TheNamelessThing.com

After Pod Boaters became Adidas Jogger became Stan Smiths became Kio’s became Nastase became Kickers became Korsika – essentially when Adidas ran out of ideas and started making shoes that actually looked like shoes – Casual was over: November, ‘82. By spring ’83, we’d abandoned foreign trainers for Hush Puppies and took LSD instead. It began in rejection from the door of the Hacienda – packed with students at the time – cos we looked too much like “Perries”. Bollocks; Perries were wedge-headed Northern Soul hard cases from mid-70s clubland who happened to bear a passing resemblance to us. We, on the other hand, were just old-fashioned football hippiegans trying to offload Superman acid on the knobheads in the Hac. As time passed, the drugs and music took control, and life became a day-to-day trip peppered with paranoia and euphoria depending on whether it was giro day, or we’d pilfered enough to hit the spot through an extended shoplifting binge. Psychosis was very normal. I may have believed I was James Douglas Morrison for several weeks in the spring of ’84. Psychologists probably have a name for that class of thing. The acid was great, but speed kills – as those old 70s Perries told us back at school. Months of psychotic comedowns involving the hallucinating of snakes, lizards, assassins, etc, and Father ordered me to find employment and get my shit together. I’d rather have died, but he found a job for me working with a crew of old blokes he knew by blood and geography.

It was mid-’85 and I was 19. My musical tastes ran to Robyn Hitchcock, Green on Red, The Lipstick Killers, and The Rain Parade, a band that sounded like the Stone Roses et al before such sounds had been discovered in Manchester. The new job was a mystery; moving furniture around the big office blocks in town: Washington House next to the Mark Addy, St. Andrew’s House off Chorlton Street, Victory House near the Mancunian Way, Albert Bridge House (guess where that is, you twat), and many more, all the way to Liverpool. We even worked in Chester House once or twice. And boy did we move furniture. We moved much of it onto our wagon and the cunts never saw sight nor sound of it again. It was taken to a Gypsy’s near the old Factory club in Hulme, or a warehouse in Strangeways, and weighed in. Filing cabinets, desks, chairs, you name it. My second day on the job, we weighed in a load of cabinets and spent the afternoon in Kicks in Piccadilly: “Bitter, 40p a pint, till 4:00 every day” said a sandwich board outside. It became routine; Paddy would pile the pound notes in the middle of the table, and I was advised to keep ‘em coming. Pissed as arseholes wasn’t in it. Paddy was an Irish bundle of genes discernible from a great distance; rubber-ridged yet strangely handsome features, an old brown suit and tie, and hair – moulded, wavy, grease-laden – the likes of which could only belong to an Irishman who made his living selling stolen furniture to Gypsies. And never a Hamlet out of his mouth. Paddy had us weigh in sacks of waste paper at a recycler in Ancoats ran by some very naughty boys. He could never resist planting bricks among the paper, despite multiple warnings from a bloke with a face and Collyhurst accent combo that funnelled your guts into your shoes.

Soon after that, I flew off to Miami and returned determined to become a signwriter. The first job I ever did was for a second-hand car dealer from Oldham sorted out by Jeff, one of the grafters from the Forresters pub in Prestwich. We once tried to prise the Manchester United sign off the wall of The Cliff, as I was living on Lower Broughton Road at the time, and I painted signs in my flat while I smoked Sputty and listened to The Only Ones and The Droogs. It was the right size and everything, so fuck ‘em.

Every week from ’88 to ’90, I went to the match with Bruiser, one of the removals lads from Salford. I wore my snorkel hood, bent my knees, and paid in the Scoreboard kids’ turnstile till they posted a dibble on it. We used to hang round till kick-off, and drain every single plastic beer glass that “real fans” had abandoned to scamper up the tunnel dead on three when the roar went up. “It’s called free beer, what’s the matter wi’ yoh?” we’d growl at them. Wankers. Bruiser’s son found me a job behind the bar in A and B stands, which the Scousers tried to rag, and I fought the cunts off. That was free beer, an’ all. And free miniatures, and the odd pound coin that fell into my pocket (about one every four fucking minutes). The following season I still had my plastic employee’s pass with the photo, which I used to gain access to all areas through the employees’ door at the Scoreboard Paddock corner. Free pies, free beer, the full Montezuma. We knew a steward from Cheetham Hill called Bashem who would let us into the away fans’ area at half-time; we’d stand amidst them and booze and then give them loads of shit as they abandoned their ale and scampered parkward, heads spinning round at our suddenly louder accents. Pissed out of my mind, I would leave Bruiser watching the match and do an entire magnet-shaped lap of OT just because I could, picking up pies and beer off the lads working the hatches perforating the subterranean concrete circumference of that magnificent cantilever, bouncing off the Stretford wall and back all the way around to the Stretford Paddock on the other side. Occasionally I’d surface for air and a live update on the reds’ progress, completely disoriented with conversation and ale, never quite sure which tunnel I was emerging from; was it the Stretford end of United Road, or had I already doubled-back and was in the main stand? The evils of the drink, I blamed it on.

