I know enough about these places to feel able at this time to call most of them Home

The end of the beginning, not as has been suggested, how to write a Story.

(It is always nice to tell a story though, especially when there are people to listen and there may be something interesting to hear).

First Verses.

The early signs were good, as were the early sounds. Born in March 1960, to a large Irish Catholic family and living so close to Liverpool, it was perhaps inevitable that music would play such a large part in my life. Against a background of Beatles bop, Irish rebel songs and the Country sad ballads of George Jones and Bobby Bare, I began to accumulate the range of diverse influences that would shape and drive my continuing love-struck relationship with music and songs.

My father played a good harmonica and could hold a room with his rich tenor voice. Memories of him with his head back and eyes closed, clutching a Guinness and belting out a Dubliners tune, or something by the Clancy Brothers, Johnny McEvoy or Sean O’Shea are strong and vivid. His brother Gerard regularly sang in the pubs and bars around Dun Laoghaire and their parents, my grandparents William and Gertie, had been well know around the town as accomplished dancers with medals and cups to show for their ability.

 The house were we lived, in Ellesmere Port, an industrial town located on The River Mersey between Chester and Liverpool, was always full of family travelling between Ireland and England, looking for work, staying for a week or two during holidays or over for weddings and funerals.

One other regular visitor was my mums brother, Pat ‘The Hat’ O’Sullivan, a Bantry Bay man whose often debilitating stammer, disappeared miraculously whenever he sang and played his accordion. I remember it was a beautiful deep maroon colour, inlaid with Mother of Pearl and was eventually lost on a drunken journey involving a stolen bicycle.What a tragedy.

Don’t tell anyone but despite these illustrious beginnings, the first record I ever bought was ‘Puppy Love’ by Donny Osmond. I blame Gail Thomas, a girl a year or two older than me who had distracted me from all things football and Everton. I don’t think we ever kissed or if we did, it was one of those strange kisses that boys and girls have, where you move your head but not your lips. 

Things got better on the musical front a long time before my private life did.

First came ‘Hot Love’ by T.Rex followed quickly by Sweet, Bowie, Roxy Music and Slade. Glam was in full stretch and at last I had a music of my own to look to the future with, instead of looking back to music that belonged to others.

One crucial element of that future came through secondary school. I won a scholarship to St. Anselms College, a part fee-paying Christian Brothers school in Birkenhead. It was a vicious regime tempered only by the fact that, those of us who travelled back and too each day, from Chester, Ellesmere Port, Eastham, Bromborough, Port Sunlight, Rock Ferry and elsewhere on The Wirral, brought with us a rich mix of experiences and backgrounds that provided us with our real ‘catholic‘ education.

For the first year or two I was a diligent student, even taking smoothly to learning and playing the cello during music classes. But it wasn’t to last long. I was different and soon realised it. The school was predominantly middle class, was single sex and littered with students whose fathers had been ‘old boys’. It was designed to promote and deliver academic achievement. It was a world away from what I had known.

Thankfully, there were enough of us who felt the same way to be able to get through it all without too many visible scars. Music, in the form of vinyl records became our common currency. 

The Who, Faces, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath, delivered the ‘Sturm and Drang’. Joni Mitchell, The Doobie Brothers, Cat Stevens and Steely Dan provided the necessary light and shade.  

Live music too was vital to the experience. According to my mother but only etched vaguely in my visual memory, my first show was to see Freddie and the Dreamers, in pantomime in the old Royalty Theatre in Chester.

Some years later, in the days before credit card bookings, with various friends I used to travel to the Liverpool Empire to queue on a Saturday morning for show tickets, going back weeks afterwards for the gigs themselves. In this way I got to see Sparks, Slade and Queen. I saw the latter again in a free festival in Hyde Park with Kiki Dee and Steve Hillage when I was fifteen. I travelled to Manchester Apollo to see the Doobies, with Mike McDonald and Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter in the line-up and to this day can’t remember how I got back in the early hours of the morning.

Looking back, it was probably in 1978 that there seemed to be a natural change to the order of things. Stood in a field at Blackbushe Aerodrome, with my friends Charlie Stewart and Jimmy Hennessey, (later to tragically die in the Hillsborough disaster), we witnessed the magical Bob Dylan re-invent his back catalogue, with a style that blew fresh air through his wonderful songs.

Later that same year the three of us stood again, this time in a damp, dark street, in a line of oddballs and weirdo’s, waiting for the doors to open for Eric’s, a Liverpool club, where the music we would hear over the next couple of years would blow a storm through our hearts and the British music industry alike.