The Manchester Wheelers

CHAPTER ONE 

 

Meeting at the Wimpy

 

 

Saturday night in Manchester, 1967: the Soul Mods needed to take their Amphetamines – the ‘Gear’– and gather at the Wimpy bar before going to the Twisted Wheel All-nighter. Pill pushers needed to have their supplies ready. The story is narrated by Dave. There were numerous Daves who were Soul Mods in the city;

 

‘You ain’t been nowhere till you’ve been in with the In Crowd’
                                                                                                         - Dobie Gray

  

 

Manchester’s buildings were black, everywhere you looked, all the buildings on every street - black. When it rained, it would come tipping down. Consequently the rain provided an additional tone and turned the buildings into a mixture of wet-look blacks and greys of all shades. If you looked closely, a dirty black mist floated on the water outlined with an inner greyness, a wet sliding paisley pattern with disgorged black sooty edges moving like amoeba riding on the water’s surface and sliding down the walls. Drizzling rain collected, then poured out of high roof gutters and down the black bricks, making the walls shine; rivers that flowed vertically down, eventually to sharply change direction and pour across the street. Wide, flat, single-dimension rivers that rushed over the blackened grey pavements, running around white chewing gum islands and onwards into the black tarmac road, where the rain turned into rivulets, racing off to find a tumbling gutter of rushing dirty water with floating dog ends, all gushing into a swollen grid.

 

I doubted anyone noticed these things because it was simply the way things were. Things we see often fade into our unconscious; being so obvious they get downgraded to an almost invisible background to our daily lives. I was noticing these things, and acutely so, because I had slipped into a different mode of consciousness brought about by consumption of a handful of pills. They adjusted my perception; I was becoming more awake than wide-awake. It was one of the first noticeable signs of their effect.

 

Manchester was black due to the years of industrial revolution; decade upon decade of soot had coated all the bricks and stonework. As a result the walls of the buildings, if you bothered to look, were black sooty velvet when dry and a wet-look black leather effect in the rain. Hundreds of mill chimneys joined thousands upon thousands of rooftop chimneys from row upon row of terraced houses all belching out black, white and grey smoke.

 

The opening titles of the TV Soap Opera from Manchester had got it right: ‘Coronation Street’. It was a black and white film set. Films were made about the North, some set in Manchester. Films like ‘Billy Liar’, where Julie Christie looked like she was walking across Piccadilly Gardens, but it was actually Bradford. ‘A Taste Of Honey’ with Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan on the bus passing blackened statues in Albert Square, St Ann’s Square and Piccadilly. Later there was ‘Charlie Bubbles’, although this was in colour; it showed the demolition of row after row of the old Manchester terraced housing, with swinging balls of steel hung from cranes crashing into the walls, the entire scene becoming enveloped in dust.

 

A common sight was half the street in ruins, while the other half was perfectly intact and being cared for; painted red, brick by brick; here and there a red Geranium in a pot and all the steps yellow donkey-stoned. Mums running, hanging the washing out to dry after the dust had cleared, from around the last demolished house opposite: clearing and emerging like a ghostly apparition from the smog generated by the collapsed house it now became possible to see lady’s hanging out their washing on the once obscured back street. Manchester Mums with their hair in rollers inside a turban scarf – they would wear their patterned pinafore overalls, and keep up their standards in the midst of the intermittent grey dust storms set off by demolition and dampened down by the rain showers Manchester was famous for.

 

It seemed depressing; it looked like it was ‘Grim Up North’, but it was far from that. The soul of the city was the underground Mod Soul scene, ironically with its black American music. Soul was black ­– well, mainly black; our city was black, and so was the music that the clubs blared out in dark underground cellars. However, the music and ‘our’ scene gave us a set of colourful, bright and enthusiastic reasons for Mod Mancunians to get excited about their city.

 

After riding down town and parking my scooter outside the Wimpy Bar near Piccadilly, I walked through the drizzling rain just to stretch my legs. And as I walked, I remembered other days and times past.

 

Tuesday and Thursday nights we would go training and racing on the Fallowfield Cycling track; it was a velodrome, known to us as the Toast Rack due to the shape of the roof profile on an adjacent building. Reg Harris was still racing, but that night he just gave the prizes out. I was no prize-winner – I’d crashed out, falling through the bunch on the highest part of the track.

 

A few Blueys sorted out the pain and after the prize ceremony we planned to go dancing at the Twisted Wheel. Our cycling club, the Prestwich Olympic, was joined by our mates from the Manchester Domino, and others from the Manchester Wheelers. In the end about fifty of us went down to the club in Brazennose Street just off Albert Square where the majestic Town Hall towered above us in all its blackened Gothic glory.

 

We chained all our bikes together outside the double white doors and went dancing in the club. This was the Twisted Wheel, it was 1963, and it was known as a Beat club.

