Having seen and experienced the results of street speed/whizz and amphetamines I am doubtful that it could have sustained and fuelled an underground dance scene. A very nasty drug IMCO, third in the line down from meta-amphetamine and H.

Yuca is also right in one of his posts, taking drugs was not sociable acceptable, or at least to be admitted too, in the UK at least until the very late 1980s. By the mid-1990s people would openly tell you they would be taking E and cocaine - I'm talking about the middle aged lower middle class.

I think before this, people recognized that even getting caught with cannabis would destroy any chance of career/work.

Here's the text of an interview I did with Chris Brick, who talked of his life on the soul scene. Chris was a very engaging character. Some of you may know him as the man behind Demob clothes in the 1980s or as an artist and entrepreneur in New York subsequently.

“Let’s go back to the beginning of this. In the sixties I lived in a little village over there caller Abercanaid. There was a famous person who came from that village. Petula Clark. She used to come back and visit in a Rolls Royce. All us kids would see her and think “My God! Petula Clark!”

I lived about a mile outside the village on a canal bank in a house with no heating. A rural terraced house. It was bleak. My father was a drunk so we really didn’t have a lot of food or money ’cause he was drinking it. He was also a fighter of a kind. The fun I had was collecting garbage and making go‑karts out of old prams and stuff.

I lived out there and it was very bleak. I’d been in hospital with a hip disease and then got out. I didn’t have any nice clothes or proper shoes. I only had Wellingtons. I was frowned upon because I was dirty. My mother married three different men and had children with all of them. My mother’s first husband was gay and it was the fifties. She didn’t actually marry my father, but I was born in Brixton. I moved down to Wales when I was about six. She married again and this was my step-father who was the drunk.

It was a really hard childhood. I spent a lot of my childhood alone, up on the hills catching horses. I learnt how to kill a chicken and how to be hands-on with certain things.

I also did a lot of begging around the doors and the local community took care of me. I was always around selling flowers and things. Between all those old women they kind of took care of me.

A boy came to visit the village from Coventry on a scooter. It was a mind-blowing experience. The panels were coppered. His name was Vaughan, but his Mod Name was Flake. He was a full-on mod. I don’t know why he came there, but he took me on the back of his scooter for a ride and I was totally blown away by this guy. He had a demon on the back of his parka.

After he left I had nothing on my mind except this boy Flake from Coventry. I watched Top Of The Pops and saw Steve Ellis and Love Affair, The Small Faces. Mod groups. That’s what I wanted. I must have been ten or eleven. I wanted something better. I tried to imitate different people. Not long after that I got a scooter. A Lambretta LI 150. I’d ride it up the canal bank. There was a girl in school I liked. She was a bit of a mod girl but she had a boyfriend who was like a bigger mod. That was the direction I was going in. But I didn’t know how far I was going to go into it. Only that I was going to go.

In that town there were not many mods. Merthyr Tydfil looked like a hippie town, but they weren’t really hippies. They were hard men with long hair and denims. They were tough guys. But there were things going on there that affected me. One of the things going on was that there were a group of people living up on those hills there making Acid. That acid was getting down into Merthyr Tydfil. You could get it in the pubs. They were all caught. Operation Julie. They were all given twenty years. There was a scientist involved. There were all kinds of people involved.

I sampled that acid as a young kid. I sampled it. It was so not like any other thing you’d ever taken in your life. For a start it cost five shillings. You could get two for ten shillings. It lasted for twenty four hours. Me and the other kids would go up to the hippie pub, hang around the back door and say “Can we have some acid?” Give them the ten shillings and we’re away. Up onto the hill and took the acid.

On this one occasion I can remember this one person telling me “After you take this you’re going to disappear.” I’m like “Okay. Let’s go.” We’re up the mountain and taking the acid and nothing happened immediately. It took a few hours. But after a while, a bit of you would go. Your hand would go. You’d look at the other person and a bit of them would go. Until, there was nobody there. Only their tongues. You saw them as a tongue and they saw you as a tongue. That was the kind of strength of the acid they were making. Disappearing acid. To this day, and I knew that I was going to go into a lot of things—a lot of things were going to happen to me—nothing’s been as weird as that.

I started off base really weird with those guys in Merthyr Tydfil. So then I went to London on a school trip. This must have been about 1968 and they took us to Battersea funfair and there were skinheads there. I could not believe it—that was it—once I saw those guys I knew that was going to be me. Once I got home I went to the local barber and got all my hair cut off.

The reason I’m telling you this is because I want everyone to understand that I was this dirty kid in wellington boots who used to beg around doors. I was all of that and more, but once I got this clean look I became somebody else. I elevated myself. I became elevated. It elevated me.

If there’s someone on the Northern Soul scene that was not either a mod or a skinhead before they became a soul person then they’ve sneaked in the back door. Because in truth those three cultures are one. They are of the same aesthetic. I can explain it because I want people to be clear on this. They are the Holy Trinity of British Youth Culture and I have been in it. I wouldn’t want to be anybody else. You couldn’t get Chris Brick to want to be Paul McCartney. I never wanted to be anybody but me. The clean image, the double razor parting that was coming along, the steel comb that I always had with me for sticking into people. My Levi’s Sta–Prest. My Tonik suits, my green porkpie hat, the Crombie that I begged my mother to take me to Burtons and have made for me, you know, was the beginning. Once I had this clean look all poverty dropped off me. It was gone. I became somebody.

Then, on top of that—at that moment—they should invent the spray-can. I wanted the spray-can. I was stealing back then. One reason I married Sue was that she was such a good shoplifter. When I had boutiques she was still shoplifting. I could barely stop her. The way I saw things and the way other people saw things was really different. I saw people’s abilities. She has a lot of abilities. My wife now, also. These are different kind of women. They’re special. Right. They do what they want. They don’t do what you want.

