Out of the blue, at the end of 1999, I was approached by a nice woman from the BBC who wanted to ‘brainstorm’ some new ideas for TV and radio. We sat in a pub in the West End of London with my then manager and although we failed to come up with a new music TV series, she suggested I take some of the tried and tested anecdotes I’d poured out during the course of the evening and turn them into a book.

The only problem, it transpired, was that to give the book an angle (The 10th anniversary of Radio 1’s Evening Session, which I was presenting at the time) it would need to be published in May 2000 and delivered for editing at the end of March.

And so it came to pass that I spent the first three months of the year frantically pulling together 80,000 words for Going Deaf For A Living. It was part fan story, part theory and partly a history of the Session itself.

Duly released in October, off I went on a signing tour to promote it – encountering a couple of Spinal Tap moments en route (Sheffield Meadowhall Waterstones! One person!). But little did I know that book Publishers are a bit like record label A&R departments. So just as the book as was about to enter its second run, there was a change of staff in the office and new boss decided to pulp the few remaining copies instead.

And that’s where the story should have ended, but the bloody thing keeps ending up on e-Bay fetching anything from £30 upwards, so we’re trying to work out a way of republishing it (with a possible second volume to follow). In the meantime, here’s the opening chapter…

It’s just gone five o’clock and there are two of us, standing outside the backstage door at the Ipswich Gaumont. The one with glasses and a parka is me, the other one with glasses and carrying a variety of record sleeves is Graham Diss who I sit next to in double history at school.

Inside the building and we know they’re there, because we can hear them soundchecking, are The Undertones. The real, in the flesh, liveUndertones. The same Undertones whose logo appears on our history roughbooks and who we’ve seen on Top Of the Pops doing “My Perfect Cousin.” Graham Diss even has one of their hits “Jimmy Jimmy” on green vinyl, which makes me obscenely jealous.

Some minutes later the noise of soundchecking stops and the stage door opens to reveal two fellas looking a little flustered. HELP! One of them is Feargal Sharkey the band’s singer. The other one, we deduce is the tour manager. Just as we’re about to pounce on them they disappear back inside and we return disconsolately to our game of kicking stones round the car park.

Another five minutes pass and the TM is back. “Do either of you two know where Radio Orwell is?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s about five minutes walk.” I’ve got one up on Graham Diss at this point because I spend every other Saturday hanging around record shops in Ipswich and he doesn’t know the area so well.

“Can you tell us where it is, only we’re supposed to be doing an interview there,” the TM adds, only in retrospect it sounds more like “Well bloody give us the directions you little brat because we’re late.”

“Well, if you want,” I say, trying to sound cool, but stuttering slightly. “I’ll take you up there.”

And that is how I came to save The Undertones tour.

Of the many features we’ve ever run on the Evening Session the most successful is still Do You Remember The First Time? It was a simple enough idea. Just write in and tell us about the night you lost your gig virginity. Which band did you see? Did the earth move? The mailbag was full for weeks.

There were tales of lost tickets and broken limbs, the vagaries of public transport, there were family disputes (usually with elder brothers or sisters), and then explosive accounts of the headlining band walking on, and playing an immaculate set which included every song the listener had wanted to hear….and more.

The question is, were any of these accounts actually true? They were true in the minds of the letter writers, but you exaggerate your first gig don’t you? If not at the time, then at least in later years. Or maybe, exaggerate is the wrong word. What I’ve found is that we personalise them, and make them revolve more around ourselves. This is why everyone’s first gig story will have different highlights – even if they happen to have broken their duck on the same night watching the same band.

Your first gig is also a subject that’s guaranteed to crop up when you’re sizing up new friends or acquaintances like your first single or the first band you pinned a picture of on your wall. It’s a good barometer of age, taste, and attitude. It’s like fingerprinting for pop fans. Although it is the one of the most widely shared experiences we have, everyone’s tale is unique.

