The young Richard, at 16, was obsessed completely with the guitar.I didn’t care much for schoolwork. It could be a really rough school – this was north Sheffield – but I got away with the whole fighting thing. I was slightly funny and also big, so they’d have to think twice. I used to go in the music room and hide away playing guitar. I formed a band called Treebound Story with friends and was playing in my uncle Frank’s rock’n’roll band in the evenings. So the whole concept of school just faded out.
It was a time of great Especially if you were from Sheffield, where the hammer blow of Thatcher’s Tories fell the hardest. They smashed the unions. And my father, my uncles, all their friends were steel workers or miners. Sheffield was devastated by politics and the collapse of industry. Horizons weren’t just lowered, they were destroyed.