I read the book—you know—Joe Hawkins and I became Joe Hawkins. I looked around for other people like me and in Merthyr Tydfil there were only two and they were grown men. They were twenty-eight and I was fifteen. I remember these two. One of them had a girlfriend called Kay who was happy to have sex with me, which was good, ’cause she was about twenty-six and I was fifteen. New experiences were happening to me since I got this new look.

Twenty miles down the valley is Cardiff. This was a whole can of fish that I was about to open up by going to football on a Saturday. I was on the Grange End. Skinheads at football was all about The End. You protected your end. Sunderland could take our end, because they had balls. They could arrive on the train and move us out because they were hard. They were a different kind of skinhead. They didn’t wear Sta–Prest, they wore jeans. And hobnail boots. We’re all over there in Tonik and stuff. They’re different. They’re from Sunderland. We have to respect them because they could walk into our end—in single file—and take us.

Being a skinhead was a really fascinating thing for me. I loved everything about it. I loved the women, the girls, the music. The music was early reggae. There were black girls. Black boys. The boy’s called a Rude Boy but he’s really a skinhead. He’s wearing white socks and he’s got the whole deal. He’s into it, but we’re in it together. We’re not looking at each other like this is a fascist world at this point. That skinhead is the confused person who came later—who’s really a biker. Who sniffs glue but has got short hair. Who didn’t make the transition to Soul Boy. I can explain that as well, because I’ve had a few experiences on the terraces with guys when I was in the Northern Soul thing.

I went down to Cardiff and I was on the Grange End and it was Jamaican music and bits of soul music. I got invited down to the docks by my black friends. I was in a really different world down there. The Bay was a place that went out—they’ve got rid of it now and turned it into an arts centre—but you went down there and there were clubs like the Stork Club—and blues parties—that were running all night.

I got into trouble with those guys down there. They showed me how to get in buildings and knock backs off safes and do all kinds of crafty shit just to get that sixty pounds. The clothing was great in Cardiff. The skinhead clothes were there. But they weren’t there like they were in Bristol. A skinhead form Bristol was smarter than the one from Cardiff. They had brighter coloured Harrington jackets. Where do you get a Wine Harrington? We can’t get those. If they’re going to play us and we see them coming along Grangetown, we’re like, they’re not from here. We’re going to get the clothes off them. We’re gonna take their clothes. That’s what it’s all about. It’s about violence, it’s about cracking them and getting their clothes off them.

Bristol Rovers were a hard little set. They’re coming over for a big fight. It was also about making clothes. I begged my mother to take me to get my Crombie made. You couldn’t really get the clothes you wanted. You didn’t want to have to end up with flares, or a Wrangler jacket. You had to get many of them made. So at an early age I knew what it was to go into a tailors, “I want this detail, and I want that one.” That hadn’t actually started at this moment while I was down in Cardiff.

We did all the things that skinheads did. On the Bank Holiday go and smash up the local resort—Barry Island or Porthcawl—fight with Hell’s Angels. Which wasn’t a fight really. I remember fights with them. I remember one fight with the Windsor Hell’s Angels. We’re talking ten of us—ten of us—to bring one of those big bears down. They were old and gnarly. They had chains. If they got you they were gonna beat you with that chain. They were there to punish you. We’d all be like “Steel comb ’em!”, but—you know what—it would take at least ten of us to get one of those down.

I remember camping out down there in Porthcawl and being in the tent when they were there, driving over us with bikes. They’d just come at night and drive over the tents in their bikes. It was bloody murder with those guys. They were scary. It wasn’t like football, where you knew what you were getting into—there’s some of them, and some of you and they’re going to bash into you and you’re going to bash into some of them—this was different. Grebos. Absolute Grebos.

The whole thing about the caravan sites was that you’d go down there and sleep with girls. Go from caravan to caravan. Everyone. I met a girl there and she was from Droitwich. I started going out with her. Mod girl. I absolutely loved her. I asked her what goes on down there and she told me about the Soul thing. She told me about her older sister who went to The Twisted Wheel and so on. She invited me up to Droitwich and I met her sister and met this boy with her sister. His name was Morris Nixon. I thought “What were these people?” They were beyond mods—they’re different. She had a party in her house and she invited this group of people who were all a lot older than me, who were called The Chelts. I was young and I was there and I saw them all. They were the guys. I was sold on it. I no longer wanted to be a skinhead. I wanted to be this. I heard the music and saw them dance and that clinched it for me. Morris Nixon is the guy who runs Portobello Market. He was a great dancer and back then he worked on Blackfriars Market in Worcester. So I started seeing this girl and writing to this girl.

But I was still down in Wales getting into trouble. I met up with these two black guys. One of their names was Wellington Cromwell Labatt and the other one was Eugene Tobin. We were going around robbing. Then the government people picked me out and put me into an assessment centre in Bristol. There were girls and boys in there for a period of assessment. They had an art class. There were about twenty kids in there, drawing away. They invited me in and I did some stuff. The teacher looked around and she saw my stuff and she nearly went white. She said to me, “Can I keep this stuff?” I said “Sure you can.” But I knew right then there was something up. I can remember what they were like.

Every body else was doing little things and I was going “Bam!” I Picassoed them. I knew there was something up with that. Anyway I was assessed to be sent to this Boys’ School in Warwickshire, Stratford upon Avon. Norton School. I could come out of there for periods. I was in there with other soul guys. There were Oxford guys in there, teaching us. It worked. It really worked on me. They helped me.

In that school there was a room called the 20 Star Room. When you got twenty stars they had a record player in there, with soul records. I could never get in there, cause I could never get to twenty stars.

