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  I can’t, in all honesty, say that he was a great father. I respected him enormously, but he was fairly strict and wasn’t really an affectionate person. He was away a lot, and the house would always be a lot more relaxed when he wasn’t there – I would sit in his big chair and put on a cross face and mimic him, ‘I’m Daddy and I’m in bad form!’ which was something he would say when he didn’t want us bothering him.

  Worst of all was his tendency towards violence. He had always had an aggressive streak and was often verbally, and sometimes physically, threatening towards us – you knew not to cross him or you might feel the rough side of his hand. It wasn’t all the time, but it was enough to put us all on edge; we all knew it was there, just beneath the surface.

  I remember one incident when I was a teenager when I had to lift the poker and warn him to leave Mum alone after he had lost his temper with her one afternoon. I was terrified he would hit her, and from that moment I was very protective of her and a little scared of Dad.

  Tragically in later years Dad contracted Alzheimer’s – ultimately it was to claim his life, but he lived with it for a long time and it was devastating to see his character change. His speech deteriorated and he began to ramble incoherently, quite often he would even order Mum out of the house, and it soon got to the stage where he didn’t even know who she was. Despite all the difficulties, Mum loved him dearly all her life and in his rare moments of clarity she would try and help him remember the days when they were young and in love. On one visit to their house I was playing a Bryan Ferry album, when the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ came on. Mum’s face lit up and she turned to Dad, ‘Do you remember you used to sing this to me when we went for walks along the Lagan towpath?’ she asked him. It was when he snapped, ‘No’, and I saw how it crushed Mum that I knew he couldn’t stay in the house any more.

  Dad was placed in a home in 2005 and we visited him constantly, but the visits grew further apart and eventually it all became too much for Mum and she stopped going with me. He was in his nineties when he died on 5 March 2009 and we gave the oul’ fella a real workers’ send off with plenty of song and drink to see him on his way.

  I prefer to remember him as the kind, generous person he could be. I was certainly influenced by his political activism, and in many ways he was the one responsible for my interest in music as he bought me my first transistor radio when I was ten. That radio opened a whole new world for me – I loved lying in bed with my earpiece in, listening to the late-night music stations as I snuggled under my bedclothes. I think in the end he was proud of me and what I did with my life.

  I was a lot closer to my mum than I was to my dad. She was very religious and we were regular attendees at Sydenham Methodist Church in east Belfast. Mum was also politically motivated and often went with Dad to Labour Party conferences and protest marches, but I always say my dad brought me up a socialist and my mother brought me up a Christian.

  Sunday was a big day in our house, Mum wouldn’t even bake a cake on the Sabbath and my brother and I weren’t allowed out to play. Church dominated everything. There was a service in the morning, then Sunday school and church again in the evening. We always went to church meetings, and every week we would go to the Grosvenor Hall in town to watch a religious film. There they always had a ‘silver collection’, which meant you had to put silver money in the collection tray, coppers wouldn’t do!

  Believe it or not, I was very keen on religion as a child and at one point I even wanted to become a missionary so I could go to Red China to ‘save’ the masses – it was a time when the Christian world viewed the rest of humankind as needing to be saved from themselves. Having said that I ended up supporting the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 and the Marxist-Leninist ideologies of Mao Tse-Tung. China probably had a lucky escape!

  I stayed close to my mum all my life – she looked after me and she was always concerned about my friends in case they got into trouble. She even said we could smoke dope in her house so that the police wouldn’t catch us. I know she despaired about me many, many times. On 6 June 2009, just three months after my father had passed away, Mum lost her battle against cancer. She had lived to the ripe old age of eighty-six. After she died I found a scrapbook that she had kept, full of press cuttings all about me, it brought a tear to my eye – it was proof that she had been proud of me after all.

  Her funeral in east Belfast was a dignified and deeply religious affair. A lot of my punk friends and drinking buddies turned up, and I have to say it raised a smile to see those boys singing hymns. I always loved the music in church. My favourite hymn was, and still is, William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ and I love gospel music. In fact, as a teenager I went to the Church of God in Belfast because their music was much livelier, featuring tambourines and the like.

