Bombed Out!

Bombed Out!

Tales of ‘70s-‘80s Music, Punk, Eric’s, Bands and Beyond

By

Peter Alan Lloyd

Bombed Out!

© 2014 Peter Alan Lloyd.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9780957592162

Publisher: PAL Publishing

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher.

This copy must not be recirculated in any format.

www.bombedoutpunk.com

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.

CONTENTS

Foreword

1961 – 1974

1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

1980

January

February

March

April – September

October

November

December

1981

The New Challenge

1982

Postscript

FOREWORD

These are my memories of growing up and passing through Liverpool, its Punk and New Wave music scene, playing in bands and hanging around Eric’s Club in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as what happened to me afterwards, as the city and the whole country slid into a deep recession.

I recorded much of my life back then in small diaries and scrawled notes, on which I have based this account. Where I’ve not been entirely clear on dates, I’ve used best guesses.

During the writing of this book, I researched and frequently played the many decent and dire chart hits and hundreds of Punk and New Wave singles and albums mentioned in these pages.

For me, the song that best-represents the whole period, especially as re-lived through the writing of this account is Jigsaw Feeling by Siouxsie and The Banshees. If a book could have a theme tune, that’s what Bombed Out!’s would be.

Listening to music from that remarkable period always makes me reflect on how Punk, playing in Liverpool New Wave bands and the people I was around in Eric’s Club as I was growing up inspired me to do things that completely changed the course of my life.

This book is for them.

Special thanks to Liz Stanton, Ged Allen and Paul Hornby for their contributions, to Martin from Bombsite Magazine for the artwork, Simon Ramage for reading the manuscript and to Christine Clarke for setting the ball rolling.

Peter Alan Lloyd

Tell Me A Story

I grew up on Brownmoor, a small, post-war council estate on the outskirts of Liverpool, seven miles to the north of the city. It wasn’t the grimmest place on Merseyside, or the hardest, but in otherwise leafy, suburban Crosby, it was still pretty rough.

We lived in a small, brown-brick terraced house, where six of us, my parents, two brothers, my sister and I all noisily competed for space, attention, food and money. Privacy and quietness were unknown, and I shared a bedroom with my two brothers right up until the elder one, Terence, finally left home in his early twenties.

Four songs remind me of this earliest period of my life. In 1966, when I was five years old, Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots were made for Walkin’ was in the charts; I’d listen to it on the radio before venturing out on dark, frosty mornings on my way to school with Terence and with my older sister, Gillian.

The Kink’s Waterloo Sunset, released in 1967, made an impression because I thought it was about a suburb of Liverpool, also called Waterloo, which was just down the road from us. We used to go to Waterloo beach to watch magnificent sunsets over the Irish Sea, but to my great disappointment it was explained by my parents that the song was about a bridge and a sunset in London.

In late 1967, the Johnny Mann Singers’ Up Up and Away (in my Beautiful Balloon) was a top ten hit in the UK. That song reminds me of my dad, polishing his boots by our roaring coal fire at 6am, before he’d head off to work at Liverpool docks.

That year, I also watched Sandie Shaw’s Eurovision Song Contest success with Puppet on a String.

Search And Destroy

My two earliest news memories are of the Aberfan Disaster in 1966, where over a hundred schoolchildren were killed when a coal mine slag heap collapsed on their school in Wales. The other was an environmental disaster of a different kind, when an oil tanker, the Torrey Canyon, carrying 32 million gallons of oil, ran aground off the south-west coast of England in March 1967.

Beaches around Europe were heavily polluted in what is still Britain’s worst oil spill. In order to sink it, the ship was mass-bombed by the RAF using high-explosive and incendiary bombs to burn off the oil.

Northern Industrial Town

At home, money was always tight both when my dad worked on the docks and, after he lost that job, when he worked as a lorry driver on the Dock Road.

Not that he knew it, but my dad was riding the waves of Liverpool redundancy, from a decline in the need for dock labourers as the Port of Liverpool gradually lost its business elsewhere, to finding work as a long distance lorry driver among the bustling dockside streets and warehouses, before they too fell silent.

Although he was in regular employment throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, with four children to feed, money was always in short supply and my dad sometimes had to find novel, if often embarrassing, ways to make ends meet.

Damaged Goods

For example, one Saturday morning my dad loaded me into the cab of his long distance lorry, which also doubled as our family car, and took me on a drive to the local orphanage. I felt pretty sure he wasn’t going to dump me there, but I was still slightly troubled because he’d said he was, Going to pick up something and I knew we couldn’t afford another kid.

When we arrived at the orphanage, Nazareth House, my dad went inside, emerging a few minutes later staggering under the weight of a worn-out, tatty and badly ripped carpet, the other end of which was being carried by a beefy nun. He excitedly threw the glorified rag (the carpet not the nun) into the cab, exclaiming, "It was free! It’s an Axminster - you can’t go wrong with that!"

Oh yes you fucking can, I thought, shocked that we were reduced to taking such literally threadbare charity from an orphanage.

