As Pat, Matt and I left the Pogues concert, the bouncers were waiting to beat us up. I was exhausted from dancing, and my feet were aching like hell from when I'd lost my shoes. And now the familiar Guinness hangover was approaching, too.

The barman stepped out of the shadows, suddenly pointing at Matt.

"You made your mistake when you smiled at me! Arsehole ...

******

Lying on my bed one night in 1983 I was torn from my slumbers by an amazing song on Radio One.

"Then the winter came down and I loved it so dearly 

The pubs and the bookies where you'd spend all your time

And the old men that were singing

"When The Roses Bloom Again"

And turn like the leaves

To a new summertime."

John Peel was playing a song by a new band. I sat excitedly waiting for him to name them. The song was obviously called The Dark Streets of London, and it somehow combined the irreverence of punk with a rollicking Irish sensibility.

"This is it!" I said out loud, surprising myself. The lead singer sounded very familiar but I couldn't put my finger on his name.

"That was indeed the debut single from Pogue Mahone," said Peel. "You may recall Shane from The Nips a few years ago ..."

The next day I went into David's Records at lunchtime and bought the record.

As I played the Pogue Mahone single obsessively in my room that month, I fancied I was tapping into my Irish roots. So what if the O'Donovans had left County Cork many generations past - I surmised it was my heritage that explained my sudden love for this music.

*****

The first time I saw the Pogues was in the grand ballroom of the Hammersmith Palais, supporting Elvis Costello. The old dance hall was so jammed full of London hipsters that I could only find space up in the balcony. First on stage were The Men They Couldn't Hang who acquitted themselves admirably; I made a mental note to search for their records.

Next came the band I had been waiting to see. They were now known simply as The Pogues. They lurched into a set of songs that left me breathless. I had rarely come across a band who instantly tapped into my psyche so viscerally and emotionally. Trapped on the balcony I could only wish to be a part of the roiling mass of humanity in front of the stage.

******

In St Joseph's playground back in the day I had always hung out with the Irish kids at break time. Fergie, Bartley Joyce, Mark, Dougie and me would chat away whilst the other kids played their games. Although an Eastender myself, listening enviously to my friends' stories of the old country I formed a bond with them that was hard to explain at that tender age. One day Fergie's young cousin showed up on the scene - a little urchin from Kilkenny, all scruffy hair and home-knitted school sweaters - but Patrick was too young then to join our gang. Ten years later, though, I was taking my copy of the Pogues' debut album "Red Roses For Me" to the flat he shared with his cousin Jim Wise. I'd had a skinful of Stella at nearby South Hill Park and was dying to share the record with my friend. A few songs into the L.P., Pat, anarchic cynic that he was, cracked a huge smile.

"Feck me, Pete! Someone's finally got it right!"

Many nights thereafter were spent dancing to the Pogues in the tiny flat in Evedon. If we had already been drinking Pat and I would accompany The Battle of Brisbane with some head percussion, courtesy of a beer tray we had 'borrowed' from South Hill Park. The hangover the next day was nicely augmented by the blows from the dented beer tray.

******

In July of 1985 I lost Pat, Matt and the gang amongst the vast crowds in Battersea Park. We were at a G.L.C. free concert. I didn't worry because I knew where I would find the boys later. Meanwhile I soaked up the musical talent on offer that afternoon. I preferred the smaller stages where the likes of Wreckless Eric and The Three Johns ruled the roost. The mighty sounds of Aswad's Warrior Charge, their encore, drifted over from the main stage and I headed back, as The Pogues were up next.

I slowly threaded my way through the hordes, one 'scuse-me-mate at a time, until finally I was at the front of the stage just before The Pogues came on. I was enveloped in sweaty, beery hugs from Pat and Matt and we were on our way. We danced on the grass until our limbs ached and our shoes were on their last legs.

The September of the same year I vaulted down the stairs at home singing Sally MacLennane at the top of my voice.

"Sounds like an old Irish song," said our dad at the tea table.

"Actually, it's a new one Shane wrote for the latest album."

We were all off to the Hexagon in Reading, the Bracknell Pogues contingent filling a whole train carriage. Somehow that night I managed to scrape together enough money to buy a tee-shirt that quoted from "The Boys from the County Hell", proclaiming:

"Lend me ten pounds and I'll buy you a drink".

