The Birth of Crud

It was the 30th of August, 1986, and I was in my flat on Ellesmere Road, Colwyn Bay. I remember it well — one of those warm days when you’ve got the rickety shash windows open and the world just drifts in. That afternoon, I started hearing the thud of drums and raw guitars echoing across from beyond the main road. It sounded good. Really good. Curious, I followed the noise.

The music was coming from the Rydal School playing fields — an open-air punk gig / summer fete happening right in the middle of Colwyn Bay. Rydal was a private school, and not exactly unfamiliar territory. Being teenagers, we’d often skulk around there, full of adolescent hormones and the daft idea that we might catch a glimpse into the girls' showers.

On stage was a Welsh punk band called Anhrefn, delivering a fierce, rebellious set. I’d actually heard them just the week before, doing a session on John Peel’s show on Radio One. Seeing them live was something else — wild, Welsh, loud, and absolutely vital.

Sharing the bill were another band from Bangor called The Paraletics, just as raucous, just as raw. Their guitarist, Jez, ended up getting told off mid-set by — of all things — an angry clown, furious about his swearing. You couldn’t make it up.

As the bands played, I was appraoched by a guy selling fanzines. One stood out immediately — ROX, thrown together by John Robb of The Membranes, a maniacal noise outfit from Blackpool. I’d flicked through countless 'zines over the years, but this one had a real charge to it. It was anarchic, urgent, buzzing with DIY spirit.

I’d been keeping a scrapbook since leaving school three years earlier, full of oddball newspaper cuttings, satirical bits, and funny headlines. As I thumbed through ROX, I thought, Why not do something with all that? Maybe put together a fanzine of my own.

When I mentioned it to Edi, he took the idea a step further.

"Why don’t we do a ragmag-type magazine for the Bay?" he said.

I paused. "Yeah. But what the hell would we call it?"

Edi didn’t even flinch. "Well," he said, with a perfectly timed pause, "Crud."

And that was it. That was the moment it began — on a late summer day in Colwyn Bay, fuelled by punk noise, DIY attitude, and a clown with a grudge.

Bath Street, Rhyl - The Corridor of Doors

 

He opened the book on his bare lap, fingers tracing the flavescent page, bent and creased from some forgotten moment of distraction. The story itself was about patricide — grim, unsettling, and yet he couldn’t look away. The words reached into him like an infection, twisting something already restless inside. It was a kind of perverted perversion, a fascination that felt alien and yet entirely his. Power radiated from those sentences: the power of imagination, of annihilation, of mutilation, amputation, and ultimately… of contemplation.

Closing the book, he rose and found himself walking down a corridor. At first it seemed ordinary — long, sterile, clinically clean, the sort of place where echoes linger long after footsteps fade. But something was wrong. Something shifted. At the far end loomed a door, heavy and waiting.

He paused, listening. Nothing. The air hummed faintly, as though alive. With a breath that caught in his throat, he turned the handle.

The world on the other side wasn’t right. The corridor continued, yes, but now its walls pulsed with a fuzzy purple light, static and liquid at once. The surfaces moved yet remained still, a contradiction that defied reason. He reached out, hand trembling, and the material resisted like gel, then rippled away into silence.

And then he saw it: the void. Where one wall should have been, there was only blackness — infinite, hungry, bottomless. The purple corridor clung to existence on the edge of that abyss, as though straining against being swallowed.

Along the single remaining wall stretched countless doors. Closed, identical, each one humming with unseen possibility.

A chill ran through him. Each door, he knew without being told, contained a future. Not a metaphorical choice, but a literal one. Only by opening a door and stepping through would he discover which life awaited him.

He hesitated. His hand hovered at the nearest knob, sweat beading at his temple. What if he chose wrong? What if the wrong door led only to deeper voids, to darker corridors? What if none of them led back?

The silence pressed in, thick and suffocating. His heart raced. For a moment he almost turned back — but when he glanced over his shoulder, the clean corridor was gone. There was only purple static and the infinite dark.

No retreat. Only doors. Only futures.

His hand touched cold metal. He drew a breath, braced himself, and—

—suddenly, awareness hit him like a crash of light.

