Al Part 1

Remember the Youth Training Scheme? It was Thatcher's way of fudging the unemployment figures, I was on it. What it consisted of was that you did a week's work with one day's 'release' to college to pick up 'all the skills you'll need in your chosen career path'. What it did succeed in doing was to get loads of kids to do cheap labour with no prospect of a full-time job at the end of it and for a load of kids within the age of consent to pop their cherries while mixing with the opposite sex on their day at college. It was while on one of my college days that I first saw Al. He was on an automobile engineering course (he worked at a reproduction vintage van factory) and his then, soon to be ex, girlfriend was on the same retail course as me. They had a row one break time and I saw her forcefully smack him across the face. He later came on the same First Aid course as me and we struck up a bit of a friendship when we thought we'd pass the time by bandaging up on willing volunteer to look like an Egyptian mummy. Al then left the van factory and came to work with me at Mojo Cash and Carry (the glamour!)

As we kind of knew each other I was given him to look after. Al was always so much more cooler than me. And I'll tell you why:

• He was allowed to smoke at home


• He'd been to see Motorhead at Leicester University and brazenly wore the tour t-shirt which bore the legend 'Motorhead Merry Bastard Christmas Tour 1987'


• He had a guitar and large amp in his bedroom


• He was allowed to take willing girls up to his bedroom for shenanigans (although his brother once informed me that one time his dad got so fed-up with the sound of squeaking bed springs that he started banging on the ceiling and shouted for him to stop)


• He was allowed to say 'bastard' in front of his parents, and, on a good day with the wind behind him, could get away with 'fuck/fucking'


• He knew 'interesting' girls. One being the local vicar's daughter

So, as you can see, that's shaping up to be a pretty decent friendship from my point of view. We started to go out drinking and to parties together. It was on one of our under age drinking trips into town that he introduced me to the delights of AC/DC. We were in a pub called the Castle and Falcon, which became a bit of a regular for us because you could get on the pool table of a Friday and Saturday night and they had a decent jukebox. On our first trip in there we commandeered both the jukebox and the pool table. We both put a pound in and it wasn't long before AC/DC's Whole Lotta Rosie came on. Al proceeded headbang, use his cue as a makeshift guitar and started chanting over the stop/start intro. "Angus!" he was shouting. "Who's Angus? Is he in here?" I enquired, looking around the pub. "Nah, you tit. He's in AC/DC innee?" Well, I thought to myself, Angus isn't much of a name for a rock 'n' roll star, is it?

I decided that I quite liked this music he'd started playing and Al promised he'd get to work on a compilation tape for me that weekend. The tape duly arrived at work on the Monday. "It's rockin'" Al said when he handed it over. Let's just say that Al had a pretty weird take on heavy metal. Hawkwind, Jethro Tull, and, er Fleetwood Mac were on the tape (although I think he just had the hots for Stevie Nicks on the Mac front). But there was enough good stuff cutting through: Motorhead, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and something called Guns n' Roses (that's how cool Al was, he had the first GnR album before they started having hit singles). He even had an album by a band called Blodwyn Pig, but apparently I wasn't 'ready for the Pig yet'.

It was on the back of his tape, and on his advice, that I went out and bought my first heavy metal record. Blood, Fire and Love by The Almighty. The Almighty were a pretty competent band from Scotland. At the time I thought it was the best thing I'd ever heard. It didn't come off the turntable. It was at this point that Al said I was ready for my first metal gig.