Bombed Out!

This is a gritty, earthy and expletive-littered Punk Coming of Age book, about my time growing up playing in Liverpool New Wave bands and hanging around Erics Club and Liverpool City Centre in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and what came afterwards.

During that remarkable musical period bands such as Dead or Alive, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Elvis Costello, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, A flock of Seagulls, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Wah! Heat, Pink Military Stand Alone and many other bands were born or nurtured in Erics Club on Mathew Street in Liverpool.

The book details my time playing bass in Pink Military Stand Alone, and with Pete Burns in Nightmares in Wax, which morphed into Dead or Alive, and the years I spent working in, going to and playing at Erics, living my life as part of Liverpools vibrant 1980s music scene.

After my band period finished, Margaret Thatchers economic policies and the 1980s recession flattened Liverpool, and I wound up on the dole, with few qualifications, no aptitude to study and with no prospects of a proper job.

Using my penniless experience of being in the bands, and a new-found confidence and determination that Punk and my time in the music business had bestowed on me, I embarked on a tough journey in an attempt to turn my life around.

This book tells what happened.