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my dad, the other really important person in my life throughout most of my childhood was my grandmother on his side of the family. I still used to see some of my mother’s family around the village, but by now her own parents had passed on and we didn’t have much contact with her other relatives. But my paternal grandmother became the matriarch in my life and she later moved in with us. She looked after us in every respect. She was a kind, decent lady whom we all adored, and despite all the upheaval I never once went wanting for any care or love. She filled our lives with it.
    She believed in that Northern family thing that you had to have your dinner every night and you never went off to school without eating breakfast or wearing clean socks. And I never did. I never, ever had to suffer any indignity and the fact I was okay was because of her and the fundamental care that she gave us. I always went to the cinema and had a new pair of football boots at Christmas. My dad had two sisters, my aunty Meta and my aunty Pat, and together with my grandmother (whom we called Mam) all three of them had old-fashioned blue rinse hairdos. They were traditional, strong Geordie women. My brother and I would never dare to disobey our grandmother, but she used to cut me a lot of slack, presumably because she’d been so horrified by what my mother had done. As I got older, she’d let me keep my dinner money for a packet of cigarettes and then cook me a beautiful meal in the evening to make sure I didn’t go hungry. In the end we had to force her to stop working so hard, because she was basically looking after all of us right into her old age.
    IT was against the background of my parents’ breakup that music became the main focus of my life. I don’t know where I would have ended up without it. Throughout my teenage years I was jamming three or four nights a week, practicing guitar at home and playing records. It filled a lot of hours when I would otherwise have been getting in trouble. That’s not to say I still didn’t manage to find time to get up to no good. I had a pretty bad behavioral record, and I had the worst attendance in school by the time I was fourteen or fifteen. I had a mate called Tommy, and we just used to go and get our attendance marks in the morning and then bunk off from school together for the rest of the day. Tommy had been through similar experiences at home, so we were both in the same boat.
    We had every cave up the northeast coast covered, and we would go there with a can of cider and do daft things like attempt to smoke dried banana skins, because we’d heard rumors they could get you high (trust me, they don’t!). There was one little bay where amorous couples would go to have sex and we knew about a cave up above, so we’d go up there and throw things at them for a laugh. There were lots of fabulous beaches and big rural areas to explore in Northumberland; and we used to go on bike rides and set fields on fire, then ride off. At night we’d build fires on the beach and sit around drinking snakebite and eating potatoes.
    When I actually did bother to go to school, I think the shock of my mother leaving gave me a sort of rabid determination to do well, so when I played football I’d tackle too hard or I’d go in too hard at judo. Perhaps without knowing it, I was trying to prove myself by trying to kick someone. I was always clashing with two sports teachers, Mr. Denham and Mr. Chambers, whom we nicknamed Dodgy Denham and Choppy Chambers. They’d pull me up for my tackling and bellow, “Taylor—off for a minute.” My mates and I used to get into a lot of fights, and if you saw some of the kids that went to my school at the time you’d know why. They would go into pubs at fifteen or sixteen and look for trouble. They used to like picking fights at that age.
    Thankfully, if I was angry as a kid I used to take it out mainly on music. I soon discovered that music allows you to break the rules, change