"Oi, I sent you a hundred quid and I never got any fucking records!"

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In the middle of Leicester Market, with hundreds of people milling about, walking up and down the stalls, and he opens his jacket and he's got all these John Dickenson envelopes you put wages in. So he says 'Well, blues are so much ... black bombers are so and so ... green & clears are this much ... ' At the next all-nighter I took three of them and this skinhead girl comes up to me and says 'Don't it make your head feel like it's got a hedgehog on it?' She was the same girl who came up to me and said that it was nice to have a few weirdos here, 'cause I had long hair at the time. The Northamptonshire scene was going at the same time as The Wheel. I mean a lot of people say that it started there, but there were always people around Bedford, Luton, Corby and Kettering. We used to have all-nighters at this disused hen house in a village called Bletsoe, about ten miles north of Bedford. Somebody had hired a generator to get the decks going. I remember dancing to Little Richard's "I Don't Wanna Discuss It'. In the morning I had dust and chicken feed all over my trousers. This place wasn't even on the bloody road, you'd need an Ordnance Survey map just to find it.

How long it will last nobody knows. Nor can anyone predict whether these kids will evolve their tastes with the development of soul music, or one day drop it as a passe fad, just as the mods did in '67 when they suddenly ditched soul for flower-power, swopped pork-pie hats and mohair for beads and kaftans and became hippies ... Edwin Starr thought that the ending was an anticlimax. "Fans had tattoos put on their body to commemorate the last night, only to find out it wasn't the last night!"