BY THE RED HOT summer of 1976 I was fourteen and going into Liverpool to meet my friends. I was a young man and stepping out. It didn't take me long to find the newly opened Probe Records shop on Button Street, off Whitechapel. I can never forget seeing Jayne Casey and Holly Johnson walking past in white boiler suits with cropped peroxide hair. No one had seen anything like that; it had all been patchouli oil, ex-army greatcoats, flares and long hair until then. It was like they had just stepped off a space ship!

The sights around Probe opened your eyes. People were exclaiming their individuality in 1976 and using their imagination. Pete Burns would be sitting on the steps of Probe with his huge quiff, black eye make-up, earrings and leather and was a sight to behold. Soon inside Probe, Eric's flyers were all around advertising bands I had never heard of like The Sex Pistols, The Damned, Elvis Costello, Deaf School, The Buzzcocks and Magazine.

Eric's had opened the same month as Probe around the corner in Mathew Street, right opposite the site of the Cavern, which the Council had seen fit to turn into a plot of waste ground and to be used as a car park. These days, people forget the diversity of youth culture of the time, but there were rockabilly gangs as well as Teds who would get their records from Probe. Another important shop from the ’60s had stood opposite Probe on Whitechapel. This was NEMS, the store that had been run by the late Beatles manager, Brian Epstein. There really was a lot of history and culture down that part of town.

In 1977 I was fifteen and started to date girls, usually from Huyton College – the sister school to Liverpool College (where I attended). I was one of the first in the crowd to get a pair of tight straight-leg jeans. Hard to believe now that that could have been such a statement back then – but it was. I had also bought a pair of green baseball boots from the Probe-related Silly Billies on Whitechapel which I would wear with a blue Navy shirt from school, the CCF (Combined Cadet Force).