An excerpt from Pow!

When the encores had subsided and the crowd had dispersed, Richard and I walked back into the city centre in the confident knowledge that we would soon be sipping pints in the comfortable confines of the Piccadilly Hotel. There turned out to be only one problem with this plan: it was a Saturday night, the city centre was heaving, and the Piccadilly had proper bouncers at the front door.

“You staying here, lads?”

“Um, no. But…”

“Then you can’t come in.”

“But the Jam are expecting us.”

“Got a tour pass?”

“Um, no. But…”

“Scarper.”

“But really, the Jam told us to stop by. You can ask them.”

“No, I can’t mate. You think I was born yesterday? Now bugger off.”

We hung around for a few minutes in the hope that John Weller or Kenny Wheeler would pop out to look for us, but chances were slim, we had to admit, that anyone connected with the Jam was giving much thought to our whereabouts at this moment of the post-gig piss-up.

We moved on to the nearby Piccadilly Railway station, where we learned that a cheap-ticket milk train would get us home around dawn if we could scrounge up the money. But that was not going to happen, either — as Richard learned when he visited the police station within the railway station, politely explained our situation in the hope that we’d be given the funds from whatever rainy day jar the local coppers kept pennies in to send Cockneys back where they came from, and was instead shown the door with a not rudely dismissive Mancunian “good luck, lads.”

It having turned to November in the midnight hour, we were now cold as well as hungry and broke and tired. We trekked back to the Piccadilly Hotel, where we opted to do what seemed very Jimmy-from-Quadrophenia-like under the circumstances: we huddled down outside the back of the hotel, next to some warm air vents. This approach proved successful for all of about ten minutes, until hotel staff opened up the door to throw out the evening’s rubbish, saw some human rubbish in the process, and told us to move on.

We then had what seemed like the bright idea of returning to the Apollo, figuring maybe someone in the road crew would recognise us and take pity on us (though to what end we hadn’t figured). We walked the 30 minutes back down to Ardwick, only to find that the venue was shut: had we really expected anything else?

(c) 2026 Tony Fletcher. All rights reserved.