Read Wild Boy for Free Online Page A

people, maybe because inside I fear I won’t see them again. But I don’t bear her any animosity. Why should I? In a way she did me a favor because all the trouble that had been going on before she left just went away. So that was it. Our meeting was over, and I got the train back to Newcastle and got on with my life.
    I’D had enough of school by now, and I didn’t bother staying around to take most of my exams. Looking back, school turned out to be one of the most negative experiences of my childhood. I may have had a lot of adult conversations with my dad, but when I tried to do the same with the teachers they would talk to me as if I was an idiot. I had a real taste for kicking authority by then, so I guess they just found me too hard to handle.
    I was playing a few pub gigs with my band but it wasn’t enough to make ends meet, so my dad got me a job on his building site. It was hard, physical work, but I was used to that from the milk round. Every morning we’d get the same bus together, and we’d try to arrange things so that we could work in the joiner’s shop, because that was a slightly easier shift than on the main site. The building trade is a tough knockabout business, and there were plenty of would-be comedians working on the site who loved nothing more than to wind up the foreman’s son! But overall it was good fun. I didn’t even have to go for an interview, because my dad was held in such high regard by his employers. Most of the time we were treated very well, but I was really just filling time. Rock and roll was what I really wanted to do.
    I’d been working on the site for about six months when I got my first big break. One of my neighbors, who lived across the road from us, was a guitar player named Dave Black. He had played in all the workingmen’s clubs and had a band called Goldie, who were very successful locally and who later had a hit with a song called “Making Up Again.” Dave had given me about half a dozen guitar lessons when I was in my early teens, and I used to go and watch him play quite regularly. Anyway, one day he came to see me and said he knew someone who was looking for a guitar player in a band.
    “They are very professional, and you’ll be expected to play everything that they ask you to,” he warned me.
    I couldn’t wait to give them a call, and so I played a few numbers to them and that was it, I was in. So I was sixteen and a half, I’d spent a few months “on the buildings”—and then I was suddenly on £35 a week in a band, and from that point on I never did anything different. The money was double what I’d been getting on the site, and I was doing the one thing I loved in life more than anything else. We were called the Gigolos, and we used to play all over the North East, touring up and down the motorway, doing covers of other people’s songs.
    We used to play in the workingmen’s clubs a lot, and every Sunday afternoon they used to put on strippers. They paraded in front of a men-only audience, who all wore flat caps and pretended to be disinterested and read their papers. The lady would come on, and if you were in the group backing her you would have to play something like “Devil Woman” by Cliff Richard. The strangest act was in Sunderland, where in one of the clubs the lunchtime highlight on Sunday was a fire-eating stripper with the glorious stage name of Singed Minge. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
    The Gigolos were a new wave band and we performed our own songs. At one point we even secured a deal with A&M to cut a single called “Teenage Girls,” but it wasn’t a hit. The lineup of the band and the name would change from time to time, but I’d nearly always find myself on the road in a transit van of some shape or description, and I lost count of how many times I slept in one. Later on, when I was in another band we had a van that we called the Streak, which was painted red with some paint we’d managed to get on the cheap