When I first there I was a Skiv. I was on the end of the table. That means I had to go up and get the food and bring it to the table. I had to give the meat to that guy, the potatoes to the next one down, the pudding to the next guy down. They dished it out and you had to wait until the end to eat. I was a Skiv and there was a soul boy next to me. His name was Richie Davis. He said to me “We’ve got to stick together on this.” He showed me this tattoo. It’s Mickey Mouse. He says to me ‘Do I have a Grebo tattoo?” Back then, even then that aesthetic was defined. You couldn’t have a Eagle or something. Yogi Bear, yes. We were different. Clean, you know, Mickey Mouse. We don’t have eagles and stuff. It’s a different thing.

He said “Let’s do thing this.” I’ll lend my egg and his egg to anybody who wants one for one back. This is how it started. They come around with the eggs and I want to eat my egg. I’m starving. I want to eat this damn egg. But we go through with it. “Who wants an egg?” Four people put their hands up. These people are starving. Give them the egg. He records it. He’s the recorder. It’s like bookmaking. So now he owes us two eggs, and so does he. We want his egg. He gives us it back, and we lend it out to someone else who needs an egg. Suddenly, out there on the book I’ve got sixty or seventy people owing me eggs. Not only owing me eggs, I can call in anything I want. I’m going to call it in one day.

One day I’d say “You know what, you owe me four eggs, but I want a pudding. But it’s the chocolate pudding.” On a pudding I could get ten chocolate puddings coming to me—like that—and loan them out again. One pudding for two puddings back. He recorded it all. So then we could convert all that stuff to tuck—Mars Bars, Cokes and so on.

What we now had was a desk full of Mars Bars, Cokes and everything people wanted. Tobacco and everything. If you came to us at night in the dorm—there were six of us to a dorm—we’d give it you, but you’d get one Mars Bar for two Mars Bars back.

If someone refused: the Equaliser. You’ve got to put it on them. There were some who refused. I’m not violent and I’m not very good at violence, but I know from Merthyr Tydfil—from growing up there—that you’ve got to be violent. If you’re not, you’re going down. I got into fights at school, but I noticed that if I was getting beaten—if I was underneath—Richie would be there with the table tennis bat banging them. Bam! I’d get back on top again.

We had everything we wanted in this school. Then on leave days we’d convert all of their stuff: “You owe us ten Mars Bars. Give us three pounds of your going away money.” So there were about 150 kids in this school and they got a fiver each at the end of term, Me and Richie got nearly all the money from that school. When we went home we were going home with all the money from the school. A couple got away from us on that morning, going on the buses, but it was okay. We got everything else. It was from the egg thing.

I’d stop in Stratford upon Avon and go into the boutiques. I wouldn’t even shoplift. I’d like “How much is this?” I’d visit my mother and give her some money and she’d be “Wow, Chris. You’ve always got money. What’s going on with you?”

Then I started going out to the clubs, but only on weekends and it was hurting me. I had this girlfriend in Droitwich and she was writing to me, “The Shadow is on.” The Shadow in Droitwich was cool. The Bank House was on. Coppertops was on. All these different clubs. I could go to them occasionally.

Up The Junction was going. I could get to Stafford. I went in 1970. That was going then. Top of the World. Let me just say this about Northern Soul. The centre is Stoke-on-Trent. I don’t care what people say. Stoke-on-Trent is the Capital of Northern Soul. I’ve been to Keighley Soul Club. Leeds Central. I was down in Cambridge at St. Ives. I’ve been all around everywhere and the centre is Stoke-on-Trent. It was and it is. It’s not Manchester. I just want to put that to rest. Some of those older guys were divs—part timers—with the records and that up there. That wasn’t the scene I was on. I was on a drug scene. I was into all the kind of other things going on. They’ll understand. They know what they are and they know what I am as well. They know me.

The Steam Machine in Hanley was great. The Top Rank in Hanley. There were a lot of things going on up there. I was drawn to that part of the Midlands.

I left the school but I didn’t go back to Wales. I went to Birmingham. This enriched my whole persona a million percent. My first job ever was in fashion. It was in The Oasis in Corporation Street and that was an important place for Northern Soul—all kids of things. I started work in the Oasis and I’ll tell you who was in there: Garaham Warr was in there with the Northern Soul stuff for a start. His music alone is monumental. Those Cheltenham people are big. They’re a big influence. Alice Clark and all the rest of it. There was another lot called the Soul Twins who also had a Northern Soul stall, selling a lot of Selectadisc pressings. I worked on a stall called Goggle. I was selling baggy jeans and bomber jackets. There was a stall next to me owned by Billy Brownstone and he made clothes and they were brilliant—absolutely brilliant. He made my clothes.

For a start, let’s put a few things to rest. The tailoring came from being a skinhead and being a mod. The side extension on the waistbands, the scalloped back pockets. You’d go to a tailor and you’d request these details. You’d get it dead right. This guy took it to a whole other level. He made things that were just something else. For a start I wouldn’t want people to think that I ever wore a badge in my life. I don’t wear badges. I don’t wear vests. This is not me. All kinds of things—which people think—are not true. I’m cooler than that.

So, Brownstone made my clothes. For instance it might be a satin jacket with an ice cream cone on the back. The pants I wore, if I bought them off the peg were Stirling Cooper. I wore long raincoats, long leather coats. I didn’t buy shit from Spencer’s Soul Bags. That all came around later with then trying to capitalise on this thing. I wore Skinner jeans from Liverpool. Sheepskin coats. I’m not saying that it’s all wrong—the badges and all that—but that’s not it. Same with shoes. My shoes were quality. There were guys with the attache cases, like Frank Booper, wearing suits and stuff like that, but that wasn’t me. Brownstone was making cords with all kinds of detail. Really cool shit.