When we got home, my dad proudly rolled the gashed carpet down on our living room floor to the looks of collective horror on the faces of Terence, Gillian and my younger brother, John, but that awful worn carpet stayed on our living room floor for four years, ensuring only a handful of specially chosen friends were ever invited to the house.

Entertainment!

Near our estate was a ‘green’ area, through which the Leeds and Liverpool Canal ran. Hemmed in by council estates, it contained some farmland, woods, grassland, a marsh and, to ruin it all, a large rubbish tip at the far end. Now grandly called ‘Rimrose Valley Country Park’, in those days it was called the ‘Back Field’, and it features right the way through this story, although for very different reasons.

From the age of nine, I hung around with much older boys in a gang on our estate. Every year, during the summer holidays, we’d go down to the Back Field and fight gangs of youths from the other council estates that bordered it.

It was more like 1970s combat aerobics, as badly-dressed mobs chased each other around the fields after much taunting, although serious injuries and half bricks splitting open heads were not uncommon in the mayhem.

The time this fighting was going on, during the early 1970s, was the period when skinheads, blue crombies and ludicrously wide flares were mixing into fashion.

Music I remember from this wayward period includes Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime, featuring the extraordinarily-side-burned lead singer, Ray Dorset, Skinhead Moonstomp by Symarip, Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together, Status Quo’s Caroline and Alice Cooper’s School’s Out.

Senior Service

Besides low-level shoplifting (well, low-level if you weren’t the shopkeeper), that was pretty much it as I cruised into my eleventh year, although I was a staunch anti-smoker by that time, because we often shoplifted cigarettes and divided them up on the Back Field. I thought they tasted disgusting and began to give my portion to the gang leader, on the understanding he wouldn’t say anything to the others and wouldn’t pressure me into smoking them.

My Aim Is True

I’m only mentioning this, not because I’m proud of it, but because there are a few tales of air weapon stupidity in this book, and this is the first.

One day, when I was ten or eleven years old, I introduced air rifles into the Back Field Wars when I borrowed one from an older friend and launched a sniper ambush on a rival gang leader, which elevated my status with the estate gang enormously. I don’t know if I actually hit anyone with this reckless attack, but the panic it caused was similar to the Roman Army turning up looking for a scrap in helicopter gunships.

From that time, I became hooked on air rifles, although I quickly gravitated to harmless target-shooting at inanimate objects like tin cans, or using them as an excuse for long walks over the Back Field and along the side of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal with my younger brother, John, or with friends.

I’m Against It

It came as an unpleasant surprise to have my delinquency bubble spectacularly burst one day when my parents proudly informed me I’d passed the Eleven Plus and the Entrance Examinations for St Mary’s College, a local Christian Brothers’ Grammar School, and that I’d be starting there the following autumn, with the State picking up the tab.

I couldn’t believe it. How the fuck had I passed them?

I desperately didn’t want to go to St Mary’s. I wanted to go to the state school with all my friends, yet some months later, there I was, walking off our estate on my first day at grammar school, sporting a bright maroon blazer and a cap, much to the amusement and derision of my estate mates.

Sending me to St. Mary’s was a total waste of time, money and a valuable life opportunity that should have been given to someone else, like my brother Terence, who was hard working and academic, but who had inexplicably failed to get into St Mary’s a couple of years earlier.

The Prisoner

St Mary’s College is an imposing red-brick establishment set in a quiet suburban road in Crosby. During the time I was there, it was run by black cassock-wearing Christian Brothers, and each year it sent pupils to university, occasionally even to Oxford and Cambridge, so they must have been doing something right; but it just wasn’t for me. I hated it from the day I started until the day I left, and on every walk to and from school I’d fantasise about the day I could be free.

I resented being forced to attend almost as much as I hated being taught, although I soon came up with a neat solution to both problems.

Songs I remember from the time I started at St Mary’s include, Rock On by David Essex, Ballroom Blitz by The Sweet and Alice Cooper’s No More Mr Nice Guy. I was also listening to my sister’s T Rex music by then, and Metal Guru and Get it On were also in the mix.

The Sound Of The Suburbs

As I said, for 1970s Merseyside, Brownmoor Estate wasn’t that bad, although it was always noisy.

The street orchestra included barking dogs, kids playing and neighbours talking, arguing or shouting. On spring and summer evenings houses would empty as children, including me, played football in the street, as parents stood on front steps, gossiping. Older boys fixed up broken cars in the road, surrounded by hordes of fascinated kids, always with music from a radio or a stereo blasting out through open living room windows somewhere.

Walking off the estate every day on my way to school, through the parks and leafy, middle-class areas of Crosby, I’d admire the nicely manicured lawns and neat semi-detached houses in quiet suburban roads and wonder how it was that we couldn’t live in one.

Borstal Breakout

In the same way I felt I didn’t really belong at school, I increasingly felt that way about the estate gang I was hanging around with.

The older members were often prosecuted for various crimes and sent to borstal, euphemistically referred to as ‘going away.’ They earned huge amounts of respect when they boasted of their courtroom appearances or about what their ‘Brief’ (meaning their lawyer) had said in court. Having a Brief was unquestionably the pinnacle of social achievement for a member of our estate gang.