 

We streamed downstairs to dance in our cotton racing vest tops and cut-off padded gloves. Our frayed-end bell-bottom denim jeans had been recently released from our metal cycling clips, and we were clinking about in our cycling shoes with the metal pedal grips underneath. If you could have heard the metal plates under our shoes tapping the concrete floor it would have been like a tap dance, but no one could; the speakers had drowned it out with Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’. That had been when the Wheel was in its early music mixture stage of Beat, Pop, Folk music, Jazz and Blues, especially Blues, with Alexis Korner soon to become the resident band.

 

That was only a few years before at the ‘old Wheel’, but since then everything had changed. Cycling had faded as a core activity on my agenda of things I was really driven to do, replaced with the fervent All-nighter scene that had developed rapidly. The drugs would fit with cycling, but there wasn’t much time left to train at the level of commitment it required. And the ‘new Wheel’ scene at Whitworth Street was, incredibly, perhaps even better than that fantastic last year of 1965, at Brazennose Street – well, almost.

 

Although the Mod scene probably finished in London by the middle of 1964, it continued in Manchester, and in ‘66 fashions had stabilised on smart suits with everything. The American Army Parkas we wore when riding scooters only hid this fact. Smart was the dress code, and the way you did the smallest of things – like how your handkerchief was folded and placed in your suit jacket top pocket. The fact that you only fastened the top button of your Mohair threads denoted who you were, but only to those that knew the code. To the rest you became invisible – but smart invisible.

 

I looked around outside the Wimpy to see who was around, who was going, as the memory of those old cycling days faded. The rain was washing my scooter; it glinted with the reflection of passing bus headlights, traffic lights and the multicoloured wet-look neon signs mirrored from the surrounding buildings.

 

The mirrors on my scooter reflected back the same multicoloured signs inside the raindrops as they hit, then they drizzled down and streaked the side panels with wet coloured streamers of rainwater. The chrome side panels held off most of the rain, almost pushing it away as if by some anti-magnetic force. I let such thoughts fade – it was just the Brasso polish I had ‘Duraglited’ onto them before coming down here from Blackley.

 

Today was Saturday 14^th of October, 1967. It was a special event tonight at the All-nighter, the biggest night there since the ‘Original’ Drifters had appeared at the end of April. The year had begun in a fantastic way for Manchester Soul Mods, with The Spellbinders on at our favourite All-nighter club, soon followed by Otis, and the Stax Tour at the Palace Theatre on Oxford Road. To celebrate the appearance tonight of De Walt (better known as Junior Walker), lots of us had promised to dig out our scooters for the occasion. By the end of 1966 scooters and the Mod scene had faded out in London, but not so much in Manchester where we had our own private Soul thing going.

 

The growling, unmistakable sound of high powered scooters ended in a slowing down, put- put-put-put noise as two immaculate GT 200s pulled up alongside my 250cc Durkopf. The guys got off, brushing water from their full-length leather overcoats. One leather was green, the other guy’s was dark purple, and double breasted. Only one Mod in Manchester had a purple coat like that; Sid from Langley. Sid was a tough guy. He was a scaffolder and bricklayer by day, and a pill pusher by night.

 

No one was inside the Wimpy; at least none of our lot. Others were irrelevant. We knew who we were and we could recognise each other at a glance. Mods had a certain look. If you were one, you knew it but you never let on. You never claimed to be a Mod. To say you were a Mod would immediately bring ridicule, and quick as you might have said it you’d be ‘out’. Such a status was earned and never openly claimed.

 

We rarely went inside the Wimpy; if we did it was for a coffee or a coke. No one in their right mind would have a hamburger before an All-nighter at the Wheel, unless you wanted to throw up on the dance floor. Some people threw up anyway, but as a result of all the dancing mixing their stomach bile with a concoction of pills and stomach acid. Bennys, Green and Clears, Black Bombers, Blueys and Dexys, and the saliva from constantly chewing Wrigley’s gum, all shaken and stirred by continuous dancing; it was a mix that could easily make you sick enough to vomit.

 

I was already partly ‘blocked’ or ‘coming up’; that was the descriptive phrase everyone used. Shivers like energy waves were going all through my body, especially up and down my spine. I wanted to move, to dance, to talk. Dancing or talking incessantly was what these pills did to you, and you could do it all night. You became ‘blocked’ after taking your ‘gear’, and after around twenty minutes had passed by, all of a sudden your perception changed; it was like coming up in a lift, but the lift was in your head. Adrenalin energy would pulse out from your stomach, all body aches and pains would just vanish. You felt a compulsion to move about, to dance, to speak. You couldn’t keep still, often moving in jerks, uncontrollable repetitive movements - things did speed up! Thoughts were rapid, speech too – and Speed appeared to affect the blokes more than the girls, with certain almost unmentionable side effects.

 

“Hiyyyaaa Dave, have you seen Angelo?” said Sid, looking sternly into my eyes as he unbuttoned his full-length leather, revealing his grey shiny Mohair suit below. “Are you going?”