I was living in Birmingham in Sparkbrook in the middle of all those Indian people who had just arrived. In Worcester I started buying pills, off a hippie who was driving to Hereford on a bike and picking them up. I was paying £45 a thousand for blues. Backstreet Blues. I was selling them for ten or fifteen for a pound. For £3 you could get 45. I was selling them out of The Oasis as well. I was selling about 2,000 a week—which sounds like a lot, but you’ve got to remember I was taking, myself, now check this out—150 a night. A lot of them had rubbed down to powder. So I had to take the powder. Such a bad taste, the barbiturate in the powder. These are what I was selling. The Northerners were buying off me. These were home-made. There was a machine going around, which originally came from Germany. They were manufacturing them as well in Holland.

I was taking them back and I was working at The Abbey Hotel in Worcester. They gave me a little flat and I was selling them out of there. I was going to The Coppertops and the local places and I was selling them there. There was quite a vibrant Northern Soul scene going on there. It’s still going on there now.

I had the pills. There was me and the guy with the eggs, Richie. There was another guy involved with us, Harry. Another Welsh boy. He’d moved to Northampton and I’d started going to visit him over there and I started going to The Shades on Sunday. The Shades was next door to the David Bowie club. It opened on a Sunday afternoon from 1.00. I started meeting that lot from over there. They are something else as well. Northern Soul is not just up there it’s over there as well. It’s Bedford, Huntingdon. It’s closer to the pill factories. Over there, Welwyn Garden City, is where it was all made. There were people in there, getting it out of there. We’re not talking backstreet gear, we’re talking about the real thing—Evans Blues. I don’t really know what people think of Northern Soul, but it was a drugs scene and I was part of it. Without those drugs I don’t know that it would have gone. I don’t know what it is today, but I know what my stand is on drugs today. I’m not going to make it palatable, I’m just going to say what happened here.

Over there in Huntingdon there were women working in SK&F and getting stuff out the doors there. The real stuff. I know that if I’m selling my backstreet stuff I could buy the real thing. So the drugs were rare as well. The records were rare. The drugs were rare. For me to get things like Purple Hearts then was pretty damn hard, but I could get them. I was getting all the good rare drugs: Green & Clears, Two-Tone Pinks. Black & Whites. Philon. And the difference in the things these things did to you: when the strings are going. Philon’s for people who are dying of cancer. You take five of those and listen to a good Northern record it throws a whole different meaning on it.

I wanted the better drugs. I was exchanging things with people for the better drugs. Then there were people burgling chemists. I was burgling chemists. Bringing the chemist with them to the allnighter: “What do you want? I’ve got it in the boot.” I’m making a few points here. One of them is that there was a lot of anarchy in this. A lot of anarchy. This is not some fabricated Punk Rock Anarchy that was orchestrated down the Kings Road. I mean we were really involved in anarchy here. But people don’t see it like that. We wanted to keep those people out. Wigan Casino for me was a big disappointment. I can explain that. It was for a lot of people.

I was living in Sparkbrook with a person called Jimmy Lynn who’s completely authentic. I don’t know where he is, but he was a real guy. He introduced me to a lot of people in places like Bradford. Over in Yorkshire there was another group at the time that had long hair. Long black hair. They had tailored clothes. 22-inch vents up into the back of their jackets, scalloped back pockets, the whole deal. They looked bloody weird, but cool. So there were different pockets of these soul people all over the place with different things going on. In South Wales there was only me. There was no-one there. I took it there. It’s still there now. I went about three months ago and they’ve still got the soul thing going on. They thought they’s seen a ghost. They didn’t recognise me. You don’t even know how blown away they were because I took it there and they’ve carried it on. Decades later. They didn’t know whether to kill me or kiss me. “What the fuck do we do with this guy?” Back then I started playing them the records. They were only young kids, who we called The Sou Crew. On top of all that Cardiff City, the Grange End, they’re now called The Soul Crew. I think that’s ironic as well.

I moved from Birmingham to Wolverhampton and I lived with a DJ called Peppie who’s an Indian. Don’t think that Indians aren’t cool. This guy was cool. Another guy in the flat was Graham from Cheltenham. The records were coming through the post from America every day. Thing is I’m up all night Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night and then I’m asleep Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I’m up on Thursday to score. Then it started again. I’m asleep three days a week and awake for four. I’m going down. I’m not eating properly. I’m so thin. But the records are coming through the door. It’s like “Open it up! Put the record on! Open another one! Put it on!” That’s the way it was happening. Lynn Randell! It’s too slow! Open another one! Lynn Randell turned out to be a massive record. I started going to The Catacombs.

In my estimation Catacombs was probably the greatest soul club. The best. For a number of reasons. It was in an abandoned building. The atmosphere was so compact. It held about three hundred people, but there was no room in there. There was a really low ceiling and you were up some flights in this old building. A stairs up, a narrow entrance, a little room and then one main room and that was it. I sold pills there, but the records. Otis Smith, Alice Clark, Bob Relf. Smashing records. The best DJs were Pep and Blue Max.

The real soul people, the core of them, the hard ones—the hardest soul boys on the planet—they went there. I fed them my pills, so I was safe wherever I went. Pete Tilsley, Smokie, Michael Flynn—there was nothing like him, he was the ultimate Soul Boy—Kenny Proctor, Coddy, his brother, that whole group. Harry and I looked up to these people. There was nothing that could touch any of them on the scene. If things got bad they were bad as well. Pete Tilsley jumped off of the balcony of The Torch, onto the people. From real high up. I’ve been back to their houses with them in the morning and stuff. It was kind of like—Larry the Lamb—he was another one, we went back to Pete Tilsley’s in Crewe. It was one room. They’re on it. Pete’s putting on The Wonderettes “I Feel Strange”, but he’s putting it on all the time. Twenty five times. Apart from the other group in Manchester, Roy Brown and all that lot—if they see me they’re going to nail me and take all those pills off me. With Pete and his crowd I feel safe.

