I was standing on my chair at the front of the class when I had the opposite of a religious experience. Sister Bridget made me do this every Monday morning, when she glided from class to class seeking out the slackers. I was convinced nuns were on castors. Like armchairs. Or Daleks. It’s an image I’ve never quite dispelled.
The headmistress’s opening line never varied. ‘Stand up those of you who did not take Communion yesterday.’
No point attempting to conceal the truth: nuns, like God himself, were omniscient. They had spies everywhere.
‘And those amongst you who failed to attend Mass – stand on your chairs.’
That’s me, folks. Usually there were one or two others; a little group of miniature dissenters, but on this occasion I was alone, the sole recipient of the weekly dose of humiliation. Which probably prompted my second sin. I raised my head, looked around me at the other ten-year-old Original Sinners with their mass-attending bums glued to their seats, and realised that they were all staring at me. There was awe, admiration, and maybe a touch of fear in their eyes. I was elevated above them; I was different; set apart. I smiled, basking in the glorious adulation.
I loved it. I fucking loved it.

1. ROOTED

MAY 1998
I was born in this house, in the cavernous main bedroom overlooking a half-acre tangle of garden, with fields, meadows and woodlands rolling away to the horizon. I lived here until November 1969, a month before my seventeenth birthday, and left very suddenly, with no thought in my head but to get away. Not from the house, nor the overbearing landlord who was forever threatening to demolish it; nor from its rural isolation. I was escaping what lurked inside. It took much longer to escape what lurked inside me.
The house is in the middle of a row of three; a huge, double-fronted, child’s drawing of a house, dwarfing the neighbouring properties which form its wings. Sweet irony - I own all three now. Not that I live here, or even draw rent from the three couples who do. They’re all family, and I can well afford to indulge them, to allow them to live out their lives in this hallowed and haunted spot.
Haunted? Don’t run away. This isn’t a ghost story, although I’ll be relating one or two strange events along the way. Maybe it’s just me who’s haunted. My mother’s family lived in this house for generations, labouring on the estate farms, or in the mines, or doing domestic work in the manor house. When I was a kid you could feel those ancestors eddying through the damp air. They’re still here, although their presence is less palpable in the modernised comfort of the desirable residence my money has made it.
It’s hard to imagine what it was like when I lived here, but if I half-close my eyes I can still see it. Stone-flagged floors, coal fires and paraffin heaters; walls, ceilings and door-frames sagging and leaning as the house sank slowly into forgotten mine-workings below. Post-war Utility furniture scattered amongst genuine but daily used and abused antiques. Damp crept up the walls, peeled the rose-patterned wallpaper. Its musty odour made me a snuffly child with a permanent cough. God knows how I ever became a singer; or maybe I have the damp to thank for the gravelly edge to my voice I can conjure up at will. We didn’t have a fridge, any more than we had an inside toilet or a bathroom. We washed in the kitchen, or in the tin bath dragged into the middle of the living room.
I never found it odd. Even when I started school a couple of miles away and came in contact with kids who lived in neat terraces and council houses, with bathrooms and hot water and carpets, I didn’t consider myself underprivileged. Just the opposite. They didn’t have fields to run through, woods to hide in, streams to dam. I lived in paradise, but there was a price to pay for an idyllic childhood.

Why am I here, alone, contemplating my past? My mother Maria, who lives here with my stepfather John Tranter, would spontaneously combust if she knew. With John’s co-operation we arranged a holiday for them. Not that Maria knows I had anything to do with it, or she’d have refused to go. They’re staying in my stepbrother Martin’s villa in Tenerife, with Eddie and Doreen, one set of next-door-neighbours, for company. My villa is just across the swimming pool from Martin’s, but Maria wouldn’t stay in that. The other three villas on that complex belong to the rest of the seven-piece band the world knows as No Mystics. At the moment they are all occupied by parents, brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces of the five men and two women who have become, much to our own bewilderment, multi-millionaires; instantly recognisable figures who can’t walk down the street without being stared at.
Around here, in the village of Pewfall, in the neighbouring towns of Haydock and Ashton, and even further out in St Helens and Wigan, Liverpool and Manchester, we are mostly studiously ignored. We are locals, after all. Most of the band still live round here, although I moved further away, to even greater silence and isolation, in a Cheshire farmhouse half a mile from Eric Smith’s racehorse training yard, where I worked, happily and long ago, as a teenage work-rider.
Yet I still haven’t told you why I’m here; why I went to so much trouble to get my mother out of the way for a week or so. Our record company boss, Russ Richardson, was contacted several weeks ago by a certain Tony Morris, a music journalist who has followed the band faithfully since he witnessed our first professional performance at the Marquee Club, London, in February 1971. He tentatively suggested that he be allowed to write an authorised biography of me and the band. Me, specifically, because I’m the frontman, the lead vocalist; the enigmatic one, or so I’m told. The one who, despite a distinct lack of height, good looks and leather trousers, is considered a sex-symbol. Russ passed on the request expecting my usual emphatic no. He was amazed when I agreed to Tony’s proposal.
There are scores of unauthorised books about the band, none of which come even close to the truth. None of those authors could penetrate further back than the day I left Pewfall and moved to John Tranter’s Haydock council house. Frith Griffith, they think, grew up in that council house, under the calm and kind influence of his mother’s second husband John. All wrong. My mother didn’t move in until I did, and she didn’t marry John until 1979. In fact, I was only there two months before I moved on and began work at Eric’s. Then there’s the album covers. Even now I don’t look much like the airbrushed, expertly photographed rock icon whose image adorns our wares – although the trademark deep blue stare is real enough – but who the hell was that cadaverous excuse for a man exhibited on our early work? I was a junkie, they reckon. Bollocks. I’ve done a few drugs in my time, but I’ve never touched that particular poison. I was my problem, not drugs.
Tony Morris knows all this; I told him, twenty years ago. I also threatened to break his face if he published any of it. I suppose I feel guilty about that threat, because he kept his promise. He’ll be here soon, with his suitcase and laptop and tape recorder. He thinks we’re staying here so he can interview me in a place which evokes my childhood memories and nightmares. It was his idea, actually.
He’s thinking conventional biography: born eight-twelve-fifty-two, Pewfall, Lancashire; Catholic primary followed by secular grammar school. That’s not the way it’s going to be. His job is to tidy up and edit my memories; I’m a songwriter, after all, not a writer of prose. And someone, perhaps him, perhaps our bass player Brian Isherwood, is going to turn the surreal reality of my life into an almost fictional account. A truthful fictional account. I’ve already read some of the book he is coming here to write. I always wondered who would write it, but now it makes sense. A collaboration between me, my most philosophical friend Brian, and our oldest fan Tony Morris, the man who, twenty-three years ago, unwittingly saved my life.