 

“Definitely,” I answered, “it’s Junior Walker!”

 

“Get me a hot chocolate,” shouted Terry as he struggled to pull back his white GT 200 onto its stand. Terry was Sid’s sidekick; he was always in his shadow.

 

“Wimp,” breathed Sid under his breath, and he wasn’t referring to the hamburger bar. Then Sid gave Terry’s scooter a push from the front to get it on its stand.

 

Sid and I entered the Wimpy, with steam rising from our coats; mine was a parka with my grandma’s fox stole sewn across the shoulders. Long dead glass eyes stared out from my right shoulder.

 

We sat down and waited for the waitress; Terry then joined us. “Have you seen Angelo?” he said frantically as he sat down. “He’s got a load of our gear, and we need it for tonight.”

 

“Calm down,” said Sid, “he’s probably hiding it in a stash somewhere. He will be along, soon.” He turned, and mumbled into my ear:  “He better be...”

 

I could see Terry was exhibiting the far away paranoid look that some members of our fraternity exhibited; it was due to being too many days in a row on Amphetamines. His lips were sore, very red and with a black outline highlighting them, tracing a sharp dark silhouette all around them, and his eyes were large like a ‘bush baby’s’ staring vacantly, unfocussed, around the room as he spoke.

 

“The bastard better had, he was at the match today. Georgie was fantastic with three goals, and that shitty Man City were total crap; Francis Lee, Colin Bell - what a set of twats! And Summerbee! Summerbee, Summerbeeeee; who the fucking hell is he?” he sang, churning out the current anti-City theme that everyone sang in the Stretford End.

 

“Did you go, Dave?” Sid asked me.

 

“Yeah,” I said, “fuckin’ brilliant! We should win the league again this year.”

 

“Fantastic, fan-bloody-tastic! You know Best is great, the greatest, but he needs Dennis. Without Dennis the entire team would be shit. If he doesn’t score, he’s the one who passes it to George for him to hit the back of the net.” Sid made this statement glassy eyed, adoringly.

 

We all sat silently then, reviewing the match; our eyes were open with blank stares as the rain ran down the outside of the windows. As we stared through them, we were seeing the footie earlier that day at Old Trafford superimposed on them, mentally lost in the visions of the game. We were brought back to the present moment with another raging outburst from Terry.

 

“Where the fuck is that twatting bastard with our gear?” he said, just as the waitress arrived at our table. She up picked the round imitation-tomato plastic ketchup ‘bottle’ and gave it a wipe, ignoring the abrasive swearing.

 

“Two coffees and one hot chocolate please,” we said in a chorus. Terry pretended to spray her with machine gun bullets from an imaginary Elliot Ness-style machine gun and shouted, “Al Capone’s Guns Don’t HHHArgue…..” trying to imitate Prince Buster. Then he started singing “Dum Dum Dum Dum Da Da Da Da,” clicking his fingers, swinging around on his seat.

 

“The fucker’s totally blocked,” said Sid.

 

Terry shouted, “Joke,” and proceeded to tell it without pausing: “A Chinese couple get divorced. She goes back to Peking… he goes back to WAN - KING… do you get it?”

 

Sid ignored Terry’s antics, and began to give me an explanation about their missing gear:

 

“We got 400 Green and Clears from your friend Angelo,” he said, putting a menacing tone on the word ‘friend’. After slightly stuttering a bit, he carried on.  “And we swapped them for cash in the bogs at the back of the Stretford End. He’s training to be the shop manager in a pharmacists. It’s great gear, and straight out the bottle, so to speak.”

 

After a pause, he frowned. “Funny name that, ‘Angelo’. He comes from Middleton, from a long line of Italian Ice-cream makers. There’s an Ice cream shop there in the woods, Alkrington Woods. Dave, you know him don’t you? Wasn’t he one of your cycling mates from years back?”

 

“Maybe,” I said, “Does he wear a green Tonic Mohair with a 23-inch centre vent?” I was purposely forgetting to tell them that I went to school with Angelo.

 

“That’s him,” retorted Sid, with a look that I took to mean he wasn’t having any of my vague reply.

 

“So why are you saying he’s got your stash?” I asked.

 

This seemed to upset Sid no end and he answered with an increased stutter: “B-b-b-because…. because, because…fucking because, we gave him most of it back again for safe keeping, to bring it here tonight. So right now at this very moment in time he has our gear and, and, and our cash.”

 

He stuttered again and then went on in a tirade. “That bastard Sergeant, what’s his fucking name? …Oh yeah, fucking Plummer – he’s after us, he frisks us on sight these days… so we took what we needed at the match. Then gave him, Angelo, back the rest and, and,” – Sid began stuttering once more – “A-a-a-and our fucking cash, for safe keeping!  He said he would meet us here half an hour ago, fucking bastarding rain. It took ages to get here and now we’re soaked and fucking frozen.”

 

“And late,” said Terry, stating the obvious.