The Blitzkrieg Gang still met in its den. It wasn’t really much fun though. We didn’t speak about punks anymore, they seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. None of the other members were allowed into town on their own, none of them had anything to say about music, not even rubbish music.The fights with Cromwell Street, in as much as they had ever really been fights, had died out. No peace agreement had been brokered, just a mutual recognition of the futility of that particular war. We spent long hot afternoons under the tree, throwing stones half heartedly at bits of metal and each other until one day the long awaited, never truly expected invasion came.

The invaders were three big girls. I’d never seen them before. They looked as if they were at secondary school – some terrifying pubescent Amazonian tribe. They strolled right up to the den, while we sat and gawped. They sized us up and asked the inevitable starter question – the question to which there was never a right answer:

‘What do you think you’re looking at?’

I can’t recall now how the conversation went. I remember that John was quiet and sheepish, the girls loud and aggressive. For some reason I was spared their attention. I’m not sure if this was an act of universal sistership, or because their only interest was in humiliating small boys. They made the others climb into the cradle of a JCB digger, which they then proceeded to pelt with stones and bricks. It didn’t appear to be a particularly terrifying ordeal. Both attackers and victims seemed equally bored and embarrassed by the theatricality of it all. Eventually the girls lost interest and drifted off, shouting threats and warnings after them. The boys took their hands from their ears and climbed out of the cradle. Mark Higgins said the girls were lucky to have left when they did, before the boys had launched their counter attack.

It would be tempting to say that that was the end of the Blitzkrieg Gang and the end of John Mahoney’s spell of influence, but I don’t suppose it was. It’s impossible to recall the chronology now, but I’m skeptical of any neatness to the story. I did eventually start tagging along less with John and the others. I found standing in records shops on my own, endlessly looking at records I already possessed or very much wanted to possess preferable to anything else really.


‘Ghost Town’ was released in June 1981, two years after ‘Gangsters’ and a few weeks before I left primary school. By the time I started secondary school in September The Specials were history. The break from my primary school was absolute. I had no cause to walk up to the flats and maisonettes where most of my primary school classmates lived, I caught the bus early for my new school and came home late. My new classmates lived in quiet suburban Hall Green, or bohemian middle class Moseley in landscapes apparently free from storm drains and building sites. The Specials had deserted me and so I turned back to Bowie, clinging to him tightly for the next few years, obsessing over his classic 70s albums, covering my school jumper with new smaller badges to ward off the evils of New Romantics and Wham! fan hedonists.

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