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and every bloody time we played there’d be a fight. We provided the soundtrack to their fighting. We also played the odd wedding, or we’d end up in a bloody social club playing to people twice our age who would go: ‘Ooh, you’re too loud!’
    Because things were getting more serious, I wanted a better guitar. Burns was one of the few companies that made left-handed guitars, so I bought me one of those, a Burns Trisonic. It had a control on it with the ‘trisonic sound’, whatever that was. I only played it until I eventually found a left-handed Fender Stratocaster. And I had a Selmer amp, with an echo in it.
    The Rockin’ Chevrolets broke up because they kicked out Alan Meredith. My next big band was going to be The Birds & The Bees. I auditioned for them and got the job. They were professional, worked a lot and were even due to go to Europe. I decided to really go for it, quit my job and become a professional musician. I was working as a welder in a factory at the time. I went to work on the Friday morning, my last day at the job, and at lunchtime I told Mum I wasn’t going back for the afternoon shift. But she told me I had to, and to finish the job properly.
    So I did. I went back to work.
    And then my whole world fell apart.

6
    Why don’t you just give me the finger?
    So, as I said, it was my very last day at work. There was this lady who bent pieces of metal on a machine, and I then welded them together. Because she didn’t come in that day, they put me on her machine; otherwise I’d have been standing around with nothing to do. I had never worked it, so I didn’t know how to go about it. It was a big guillotine press with a foot pedal. You pulled this sheet in and put your foot down on the pedal and then this thing came down with a bang and bent the metal.
    Things went all right in the morning. After I came back from my lunch break, I pushed the pedal and the press came straight down on my right hand. As I pulled my hand back as a reflex I pulled the ends of my fingers off. Stretch your hand out then line up your index finger and your little finger and draw a line between the tops of them: it’s the bits sticking out from the two fingers in the middle that got chopped off. The bones were sticking out of them. I just couldn’t believe it. There was blood everywhere. I was so much in shock it didn’t even hurt at first.
    They took me to hospital, and instead of doing something to
stop the bleeding they put my hand in a bag. It quickly filled up and I thought, when am I going to get some help, I’m bleeding to death here!
    A little later somebody brought the missing bits to the hospital, in a matchbox. They were all black, completely ruined, so they couldn’t put them back on. Eventually they cut skin from my arm and put it over the tips of my injured fingers. The nails had come straight off. They put a bit of beard back in one of them so that the nail would grow, they skin-grafted it and that was it.
    Then I just sat at home moping. I thought, that’s it, it’s over with! I couldn’t believe my luck. I had just joined a great band, it was my very last day at work and I was crippled for life. The manager of the factory came to see me a few times, an older, balding man with a thin moustache called Brian. He saw that I was really depressed, so one day he gave me this EP and said: ‘Put this on.’
    I was going: ‘No, I don’t really want to.’
    Having to listen to music was certainly not going to cheer me up at that point.
    He said: ‘Well, I think you should, because I’ll tell you a story. This guy plays guitar and he only plays with two fingers.’
    It was the great Belgian-born gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and, bloody hell, it was brilliant! I thought, if he’s done it I can have a go at it as well. It was absolutely great of Brian to be thoughtful enough to buy me this. Without him I