Steve looked upwards, to where the gods of rock were watching and waiting. ‘She knows them already,’ he said. ‘Halle-fuckin’-lujah.’

Three or four run-throughs and Alison nailed it, her voice honey to Steve’s sulky gravel. She knew his lyrics like he knew them himself and she had all the right instincts: sang without ego, heard the spaces that waited for her in the music, used her voice to complement Steve’s with another layer of sound, light and lovely. Only in ‘Juliet’ did she play about with the words, adding a kind of sweet, insolent comeback to his macho, half-hearted apology to a girl he left behind. Dooley looked at Daniel and mugged an expression of awed astonishment, and Daniel, equally impressed, only shrugged.

Afterwards, Steve was intent on pinning her down to dates and times – gigs, rehearsals – and he hovered about, badgering her with questions, as she came and went from the welfare hall into the muggy summer night, helping pack the equipment back into the van. John’s dad watched at the open door, his arms folded across his beer belly, a bunch of keys bristling from his fat fist.

‘I said till ten,’ he kept saying when anyone passed him. ‘Ten o’clock, I said. Not twenty past eleven. Ten.’

Alison stopped and smiled regretfully at him. ‘I’m really sorry, Mr Spencer,’ she said. ‘It’s because they wanted me to sing.’

He looked at her askance, noticing her properly for the first time. ‘You’re never involved with this shower, are you?’ he said. He had a florid face, a swollen nose, the curse of a landlord too keen on beer and too free with the optics. ‘What a bloody racket.’

She laughed. ‘I suppose if you liked it, we’d be doing it wrong,’ she said, but so reasonably, and with such a friendly smile, that he took it as a compliment to his own good taste.

‘Aye, right enough, lass,’ he said. ‘Right enough.’ And he whistled and waited almost good-naturedly as they hauled their trappings into Steve’s Transit. Then they clambered in themselves, Dooley and John slammed behind the doors of the windowless back like hostages, Alison and Daniel up front on the seats with Steve. When he turned the key in the ignition the Buzzcocks bounced violently out of the speakers, and Steve turned them up further still, loud enough that people on the pavements turned to look, and shook their heads. He lit a cigarette, took a hungry drag, then held it in a pinch between right thumb and forefinger and drove left-handed with a sort of reckless, casual skill, letting go of the wheel altogether to change gear. He was going to drop Alison last – it made perfect sense – but she hopped out with Daniel at Nether Edge and wouldn’t get back in.