  When I look back on my early years I can see clearly that everything I did was drawing me ever closer to a career in music. My earliest memories are of music: while other kids my age were spending their pocket money on sweets, I was always saving up for the next record.

  It was becoming an obsession. I loved it when Mum and Dad went out to political meetings as it meant I would be able to sneak downstairs and listen to Radio Luxembourg. As far as I was concerned, radio was simply the greatest invention ever and I spent a lot of time in friends’ houses listening to rock ’n’ roll, folk music and whatever other music I could get access to.

  I realised very early on in my teens that I couldn’t play an instrument of any sort, even a comb and paper seemed beyond my capabilities. I did own a guitar but though I tried and tried, I just couldn’t seem to get there: I couldn’t find my muse. Soon my attention turned to DJ’ing.

  In my mid-teens I joined the Presbyterian Boys Brigade and it wasn’t long before I started DJ’ing at their youth club, which led to gigs at people’s parties. At that time Bangor Rugby Club held a ‘Saturday Night Scrum’ and I would do their music and even book bands for them – I was a familiar sight walking down to the Strand Presbyterian Church Hall with my Dansette record player and a bagful of records.

  I honestly believe I was born at the right time and in the right place. Growing up in the sixties was remarkable. Free music, free drugs, free love – what more could you ask for? People talk about the promiscuity and drug taking that the younger generation were indulging in during that period, but not everybody was taking drugs and making love – I was just one of the lucky ones!

  Sex wasn’t a big deal for me and really I think it was because it was so readily on tap in those days. Before I had even reached my sixteenth birthday I’d already spent an afternoon in bed with three girls from a well-known Belfast school, though that was by no means my first sexual experience.

  That would have been during the school holidays in the summer of 1962. Being the Protestant end of town, the community was gearing up for the annual Twelfth of July celebrations. It was a good few years before the Troubles started and I don’t ever remember it being a time of particular tension – the Prods lit their bonfires on the Eleventh Night, got pissed, marched on the Twelfth, bashed the Pope a few times (metaphorically of course) then went home. Perhaps I was too young to recognise the overt bigotry that hung over the so-called ‘marching season’, but then I have a very different reason for remembering the Glorious Twelfth of 1962.

  There was much merriment and celebration round the bonfire that Eleventh Night, and of course we were all hanging around enjoying the craic. The wife of a well-known robber seemed to have taken a shine to me – her husband was in jail at the time having been found guilty of holding up the local post office. She was only nineteen, but to me she may as well have been twenty-nine. It didn’t take much effort on her part, but she managed to talk me into bed. Like most people, my first experience wasn’t up to much, I fumbled around not really knowing what to do, but she seemed quite happy, and the next morning I dandered home wondering how on earth I’d managed it. My dad demanded to know where I’d been so I told him I’d slept in a gar
age. I thought that I’d be able to keep my guilty secret for life, but a few weeks later Dad answered the door to find the newly released bankrobber and another man on the doorstep – they had come round to sort me out. I was ready to take my beating, but didn’t want it to happen in front of Mum and Dad, so I told him and his mate to fuck off and stop annoying my parents.

  But Dad had overheard everything and, ever the trade unionist, brought them in to sort it out. The robber announced, ‘Your son had intercourse with my wife’, or words to that effect, and I protested my innocence claiming I had never even heard the word ‘intercourse’! I went to hit him but he actually backed away – and this is a guy who had come round to knock ten shades of shit out of me! So my dad asked, ‘What age is your wife?’ and, when the robber told him, he said he was going to take her to court for molesting a minor. That was the end of the matter. I couldn’t believe it; it was the first and only time my father ever stuck up for me. But I’ll never forget her, or that shag at the bonfire – she rolled her own tobacco, was drop dead gorgeous and was every schoolboy’s dream!

  It was not long after this that I fell in love for the first time, with a beautiful, intelligent young woman called Doreen Hewitt. But, like all true-love stories, it was to end in tragedy.

