The Alchemist
How many times I've saved myself
View attachment 103236
As an aside to the above:
Dave Twist was very well known on the punk scene. (The Prefects, The Hawks et al).
Twist has an early history with Morrissey.
From a 2021 interview:
"I was sixteen in 76 and couldn’t find a single one of my friendship group who’d accompany me to see the Patti Smith Group. Most subscribed to the Melody Maker opinion that the band couldn’t play and that she looked like a man… All of that crap that the emerging scene had to breakthrough.
So, shoving my copy of Horses into a carrier bag, I headed for New Street alone. Way too early for the show I found myself down the wide side alley and listening to the soundcheck at the stage door. The only other fan waiting there was a youth who said he’d travelled from Manchester; wedge cut hair, clear plastic ‘Bowie’ sandals, national health spectacles. We got talking, he said that his name was Steven Morrissey and he wanted to start a New York Dolls appreciation society. We exchanged addresses.
We’d compared our collections: records and clippings. All of this stuff was so hard to come by in mid-70s Britain. Steven was desperate for any ‘swaps’ I might have and I knew that I had a couple of duplicate photos from Rock Scene and told him I’d mail them to him. One of these – of the Dolls onstage at the Mercer Arts Centre – was cropped out and included in his book. Steven was absolutely desperate though to acquire from me my import picture sleeve promo 45 of Trash/Personality Crisis.
I really have no idea how I came to keep his letters, but I did. Here’s the first with its envelope where, complete with misheard error, he’d scrawled the lyrics to Patti’s Kimberly on the reverse."
View attachment 103237
Gave me goosebumps reading this and looking at the images.
A little too hard to make out the text in the letters, but what a piece of history this is.