Although a ‘Manchester band’ through and through, the bedrock of the Gags line-up was actually three school friends from Yorkshire. Brendan Gore (piano, vocals, blues harp), Gerry McLaughlin (guitar, vocals) and John Kelly (bass guitar) first played together in the early Seventies while at St Michael’s College in the heart of Leeds.

Their early forays into live music came under the name of Pig’s Trotters (surely one of the worst band names of all time). Starting out in local folk clubs (and irritating the hell out of Martin Carthy devotees) they quickly added drummer Kruge Murphy to the line-up and discovered prog (‘Us repeatedly playing three chords while Gerry disappeared up his own backside with endless guitar noodling’ according to Gore) before discovering they could actually play a bit.

The band landed a test session at Island Records with Muff Winwood only to be subsequently denied a breakthrough due to a vinyl shortage caused by the 1973 oil crisis. That unfortunate outcome pretty much summed up the band’s luck for the next quarter of a century.

1974 saw a move to London, a brief period of living in squats and a series of lackadaisical efforts trying to catch a break (another consistent theme for the band). Finally, short of cash, real life intervened with Gore returning to university, Kelly taking a job selling ad space (in preference to returning to Oxford University where he was studying Oriental Studies) and McLaughlin landing a berth with pop band The Sweeney who subsequently scored an appearance on TV talent show New Faces (as he recalls: ‘We came bottom. Arthur Askey said we should go back to the drawing board. The band broke up in the van on the way home’).

That could have been it. But Manchester was calling.

Pig’s Trotters, 1973, Leeds. Left to right: John Kelly, Kruge Murphy, Brendan Gore, Gerry McLaughlin