Mark Hoyle: 'If you can avoid bitterness, it’s better for you in the long run'

Mark Hoyle describes writing his memoir, Swerve, as a “slice of a process” of reassessing his life, much of the early years of which were spent in care before he went on to become part of Manchester’s thriving music scene as frontman of the bands Vibrant Thigh and Dub Sex.

“There were always a lot of mysteries in my life,” the 62-year-old tells The Yorkshire Post. “My mum died young [when Hoyle was only nine years old]. As part of the process of trying to protect me, she did create kind of a smokescreen around things because she was scared of me being taken into care earlier.

“Even though she was not a particularly religious person, in fact she left Ireland because she was pregnant, with the furore that caused in the Sixties being a single woman. When she got to England she realised the landscape and invoked the help of Catholic rescue societies.

“She was given a death sentence and everything about her life from then on was to protect me and make sure I was safe when she was gone. She was a very brave woman and I’ve got a lot to thank her for.”

Although Hoyle did eventually end up in foster and care homes in Greater Manchester, his mother had equipped him with a love of reading and writing that enabled him to pass his 11-plus and attend Cardinal Langley Roman Catholic High School in Middleton, where he forged friendships with David and Martin Coogan, older brothers of the comedian Steve. He recalls that along with their other sibling, Brendan, all of them “had this skill of mimickry” and would be cast in school plays.

For a time Hoyle lived with his father, an Irish navvy, who Hoyle’s mother had previously claimed was dead. However, he left due to his father’s heavy drinking and violence. Remarkably, Hoyle recounts it all without bitterness.

“I’m proud for people to say that,” he says. “If you can avoid bitterness, you swerve it, it’s better for you in the long run… I can’t pretend that I didn’t have a lot of despair and animosity towards the situation when I was younger, but I was writing about in my fifties. It’s very optimistic, but these are the words of a grown-up man that’s lived as well and learnt to accept it and learnt to be positive.”

From the age of nine or ten he “retreated into a world of music”, buying magazines with song words with his pocket money and listening to pop songs on the radio. But at 14 he discovered he was “the perfect age” for punk rock. At 16, he formed his first band Vibrant Thigh. “The credo was anyone could do anything and I believed it wholeheartedly,” he says.

Mark Hoyle playing with the band Dub Sex.

They made their first recordings with the help of the Manchester Musicians Collective; among their contemporaries were Buzzcocks, The Fall and Joy Division. Hoyle says he was “attracted by the intelligence and the world it came from” with The Fall and remains connected to the band more than 45 years later. Dub Sex, the band that Hoyle formed after Vibrant Thigh’s break-up became favourites of the BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.

Pointing to the likes of Martin Coogan, who went on to form The Mock Turtles, and Dick Witts of the Manchester Musicians Collective who helped him at key points, Hoyle says sees his book as “a story of good interventions and the good people that came and pointed me in a different way”.

Mark Hoyle and Paul Hanley will be talking about The Fall’s album Live At The Witch Trials at The CAT Club at The Robin Hood, Wakefield Road, Pontefract on Thursday January 30 at 7.30pm. https://thecatclub.co.uk/