Trousers were very important as well. In the ‘70s in the North you were lucky if you had more than one pair of trousers. So it was crucial your one ‘special’ pair of trousers were the right ones. At 16 I had these 24” flared loon pants with white stitching all around the hems – I wore them to school once and obviously was sent straight home. A little later I interviewed Marc Bolan and then I had these trousers that weren’t flared and this also seemed so wrong – interviewing my hero without the right trousers. Even worse, my mum had just washed them and they had gone all streaky. When the North West music scene started to happen in the late 70s – Joy Division, Buzzcocks and so on – we knew we had to find the right trousers for it. Some new kind of trouser. The right trousers for what we had to say.

The careers master just laughed when I said I wanted to be a journalist. Even the suggestion that I could maybe work on a local newspaper was thought ridiculous, never mind the idea of what I really wanted to do, which was write for the NME. The nearest thing to a relevant course they could find was a National Diploma in Business Studies. The big thing was that apparently Tony Blackburn had done it. It seemed to be full of girls wanting to be high-powered secretaries. Before long my attendance record had far too many black marks.

At 17 I went to work in a bookshop and it was there I got my real education. I started reading voraciously – JG Ballard, William Burroughs, Orwell – listening to jazz and extreme rock bands like Faust. On the outside I was wearing the same jeans for weeks on end, but at least internally I was setting about a course of self-improvement and satisfying this burning curiosity. 

I would make little magazines for myself in my bedroom. I can’t fault any of that. I like the decisions the younger me was making.

I couldn’t in all honesty go back and say to that teenager, ‘Make some friends’, or ‘Don’t worry so much about getting girlfriends’. I was quite strange and reserved – I was very abstemious, I wasn’t interested in getting drunk or anything. I was more interested in the imagination of pop music and its potential as a genuinely hallucinatory power.

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