I never aspired to either wanting a Brief, nor a courtroom appearance as a juvenile defendant for that matter and, for the first time, I started to think these older boys were losers.

What’s With Terry?

Worse, these friends particularly had it in for my older brother, Terence, often chasing him down the roads of the estate uttering blood-curdling threats whenever they saw him. There was nothing I could do about this, even though I tried. They did it because Terence was different.

Terence was never one of them (or one of us, come to think of it, except for being tall, dark-haired and heavily eyebrowed). He looked and sounded different to everyone on the estate; he wore thick black-framed glasses, he’d never spoken with a trace of a Scouse accent, he was into Classical music when people were listening to 1970s Glam Rock, he had posh friends, he (feather-) bird watched, studied hard and - his biggest estate crime - he wore unusual clothes, including cravats - cravats - on a 1970s Liverpool council estate. He also sported a lilac safari jacket, which was the red fashion rag to the estate gang bull.

To his credit, Terence never compromised on his fashion sense, although he did become a hell of a good runner.

No More Of That

What finally ended my gang involvement was when my ‘friends’ began to terrorise a dirt-poor family who lived around the corner from us. The family had an educationally subnormal older son, who often came home drunk and caused trouble by shouting at his parents.

A couple of times a week, late at night, there’d be a huge uproar on our estate as my friends tormented this pathetically sad, poverty-stricken family.

It disgusted and sickened me, and I felt desperately sorry for the victims, the son drunkenly shouting at the gang in the street as they baited him like a wild animal, kicking and punching him as he roared and tried to fight back. All the while, his distressed parents would shout and scream in the background, desperate for the confrontation to stop.

The police usually turned up half an hour or more after the fighting had started, but they viewed it as a domestic disturbance and they weren’t interested in arresting anybody.

My friends couldn’t see any harm in it and thought it was a big joke.

One day I asked the gang leader why he did it.

It’s just a fuckin’ laugh isn’t it?

No it’s fuckin’ not, it’s pathetic. Imagine if that was your fuckin’ family, I replied, and walked off in disgust.

It was one thing fighting with gangs our own age or older on the Back Field, but taking advantage at night of an impoverished old couple and their drunken son struck me as shameful, and my heart used to sink into the pit of my stomach whenever I heard it kick off in the street.

As a result of my feelings about this torment, I cut myself off from the gang completely. I realised there might be more to life than hanging round with a bunch of fucking dickheads.

I was only 13 at the time, but I had finally come to realise that I didn’t belong with them.

My musical memories from this turbulent period are a mixed bag, and include Don McLean’s American Pie, America’s A Horse With No Name, Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks and Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain.

By now, I’d also started buying my first singles, including Queen’s Seven Seas of Rhye, Elton John’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Lou Reed’s Walk on The Wild Side, and Sorrow by David Bowie.

A little later, I got heavily into two of Elton John’s albums, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was the first time I became aware of, and appreciated, what a bass guitar sounded like, as there’s some outstanding bass playing on that album.

Black Leather

I was obviously developing some kind of social conscience, but there was no similar maturing in my scholastic performance.

At school I was not academic in the slightest; I was uninterested, disruptive, unwilling to learn and lazy. I’m sure there’s a medical term for it now, but back then the teachers believed it could be strapped out of me, and I was frequently beaten with a thick, flat, black leather strap across the hands, for all sorts of infractions.

It didn’t really bother me. Most of the time I deserved it, but it was still an odd sight watching Brother O’Halloran, the headmaster, dressed from head to foot in a black cassock, his face contorted with rage, as he raised the strap and brought it down hard on my hand.

Mark Me Absent

The problem was with me, not the school. I really felt I didn’t belong there academically and that I wasn’t cut out for a formal education. I used to fall asleep when teachers talked, and I had a memory for facts and an attention span that would now have me worrying about the early onset of Alzheimer’s.

I’m pretty sure that wasn’t just boredom, but I conveniently diagnosed myself with a study-related illness, the cure for which was to miss as much school as possible, until the earliest day I could leave.

I wasn’t cut out for academic pursuits in the slightest. They knew it and I knew it.

Present Arms

After using air weapons in the Back Field gang wars, I’d grown out of those fights and had taken up target shooting as a hobby with my younger brother John and, later, with friends, particularly with two brothers, Ged Allen, who I was at school with, and his younger brother Stephen. They both feature throughout this story.

In an incident that would now have armed SWAT teams converging, I once took an air weapon into school to show to a friend. It was a Webley .177 calibre air pistol, and I’d spent weeks painstakingly sandpapering off the black gunmetal paint then lovingly polishing it into a shiny, silver pistol. It was my pride and joy.

While my familiarity with air weapons might have passed for normal at home (well, in our home at any rate), when I took it into school, pulled it out of my bag and placed it on the desk, it looked deadly and totally out of place.

Suddenly, even I was aware of the inappropriateness and dangers of having brought it into school, and the complete astonishment, tinged with fear, of my fellow pupils made me realise how feral my non-school life