Some people say you should watch a man’s feet to see if he’s ready to swing a punch, I say watch his fucking eyes!

The only kicks and highs people got then were the ones dished out in nightclub fights.

My time as a doorman was quite volatile and bloody, no door registration schemes or training courses could have prepared you for what it was like back then. You didn’t have vanloads of police patrolling up and down the town then, you were lucky if you even seen a couple of bobbies in a car, never mind on foot.

Like Lenny McLean said, and I agree with him totally, he told me it’s these bastards that hurt the old people and fuck up the young kids, they are the animals and they hardly get any prison sentence for it.

I must have had that Bugsy Malone type of face that attracts every fucker to have a go at me.

My father was always suppressing the softer side of my nature; it seemed to have disappeared in the course of those boxing lessons, that’s what boxing did to me. My father took away the real me and replaced all what I could have been by imposing his brutal regime of terror upon me.

I wanted to go in one direction, but my father forced me to follow his direction, and, somehow, he won. In one of these compelling situations, he wanted me to join the police force, but he had previously said that I didn’t have the bastard brains to pass my driving test. What a contradiction of terms?

My aspirations never lay with boxing, but that’s the way I was pushed. I was still a choirboy when I started boxing because I remember I went to choir practice every Wednesday night. I missed some Wednesday nights if I was boxing and then when I missed it I’d have to tell the choirmaster why. I had a battle between the choir and boxing. When my voice inevitably broke, boxing won.

If I lost a bout then I soon learned not to go home straight afterwards, I would give him time to go to the bar first. Event though I’d go to all of that trouble to escape his ranting and raving, my father would come home steaming drunk, drag me out of bed whilst I was still half asleep and beat the living shit out of me!

I remember, I walked in to the house expecting to be consoled by my father, but he yelled, ‘What, you fucking lost!’ At this stage I was still only a kid, if I lost then I was given a good kicking by him. He would suddenly turn in to King Kong and proceeded to paint the walls seven colours of shite with me!