I sat with a two-litre bottle of cider in one hand and a roll-up in the other, watching the video screen in my landlord Steve's living room. Roger Maynard, then a news presenter at BBC East in Norwich, was interviewing a young man. The young man, in his twenties, was dressed almost entirely in black, his thin face appearing more gaunt for a surfeit of smeared mascara. He lurched uneasily in his seat as he fielded the interviewer's questions. Did he think, asked Roger Maynard,

July 1979 - age 26 - a small residency on an American Air Base Having lost my home and my girlfriend, then rejected the idea of going to university, I was in a pretty nihilistic frame of mind. First, though, there were a number of gig obligations to complete. One problem which we faced was the financial hangover from our ill-fated EP Yaaah! from the previous summer.  Quite apart from the fact that in my mind at least, the NME had publicly laughed it out of town, we'd not even