  Our story actually began, however, with another girl. I was walking along the Belmont Road in east Belfast with my mate Tommy, when I saw someone standing at the bus stop. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, like Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida all rolled into one, and so Tommy dared me to ask her out.

  I was really nervous, but rather than lose face I went over and told her that my mate had dared me to talk to her. She told me she had a boyfriend that she was actually on her way to see, but that she would be at the Belmont Tennis Club dance the following night if I wanted to come along.

  I spent the whole of the following day getting ready – I had three baths and shaved, even though I didn’t have any facial hair. I put on so much aftershave you could smell me three streets away! I used my dad’s Brylcreem and put on my brother’s Teddy Boy jacket and drapes, then set out for the tennis club. I had never been to a dance before but I felt cool as fuck. My cockiness did take a bit of a knock when I arrived however – not only was I the only Teddy Boy there, but the girl from the bus stop had stood me up! My mood soon lifted though when I spotted Doreen across the room. She was there with two other girls, Valerie Hewitt and Pauline Harrison, who were to become dear, dear friends of mine. They had a right laugh when they first saw me, but soon we were all chatting away – we got on so well.

  Doreen and I became inseparable. I’d never met anyone like her. At twenty-one, she was seven years older than me, but we just clicked. She introduced me to writers such as J.D. Salinger and Nietzsche and it was Doreen who bought me my first pint of Guinness with a brandy chaser, which as many of you may know is still my choice of poison.

  It wasn’t long before Doreen and I became lovers, but barely eighteen months into our relationship my world came crashing down. One day, while I was busy putting up anti-Vietnam War posters – a cause I had become very heavily involved in – she came round to see me. She wanted me to go with her to a party in Bangor as Billy Harrison, who played with Van Morrison, was going to be there. I was too involved in the Vietnam thing to go with her, so she went on her own. On the way back, as she was travelling along the Bangor bypass, a drunk-driver hit the car she was in and she was killed outright. I still have pictures of her and I think about her a lot.

  I’m sure it will come as no surprise to hear that I hated school and that I left at fifteen, which was as soon as I was able. I attended Ashfield Boys School and I have very bad memories of that place – there were some real evil bastards there. Corporal punishment was the norm, and children were regularly battered for no real reason. It was appalling and still upsets me when I think about it.

  As a way of getting out of class I would tell teachers that I had an appointment at the hospital about my eye. Whether it was because they didn’t like to talk about it I don’t know, but I was never questioned and it always worked. Of course I had no intention of going to hospital, instead I would head down to the Plaza Ballroom in the city centre for lunchtime sessions. The Plaza was a huge ballroom on Chichester Street, right in the centre of Belfast, and they would open for three hours between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. on a Wednesday and a Friday. It had a massive revolving stage and there were often bands on, so it would always be packed. I even remember the Royal Showband teaching us to ‘do the Hucklebuck’ there.

  By this stage, we had moved house to Clarawood, an east-Belfast housing estate which I didn’t really like so I started spending a lot of time in Botanic Avenue where my grandparents lived. It was in the south of the city and a lot of artists and musicians lived there. To me it was like a Paris boulevard – I loved it. The well-known artist Mercy Hunter and her sculptor husband George McCann lived there and I got to know them very well. I was very fond of Mercy. It was the mid-sixties and at that time she was head of the Art Department at Victoria College, a posh girls school in south Belfast. She used to send for me to pose as a life model for her art class, which was a bit embarrassing but she would make up for it by taking me down to John Rath’s off-licence to buy gin, and then we would get drunk. Now that was a proper education.

  By the time I was sixteen there was another interest in my life as well as music and girls. My school life was over and I was determined to indulge my new-found passion for photography – I suppose at that time the thought of a career in the music industry didn’t seem like a realistic proposition, so photography it was. The trouble was I had no qualifications. I remember going for a job in the Queen’s University Photographic Department. They required that I passed a medical examination but I think I embarrassed the doctor when he put a card over my right eye and asked me to read the chart on the wall, ‘Are you fuckin’ stupid?’ I said, ‘I’ve got a glass eye!’ Needless to say, he failed me.

