‘Eh?’
‘How long you been ’ere?’
‘Stop whispering, son.’
‘HOW LONG HAVE YOU WORKED HERE?’ I shouted. Harry had obviously gone completely deaf from listening to car horns all day.
‘Twenty-nine years and seven months,’ he said with a grin.
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘Eh?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Stop whispering, son.’
‘THAT’S A LONG FUCKING TIME, HARRY.’
‘You know what the best thing is?’
I raised my hands and shook my head.
‘In five months’ time, I’ll get my gold watch. I’ll have been here thirty years!’
The thought of thirty years in that room made me want the Russians to drop the bomb and get it over with.
‘If you wanted a gold watch that badly,’ I said. ‘You should have nicked one from the fucking jeweller’s. Even if you got caught, you’d only do a tenth of the time that you’ve done in this shithole.’
‘Say again, son?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Eh?’
‘NOTHING.’
I’d had enough. I threw down my screwdriver, walked out of the door, past my mum, out of the factory gate, and straight to the nearest pub.That was the end of my first job in the music business.
The idea of getting a real job in the music business was a fucking joke. It was just one of those impossible things, like becoming an astronaut or a stuntman, or shagging Elizabeth Taylor. Still, ever since the time I’d sung ‘Living Doll’ at our family shindig, I’d been thinking about starting a band. I even went around for a while boasting that I was a member of a group called the Black Panthers. Bollocks, I was. My ‘band’ was an empty guitar case with ‘The Black Panthers’ written on the side (I’d used some emulsion paint which I’d found in the garden shed). It was all in my imagination. I used to tell people I had a dog, too: it was a Hush Puppy that I’d found in a dumpster, which I put on the end of a leash. I’d walk around the streets of Aston with my empty guitar case, pulling this old fucking shoe behind me, thinking I was some kind of Mississippi bluesman. Everyone else thought I was fucking insane.
When I wasn’t spending time with my imaginary band and my Hush-Puppy dog, I used to hang around with the Teddy Boys. It was a bit before my time, the Teddy Boy scene, so I never got into the long coats and the brothel creepers and all that shit. But I liked the music they played on the jukebox. I went around singing ‘Hey Paula’ by Paul & Paula for weeks. Those old tunes were great. Then I got into the mod stuff—I used to like the slim-fit mohair suits.
Then I was a rocker, with the leather jackets and the studded belts. I’d switch back and forth all the fucking time. I was just looking for adventure, me. Anything that didn’t involve working in a factory.
Then the Beatles happened.
All of a sudden, these four moptop Liverpudlians were all over the radio and the telly. Using my last pay cheque from the job at the Lucas plant, I bought their second LP, With the Beatles.
The moment I got it home, everything changed.
A light went on in my head when I heard that record. It just sucked me in. Lennon and McCartney’s harmonies were like magic. They took me away from Aston and into this fantasy Beatleworld. I couldn’t stop listening to those fourteen songs (eight were originals, six were covers, including a version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’). It might sound over-the-top to say it now, but for the first time I felt as though my life had meaning. I played that record over and over again on my dad’s big, polished radiogram, which was a combination of a valve radio and an old-fashioned phonograph, made to look like a piece of furniture, which took pride of place in our living room. Then I’d go to the Silver Blades ice rink and they’d be playing it on the Tannoy system there. Sometimes I would just walk around with the album under my arm, I was so fucking pleased with it. Soon I began to collect anything with ‘The Beatles’ written on it. Photographs. Posters. Cards. Anything. It would all go up on the bedroom wall. My brothers didn’t mind—they were mad about the Beatles, too.
But not half as mad as me.
Obviously, I had to save up some dough to buy the Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me. Then, when A Hard Day’s Night came out, I was one of the first in the queue at the record shop to buy that. Thanks to Beatlemania, it seemed all right that I didn’t want to work in a factory. John Lennon and Paul McCartney hadn’t wanted to work in a factory either! And they were just like me—working-class kids from the back streets of a run- down, far-from-London industrial town. The only difference was that their town was Liverpool, not Aston. I reckoned if they could be in a band, then maybe I could, too. I was eight years younger than Lennon and six years younger than McCartney, so I still had plenty of time to get my first big break.
Trouble was, I had no idea how to get a big break. Apart from Tony Iommi—who I’d never seen again since leaving school—I didn’t even know anyone who could play a musical instrument. So, instead, I decided to grow my hair long and get some tattoos. At least I’d look the part.
The hair was easy. The tattoos stung like a fucking bastard.
First it was a dagger on my arm. Then I learned how to do them myself with a needle and some Indian ink. All you needed was a big enough blob of ink on the end of the needle and then you’d poke it far enough through the skin to make it permanent. When I was seventeen, I spent a whole afternoon in Sutton Park—a posh area of Birmingham—spelling out ‘O-Z-Z-Y’ across my knuckles. I went home that night feeling really fucking pleased with myself.
My dad wasn’t so happy. He went white when he saw me.
‘Son, you look like a fucking idiot,’ he said.
In 1964 something totally unexpected happened.
I got a job I enjoyed.
It turned out that although I was no good at plumbing or tuning car horns or working on building sites or doing any of the other half a dozen shit jobs I’d been fired from, I was a natural at killing animals. They say that when the average person sees the inside of a slaughterhouse, they become a vegetarian. Not me. Having said that, though, it was an education. I quickly learned that there aren’t any little nugget-shaped chickens, or little hamburger-shaped cows. Animals are big fucking smelly things. I think that anyone who eats meat should visit a slaughterhouse at least once in their life, just to see what goes on. It’s a bloody, filthy, putrid fucking business.
The slaughterhouse that hired me was in Digbeth, one of the older parts of Birmingham.
My first job was puke remover. They showed me to this big pile of sheep’s stomachs in the corner, and I had to cut them open, one by one, and remove all the puke from inside. I was throwing up like a son of a bitch the entire first day. And it didn’t get any better for a long time.
I threw up every hour or so for a solid four weeks. My stomach muscles were on fire, man.
Sometimes the other guys would have a laugh by giving me the stomach of a condemned animal—like a crippled old sheep that was unfit for human consumption or something. One time I picked up this dodgy stomach and it just burst in my hands—all this fucking pus and blood squirted into my face. They all thought that was extremely fucking funny.
But I grew to like the slaughterhouse. I got used to the smell, and once I’d proved myself as puke remover they promoted me to cow killer.
What a fucking job that was. I’ll tell you something: if you ever get kicked by a cow, you’ll know about it. When one of them got me in the marbles I thought I was going to cough up my left ball.
The process starts with a gang of five or six guys roping the animal into the kill room. It walks up this ramp and I’m standing at the other end with a pressurised bolt gun. The gun is loaded with a blank cartridge, which creates enough pressure to fire out a big spike, like a round chisel, straight into the cow’s brain. It’s designed to make sure the animal doesn’t feel any pain—apart from at the moment when it gets this big fucking bolt through its
