Tymon played with the 101 ers, and was friends with Nora, John Lydon’s (later) partner, and her fourteen-year-old daughter Ari Up. Booking Alan Price instead as a “baptism of Fire”, John chose The Leeds Grand Theatre as a premier, also booking Price’s cousins band Limelight, and his mate Tymon Dogg, who lived with Strummer, and taught him to play guitar. His first professional foray into promoting was an attempt to book Lou Reed into Leeds Grand theatre, who he couldn’t get, being a first-time promoter. Indeed, he had already been promoting music for a decade by the time the filth and the fury hit Roundhay, putting on John Mayalls blues breakers age 16 at Southport College. Suddenly they were right in front of you, you were two feet from the stage.” The tickets were expensive, and he would have been miles away, a dot in the distance. You had this feeling that you couldn’t see your heroes. “I had tickets to see Bowie at Milton Keynes,” continues Claire- but I ended up not going. Probably fourteen more than the previous undocumented outing in Northallerton in 76, but somehow exploding the same firework of potential that it did in Manchester, in Birmingham, in London earlier that autumn. “There was about 14 people in the audience” said Claire Shearsby. In October 1976 The pre-Anarchy Sex Pistols landed on the Fforde Green in Leeds, a traditional boozer crouched up near Roundhay park. ![]() Yet because nothing was possible, suddenly everything was possible. “You watched who you spoke to” said Choque, “you never knew if they were one of them- I ran the gauntlet every single day” Choque was later to find infamy with bands like Salvation, and Black Star liner and is currently keeping the F spirit alive in his Farsley club, the Constitutional. The National Front were abroad in the town and in the clubs, emboldened by local interest, selling their magazines, chasing and beating young black and Asian kids like Choque Hosein. Just like 2020 politics had factionalised. ![]() Women banded together to walk home, marched together to claim their safety on the streets. One or two music venues that were habitable, mainly playing Pub Rock, a failing LUFC, the spectre of the Yorkshire Ripper on the streets, present enough that young women like Claire Shearsby would ensure they “wore their flat boots” just in case they needed to run. ![]() The cold, dark Leeds of 1977 boasted very little for the young.
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