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of weirdoes you’ve ever met in your life. Barney went to meet a couple of them on his own, and we saw a few together, but none of them really stuck out. Getting a bit frustrated, we decided to ask Martin Gresty from school because he was the wackiest person we’d ever met in our lives. Fucking mental, he was, absolute psycho, but in a nice way, the terror of the school. We thought he’d be ideal as a punk singer. We went round to his house, just near Langworthy Road, and knocked on his door.
    ‘Is Martin there?’ we asked when his mother answered the door.
    ‘Sorry, love, he’s gone out plane-spotting.’
    Turned out the scourge of Salford Grammar had calmed down. He was a plane-spotter now. Not trains but planes: he joined coach trips to different airports to spot planes. Very weird. (I mean, how hard can it be to spot a plane at an airport?) Anyway, we gave our numbers to his mum but Nidder (as we called him) never got in touch. Too busy spotting planes, probably. Which was a shame because I’m sure his lunatic tendencies would have been reawakened by being in the group. Plus he and Barney would have had mad fights. At school they used to wind each other up like crazy, and every Friday night they’d have a fight. We’d all go and watch them in the park but we’d be bored because they were so evenly matched – we’d be like, ‘Oh come on, lads, it’s five o’clock, we want to go home . . .’ Anyway, it wasn’t to be.
    Then Danny Lee, my mate from Sorbus Close, tried out for the singer, but he wasn’t much cop. Then Wroey tried his hand but he wasn’t much cop either.
    In the meantime we were becoming more and more friendly with Ian. We started seeing him out more often and we’d recognize him because he’d either be wearing his jacket with ‘Hate’ on it or his mackintosh, which he wore when he came straight from work. We’d found out his name, that he was from Oldham and married, which came as a bit of a shock – not that he was from Oldham, but that he was married. I mean,
married
. We’d only just left school. Or it felt like we had.
    He’d got a band together as well. That was the thing about that period. We’d all been inspired. We were all desperate to get on and do it. Ian had returned from a punk festival in France, having seen Iggy and the Damned, all fired up about doing his own stuff. So far he’d managed to recruit a drummer and a guitarist and, like us, had been getting help (advice mainly) from Richard Boon and Pete Shelley.
    We wanted a singer and a drummer but Ian had a drummer and a guitarist, so – remembering the rules of punk – we couldn’t join up, even though we desperately needed a singer and he desperately needed a bassist. We had to follow the rules.
    We’d meet in the pub. ‘Hiya, mate. How are you? How’s it going? How’s the band?’
    ‘Oh, me drummer’s left.’
    Ian’s drummer was Martin Jackson, a very good drummer. We ended up trying to get him for Warsaw but he said no and went to play for Magazine initially then ended up with Swing Out Sister, among others. I bet he still kicks himself now.
    So anyway, he’d left Ian.
    ‘Still got me guitarist, though,’ said Ian. That was Iain Gray, a big mate of Ian’s and another familiar face on the punk scene. He’d been at the first Pistols gig.
    There are two schools of thought on how Ian ended up joining us. The first is that Ian answered another advert we put in Virgin Records, but that’s not what I remember. (Saying that, there are a lot of things I don’t remember . . . ) The way I thought it happened was that the next time we saw Ian, at the last Sex Pistols gig at the Electric Circus, we said to him, ‘All right, mate. How’s it going? How’s the group? You still got Iain as your guitarist?’
    ‘Nah, he’s fucked off.’
    And we had a Eureka moment. ‘Well, come in with us, then. You can sing for us.’
    Either way, the result was the same: we had our lead singer. We met the Saturday after