I liked small places. Apart from Cats I loved Va Va’s in Bolton. It was amazing. For a start there was only one DJ—Richard Searling—who’s probably the best of all of the DJs. I don’t think there was anyone better than him. Ian Levine, Colin Curtis, I’ve seen them. Richard Searling was breaking ground there. When I’m out of my head on 150 of those backstreet pills and he plays The Volcanoes “Laws Of Love” with the lights that used to go around in there. Man. On this side there’s Coddy, Kenny Proctor, Michael Flynn and all that, and up the back was Roy Brown and all that lot from Manchester.

One night we were going to Va Va’s—Harry, me and this other guy and waiting for the train to Bolton in Manchester. We were wearing blazers—but no badges—and a train full of Manchester City fans pulled up and surrounded us, wanting to know what team we support. While I’m trying to tell them we’re on our way to an allnighter they started to beat us. For ten minutes they kicked us around the platform. I’d taken about forty caps—a medley of caps—Bombers, black and whites, other things. When they’d gone I turned to Harry and the other guy. We were all laughing hysterically. I didn’t feel a thing. Not a thing.

The Pendulum in Manchester was okay. I really loved alldayers. I loved the alldayer in Whitchurch. They were really good. Burnley. That was another place. I ended up back there after some nighter with these girls. I had no idea English people could be that poor. Until you get to The North. Wow. These English people were different to the other English people. Birminham. There was an allnighter called Saints and Sinners. There were a lot of cool people in Birmingham, a lot of great dancers. Dancing was different back then. Dancing hadn’t been based on Keb Darge back then. It was somewhat mod dancing. I picked it up. Dancing was a whole form of expression as well.

It was a drugs scene, it was a clothes scene. It was about dancing. It came out of this thing. It was about pills that made you go fast. To go fast to make the scene happen. It was about women. It was about women who weren’t your normal kind of women. These girls weren’t ordinary. They did what they wanted to do. They still do. They’re not the same. Have a look at Sue. I mean have a close look at her. It was about these kind of women. In Brownstones as well there were two girls who helped out. They were wearing vintage. This was 1970. These women were really different.

Now, the hippie boy took me to London, to Portobello Road to where the pills were coming from. Big, white house with hippies. It smelled like oils and the women were different again. It was a whole different world again. It’s Thursday and I’m down there to buy pills and I’m back on the train. I’m part of That up There which is going strange. People are having nervous breakdowns. There were people dying. Car accidents. All the time. Taking barbs to come down and driving off the road. Every week. The madness I was involved in then makes everything else look tame. I don’t know if there can ever be anything like it. It can’t repeat itself. It can’t do that same thing again. The wildest things that could possibly happen—happened.

I was going down. It was draining me. I was drinking milk rather than eating during the days and I was knocking the milk over at work. And dropping the money. Black kids were stealing off the market stall and there were stabbings and running battles. The pub bombings were happening at the same time. It was getting crazy.

I got down to London. I started looking at clothes in London when I was down to buy pills. I was like a businessman. I had to grow up quick, I didn’t really have a childhood. I remember going on the train and going first class. Travelling with MPs. Drinking whisky, pilled-up and—finally—eating. I remember the MPs looking at me. I had a lot of front as a kid. I’d come back with the pills in a case. Three quid would get you smashed. Most popele used to take around forty. Three or four quid would get you sorted out.

I went to Blackpool Mecca. I could tell the difference. I liked Colin Curtis. I liked the things he was spinning. It was nice, but it wasn’t The Catacombs to me. It wasn’t tight. There was space to dance. It was sophisticated. I was living with a girl in Wolverhampton called Jennifer and I was starting to have nervous breakdowns. I started having them at a really young age from taking drugs.

I remember the first one I had. I was on the way to Leeds on the train. I was alone. I will move around with people but I prefer to travel alone. There was an Indian woman in front of me with two children. The children were messing around and screaming at each other, and for some reason I started crying and rolling on the floor. The woman came over and asked what was wrong. I just said, “Stop your children from doing that.” I was living with Jennifer and we had no food. I was burgling offices to get petty cash.

I went to The Catacombs and next day Wigan was starting. First night at Wigan I went up with the lot from Stoke. Important people. We went together. It was amazing. When we got there, it was full of people we’d never seen before. Where they got them, whether locally or wherever, I didn’t know any of them. It took until 3.00am to get in there. The people from Stoke were saying “This is the worst thing—this is the end of it.” I was like ‘Yeah. It’s the end.” Who was this guy playing these records? Russ Winstanley? He was playing all these records which had already been pressed. You didn’t do that. The next morning I travelled back with these people from Stoke and they turned off for Stoke and I went back to Wolverhampton with the girl. I’m telling you: I’ve never seen them again. I don’t know what happened but I never saw them again.

I said to Jennifer “I want to go back to Wales—” I was cracking up “—come back with me.” We moved to a seaside town and I got a job washing dishes. She got a live-in job in a hotel. A couple of weeks went by and I’m sweating over the dishes and Jennifer comes up to me and says “See the second chef—I’m moving in with him.” She left me. After a couple of days I met a girl on the record counter of Woolworths and I started dating her. After a couple of weeks I started feeling better. I met this Italian guy who had a nightclub for older people. He asked me to DJ there and to compere when they had acts on: “Tonight Ladies and Gentlemen we have Harry Secombe!” I would play records like Cockney Rebel for the holidaymakers but would still spin a bit of soul for the young kids.

I had no intention of going to allnighters ever again. Then I met a Jewish man—a blind guy—called Cyril Bloom. I went into partnership with him. He had a few TV stores. Because he was getting old he gave me the stores. He didn’t want to run them any more. He gave me three stores and I ran them as boutiques. I was selling nick-nacks and things and then I thought “Why not sell fashion?” I started going to Olympia and ordering stuff and built up this little fashion company. I was doing really good. I bought a house, had a Mercedes. I went back to see my mother and she was like, “Wow! Chris!” I wasn’t selling drugs. It was all legit. I was clean. Then I partnered up with another person and we bought a club. So at this point I had three shops and a club. On Monday night in the club I would put on a night for Roxy fans. I forgot about the soul thing and lived a normal life. It wasn’t quite as good as it looked, but it looked pretty good.