  I did, however, manage to get a job in the photographic department at the W. Erskine Mayne department store in Belfast city centre. My department was situated right next to the record section, which was fantastic. The reps used to give me promotional copies, which meant I had them weeks before they were released and my music collection was growing apace.

  I was working and, for the first time, I had money in my pocket. I would get paid on a Friday and on my way home I would buy a couple of singles. I bought some real classics at that time, stuff by The Big 3, The Searchers, The Animals, The Rockin’ Berries, The Hollies, The Dave Clark Five, The Nashville Teens and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. After tea I would head up to my room, stick on the new singles, and read New Musical Express. Then at seven I would head for the bathroom with Radio Luxembourg blasting out of the transistor. I would take a quick bath in my mum’s bath salts, and follow that up with a dousing in Dad’s Imperial Leather aftershave. I would always be warned not to stay out late, I was still a teenager and the front door would be locked if I wasn’t home by midnight. But I never listened because I felt like a million dollars.

  So off I would go to meet my mates in a coffee bar and listen to a bit of Elvis, Roy Orbison, Cilla Black or Dusty Springfield on the jukebox. We’d either score a bottle of cheap wine or a gallon of scrumpy at The Spanish Rooms and head for one of the dozens of clubs in Belfast city centre – Betty Staff’s, The Maritime, Clarkes, The Astor, The Elizabethan, The Plaza, the list was endless.

  Saturday mornings however were shit, Dad was off work and seemed to have nothing better to do than stop me lying in bed. I couldn’t see why he wouldn’t let me lie in bed and listen to Children’s Favourites with Uncle Mac instead of making me sit downstairs with him to listen to the same programme. Perhaps he was afraid I would discover masturbation and go blind in my good eye! All I knew was that I would rather have had a wank than face one of his bread and dripping fries.

  Saturday afternoons were spent in Smithfield Market looking for se
cond-hand records or playing snooker with my mates. If I was lucky I’d go to the flicks with a girl in the evening, or hit the clubs again. Sundays were often boring and so I’d take my transistor radio to the grounds at Stormont or up to Cave Hill, to listen to the Top Twenty.

  I was getting more and more DJ’ing gigs. The Maritime Hotel near the city centre had a weekly Jazz Club where I would DJ quite regularly, and I remember doing a gig at Bangor’s Co-Op hall where they put up a poster hailing me as, ‘Ireland’s Top DJ’. I knew I had to have it to show my mum but, as I was trying to tear it down, I was interrupted by a cop. I thought I was in big trouble, but when I explained the situation he actually helped me rip it down before sending me on my way. These were happy times and Belfast seemed like a very good place for a teenager to live.

  Parties and Politics

  During the sixties you really felt you could go out and make a difference. The world had changed and the music changed with it: this was the age of protest and of the protest song. Hootenannies replaced the skiffle of the fifties, and we crowded into the strangest places to listen to Folkniks and their songs. Joan Baez reassured us that ‘We Shall Overcome’, Bob Dylan reminded us that ‘The Times They are A-Changin’ ’ and it was Dylan again – through Peter, Paul and Mary – who told us that the answer was ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’.

  People used to say that a lot of Britain’s ills stemmed from the hippies of the sixties but, as I always contend, it wasn’t a case of us being the first generation of people with opinions, it was just that we were the first working-class generation who could afford to buy drink and drugs and also to have the independence to do our own thing. And of course, thanks to my mum and dad, I had always been very politically motivated anyway.

  I had marched with CND from an early age, but it was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that really politicised me. It may have seemed far away but I knew that our futures were inextricably linked with what was going on across the pond. I had always felt that the British government was spending too much money on nuclear weapons and power stations; money which I believed could have gone on better things like the NHS and housing, but the events in Cuba had me really worried, and so I became an avid supporter and fully-fledged member of CND.