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\u201cI nearly went and sat with her but because of the peer pressure from others I didn\u2019t. “<\/p>\n\u201cEven as us kids danced around the flames, there were real life monsters watching from the shadows.\u201d\u201cI nearly went and sat with her but because of the peer pressure from others I didn\u2019t. “<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a memory that flickers in his mind\u2019s eye. The moment eight-year-old Steve Diggle came face-to-face with Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. The Buzzcocks frontman spent his youth gadding around the terraced streets of Bradford, east Manchester – a place he describes as \u2018the real Coronation Street<\/a>\u2019 which influenced his politics and outlook on life.<\/p>\n And though he recalls his formative years as a happy time, he remembers one Bonfire Night with startling clarity and grim hindsight.<\/p>\n \u201cWe used to have a croft at the end of the street with all the wood on. And this blonde woman came and sat down on this box.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously it was Brady who then said: \u2018Come and sit next to Myra\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t realise of course. You don\u2019t realise until much later.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were about five of us, cousins, friends, you know. But we were only about seven or eight.<\/p>\n \u201cI nearly went and sat with her but because of the peer pressure from others I didn\u2019t. Somewhere else I might have sat down but luckily I didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s an episode Steve also recounts in his book Autonomy: Portrait of a Buzzcock.<\/p>\n \u201cThe chilling reality for kids of my age was that the Moors Murderers\u2019 Manchester was our Manchester,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n \u201cThey plucked their victims from the very streets I grew up in, all to the east and southeast around Gorton<\/a>, Ancoats and Longsight<\/a>. So it\u2019s not really surprising that one day I\u2019d end up seeing them with my own eyes.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was a bit later, when I must have been maybe 8 or 9. It was at a bonfire at the end of our street, and I remember seeing this Teddy Boy-looking bloke with this blonde woman.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just those two watching us kids run around the bonfire, which even at the time I thought was a bit odd.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were sat on an old broken wardrobe, there to be chucked on the fire, going, \u2018Come and sit next to Myra.\u2019 I never sat with them, and I\u2019m not sure any of the other kids did either, I just remember them being there, and I only mention it because that\u2019s how frighteningly easy it must have been for them to do the horrendous things they did.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one of those weird, creepy memories that only pieces itself together years after the fact. Thinking back and suddenly realising \u2018F***, that was them!\u2019. But it happened.<\/p>\n \u201cEven as us kids danced around the flames, there were real life monsters watching from the shadows.\u201d<\/p>\n Steve says his parents also encountered Brady and Hindley.<\/p>\n His \u201cbighearted\u201d mum ran a children\u2019s shop in the area and always let customers buy on credit – even Hindley\u2019s mum, who lived nearby. While his delivery driver dad got \u201croped into decorating Brady\u2019s bedroom\u201d, years before details of his vile crimes were ever known.<\/p>\n \u201cMy dad knew his stepdad who told him, \u2018Eric, this kid\u2019s a nightmare, he\u2019s just coming out of Borstal.\u2019 So because my dad was good at wallpapering he asked if he\u2019d help get Brady\u2019s room ready, which he did,\u201d he writes in Autonomy.<\/p>\n Speaking to the Manchester Evening News 60 years later, Steve says the Moors Murders put \u201ca dark cloud on everything\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cYou had to rethink your life then and think \u2018f**k, there’s people like that about\u2019,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n This close encounter is a memory he can\u2019t escape, but it\u2019s far from the most important part of Steve\u2019s reminiscence about the east Manchester of the 1960s.<\/p>\n As a child born at St Mary\u2019s and raised in Longsight and Bradford, he says it was a \u2018fantastic\u2019 childhood.<\/p>\n \u201cManchester is so modern now – all concrete. But it was all proper terraced streets back then,\u201d he says. \u201cVery Coronation Street.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was fantastic growing up in that kind of place. And obviously that left a Manchester mark on me.<\/p>\n \u201cYou had Belle Vue right at the end. I lived round the corner opposite the police station and the fire station. Belle Vue was an amazing thing looking back with the zoo. It was like Disneyland in the middle of all this industry.<\/p>\n \u201cOur street was near The Bradford Hotel, which was on the corner. A big pub that looked like a beautiful palace.<\/p>\n “Round there it was that thing where people would go into work all day and the pub all night. And in the summer the smell of the beer and cigarettes was better than any Chanel perfume.\u201d<\/p>\n Living in close quarters with his working class peers and struggling families, Steve says he found himself observing from a young age.<\/p>\n \u201cThere used to be people taking their two weeks holiday to mend the car,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019d see cars on bricks. That was poetry to me. It was hardship and it was poetry.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was something else growing up with that kind of thing. That impacted on my songwriting I think.<\/p>\n \u201cBut you never felt hard done to. That was the poetry of life to me – the reality of it.\u201d<\/p>\n It was this poetry that first drew Steve to music and books.