I like it when ghosts connect. And ghosts began to connect when I returned from lunch next day at Govnet having bought Joe Meek (part of the Skazz canon) on a CD whose case I opened at my desk and read the sleeve notes until a colleague on another desk Steve asked what I got up to last night and I didn’t say I got a letter from my dad asking me if I was gay. I said: Played Vice City. Hoping by being monosyllabic that Steve would leave me alone but no, he wanted to crawl further up my arse by asking what CD and I held up the cover for him to look and he said oh Joe Meek, he had heard of him but there’s a new band now called Kasabian. Similar to the Roses, he said. I like the Roses, I said. And from then on, we’d then talk about music and football cos he supported Liverpool and the day John Peel died we went for a postwork drink in the Zumbar opposite BBC Oxford Road and we were supping away while in the building across the street Mark E Smith talked about Peel to Gavin Esler and we were supping away when Steve said he’d worked for a Liverpudlian company selling magazine space and a man on his team was Michael Abram who’d take loads of speed and he broke into George Harrison’s house, attacked him, Harrison who I saw today in the Granada News clip from 1976 when he’s watching a TV and he laughs cos on the screen is The Beatles playing That Boy’s dripping harmonies and as he watches a previous version of himself you can see above his right shoulder Tony Wilson who everybody in Manchester has met: therefore all of those people have met a man who met George Harrison. And this in my mind is ghosts connecting. Like my dad once said: You know Bomber, he saw Jeff Lynne and George Harrison coming out of an Indian restaurant in Atherstone and they walked down Long Street singing.
