Johnny was born in the mean, bleak, dark streets of a northern Manchester satellite town on a rainy night in August of 1971; the binmen were on strike and the local swimming pool had been shut for the summer due to a veruca outbreak. The youngest son of an international diamond smuggler and a school dinner lady he was always eager to learn from his older brothers and sisters - all 13 of them - and it wasn't long before he picked up his elder brothers guitar. It also wasn't long before he put it back down again and picked up the glockenspiel, he became a maestro at said instrument representing Rochdale (north) at the annual Rawtenstall and District Fair (eventually his take on Paint it Black saw him placed third, he still has the rosette to prove it).


At the age of 13 he found an unused ticket to Wigan on the floor of Manchester Victoria railway station and there were borne his ramblin' tendencies. During his sojourn in Wigan he took drink for the first time and bought a Young Persons Railcard, he didn't look back for the next eleven years, until in fact he was rushed into hospital in Birmingham, Alabama and had his internal organs replaced with the hot wired offspring of Texas Instruments Speak and Spell machines, unfortunately these early years hybrids couldn't cope with the booze and he became tee-total. He often looks back with fondness of the 'lost years' but cannot recall much about them at all. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.