WHY I WROTE THE BOOK

For many years people had asked me why I wrote the rock 'n' roll book, 'Bradford's Rock n' Roll the Golden Years'. This all came about with a chance meeting in Bradford with Kenny Fowler of The Dingos fame, in the mid-1980s. 

I hadn't seen any of my old rock n' roll members for over twenty years and he told me that a lot of them still met up at a pub on lower Bolton Road during the weekday.

I went with him one night and was surprised to see how many friends from the groups were there and it was there that friendships were renewed, as much of the conversation was all about our times of twenty-plus years ago. At my home, I kept many items from my days with my rock 'n' roll group, including many autographs of my days as a disc jockey.

It was my wife Diana who encouraged me to put something on record for those times, however by coincidence Mike Priestley of the Telegraph & Argus who was a friend, said the same, and on 22 April 1987, he did a feature on me with the title 'Days among the parcels-nights with the stars'  which referred to my working at Grattan warehouse and a DJ at night! 

It worked. For weeks and months many contacts were made with people associated with our rock 'n' roll world, meeting again many old friends I had not seen for years. There were no computers as such in those days- just a simple typewriter for Diana. No website for checking text and stories, just a phone to make those many calls.

However, it was really just about me, my group, and my DJ nights. The book was just nearing completion, when I realised it would be a good idea to include some of our local groups, to which I managed to add about a dozen.  All this had taken four years to complete when we had the launch of the book on 28th June 1991 in The Gods Bar of the Alhambra Theatre, Bradford.

The book was a great success. However, I always thought that I had just scratched the surface, and thinking of all the very many group members who missed out, it took another twenty years for me to rectify that gap with 'When Bradford Rocked  in 2012'.

I wrote the text for this section in late August 2022 at Rorke's Drift, Zululand, Natal, South Africa.