But there are parts of the story that we will allow ourselves to share. Parts of the excitement and the trauma. Which is why I have honed my first gig story into a shape I’m happy with. It was a band called the Lurkers – a second wave punk group whose third single“Ain’t Got A Clue’ had unbelievably been made Record Of The Week on Kid Jenson’s Radio 1 drivetime programme. They were without question my favourite band of the era (I’d been too young for the first wave of punk and was scrabbling around for the best of the rest when I found them on the radio). I didn’t have the album yet, but I did have permission from mum and dad to go and see them at the Chancellor Hall in Chelmsford, a venue better known for its amateur dramatics and wrestling nights.

Now blow by blow, minute by minute, I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened when the gig finally arrived. But this is how I tell the story. Stop me if you recognise any of these symptoms:

I spent two hours before leaving deciding what to wear.
Mum and dad gave me a lift and dropped me off – not outisde the venue, because that would have been too embarrassing – but at the end of the street.

They both raised their eyebrows as they surveyed the motley collection of people who made up the queue outside. At least I think they raised their eyebrows. I don’t think I actually saw them do it – afterall, I was in the backseat of the car and unless I was scouring the driver’s mirror for a reaction, I wouldn’t have been able to see them. But they definitely shifted in their seats a little, which is a sure sign of eyebrow action.

I had a ticket and no-one else seemed to. I was quite chuffed when it had turned up in the post. Ticket number 0012. I thought this made me one of the elite (surely the lower the ticket number, the cooler you are?). Little did I realise that advance ticket sales for The Lurkers were probably in the region of 30. And that when a bouncer shouted “Anyone with tickets can come straight through”, I would be the only person to shuffle from queue and walk in, past the scornful looks of 100 punks.

At the end of the night, there was a piercing ringing sound in my ears. I actually thought they were broken; that I’d done some irreparable damage to them. I was so scared that my parents might ban me from further gigs if they found out, that I kept schtum. It took two and a half days for the noise to stop.

The actual details of the gig aren’t that important. But being older and wiser now, I wince at the vision of the unhip me, who got to the gig too early; stood right at the front; got spat on by the singer of the support band – a local Essex group called The Sods – and was then crushed against the front of the stage as The Lurkers arrived and everyone tumbled onto the floor from the bar.

I scrambled out halfway through the set, and watched the rest of the gig from beside the PA, but it was too late to save myself. I was infected with something more virulent than whatever might have been lurking in the singer’s saliva. I had contracted some kind of live music disease. I know, it sounds embarrassing doesn’t it (and it’s worse if you say it loud). But honestly I think that The Lurkers at the Chancellor Hall was the most exciting moment of my life up to that point. I mean, there wasn’t much to compare it to (winning a school art competition and getting a Christmas card from Linda Audsley were good, but they weren’t a patch on The Lurkers). And from the moment I left the gig, all I wanted to do was go to another one. And another one.

And that’s where my problems began. Living in a small Essex village, 10 miles from Colchester, didn’t give you much opportunity to join the live circuit. No-one seemed to play in Colchester or Chelmsford – or even further up the A12, in Ipswich. On reflection there must have been gigs going on, but either I didn’t spot them or there were reasons (school, lack of transport, poor finances) that must have prevented me from going. The worst disappointment of all was that The Undertones were due to play the Chancellor Hall a month after The Lurkers….and having kept quiet about the business with the faulty ears, my parents had once again agreed to give me a lift there. Then with just days to go before Gig 2 the show was cancelled. I cursed and sulked and sat back on my bed and waited impatiently to see when they would tour next.

In the end it was three years before The Undertones finally played near enough for me to see them on a non-school night. And by that point, the entire musical landscape had changed.

Punk had been and gone and what remained of the New Wave was an over excitable and under-achieving mess. The onset of the ‘80s signalled a tawdry Top 40, which apart from the odd 2-Tone or Jam single, was full of charlatans and chancers as far as I could see. A bunch of FAKES. And being a teenager whose only take on pop music came through the radio and the pages of a paper called Record Mirror, I didn’t understand what was going on. Who was responsible for this? Why had all the bands I liked started to go out of fashion? What was I going to do now?