Then Harry came to see me. He’d been in Jersey and all over. He said “Why don’t we go to an allnighter?” I thought he was kidding. It had been three years since that first night at Wigan. I was getting married to the girl from Woolworths, but thought: “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” That was it. It was the biggest mistake I could ever have made.

Got there and I didn’t recognise anybody. Sue was there and all the next generation. I said to Harry “I don’t see Coddy or any of these guys here.” So I’m looking and I can’t see anyone of any danger there and I’m thinking: “Hold on a minute. We can take this. The whole damn thing!” Harry was like “Yeah, we can take it.” I was set up down in Wales so I thought about what had changed there. For a start there were no pills anymore. Everyone was shooting sulphate. It’s now all about powder. It’s now a powder game. I couldn’t even buy pills. The powder they were taking was shit.

I started seeing Sue and went back to Wales. That group from Blackwood had started going to Wigan so I started running coaches. I would pick them up from Porthcawl, Bridgend, pick them up and then we’d go to Wigan. I started going around the country and I lost the stores. They went first and then I burgled a chemists and I got caught for the chemists. I had money and I started buying powder. I knew people in London, so getting powder was not a problem. The powder was so different. Every week I had to try it before I batched it out to a thousand people. So I had a system for this and it was a great system. I’ve been busted for this so it doesn’t matter. I can say anything I want to. First of all I moved to Hungerford and bought a house there. Sue lived in Newbury. Sue’s from a military background. The group of people surrounding her were about a hundred strong. I also knew older people from different places, like Skelmersdale. I’d be at allnighters and I’d run into people and they’d be like “Haven’t seen you in a long time.” This was my second phase of this Northern Soul thing. Wigan had picked up by then, It was a different kind of thing. It was a going allnighter. It had been going a long time.

The people in Blackwood were particularly crazy. Most of them are dead. Yogi’s dead. Paul Guntrip is dead—he jumped off Tower Bridge a few years ago. Martin Peerman is dead. Jacko. A lot of those guys were very crazy. They were like my group and there were a lot of them. In Wigan I had about two hundred in my group so I could relax. I didn’t have to worry about anything in Wigan. I had about maybe sixty people selling for me in Wigan, but over the country I had about two hundred, because of other allnighters.

It was the way it worked which made it so simple. First of all I don’t know if any of these places would have worked if I hadn’t done this. Because I did miss weeks and it was terrible. I didn’t miss weeks very often, but I did miss weeks. Other things happened as well. One week I had a batch of sulphate that was pink, I had it on Thursday and I would do a gram myself to see what goes on with it, because I’ll kill myself before I kill everybody. I was very tolerant to stuff but it was very glowy. I was kind of speeding. I wanted to dance and stuff but everything was glowing. But I already owned it so I sent it out. I went to Wigan. I never sold any drugs at Wigan, Not one time. That’s not how it worked. So I got to Wigan and when I got off the coach there were all these people looking at me. Wow. They were all kind of tripping. So that week all those thousand deals that went out tripped everybody out. So, when you’re in a place, and they’re all looking at me like I’m Jesus, and you know you’ve tripped everybody out. I was like “I don’t know about this week.” It was kind of different.

All sorts of other things happened. One week at St. Ives with a batch of stuff and suddenly everybody was falling over. “Chris! That girl just fell over!” They started dropping off like flies. Or driving through Milton Keynes at one in the morning, late to get there—and I’m caught in the roundabouts for maybe an hour—going round and round in circles. All kinds of strange shit that happened. One day on the coach I had this kid—Donald, he had glasses, he looked like Joe 90—suddenly he has a freak-out on the coach. Screaming and hitting girls, hitting himself. Screaming “Let me off!” We’re in the middle of the motorway, but we stop the coach to let him off. He’s got off, got up and over the embankment and is running away through the field. “What’s going on with Donald?” Next day, coming back, we stop and he’s still out in the field and we pick him up.

Another one. One batch of sulphate. Sue had a boyfriend before me, Clifford Price. Clifford had a brother, Jimmy. Jimmy’s dead. There couldn’t be any other way for him but Clifford’s a business guy in London. Between those two they’d asked me to go around their house. They don’t have a stairs. “How do you get up stairs?” They had sacks of cement where they were going to build a stairs, which acted as a stairs. I sold them a batch of powder and we were going up to Wigan on the coach. Everything was all right, then someone came up to the front of the coach and said “There’s a problem with Clifford.”—“What’s the problem?”—“His eye”—“What’s wrong with his eye?”—“His eyeball’s turned around.”—“What the fuck. I can’t do anything with his eye.” So I went down to have a look at him. He was cranking up. He’s probably had four shots. His eye had turned like it was backwards, but the other eye was allright. What do you do with a thing like that. We stopped at the services and we took him into the bathroom. It’s kind of one me, ’cause I’m the guy dishing out the powder. Yogi and me take him into the bathroom and we fill a bowl-full of water and splash it on his eye to see if it will come back. But it doesn’t. Oh Shit. Back on he coach.

That’s just one of the things which happened, but it happened to thousands of people. This kind of thing was running rampant. It was a mad thing. The whole thing from beginning to end.

Drug Squad were following me everywhere I go. I know they’re following me because I’m running into them all the time. I had an accident in Hungerford in the snow and the guys who pulled me out was them. They were everywhere with me. But I’d see them in the car park at Wigan and they’d be looking at me. It wasn’t paranoia. They were really there. I’d say “I’ve only got money on me.”

