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from the Post Office. We used to call it the Streak because when we were coming back from gigs late at night we used to streak it up against a parked car and the red paint would come off. It was a pretty dangerous game, not to mention illegal, but at the time we didn’t care.
    MY guitar playing was going from strength to strength, and I managed to win a contract with a covers band to play a series of gigs at military bases in Germany. Looking back, it was another really important break in a formative sense, because it meant we had to learn a huge repertoire. It was also in Germany that I really learned how to party!
    By now it was 1979. Maggie Thatcher had just become prime minister, the cold war was at its height, and Germany was stacked to the rafters with American troops. The country had been heavily militarized ever since World War II, and the whole place had to be prepared to go to war again at any minute, this time against the Russians. My dad had done his National Service there when he was eighteen, so he could relate to it, and he taught me a few phrases before we loaded up the Streak and headed off to the ferry down to mainland Europe.
    The biggest base we played at was Ramstein Air Base, near Frankfurt. The sheer scale of it was staggering; it was like a small city in its own right. They would drive us around it and we’d see missile transporters and endless rows of fighter planes. To an eighteen-year-old from near Newcastle, the American culture was like a whole new world. Back in England all we had were Wimpy Bars, but on the base they had a vast array of American catering. Believe it or not, short-order food like hamburgers seemed very exotic at the time. You could eat as much as you wanted, and there were delicious things to try like pumpkin pie. The military was superorganized, but when you arrived at the base all you had to do was show your passport so they could check it briefly, and then they would give you a pass for the month. Terrorism was a threat even then, what with the IRA and the Baader-Meinhof supporters, but somehow the security didn’t seem to reflect that—I suppose they were more worried about the Russians.
    We obviously had to play things that would appeal to an American audience, so we’d do covers of numbers by Stevie Wonder and Aerosmith. I also used to play a fifteen-minute solo of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” and all the GIs would go nuts. If you got them going they would be really noisy on a Friday and a Saturday night, so the colonels who ran all the shows would sometimes intervene.
    “Don’t play that, don’t whip them up. They got too drunk last night,” they’d warn us.
    We’d often be told off if we went too far, especially if we did too much AC/DC. I used to put on a kilt and do an Angus Young impression until they eventually banned us from doing it—because it caused too much of a frenzy! If we played in the officer’s mess we had to be a bit more reserved and maybe do some jazz or something smooth, but it had to have an American flavor, so we’d also do the Eagles. I started to sing a bit, too, and I was sharing lead vocals in the band, so I had to learn all the great American songs and harmonies.
    The Americans themselves were fantastic, because they were so open and confident. I had come from an area that was depressed at the time and falling apart by comparison, and then suddenly I was eating and drinking with the American military, who are the most confident bunch of people you are ever going to meet. They were all massively interested in me because I was still so young and no one does anything before they are twenty-one in America, unless they’re in the military.
    So I met a lot of people who were the same age as me. They’d sit there and hold out a joint and ask me, “Have you ever smoked one of these?” They’d get high on American weed on the weekend and have big parties in the barracks. It was a real eye-opener, like something out of
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