I wore that shirt throughout my travels in the States the following year and it never failed to elicit comments. The worn-out tee-shirt was finally retired years later when thousands of washes had faded the slogan and the cotton resembled tissue paper!

*******

In December, Pat, Matt and I were drinking in the bar at Reading University. The night's concert was a few hours away and Shane, Spider and a few of the other Pogues were at the next table. We got to bantering with them and told them of their shows we had seen that year.

While the other blokes in the band were on beer and whisky, Shane was coughing and spluttering over what appeared to be a glass of wine cooler.

"You really drinking wine coolers, Shane?" I said.

Shane made an inarticulate phlegmy sound and shook his head in shame.

"Aaaargh ... fecking doctor says me stomach is disintegrating and I got to stay off the hard stuff for a while."

"That right? How long is a while, then?" 

"One night, as far as I'm concerned ... these fecking doctors are killing me!"

Shane wheezed out a laugh which resembled that of Dick Dastardly's dog Muttley!

Later that night as the show approached, the bar was filled to capacity, and Pat explained his cunning plan to get free Guinness for us all.

"Victimless crime, innit?" said Matt, when he'd finished.

"Well, I don't know ..."

"Aargh, gerraway with yer, Pete! You big jessie!"

Shortly afterwards, the plan was put into practice: we picked our way to the bar and Pat ordered seven pints of stout. Carefully, he passed the first four pints back through the throng to me and Matt. Once Pat had pints numbers five and six, the three of us melted into the crowd with our ill-gotten Guinness while the unsuspecting barman was lovingly pouring the seventh. After all, a Guinness can't be rushed!

When we had downed the pints it was Matt's turn; he found a different barman and repeated the order.

Luckily for me the Pogues were about to hit the stage when it was my turn to go the the bar and order. I was a big jessie indeed, I decided.

******

Three years later, I was propping the bar up in the Orpheum in Boston waiting for the Pogues to hit the stage. My life had changed immensely in the intervening years and I was now a married man living in the States. I hovered on the edge of the crowd wondering whether I was too old to join the dancing mass.

Shane had changed too in recent years. He was very much the worse for wear, slurring his words and leaning on the microphone stand for support. Joe Strummer from The Clash was with the band at the time, deputising for ailing guitarist Phil Chevron, sometimes sharing vocals and the stage front with Shane. 

I ventured into the maelstrom of dance and found it to be different to the friendly camaraderie of my youth, when a fallen dancer would quickly be pulled to his feet. Now it all seemed darker and a tad more violent, but the dance went on and The Pogues continued to play. For me, though, all seemed changed.

******

"I'm really sorry, mate!" said Matt.

We shifted nervously from foot to foot, anxious to leave Reading and get home to Bracknell.

"It was nothing personal ..." I ventured.

"Shut it, you!" said a bouncer.

The bouncers loomed menacingly in the darkened lobby of the venue. I wondered whether I would feel the pain after all the Guinness I had consumed that night. I hoped it would be a swift beating so we could soon be on our way. The glorious concert experience earlier was now becoming a distant memory.

I had lost both of my Doc Martens on the dance floor and so had climbed onto the apron of the stage to rest my aching feet.

When Shane had finished singing "A Pair of Brown Eyes" he looked to where I sat.

"What the feck you doing?"

"Lost me shoes, ain't I?"

I pointed at my socks.

"Look under the stage afterwards. That's where they always end up."

"Cheers, Shane mate!"

I found eleven shoes under the stage after the concert. Amazingly, two of them were mine. I held the others up and tossed them to their rightful owners.

The shoe episode seemed hours ago and bruised feet were the least of my worries now; I was concerned for my teeth and other, softer, bruisable parts of my anatomy.

However, after a seemingly interminable discussion with his pals, the barman turned to us and said: "Go on, get the feck out of here. And don't ever come back! Sling yer hook before I change me mind!"

We took him at his word and ran to Matt's car. Well, they ran, and I hobbled like an old man. It wasn't until we were safely out of Reading that the laughing began. By the time we got to the outskirts of Bracknell we were singing Pogues songs with happiness and relief at our narrow escape.

