Read Wild Boy for Free Online

the rules, and make up your own rules as you go along. It allows you to thrash the hell out of a guitar and use up all your energy and frustration. The first band I was in as a young teenager was called the Haze. As I got older I started going to concerts at Newcastle City Hall and Newcastle Mayfair Ballroom on a Friday night. We’d catch a bus there along the coastal road, but we often ended up having to walk home at the end of the evening because we’d blown all our money on beer.
    Virtually every act on the planet played in Newcastle over that period—David Bowie, Roxy Music, and all the great metal bands like AC/DC and Van Halen. Concert tickets cost about 75p or £1 in those days, so I got a milk round to pay for them. I worked six mornings a week, and I had to be up at 5 a.m. in all weather, but fortunately my family had a large supply of old fishing clothes that I could wear. The milkman had big Eric Morecambe–style glasses, and he nicknamed me Elvis because I was so mad about rock and roll. Every day he would greet me by saying, “Morning, Elvis—made any progress yet?” It was tough work, but it meant I could go to two or three gigs a week and also afford to keep up the payments on a new electric guitar I’d bought.
    I was fifteen when I saw my mother again for the first time since she’d left us. I had a cousin on my mother’s side of the family whom I used to see out and about around town, and occasionally we’d stop and chat. One day he told me one of my aunts on his side of the family, who lived down South, was having a sixtieth birthday party at the same time that an uncle was due to retire. They were planning a joint celebration in Kent. I thought, great, a trip to London!
    I was starting to get inquisitive about my mum, and something inside of me just wanted to go to the party. I suppose it was curiosity. The only problem was my dad, as I didn’t want to upset or hurt him. He’d moved on by now; he was a good-looking bloke and he was having a great time, having met a new partner named Sandra. But even so, I didn’t think he’d be very agreeable to opening up old wounds, so I told him a bit of a story about going to see a band and I went down on the train. I thought it would be nice to see all the other members of the family whom I hadn’t seen for so long, but of course inside I was a bit apprehensive about seeing my mother. By now, I was a teenager in a band, with a regular girlfriend, and I was confident about what I wanted to do. But the last time I had seen her I was an eleven-year-old schoolboy, and a bit of that child was still within me.
    When it finally happened, it wasn’t a big emotional reunion like you might see in a movie. We didn’t throw our arms around each other and burst into tears. I just walked in and she was there and we said a polite hello. She was never very tactile, at least not with me, and we didn’t cuddle and we certainly didn’t discuss anything about what had happened. We just spoke about trivia—I can’t even remember what, but I know that it was completely nonemotional. I suppose in some ways we’d become strangers and it was very sad, but at least we were both at a stage where we could move on. I don’t blame her, but when I looked back at it as I got older, the one thing that stood out as thoughtless was her timing. She was never there to support us through certain achievements, and I’d wonder why she chose such a significant day to leave. You couldn’t pick a worse day to do it to a kid.
    We tried to keep in touch as the years went by, but it was very difficult because she never gave me an explanation for what happened. Years later, after I got married, my wife, Tracey, contacted her and urged her to explain things but my mother just wouldn’t do it. She was proud of what I later achieved in Duran Duran but she did not throw any real light on what happened. I daresay it has left me with a few scars, and to this day I don’t like saying good-bye to