I picked the powder up on Tuesday and I posted it from a different place every week on Wednesday or Thursday. It took about two and a half to three and a half pound a week. If you break 36 ounces up into quarters you’ve got about 140 quarters. I’d send out about 140 quarters to different paces, in plastic, then in envelopes. There was a list, the same principle as Richie with the eggs, but it was Harry. Harry kept the list. Depending on how much you paid, that’s how much you were going to get sent again. They didn’t have to pay for it up front. Say if one guy in Norwich wanted four quarters, send him four; this guy gets one; Skelmersdale three; Liverpool four. Scotland, you know, all over the country. Every week. That one day we batched it all up, put it into envelopes, sent it off. If one person said they didn’t get it, okay, you’re not going to get another one next week. There were rules. If they were coming with “I didn’t get it.” They weren’t gonna get it. So I sent it out to the whole country and they paid me in Wigan. With the other allnighters they sent me the money. If I didn’t get it they didn’t get any more. It was in their interest to pay me because they always wanted more.

That’s why I made more money than anyone else out of Wigan. I made, on a bad week, three grand. But usually five. The thing is, you try carrying five grand around at an allnighter. The people are coming to Harry and he’s checking it off the list, counting it and giving it to me. Now my pockets are full of money and the sweat when I’m dancing and soaking the money. Then we’d get stopped on the way out. “Mr Brick you have £3,800 on you.”—“Well, I’m in business. I’ve got a boutique.” But they knew. At first they didn’t really try that hard, but their opinion changed as the years went by.

To begin with they were like “We like these kids. They’re short haired. They look like army kids. They’re clean cut.” We weren’t like the hippies I was buying the pills from. I didn’t smoke pot. I didn’t do any down drugs. Heroin got me in the end. Everybody ends there. But not when I was young. When I was young I was an Up guy. In the end, like everybody, I got nailed.

Before I moved to Hungerford I was chased out of South Wales. I’d been getting different sulphate from different places, but then I decided to set up a company to manufacture my own with two chemists. It was in Ebbw Vale, down in the mountains there.

With one thing and another I’d been missing some weeks and—if i missed a week in Wigan or if the batch didn’t go—it was a bad night. I set up a perfume company called Aromatic Oils. I’d read a magazine earlier—The Anarchist—and in there were four pages on how to make sulphate, which I kept. It seemed pretty easy. In reality it was difficult. It was really difficult. You make it out of Benzyl Methyl Ketone, Ammonium Formate and car battery acid. These are the three ingredients. It smells like cat’s piss when you’re making it. This was in a council house in Ebbw Vale and the smells coming out of the place were unbelievable. The other thing with creating stuff like that is that it’s such a trip because it’s like your making magic.

People take drugs because they don’t understand them. When you understand drugs you no longer take them. They’re all in a sense modern day magic. Pot that’s grown, or mushrooms or people making acid, or even the modern day drugs which the big pharmaceutical companies make—when you think about it—what they actually are is something that changes you completely. One little pill of a prescribed medicine—which you get off a doctor who says you need this that and the other if you’re depressed—changes you. It has a sense of magic to you.

It’s the same with cannabis, which is a very dangerous drug. Cannabis is a very clever drug because it tells you it’s not dangerous. It tells you that it’s an easy drug which should be legalised, when in actual fact it’s probably the most dangerous—once you know what it is. It takes you down slowly. It takes you down over a lifetime. If you look at someone who’s been smoking pot for forty years you’ll see someone whose head has gone. You never understand it. You understand when you don’t have it and feel like shit ’cause you’re out of pot. It has you on a psychological thing.

When you understand all about addiction the magic is gone, but then I was in the business of creating magic. I have a deep understanding of it all now and don’t want to leave you with the impression that what I did was great. I’m not promoting drugs. I’m for getting rid of drugs in actual fact. If it was my choice. But it’s not my choice. It’s down to the individual. And each individual has to learn about it. It’s a process of learning.

When you’re creating speed it’s essentially a distilling method, in different bottles and flasks. You’re cooking it and trying to create scums. The scum is it. Then you’ve got to distil the scum off into another bottle and then you crystalise it. It’s liquid then on a flat surface and you pour the battery acid on it and then—sizzle—it becomes the thing. It’s powder. I was immediately taking it as soon as I was making it. “Hey, what’s this like?”

It took me a few months to get to that stage, but now it’s around Christmas. I was selling it but I hadn’t learnt yet how to produce big batches of it. I could only produce a couple of ounces at a time, so I was still buying from other sources too. I knew the police were watching me but I was quite hip to the authorities. I had lawyers and stuff. I knew once I was busted my lawyers would be right there and I knew the police had been building a case against me for some time. They don’t just come and bust you for the first thing you do wrong, they let you do a lot of things and stack it up on you because they want to convict you. They wait and they watch and they make surveillance. It’s all a big thing. They get their overtime from it. They invest in you. I had to figure out how much they had invested in me. I thought it would probably amount to a couple of hundred grand in man-hours. For that amount of money they have to get convictions. That’s how it works, the police.

There are universal laws too with the police. A person like me had to get to understand those. One of those laws is that if you run—when they catch you—they’re gonna beat you. That’s it. You know that. If they catch you and you put your hands up they ain’t gonna beat you. It’s the law from here to Nigeria. That’s the way it is. You have to accept the consequences of what it is. At this point I knew they were with me and wondering when they’re going to drop on me. If they drop on me I’m wondering if I have the money and the power to get me out of trouble. I know that they only see me as some little punk anyway—some jumped-up boutique owning street kid. They know I’m pretty smart, but I’m not some big gangster. Still I’m enough that they have a case on me.