But the worst moment of all – the point when I knew that punk and new wave were really, finally all over – was when the Big Boys stopped going to the youth club. Every Essex village has two Big Boys. They’re compulsory. They’re there as a reference point to your parents and so they can say things like “You don’t want to end up like them.”

But at 13 you do want to end up like them, and I wanted to end up like one of them in particular because he had a leather jacket and an amazing record collection. Each week the Big Boys would idly slouch into the youth club, flick a couple of small children to the floor and then march up and commandeer the record player.

Before discovering John Peel they were responsible for much of my musical education (even if was just Sham 69 and the Smirks and Nine Nine Nine). Also, to break up the monotony of village life, the Youth Club would hold Discos every month or so, and the Big Boys would pogo and I’d stand in the corner and gawp at them. Then one week they stopped going. And the next week it was wall-to-wall Bee Gees records and that was that. The mighty punk revolution, which had promised so much, had fallen at the first hurdle. It had lost the battle for the Colne Engaine Youth Club record player.

And I think I could have handled this, if I hadn’t of invested so heavily in music in the previous couple of years. But after The Lurkers gig I’d started to use pop music as a cover for my lack of real identity. I wasn’t particularly gregarious, I wasn’t terrifically good at sport, and I wasn’t even that good at being the sort of rebellious swot who never seems to try, but gets great marks. I was the classic OK pupil in the top stream of an OK Essex Comprehensive who one day wanted to be something, but didn’t know what it was he wanted to be.

The nearest I got to being enigmatic was when our frightening English teacher set our group an end of term crossword competition. “And 14 down”, she hollered, “ is for you Lamacq”. The clue was: Murderous group (10 letters). It wasn’t much of deification, but it was enough to give me a certain amount of notoriety for a time.

But something was definitely missing. And if I had to pinpoint it, I think it was the lack of interaction between me and pop music. I bought records, and taped songs off the radio, and stuck pictures on my wall, but that’s just being an armchair supporter (or in reality, a lying on the bed sort of supporter). No, we needed to work on this relationship between pop, and me because it was too one way.

Then sometime in 1981 The Undertones came to Ipswich on their “Positive Touch” tour and I met Fergal Sharkey. During the walk to Radio Orwell I was barely able to speak for fear of saying something stupid or soppy. This is a situation that I can happily report has never changed to this day. Only now it’s not just Feargal Sharkey who makes me tongue-tied. It’s Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters, Bob Mould, Jarvis Cocker, a hundred other people in bands and the entire Colchester United first team squad.

I can talk to them when there’s a microphone around, but say they were standing at my local bus stop…I’d have to cross the road. The problem with these chance meetings with pop stars is that you know you’ve only got a limited amount of time with them (in Fergal’s case a five-minute walk). So where do you start? Everyone has chat-up lines for the opposite sex, but 50 years after inventing rock&roll, no-one’s come up with an infallible chat-up line for singers in bands. One that will leave said singer thinking a) nice chap, rather than b) saddo.

What did I want to say to Fergal anyway? Still haven’t forgiven you for cancelling Chelmsford? Any new songs in the set tonight? By the way what the publishing deductions like in your EMI contract?

No, I think all I wanted to say was thanks for making good records. Thanks for still being there when so many of my other favourite groups had already given up the ghost. “Cheers Fergal, you’re a real brick.” No, bugger, maybe not. I think I managed a strangled enquiry about how the tour was going and then fell silent again. Within minutes Feargal was inside Radio Orwell, and Graham and I were on the pavement outside looking in.

But despite the lack of any real exchange, we were jubilant. Come the gig, we could stand in Row F and look up and say, “That’s our mate Feargal. We were chatting to him this afternoon.”

My lust for interaction had been cured.