Its No Accident....Andy Sharrocks
By Chris Rockson
Born in Manchester on the west side of The East Lancs (the east lancs is the A 580,
a road between Manchester and Liverpool) which is ironic as I ended up in the punk
band Accident On The East Lancs.
Hey Andy Sharrocks is in the room….How are ya doing?
Hey Chris, yeah I’m good, I’ve just given up smoking, my last addiction, writing a lot,
and got some good people around me, what more could a boy ask for.
You recently got kicked out of the United States right? What was that all about?
I went over to the States to record my new album with Jeff and Tommy Vee, who
are Bobby Vee’s sons. Bobby was a 60’s pop star who took buddy Holly’s place the night
Buddy, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens took their Fatal plane flight which ended,
in all their deaths. The Crickets put out a message on the local Minneapolis radio station
asking if there was anybody who could sing as they wanted to carry on the tour
in Buddy’s memory and Bobby stepped forward. I got to know them all when I tour
managed one of their UK tours. They both played on four tracks of my last album
Walking In Familiar Footsteps, and they have been saying for a couple of years to go
over to Minneapolis to their studio Rockhouse Studio in St Paul. It’s an old bank,
looks like Jesse James might have robbed it once. So I booked tickets for me and
my guitarist The Reverent Paul Green in January and waited for April.
So I stepped off the plane went up the tunnel and were met by four Immigration Officers,
who recognised us immediately, and I was the subjected to three hours of being to feel
like the worst criminal to ever grace the US shores. It’s funny how similar the immigration
uniforms are to German SS uniforms. This was all because I was busted twice in 1977
and once in 1987, in other words twenty and thirty years ago.
The guy who interrogated me was not evne born when I got the first two offences .
Mobile phones were not invented, computers were something you saw in science fiction
movies and the world was a whole different place. That is why I wrote We Want It Legalised
when I was in Accident On The East Lancs back in 78, because a lot of people got criminal
records for what I don’t believe is a criminal offence. I wouldn’t have a criminal record these
days, I would have had two cautions and one would not have even gone to court,
as it was for a third of a gram of charred cannabis found in a roach in a bin in a house
where six people lived and a lot of people regularly visited. And now they are going to
re classify Cannabis back to class B, so in another thirty years someone will have their
plans fucked up because of an offence they got as a kid.
So I was sent back on the first plane back, three hours later. Had they detained me I
might have got in as Tommy had got hold of one of the top Immigration Lawyers and
he was going to try and over rule the decision. And that is the annoying thing, it is not a
rule that I had to be sent back it is down to their discretion. They could have sat down
with me for a couple of hours had a chat, sussed I wasn’t going to murder the president
and let me in to record, but hey that would have too nice, and easy .
Ah, Accident On The East Lancs? I remember seeing that name quite a lot during the
late seventies on the Manchester Punk Scene, and I still have a copy of ‘Legalize’
somewhere. You played, and were DJ at The Deeply Vale Festivals that Chris Hewitt
used to put on. What are your memories of those crazy events?
Deeply Vale, I did indeed play and DJ at Deeply Vale, but I was also one of the
original organisers. In 1975 and 76, I was living in hippie commune in Oldham Road
Rochdale, it was opposite Balderstone Park, it isn’t there anymore, it’s been pulled down..
S me and couple of the guys and girls spent the summers travelling round the free festivals.
After one journey we were sat around the kitchen table and Dave Smith said why
don’t we put on our own festival, then we won’t have to travel. So we went down to Tractor
which was also on Oldham Road at the time and Chris came on board, organising the
bands and PA, which he owned. Meanwhile we went to a festival at Rivington Pike,
and met a greasy old biker with one leg called Seth, who led us to believe that he could
help organise a free festival. He virtually moved into Oldham Road taking over a spare
bed in my room. He gave us tips like how tap electricity from pylons to run the stage,
and other such wondrous things We should have known he was full of shit when he
told us he was an archer of Olympic standards. Anyway two days before the festival
was due to start he disappeared, leaving us to run around hustling generators and staging.
We never saw him again.
I took my entire record collection up there, and DJ’d from morning till morning from
underneath the stage the first year. I used to put periodic messages for someone to bring
some drugs, as people tended to forget I was there. I did’t used to do morning well
in those days, and I remember Chris Hewitt every morning would say over the PA
will Andy Sharrocks please get out of bed and come to the stage. It went on for hours,
till I was ready. And so on a chilly wet September weekend we put the first Deeply Vale
festival on, attended mainly by local folk and entertained mainly by local bands. That was 76.
Accident did a lot of benefits to raise money for Deeply Vale, because although it was free
to get in it wasn’t free to run it There is link on my myspace page which shows a poster of
Accident supporting g the Fall, at Rochdale college, with me DJ’ing as well.