The corridor dissolved. The void melted. The doors vanished. He was back on the threadbare carpet of his first flat in Bath Street, Rhyl. The book was still in his lap. The walls were still nicotine-stained. The buzzing wasn’t cosmic energy — it was the fluorescent strip light.

It had been an acid trip. One of many in those days, when his experiments with LSD carved out strange journeys through his own mind. That night, 1984, he had wandered corridors of choice and stared into black voids of possibility. And though the drug had rattled him with visions of futures unknown, somewhere in that trip — and in the years that followed — he’d like to think he chose the right door.

John Lennon is Dead

 

It was a wet and miserable December morning, the time was about 6.55am. I was in Colomendy estate in Denbigh on my paper round. I had been doing it for about a year & Xmas was coming, normally for a paperboy the advent of Yuletide meant a big pay-day as the tips for your year long slog with scant reward would start flowing. This, sadly was not the case, my round cover the most affluent part of Denbigh, nice houses, nice cars, no tips. The other paperboys who did the council estates returned loaded with 50p's and pound notes, although there was little money within the households they served. There was plenty of cash flow, perhaps the phrase; 'the rich get richer while the poor get poorer' stemmed from the generosity extended to the paperboy at Xmas.

My BMX bike weaved its way along the dark pavements, door to door, delivering the Telegraph, the Guardian, and the Times. For company, tied to the handlebars I had an Action Man radio, a waterproof birthday present which could transmit Morse code should I ever get lost in the depths of Denbigh. Radio One, as ever, poured out drab pap music, but it kept my 14-year-old mind on the job in hand.

The 7 o'clock headlines rang out across the sleepy housing estate:

'John Lennon has been shot dead outside his home in New York.'

I pulled the brakes on my bike, took the heavy paper sack off my shoulder and dropped it onto the wet pavement. A state of complete shock came over me, but I didn't know why, John Lennon had never consciously meant anything to me, particularly during my musical awareness years where the likes of Sham 69, Sex Pistols, The Damned, Clash etc. were my idols.

Leaving the sack in a puddle where it fell, I solemnly made the long climb up Vale Street and home to my sleeping family. I awoke my mother:

'Mum, John Lennon's dead.'

We lived in Ruthin in the late sixties as did John & Cynthia Lennon, and my parents would attend the various parties held by the neighbours.

My mother didn't get out of bed that day.

Dad’s account of this day (written in 2009) goes like this…

It was my day off. I dragged myself out of bed mid morning, turned the kettle on and then the radio.

The kettle boiled dry.

Shocked by the news, I never got my morning cuppa. I sat all day, stunned, as a crackly medium wave Radio City struggled to reach over the Welsh mountains. They played Beatles tracks all day back-to-back.

John Lennon had been shot.

The following day I was back at work for the Evening Leader newspaper. Myself and feature-writer Carol James were the only newspaper people John’s ex wife Cynthia would talk to at that sad time. We interviewed and photographed her at her home in Castle Street, Ruthin, whilst the photographers from the Nationals were dropping mind-blowingly huge cheques through her letterbox desperate for exclusive pictures and an interview. She tore them all up.

We got through the door because we were journos she could trust to be sensitive and not sensationalise how she felt about John’s death, having previously done a feature about her charity work a few months earlier and prior to that a promotional piece about her book A Twist of Lennon.

For me, the whole thing was made far more poignant since I’d been part of the 60s/70s music scene myself.

My band, The Executioners, had graduated from the local village hall dances, through the Chester and Deeside working-mens clubs, to earn our place on the Mersey Beat scene. We played the Cavern, The Iron Door, Tower Ballroom New Brighton and many other Merseyside Clubs, alongside the likes of the Searchers, The Big Three, Freddie Starr and the Midnighters, The Black Abbots, and the Undertakers.

Sadly, we were never on the same bill as The Beatles, so I never got to meet John Lennon.

It was spooky when some time later, I photographed Julian Lennon as a young man because at that time he was just like his father during the Cavern years.

Today, 29 years after his untimely death, John’s music is as fresh and meaningful as back then. It will live on forever. But I often wonder what he would be doing now had December 8th 1980 never happened.