"I think I prefer A Pair of Brown Eyes to a pair of black ones!"  I said, getting out of Matt's car in Greenhow.

"Get out, yer big jessie!"

"You and your victimless crimes indeed!"

"Night, Pete!"

"Yeah cheers, Matt! Night, Pat mate!"

I climbed over the honeysuckled fence and was in through the back door. In the kitchen I glugged a pint of water to combat the alcohol and went up to bed. I needed sleep as I was working at the dole the following morning. My body ached, my ears rang and my head hurt but I was as happy as a boy from the County Hell.

"And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink

And mother wake me early in the morning!"

*****

"What's the point of Social Studies?" said Ken.

"What's the point of a formal education?" I replied.

We were climbing the stairs at the Birch Hill annexe of Easthampstead Park School. Whereas the original school was an ornate mansion this subsequent addition was a collection of prefabricated boxes.

"And look at that bloody mess!" said Ken.

He pointed to a modern-art print adorning the wall.

"That's Marcel Duchamp's bloody mess, mate," I explained.

"You what?"

"The painter is called Marcel Duchamp and the work is "Nude Ascending a Staircase."

"It's enough to put you off sex for life!"

"Well, that'll save you a lot of bother then, mate!"

"I don't get this modern art lark, Pete."

"Granted, Marcel was a bit of a joker, Ken mate. He once signed a urinal and called it Fountain."

"You taking the piss now, Pete?"

"No, straight up!"

We had arrived at the small theatre on the second floor.

"Double Social Studies! I mean, why do they bother?" said Dougie, joining us.

"No idea, Doug. Perhaps Mr Parr likes watching you twang rubber johnnies around the room in his sex-education classes?"

"Well, old Parr ain't here today, for your information. We're gonna see a film instead."

Shortly after we had settled into our seats in the small amphitheatre an unknown substitute teacher walked in.

"I'm Mr Drake and without further ado I shall put the film on. If there is time enough afterwards we shall discuss it."

"Bit posh, ain't he?" said Dougie.

The lights went down and a muffled girlish shriek was heard.

"Hands off, Dougie, you pervert!"

"Quiet, please!" said the mysterious Mr Drake.

The film began on the large screen and I sank into my seat. This beat some boring old Social Studies lesson by miles.

The film was Walkabout, directed by Nic Roeg. It opened with children in a classroom.

"This looks boring. Wish it was The Sting!" whispered Ken.

"Wassamatter, scared you might have to use your brain, moron?"

"Wow, Jenny Agutter's in it!" said Dougie.

"She got her knickers off in The Railway Children ... then put 'em back on in I Start Counting!"

"That was filmed in Bracknell, weren't it?" said Ken

"Yeah, Point Royal in Easthampstead."

"And in the town centre when they were building it!"

"Will you two shut up. I wanna watch this!"

"OK, well I'm having a kip," said Dougie. "Wake me up if she gets her drawers off again!"

The father in the film was driving his children into the Australian Outback, ostensibly for a picnic. He appeared to be deranged and seconds later was shooting at Jenny and her younger brother. They narrowly escaped into the orange terrain.

"Gordon Bennett! said Ken. "My old man just goes down the pub when he can't stand the sight of us!"

"Please belt up, Ken. I reckon this will be a good one, trust me, mate!"

Dougie was already gently snoring.

For the next hour and a half our class sat enthralled as the strange story unfolded on the screen. The children, now stranded, were discovered by a native youth who was on "walkabout", an Aboriginal rite of passage to self-sufficient manhood. Quite what this had to do with secondary education in small-town England, I had no idea,  but I allowed myself to slide into that place of suspended disbelief; our school had ceased to exist and I could almost feel the unforgiving sun upon my skin.

A startling scene occurred when the skilful native boy went hunting to provide food for the children, intercut as it was with a sensual swimming scene at a waterhole. A kangaroo was speared and a lizard impaled while Jenny's nude body twisted and turned through the distorting, rippling water.

I heard Ken sigh deeply beside me.

"Doug'll be well choked that he missed this, Pete!"

"Shush, will yer!"

I didn't want to be reminded that we were still in Bracknell; I needed the spell to continue and transport me somewhere far away.

