be a number one song "Keep On Running". 

Paul Peakman appeared in his seat around that point. It turned out he'd legged it from casualty and he'd been hiding away ever since. He thought he was safe from authority now, but the same St John's Ambulance worker who had nabbed him in Central Park was also on duty at the Stones show. He spotted Paul in the crowd. He came over and demanded a look at his hand. Peakman hadn't got it stitched and the wound was still weeping. So he was dragged off to casualty again, just as the Stones hit the stage. 

I still remember that show. The crowd going berserk, the mad frenzy, the smell, the heat, the noise of unfettered youth screaming. I was screaming too. The noise was deafening, like sitting inside a jet engine as it revved up for take off. People were fainting and being dragged into the aisles. There was chaos everywhere. I held my poster aloft and a hysterical girl behind me grabbed it and tore it to shreds. You couldn't hear the music. There were no PA systems then, bands played through their amplifiers with a small vocal PA. When The Stones started "Satisfaction", you heard the first few distinctive notes and the rest was drowned in the shrill sound of the crowd. It didn't matter. The band were there, sneering and pouting before us. We could see them, almost touch them, that was enough. It was real, thrilling, the most exciting night of your life. Then, as if in an instant, it was over. They were gone. We filed out and headed back into the real world. 

After the show, I followed a gang of youths to the back of the ABC. To the stage door where The Stones would leave. There was a large limousine parked there and after a while, a group of people with blankets over their heads appeared. They jumped into the car and drove away. We chased it down the road, thinking The Stones were in it. Then someone said it was a decoy. So we gave up chasing the limo and went back to the stage door, but it was too late. They had gone. 

A few years later, they played a free concert in Hyde Park, London, to 200,000 people. Mick Jagger is interviewed in the film of that day. He says that it made more sense logistically for the band to play shows of the size of Hyde Park than it did for them to do two shows a day in places like Wigan. So he never forgot that night either. 

As for Paul Peakman, his bad luck never changed. He died of a heroin overdose before the 60's ended and before he reached the age of twenty one. In doing that, he unwittingly he taught me another lesson for life, that heroin was very bad news and I should stay away from it, which i did. I owe him a lot. 

He also taught me that you have to grab the opportunities that present themselves in this life. The Beatles came to Wigan in October as well. Paul Peakman had gone to Birmingham the weekend tickets for that concert went on sale. Nobody got me out of bed that morning. So I missed them. I wasn't bothered at the time. I thought, I'll catch them next time they come. And of course, next time never came. The following summer The Beatles announced that they had retired from touring and I never got another chance to see them. 

The Rolling Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park, London July 5, 1969. A crowd estimated at 250,000 people attended.

"Why is it free? Well, it never occurred to me why people should pay because, you know, you don't make any money when you, er, play the ABC Wigan. Holds 2,000 people, two houses 4,000 people. Each pay an average ten shillings which is two thousand pounds of which one thousand

pounds goes to the management of the theatre or the promoter or the da der. The thousand pounds that is left goes to the publicity, blah blah, the groups who are supporting the bill. You end up with three hundred something pounds and it costs you one hundred and fifty pounds to get there. Divide by five, leaves you with (sneer, shrug) I mean, really. You know, you can get all these people, all at once. They don't have to pay, they're all going to have a better time if they don't". 

Mick Jagger, interview, "Stones In The Park", Granada Television documentary film 1969.

In 1994/95 The Stones Voodoo Lounge tour grossed $316,365,576.

In 1997/98 The Stones Bridges To Babylon tour grossed $336,017,048.

In 2005/07 The Stones A Bigger Bang tour grossed $558,255,524. (This was the highest grossing tour in history until beaten by U2's 360 degrees tour in 2011.)

It is safe to assume that by then live shows were making Mick and his band some money.  

Very special thanks to Ben Housden for his advice and encouragement with this blog.