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Years on, there is no one left for whom Billy is ‘ours’, and the only flowers frequently left at his grave are from me.
    The magical properties of recorded noise had trapped me from 1965 onwards. Song made a difference to everything, and permitted expressions that otherwise had no way through. The Paul Marsh record shop on Alexandra Road had been my Eton, a temple of Holy Scriptures and evangelical hope. Nothing else could be worth knowing, and the whole world fell away as I surrendered to the words on the page and the voice that sang. Paul Marsh is a small shop with exposed wooden floorboards; pop singles lodged upright in pigeon-holes behind the counter and LPs conveniently racked for small boys to study in occultish ways. Record Song Book is an expensive magazine that prints the lyrics of famous or bubbling songs of the month, and I practice with invented melodies on the songs that I haven’t heard. It is only the singing voice, I decide, that tells us how things became how they are, and You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’ by the Righteous Brothers had led me to the light. In this duet between Bill and Bobby, the language of despair becomes beautiful, and the final forty-five seconds hit such call-and-respond excitement that I am now in danger of feeling too much. Bobby’s rooftop falsetto is the fire in the belly, whilst Bill’s deep-chested leveling is the full invasion. Suddenly everything else in life is in question. From yesteryear I discover Good timin’ by Jimmy Jones, and I am beginning to feel something that no one else has brought to my attention. Tony Orlando’s surfs-up voice leaps on Bless you , and I am spirited away watching and watching as these discs spin, calling up to me. How is the voice imprinted on the cheap plastic? Paul Marsh is revelation and prophecy, and every effort is made to evoke enough pity from anyone with cash to take me along Alexandra Road and to pause at this temple. My very first disc had been Come and stay w ith me by Marianne Faithfull, acquired after howls of insistence from beneath the kitchen table. The howls worked and my parents gave in, and the five-and-six eased my soul like God could only know. Top of the Pops began its life in Manchester, and although we are not easily intimidated we allow Top of the Pops to tell us where it’s at. All human activity is fruitless when pitted against the girls and boys singing on pop television, for they have found the answer as the rest of us search for the question. I will sing, too. If not, I will have to die. But again and again it is the sight of the Righteous Brothers singing You’ve lost t hat lovin’ feelin’ (to each other?), gazing into their own separate distances. I cherish each glimpse that television allows – so unrepeatable, and God forbid that anyone should talk too loudly or meddle with the sound. Yes, there he goes again – Cherub Bobby swooping up into a female scream, and visual art unravels before me. At a crofted fairground on Stretford Road the sights and sounds and smells are alive with harm and hellborn pleasures. I catch sight of Margaret, who is in my class at St Wilfrid’s and who has a red birth mark on her right cheek, and I wave a wave that she returns, but the brimstoned boy that she is with rockets towards me and lands me an upper-cut so fierce that I am unable to see for a full minute. When my senses return, I am voluntarily rescued by Billy O’Shea, who is also from my class and who whomps the boy with a swing that I am assumed unable to deliver. Smiling Billy returns this duty some weeks later at school when I find myself singled out for a ferocious whack in the yard. As a blow lands, I fall, and from nowhere Billy O’Shea shazzams and rips the head off the ass-backwards assailant. And the world turns.
    Before leaving for America, Mary had once again escorted me to Paul Marsh, where I had chosen Rainbow valley by the Love Affair, a group led by impish Steve Ellis, who has a mannish