Tony arrives at the back door; his car is parked on the wide drive which used to be our yard, next to the dark green MX5 I’ve just collected from the showroom. He looks at it, no doubt thinking that classy car it may be, but somewhat downmarket for a man of my means. Actually, it isn’t mine. It’s a present for someone with a birthday at the end of May. Extravagant, but I can afford it. That said, I’ve never really got used to being wealthy, and at times it makes me feel uneasy, not to say guilty, when I’m with my less fortunate friends. Not that I’d go back to being poor; as I recall it, that wasn’t a bundle of laughs, either.
I lead Tony through the kitchen and up the stairs, where he dumps his bags in the room I’ve prepared for him. All the while he is looking around him, taking in his surroundings, studying me surreptitiously. He hasn’t seen me for a few years; not close up, anyway. He thinks he knows me quite well, but there are things he hasn’t a clue about. The main one being - well, I’ve set up a surprise for him, but he won’t find out about it until we move out of my mother’s house and go to my own home. He is looking, I think, for signs of ageing; silver hairs amongst the red, deep lines around my eyes. He doesn’t find them, I hope. I’m remarkably well preserved for one whose body has been abused both by myself and by others.
I collect my laptop from the living room and set it up on the kitchen table. Tony is amazed that I can use a computer. Someone, Martin I think it was, once called me Mr Technophobe. I played keyboards back then as well as lead vocals. I was a keyboard player who refused to learn how to use a synthesiser. Tony seems a bit put out that I’ve started without him, but he settles down at the table to read what I’ve written, while I make coffee and roll a joint.
He looks up at me and smiles when he’s finished. ‘Shouldn’t that read “longest-serving fan?” I can’t be No Mystics’ “oldest” fan; I’m only forty-seven.’
‘You read that into it, not me,’ I reply, flicking open my Zippo to light the joint. He looks at the screen again, frowning as he reads more closely. He’s remembering that day in 1975 when he saved my life. He was working for one of the music weeklies at the time. His favourite band, No Mystics, had gone strangely quiet following a successful tour. We’d recently broken out of cult-band obscurity and we needed publicity to avoid sliding back. But requests for interviews went unanswered. His journalistic curiosity burning, he took matters into his own hands and knocked on the door of my Portobello Road flat. After a while, the door opened and Tony’s jaw dropped. Frith Griffith, the short but well-muscled ex-stable-lad, had turned into a walking skeleton. For a moment he was speechless, then professionalism won the day.
‘I, er, wondered if we could arrange an interview?’
‘No.’
‘But what about the band? What’s happening?’
‘Ask them. I’m not in it any more.’
Shit, an exclusive! Frith Griffith had left No Mystics! But it gave him no pleasure to be the first to hear it, and my appearance worried him deeply. Rather than rush back to the office to publish his snippet of information, Tony phoned Russ Richardson, who was in Manchester in his shiny new office in the recently extended and refurbished studio complex financed by our success. Russ was too busy, and too furious at me for putting his expansion plans at risk, to do anything himself. But soon our road manager, Joe Barnaby, was breaking the speed limit on the M6.

Tony’s eyes refocus as he looks up. ‘What do you mean, you’ve already read the book I’m here to write?’
‘We’ll get to that,’ I tell him. ‘You know, that day you knocked on my door, I could quite cheerfully have strangled you. I didn’t want to live. I didn’t want to commit suicide, either - maybe my Catholic upbringing made me think starving myself to death wasn’t really killing myself; it’d just sort of happen naturally. Anyway, after you alerted Russ they all descended on me. Martin was busy having his own nervous breakdown. All of a sudden the flat was full of people, then everything went black. The next thing I knew I was waking up in hospital.’