<\/p>\n He grew up on a diet of The Beatles, The Kinks, Bob Dylan and The Who and with authors and poets like HG Wells, Wilfred Owen and latterly James Joyce and George Orwell who sparked his interest in politics and philosophy.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce you\u2019ve read stuff like Orwell and Joyce there\u2019s no turning back. You think there\u2019s got to be more to the world than this,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Working class heroes like George Best inspired him to think big. While an older lad on the street with a scooter moved him towards the Mod style.<\/p>\n \u201cManchester had this wonderful post war feeling and a great spirit. And that was amazing growing up in all that.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s this attitude to life that Steve says influenced his songs like Why She\u2019s a Girl From the Chainstore – which references sociologist Basil Bernstein, who theorised that middle-class students have an advantage because their language style is more aligned with the formal style used in schools.<\/p>\n \u201cFacing Bernstein’s barrier\/Waiting for someone to marry her\u201d Steve growls in that 1981 classic.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of my songs were political. Not straightforward finger pointing things but there\u2019s a lot of undertones of politics in there.<\/p>\n \u201cHarmony In My Head’s is about self rule. The Pistols were singing \u2018anarchy in the UK\u2019 I was saying you\u2019ve got to rule yourself, not the government. You need to find yourself. That\u2019s your country – your body.\u201d<\/p>\n As a teenager, Steve worked briefly in an iron foundry but says: \u201cI was always interested in music, not really interested in having a job.\u201d<\/p>\n As such, he answered an ad for a bassist in the Manchester Evening News and met his future bandmates Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto at the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall – something we\u2019ll explore in detail in the second part of our interview.<\/p>\n And for a young songwriter, the Manchester of the 1970s was an inspiring place. But Steve says the city today is a far cry from the one he knew then.<\/p>\n One of his most famous songs Harmony in My Head – penned in 1975 – was inspired by a stroll down Market Street<\/a> in Manchester city centre<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cManchester now reminds me of 1984 to four or something,\u201d he laughs. \u201cI remember when the Arndale Centre came up and you felt alienated by that.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I wrote Harmony in My Head it was about walking down Market Street. It was the cacophony – that was the harmony. The whole of life was there.<\/p>\n \u201cAll the people in that street, that’s the sound of life. The percolation of sound in that Market Street was like the whole of life was there.<\/p>\n \u201cI’ve just been all around America and that’s full of glass skylines and Manchester’s like that now.<\/p>\n What freaks me out is I walk down Aytoun Street and remember there’s a police station and a pub – you\u2019re half way down the street and a glass pyramid pops out. It\u2019s all impersonal but it\u2019s the same all over the world. There\u2019s something beautiful but something impersonal about it all.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom coming from those lovely streets of Bradford where it had a heart and soul, it seems so impersonal now. I mean it’s what they call progress, but is anybody any happier?\u201d<\/p>\n Steve\u2019s memoir <\/strong>Autonomy: Portrait of a Buzzcock<\/strong> is out now.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cEven as us kids danced around the flames, there were real life monsters watching from the shadows.\u201d\u201cI nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602408,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8813],"tags":[748,393,4884,2465,16,15,185318],"class_list":{"0":"post-602407","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manchester","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-manchester","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unmissable"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115636062855701293","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602407\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0_National-Archives-papers.jpg\")
Moors Murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady(Image: PA)<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0_Portrait-of-Buzzcocks-frontman-Steve-Diggle.jpg\")
Steve Diggle(Image: Kenny Brown | Manchester Evening News)<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0_LG_MEN_201125_Bradford_in_Manchester_1960s_08.jpg\")
Manchester: Bradford, Hutchins Street, Victoria Gardens – 1963(Image: @Manchester Libraries and Local Archives)<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0_BradfordArchs.jpg\")
Gas holders in Bradford, Manchester(Image: Manchester Libraries and Archives)<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0_LG_MEN_201125_Bradford_in_Manchester_1960s.jpg\")
Bradford Hotel, Mill Street, Bradford, east Manchester, 1964(Image: @Manchester Libraries and Local Archives)<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0_LG_MEN_201125_Bradford_in_Manchester_1960s_05.jpg\")
Manchester: Bradford, Grey Mare Lane, west side – 1962(Image: @Manchester Libraries and Local Archives)<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0_LG_MEN_201125_Bradford_in_Manchester_1960s_03.jpg\")
Manchester: Bradford, Barmouth Street, from Port Street, facing east – 1964(Image: @Manchester Libraries and Local Archives)<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1764466164_372_0_Portrait-of-Buzzcocks-frontman-Steve-Diggle.jpg\")
Steve Diggle(Image: Kenny Brown | Manchester Evening News)<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0_LG_MEN_201125_Bradford_in_Manchester_1960s_12.jpg\")
Manchester: Bradford, Nelson Street from Score Street – 1964(Image: @Manchester Libraries and Local Archives)<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0_p1270156.jpg\")
The Bradford Inn, Manchester(Image: MEN MEDIA)<\/p>\n