Approach to Maine Road Stadium, Manchester, 1985

That was when the trouble started. The crowd surged forward. A girl got knocked down in front of us and her boyfriend span round, snarling at us to get back. I meekly complied. Trapped in a panorama of blokes, booze and banter, the compelling urge to go for a piss overtook me. I didn’t know then that the correct procedure under such circumstances was to find a plastic pint pot, fill it with piss and launch it. Instead, I told my friends I was going for a wazz, and asked them to remain where they were. In my youthful naivety, I expected to find them where I left them.

It still seems like an idiotic decision, but worse was to come. Pissing, I heard the sound of a helicopter passing up above, followed by a drawn-out roar of braying adulation, shrill and guttural. Then the unmistakeable strains of Swamp Song struck up.

Swiftly left I the stinking piss-trough to findeth my rightful place in the righteous crowd. Scant hope: much like Bonehead’s hairline, they’d vanished. I drew a bead on the point where they had been, in the vast swell of beanie hats and replica City shirts. I inched my way to the approximate point in the crowd where we parted company, continually apologising as I trod on feet and knocked pint-raising elbows, ducking as pots of piss rained down from on high.

Imagine trying to find three teenagers dressed in blue in a fucking cosmos of teenagers dressed in blue. Crestfallen, I began inching my way to the edge of the crowd, trudging my way to the back of the stadium, scuffing my Gazelles through the tide of rubbish.  

I watched the entire gig from the far end of the ground on my own. I was too panicked to enjoy the performance. How the fuck was I going to get home? Paul’s dad was supposed to be giving me a lift. But we hadn’t agreed a meeting point, other than outside the massive Kippax stand. It was assumed we’d stick together. Only me – idiot – had failed to do so.

Sure enough, post-encore, the floodlights came on and I scanned the surf for recognisable faces. I couldn’t see a single soul. There were other people I knew would be there, so I looked for them. No sign either. I walked back through the turnstiles. People selling rip-off Oasis merchandise, pissed up Liam-imitators milling around looking for trouble, taxis and minicabs juddering off into central Manchester for after-parties I’d never know the like.

The crowd was thinning, and by now I was beginning to panic. For a nanosecond, the thought of hitching a lift home entered my head. Then I remembered Dennis Nilsen. And decided to stay put.

Subsequent to our fated trip to Maine Road I’ve spoken a number of times to Paul’s dad – who was supposed to be giving us a lift home – about what he did when he came to collect his son and friends and found one of them missing. What did he do? He drove back to Sandbach, dropped off his son’s remaining friend, thence continued home, whereupon he called my parents to inform them that their eldest son was still in Moss Side. Missing, presumed dead.

Amazingly, a miracle occurred. Around midnight, I randomly bumped into someone I knew: a lad from my year. We weren’t on first name terms, and rarely spoke. Some mutual antipathy. I fell upon his mercy, and he squeezed me in the back of his mum’s car. We travelled down the M6 in silence.

Such is the vividity of those hours of solipsistic solitude that I remember little of the music, nor what happened after I got home. I have a dim recollection that my dad had driven off into the night to find me, and my mum phoned him on his mobile to call off the search. Perhaps that's wishful thinking: most likely they were still at home thinking I’d turn up, possibly in a police car. Either way I’d have been informed I was a ‘dipstick’ or an ‘idiot’, maybe even a ‘stupid boy’. And they were right.

It was the best gig of the 1990s, and I missed it. So much for being mad for it.