The final stretch into Oldham was free from mistakes, and fortune was now favouring us, as the venue for the exhibition – Gallery Oldham – was well sign-posted. We made it in at ten to nine, thankfully just before the last of the free bottles of Magners were packed away.


I think our viewing of Squire’s latest work could not have lasted much longer than ten minutes, as we were being encouraged to be quick about it. All that way for a ten minute viewing!! I resolved that we should return in the morning to have a proper look. It was good to see John’s agent, Vivienne, once again, who appears more beautiful with each exhibition, this time dressed in an eye-catching white and yellow number, and also of course, John himself.


Jah Scouse claims to be one of the few people to have seen The Stone Roses at a gig in Cardiff when there were, as he put it “eight people there, and ten of them were staff”, and also to have been to a wedding where he met John’s wife. With minimal talk of the Roses still de rigueur, he did not mention the first fact, but did try to ask something about the wedding. There was something about a person called Andy Cole dying, which John, as a Man Utd supporter, naturally took to mean the Premier League football player. I think Scouse was in fact referring to the person at the wedding.


Anyway, I also asked a slightly Roses-related question. Having only seen the latest exhibition for ten minutes, I didn’t think of any immediate questions in relation to it. John was his usual quiet and polite self, paying genuine attention to what we said, it felt to us.


Well, that was about it for the opening really! We were leaving at just the same time as John’s mum and dad, and we couldn’t resist the opportunity of sharing a lift with the parents of a member of, as Scouse frequently referred to them, the biggest band on the planet. What a lovely, down-to-earth couple they seemed to be. Just regular, northern folk, it seemed (if that itself is not a cliché), just as you might expect. Scouse asked where John had got his artistic talent from, which neither of them could really answer. Scouse did speculate though that John had, at least in the case of the current exhibition, with its concentration on metalwork and box- like structures, drawn inspiration from his dad, who was an engineer.


15


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