It was much more exciting and satisfying to see young bands perform in the clubs that would allow punk. Watch them grow over months.

The next step was to follow local groups around town. Watch them grow over weeks. There was an even greater sense of connection.

My friends and I would analyze the performances on the bus ride home—“Did you notice they had a new guitar amp?” “Did you like that new song they opened with?”—and we would also critique the posters and the flyers that had been handed out.

Hockley Heath Rugby Club was the venue that had been chosen by the Sixth Form Committee for the summer dance. A bar lined the back of the room, with a few tables and chairs laid out casually and a dance floor in front of them. There were floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides of the room so, being June, it was never properly dark in there. There was no stage, so we set up our meager collection of instruments on the floor, our onstage sound augmented by the loan of a genuine Carlsbro 100-watt Stingray combo amplifier from our friends in the Prefects.

I had never experienced anything quite like the thrill I got from plugging my Telecaster copy into that machine.

Standing in front of my classmates, holding this weapon, all the rules changed. I was no longer nerdy Nigel who never got the team call-up, who had eschewed prizes and attention and competition. Before tonight I was nobody, but now I was in charge.

I was the bomb.

I had taken no lessons and I was no virtuoso, that much was clear, but I had written a few songs, and despite my limited technique, when my guitar was fed through the Carlsbro and the Big Muff distortion box, it sounded big.

I wielded enough power and electricity with my £15 guitar and a borrowed amplifier to shake up everyone’s perception of who they thought I was. I could see it on all their faces. They didn’t quite understand it, but they all knew, boys and girls alike, that some substantial, chemical, hierarchical shift was taking place.

At the end of the night, there were two new facts that I knew for certain:

1. Shock Treatment were awful.

2. I couldn’t wait to do it again.

Shock Treatment played a handful of gigs—we even got a review in local music fanzine Brumbeat—and then morphed into the Assassins. I have flyers for both bands at the Golden Eagle on Hill Street, both times supporting the Prefects. Then David and I met Mark Wilson, a DJ on the scene, who asked us to join the band in which he sang and played guitar—Dada. Dada was a much more inventive musical concoction than Shock Treatment. Boutique owner John Brocklesby played a pink Vox bass and sang his own songs. We brought in Roxy fan Marcus to play Stylophone, mounted on an ironing board (very Dada), and David switched from voice to drums. How crazy is that?

John’s wife, Heather, made us some beautiful clothes—a white jacket with a leather collar, beautifully tailored, the kind of stuff they’d be selling in the shop—that gave us a certain classical flamboyance.

The Dada songbook opened with “Toyroom,” Mark Wilson’s off-kilter paean to the joys of childhood, sung over a stuttering disco beat. The chords were DA/DA and it was seven minutes long. This was not intended to be mainstream music.

We went to the Crown on Hill Street and asked them if we could have the use of their upstairs room on Tuesdays. So in May of 1978 we began a residency there.

I am a big believer in residencies—getting to play in the same venue, the same night, week in, week out, you really get to develop a sense of what you are and where you are going. You have an objective—to improve—and each week you get feedback from anyone who chooses to come along. At first, the audience will almost always consist of friends and family, but after a while, if you have anything to offer, word will spread and people you have never met or don’t know will show up at the door and pay money to hear what you play.

That summer, after telling a skeptical high school careers officer that I wanted to be a “pop star,” I enrolled at Birmingham Polytechnic’s College of Art and Design for a twelve-month foundation course. I had never stopped drawing at home and had filled up books with ideas for posters and band logos. This work, and my enthusiasm, was enough to get me a place, in spite of my underperforming at the grammar school.

A foundation course offers a fantastic buffet of basic art training in graphics, fashion and textiles, fine art, and photography all in one year, with the aim of helping you decide which area you want to specialize in for your degree.

For me, however, the decision to go to art school was inspired more by musical heroes—John Lennon, Keith Richards, Bryan Ferry—who had gone to art school. I hoped to hook up with other like-minded souls, just as they had.

Which I did.

The student that I was most drawn to was Stephen Duffy, the future founder of the band the Lilac Time. In drawing class, when the rest of us were striving to reproduce each detail of the subject as accurately as possible, Stephen would grab a stick of charcoal and violently maul his paper with three or four rough strokes, handing it to the teacher as if to say, “I don’t care about any of this.” The teacher would invariably announce, “You see, everybody! Stephen gets it!”

What’s more, Stephen was a songwriter and he played bass. Fretless bass.