I NEEDED A WORKHORSE OF a guitar. The red Burns I'd been using since 1985 was a classic vintage guitar but not a gigging one, so I traded it in for a big Aria semi-acoustic called a Jazz Star. It had a sunburst finish and was great to play and suited me down to the ground.

I'd go in to see Geoff at the Probe Plus office above the Probe shop. It would always be covered in hundreds of records and tapes and Geoff would be holding court up there being very funny and provocative. I did an interview with James Scanlon from Roby for his Blast Off fanzine we'd had a lot of local interest with The Pool of Life, but national radio play had proved to be a stumbling block.

Geoff was upbeat, though. He showed me a review of the album that had recently appeared in Folk Roots magazine where the reviewer called us ‘rednecks on speed’ before going on to suggest the album was ‘one of the finest things that Probe Plus had released’.

Simon had started off a little PA hire company and so we did the PA for Eugene Chadbourne's ‘Shockabilly’ show at Planet X in town. It proved to be a fantastic, psychedelic-tinged evening. Another of Geoff's Probe Plus bands, The Walking Seeds were on first, playing their brand of warped, ’60s garage punk. Their Probe Plus album Skullfuck would later be cited by Nirvana's Kurt Cobain as an influence and they played a great show that night at Planet X. Another band on was Back From Nam, which featured ex-La's Tony Clarke on drums, Barry Shailes (who worked in the Probe shop) on vocals and Paul (another Probe assistant) on bass. They had a punk rock tune called ‘Robocop’ and kicked ass.

The general sense of optimism we were experiencing would be shattered by a tragedy that would resonate for decades to come. On 15 April so many Liverpool fans were crushed to death at Hillsborough, Sheffield Wednesday's football ground. What should have been an exciting Liverpool FC cup tie became one of the greatest tragedies ever suffered on Merseyside and in the UK.