It’s the night before Christmas. Christmas Eve. I’m down in Ebbw Vale with Harry and the chemists and we’re cooking up a batch and I try it. It’s a pretty good batch and I’m tripping and I want to go back down to Hungerford to see Sue for Christmas. The next morning I get up and it’s snowing. You can see snow for miles and no-one else around. It’s Christmas morning and there’s nobody on the roads. I get in the Dodge van and I’ve got this batch on a large plate with clingfilm over it. We start down the valley to get on the M4. As we get down to the end of the valley I notice a big snake of cars behind us. Maybe about ten or twelve cars. It dawned on me that this was it. They’re going to bust us right now. I said to Harry “You know there’s a snake of cars right behind us.” He said that if they were going to swoop on us they’ll wait until we get on the motorway. As we get to the motorway the first two cars pull out and overtake us. They motion for us to pull over. There are four guys in each car.

The thing about Harry was that he was ballsy. Others will tell you that. We never looked for trouble in our lives, but when it happened to find us: “Wow.” So Harry, being the way that he was, pulled the van up onto the grass embankment, around the ramp and back in front of the cars in front of us. As he’s doing that, I start to get all the pills and stuff on me and throw it out the window. We’re on the motorway heading towards Newport and the snake of cars is still following us.

We’re doing 90mph—as fast as the van will go. I throw the plate of sulphate out the window and it bounces on the road. It didn’t look like it broke and it rolled down into the grass. Then we go along and there’s a turning towards Monmouth and there’s a roundabout there. We’ve gone right over the roundabout and the first three police cars shot off in the other direction. We’re going the wrong way around the roundabout now and narrowly avoid a big lorry. Instead of turning off to Monmouth we make a big mistake and go back to the way we were originally heading—for England.

The others were still following us—but of course the three cars which had overshot us were now up front—ready to trap us. You should keep in mind that these Welsh plain clothes guys are all rugby players. Now there’s danger involved and they’re getting mad. The next miles of motorway are running up to a tunnel and the cars in front of us are now parked at the entrance to the tunnel. In front of us now are the parked police cars, with the guys behind their cars, waiting for us. We’re doing eighty or ninety and we go into the back of the first car and it slams into the one of the policemen. He goes up in the air, comes down and breaks both his legs, and we’re wedged into the back of this mangled police car.

It’s all stopped now. The cops behind us get to the van, open the doors and get me by the hair and they pull me out. Remember I’d been trying the sulphate all night. I was so wired they couldn’t have got me at a better time. They took me and Harry out and put us down on the road and then they started to beat on us. We’d just run one of them over and they were mad. Again I couldn’t really feel it and I remember thinking “I’m gonna get through this.”

They took me and Harry separately. They put me in the back of a Land Rover with blacked-out windows. In the back of the Land Rover there were chains and bollards and stuff like that. They handcuffed me and put me in the back laying down. There were four of them. One drove and the other three got in the back. They were big guys and they sat on me. They nearly fucking killed me. One sat on my head, another one on my chest and the other one over my hips. That’s how they do it to you. I’m lying on all these chains with these guys sat on me. I couldn’t breathe and they drove me to the police station in Blackwood. It was snowing. The beating I could take but the sitting on me nearly killed me.

My lawyers already knew I was coming. They’d already rung and said “You’ve got to let him out.” A doctor came and they stripped me in a cell and stood me on sheet of paper, still handcuffed. They took samples from under my nails, my hair. Then they put me outside, in the snow, in a small concrete garden with one plant in a pot. I didn’t care what was going to happen, because the sitting thing had ended. That was the worst. Then they bought me back in and started talking to me. “We’ve got you Chris.”—”You’re gonna get ten years.”—”Wigan Casino, Chris. We know all about it.”—”We’ve got photographs of everything.” I was thinking “I’m gonna get out of this,” and I told them, “My lawyer’s gonna get me out of here and I’m gonna leave the country.” And that’s what I did. I had to.

That’s what stopped the Wigan thing. I went to Spain on a forged passport under the name of someone on my list, but it was winter and it was cold. So I went to The Canary Islands and opened a bar there with these Germans. It just went on from there. That’s a whole other story. I bankrupted the bar, came back and settled in the North West, but I couldn’t go anywhere near allnighters.

I settled up in Fleetwood in Lancashire and sold flawed velvet jackets to Irish people off the boats on a market stall. Spieling. Then I moved to Chorlton and got a job window dressing in George Best’s boutique. I went to The Russell club and saw Joy Division. Tony Wilson, Mark E. Smith from The Fall. They were all there. A lot of the kids were wearing plastic sandals and jumble sale clothes. It was the start of something.

From there I moved down to London and lived in a shared house with Sue in Golders Green. We shared with a Polish violinist. I went to London because cocaine was starting to get really big. Money from this time started Demob. I wasn’t in drugs for the money. I liked to use the money to do other things. Projects.

They still hadn’t got me for the Wigan thing. They knew it was me but they didn’t seem to care. I was in the press with the clothes thing and our office was right across from a police station. So they didn’t bust me for six years or something. That’s when they presented me with that charge dating back to Christmas 1977. That’s all they really had and I did thirty months. But when they fully got me later, it was so bad.”

Last edited by NaturalSoleReprise (2014-10-26 18:10:49)

NSR's post #105 has to be the the longest post I've ever seen on here.

The Chris Brick material has already been published. The only thing expurgated by the publishers was the recipe for making sulphate.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/10321153/Northern-Soul-An-Illustrated-History-by-Elaine-Constantine-and-Gareth-Sweeney-review.html

The book's been out there for over year, and in that time I've never had it mentioned to me that the events Chris talks about were misrepresented or exaggerated. To characterise him as a drug dealer is to miss the point. He did what he had to do to enjoy a better life. It's taken him to some dark places but also some pretty good things too.

Last edited by NaturalSoleReprise (2014-10-26 13:01:05)

Was.

Yes. He lives in a vicarage in rural Herefordshire. He hasn't sold a pill, cap or wrap for over thirty years.