When gentle Paddy died, the crew took a turn for the most alarming. One of the younger lads, PG, took control. PG was from Possilpark in Glasgow, and sometimes took me up there to do business of one form or another. It was an interesting place. He also took me in a tiny pub in Ancoats, down a narrow street (named for a radioactive substance) hulking with factories and other strange structures, where they served alcohol around the clock. PG’s mates from childhood frequented the place, and it wasn’t long before I realized that life was like a box of chocolates – just as Mr. Gump said. This was no fuckin’ tin o’ Roses, me hearties, I can assure you of that, and furniture was rapidly usurped by a variety of other more lucrative commodities. Our visits to the gypsy was replaced by visits to other places, fronts for skullduggery ran by blokes with that same arse-twitching face and voice. It was exciting for an adrenalin addict. When the rest of the world caught us up in ’88-‘89 and started doing acid themselves, things became even better. One night, one of PG’s mates, having taken a dose, had his Collyhurst flat door smashed in by a TAG team at the wrong address. The bloke could’ve given a grizzly bear a run for its money, the thought of him tripping most incongruous. The 80s became the 90s. I moved into Ruthin Court on Salford Precinct with Bashem the United steward, and having spent that first evening at a techno night in the Brass Handles, found myself dangling from our fifteenth-floor window-sill tripping my brains out. Never really grew out of that 1984 Lizard King phase, to be honest. The flat was utterly devoid of furniture save a stereo, a couch, a kitchen table, and two mattresses on the floors of the bedrooms. Bashem and I ate our breakfast when most were stumbling home to bed, and our lunch at three in the morning. My Madchester was a kaleidoscope of stolen telephones, watches, designer-chairs, snide perfume, and “Adidas” trainers, viewed from the top of a tower overlooking Old Trafford and the Quays. My life bifurcated into two realities; one in town at “work” and one back up the New Road in beautiful Prestwich, where I’d spent at least half of my life by that time – itself subject to a bifurcation of its own; the Prestwich Boys had encamped in two main pubs – the Forresters on the New Road, and the Ostrich on the Old. The Forresters mob were mainly grafters, working markets and concerts and knocking out snide perfume at Strangeways on Sunday mornings, and they were degenerate gamblers. The Ostrich lot, my lot, was drug dealers, thieves, extortionists, and general undesirables, a nickname given to us by Meecey the Blue from the Forresters after an unsavoury incident between denizens of the two pubs. Big Andy was our captain and giant joint-rolling champion, and he would savour a ten-skinner held between his large well-inked fingers, contemplating scams and schemes, 24/7. With homemade tats festooned across his throat and face from when he ran away with Silcock’s as a kid, Andy led us into the good honest world of flagging. Flagging entailed crowbarring York stone flags from public thoroughfares and selling it to bent builders – in our case a bloke with a guts-into-shoes Ancoats accent stationed near the Bradford gasworks – who sold it on to bigger builders rejuvenating the London Docklands. It went against all my principles of Manc-Cockney thermodynamics, but Andy was very persuasive, especially when he threw you a lump of doctored-up Sputnik the size of half a Milky Way wrapped in twenties for your troubles. The Yorkie had been largely replaced by tarmac in the late-70s, but there were many nooks and crannies still bearing vestiges around North Manchester almost a decade later; entries, parks, side-streets, and even cellars. We chose to flag east of Bury New Road ‘cos Salford meant murder. Little did we know, Quadrant Two held a similar punishment, but it was close to our builder and we mixed with Salford more than those aliens from the Heartlands. Andy’s size and strength meant he could jump into a walled-in back-yard in Newton Heath and have eight big flags up to me (and from me down to Dave in the van) in no time at all. I once saw Andy pick two flags up simultaneously as if it were one, before he realized what he’d done and dropped one directly onto my foot for a laugh, like he was dealing a bad card.

But the biggest laugh wasn’t flags, it was gargoyle’s heads. A church in Salford close to where Andy lived was being renovated, and one night after the Cyprus Tavern we loaded up a car-boot a few times and weighed in some real live gargoyles. Historical oddities from a bygone century. Andy told his girlfriend we were late home that night ‘cos we had to help Clayton Blackmore out with a lift after his car broke down. It was a cracking story enhanced massively by ketamine and barbiturate-infused hash. Those were good years, and sometimes I wish I hadn’t stole gargoyles from Salford churches. But I do regret not managing to rip that fucking sign off the wall outside The Cliff…