We had to have money for diesel for generators, for scaffolding for the stage,
for expenses for the bands, for flyers and posters, it was like a cottage industry,
we would get the flyers done and go to other festivals to distribute them, and go
fly posting all over the place. Accident played there in 78 and 79, this year I played
in front of the biggest crowd I played in front of before and since, there were about
20,000 people there that year.
A festival like that couldn’t happen these days, too many rules and regulations,
we didn’t even have toilets. We got busted at the house in 77 in an attempt by the
police to discredit the organisers of Deeply Vale, but all they got was a roach,
which thirty years later bit me on the ass. They took away a bag of sea salt as they
thought it was a bag of cocaine, they didn’t know anything in those days,
they were fighting blind.
The festivals were very anarchic, it was a police free zone. They tried to come on site once
and they were marched off by a crowd of people. The top brass from Manchester
came down, and we did a deal, no police on site and they would get no trouble,
they agreed, it worked, they still searched people approaching the site but they
didn’t come on the site after that.
We had to repair the approach road every year so vehicles could get down to the site.
We organised work parties to do this. It was a good community spirit.
I think it was 78 I burnt my hands real bad. I fell asleep after a few heavy days partying
with a candle burning, and woke up with the tent on fire – instead of just getting
out of it I set about putting it out with my hands – stupid idea. I ended up with my
hands in plastic bags for weeks while they heeled, they looked like hot dog sausages,
all red and raw, nasty.
I recall John Peel playing your songs and really championing your cause back then,
tell me some more…
There’ll never be another John Peel that’s for sure. It was so special to get played on
Johns programme. I never really listened to any other radio programmes,
but his show was like a religion at the time. I’ll never forget, John Clarke who was
amamgeing us at the time told us it was going to be on. Me and Kiearan sat in my room
in John Street Whitworth, and we heard ‘And this is a band with the most unlikely
name of Accident On The East Lancs, with the most exiting sound I’ve heard since
The Sex Pistols’, and the hair on the back of necks rose, we couldn’t believe it.
He played Tell Me What Ya Mean,a she couldn’t play We Want It Legalised for
obvious reasons, which is why I made it a double A side. He played on quite a regular
basis after that, and the second single Back End Of Nowhere, which is about Rochdale
and towns like it. John Peel bless him – I hope he is ok
After the initial tidal wave of Punk Rock had moved on, you also moved on from the
Manchester/Rochdale Punk Scene. Where did you go?
I was wasted in 1982, totally wiped out, I was doing over an ounce of smack a week,
and then there was all the recreational drugs, I was an emotional paranoid wreck,
I couldn’t run my own life never mind a band. I ended up owing a lot of money,
I ain’t proud of it, but I knew I was either going to go to prison for a long time or I was
going to die, no two ways about it, so my survival voice made me throw some bags
in to the back of my van and disappear. I disappeared deep into the Welsh country side.
Went cold turkey, and had a major culture shock. I ended up making money by shearing
sheep and picking big stones out of fields so the farmer could plough them .
I started playing with a local funk band Paradise Dance, playing local pubs and community
centres. At first I just joined as the vocalist, but as usual I ended up running it with the
drummer. He used to play in a band called The Tremors in London. The band had split up
and he came back to Shropshire. His girlfriend owned a large rambling falling down
country mansion, which her father a scrap metal dealer had bought. He had died and
left it to her, but it was really beyond repair, there were two rooms which weren’t
derelict and we used to rehearse in one of them. Then the guitarist from The Tremors
came up for a visit, and we got on real well, too well, I ended up moving in with him in
his squat in Clapham, and we embarked on an 18 month junk bender.
We had grand plans of forming a band but did nothing except get stoned, such id the
insidiousness of class A drugs. He bailed out first going back to his parents in Coventry.
I went back to Wales, to the love of a good woman, another cold turkey, and the start
of a drug free life. I rehabilitated myself working on building sites and driving taxi’s,
getting a work ethic. I hadn’t worked since leaving school, it was a new concept.
I was offered a job tour managing, which at first I turned down, but after some thought
accepted it. I then spent the next fifteen years on the road, mainly with old established
acts from the 60’s and 70’s anyone from Gerry and The Pacemakers to Art Garfunkel,
to Sister Sledge.
The last tour I did was with Errol Brown in 99 after a resurgence of his popularity with
The Full Monty. The support was Ray Minhinnit who used to play with Frankie Miller
and playing with him was Hilly Briggs. I was asked to be the production manager for
the promoter I had been working for on the road, so I had a three month trial, and while
I was on it I slept on the floor of the lighting rigger off the tour in Watford, and it
turned out Hilly Briggs lived just round the corner. I went round for some food one
night, and he had a studio in his house, and that was the birth of my last album Walking
In Familiar Footsteps, which featured Mick Taylor from The Stones. Hilly had co written
and co produce Mick’s album A Stone’s Throw. Paul Jones form The Manfredds/Blues Band
playes harp on it too, as well as Jeff and Tommy Vee, and a whole host of other people,
including The Reverent Paul Green who I work with now.