I slipped further into my seat and back into the film. The whole class seemed to have been hypnotised. We were a group of teens who would normally have whooped with hilarity at the mere mention of a nipple. Now a spellbound silence prevailed. Our biology lesson on human reproduction had been delivered in a perfunctory style making the whole process akin to a mechanical chore like changing a car tyre.

Now we witnessed a scene of true sensual beauty; when Jenny Agutter swam naked it seemed like a completely natural thing to do and we were not all getting out of our prams about it!

But what the film really exposed was the lack of communication between the "civilised" white children and the aboriginal boy. I pondered on the idea that we can all be lost inside, unable to really express ourselves, no matter what the circumstances. Any teenage boy listening to the radio in his Bracknell bedroom was aware of the blocked nature of true feelings. I didn't need to go all the way to the Australian Outback to appreciate that essential truth.

The films at school were generally mind-numbing in their sensibilities. Laurence Olivier was great in Henry V, but sitting on the hard wooden floor watching in a seething mass of teenage humanity did tend to adversely affect the experience. Fred McMurray exhorting a bunch of scouts to "Follow Me, Boys" may have been viscerally exciting, but did it really speak to my soul? Did it nurture the lust for life and mysterious psychological adventure that I yearned for daily?

Walkabout, by contrast, was an almost hallucinogenic experience. Lit in incandescent colours, filled with unfathomable rites, the film attempted to address emotions too difficult to articulate in real, everyday life.

There were muffled sobs from some of the girls in our class when the aboriginal boy hanged himself, unable to convey his true feelings to the girl.

"Thank you, sir!" Ken said to Mr Drake as we left the room.

"Thanks very much! I'll never forget this, sir!" I added, not overstating my case.

"Wow ... what was that all about?" said Ken, in genuine awe, as we stepped into the lighted hall.

"I'm not entirely sure, but it was bloody brilliant!" I said.

"Don't know what all the fuss is about," said Dougie. "I mean, did she get her kit off or didn't she?"

"No, Doug mate," I said with a wink to Ken. "She kept her school uniform on for the whole film."

Doug walked away smiling.

"He's like a junior Benny Hill, ain't he, Ken?"

"Yeah, but the film was really good, Pete, wasn't it?"

"Ken, it was bloody marvelous, mate! We'll never see anything like that again!"

******

Neville Staple yelled:

“Blow, Mr Rico, blow!”

So Mr Rico Rodriguez blew his ancient trombone and we all danced dementedly, like jointless robots, when The Specials came to Bracknell.

Out of the blue a fight erupted in the crowd and an empty space fanned out on the dance floor. Seconds before, we had all been a seething crush of humanity and now some west London Skins had started trouble. Imagine the mentality of those who had traveled down from London to our town in the Berkshire countryside expressly to cause mayhem. The Specials were a band that united fans and now they had to deal with a bunch of neo-Nazis trying to divide us. 

The song came to an abrupt halt and some members of the band jumped into the crowd to take on the skinheads. Eventually order was restored as the bouncers herded the west- London contingent out of the exits.

"Thank God for that!" I said to Dave, "Jerry Dammers can't afford to lose any more teeth!"

Minutes later we were all jogging happily along to the Two-Tone beat.

“A message to you, Rudy!”

We gasped for breath and the hall sweated along with us, condensation streaming down its walls. Then the stage was invaded - peacefully, mind you - much to the bouncers' relief. There was my sister Jane, dancing alongside Terry Hall! Such, such were the joys when The Specials came to Bracknell.

Later we managed to sneak backstage courtesy of a bouncer friend, Jock, a veteran of "Wednesdays" nightclub. We discovered all was not well with the band. Factions had formed, and the soon-to-be Fun Boy Three were not having much fun. 

Not that Jane, John and I were worried because at that moment we were backstage with The Specials eating their food and drinking their beer!

So as not to outstay our welcome we didn't linger very long, but we especially enjoyed chatting to the genial John Bradbury, plus I had Jerry Dammers autograph a banana that I'd swiped from their fruit bowl.

"You're a nutcase, d'you know?" said the toothless wonder.

"But you're the one who signed it!" I reminded him.

I kept the signed banana in our freezer at home until it went black and the signature couldn't be read any more. To this day, whenever I smell an overripe banana it reminds me of the time The Specials came to Bracknell.

*****