How a music fan helped a band avoid Top of the Pops

A music fan who helped his idol escape playing Top of the Pops says his friends did not believe him until they heard the performance was cancelled on BBC Radio 1 the next day.

Indie band The Wonder Stuff had finished their gig in Cumbria when singer Miles Hunt decided to go missing so they could avoid playing the music show.

Hunt left the Sands Centre in Carlisle through a side door and blagged a lift to a hotel in the city centre with Mark Galbraith and three of his friends in Galbraith's mum's blue Volvo.

"There wasn't any internet and there was no way of corroborating any story like this other than waiting to hear it on the news," Galbraith said. "It was a different era."

But, once his friends had heard the news for themselves, "it was then believable how we had such insider knowledge", he said.

The Wonder Stuff were due to play on Top of the Pops for a sixth time during their March 1994 tour, but Hunt said that he had hated "every single one of those experiences".

"I didn't join a band or learn to play an instrument to mime," he said.

"There was no way I was getting up at six or seven in the morning to fly down to London and do Top of the Pops on a day off."

Instead, he sought the help of then-teen Galbraith, who had been at the gig with friends.

"I found three or four lads, they could only have been 16, maybe 17," Hunt said.

"I just walked up to them and they were really wide-eyed because they'd just seen me on stage."

Though none of them had their own car, Galbraith volunteered his mother, Margaret, to drive Hunt to Carlisle City Centre, on their way home to Annan, over the Scottish border.

She said it was a "squash" with four teenagers and Hunt in the car, and was surprised that he wanted to avoid playing on Top of the Pops.

"Everyone wanted to go on Top of the Pops," she said.

"Even me, the mum of three kids. But the man had his reasons."

After spending two nights in the Station Hotel, Hunt re-joined his bandmates in Glasgow and the tour continued - though they were never invited to appear on Top of the Pops again.

Hunt said it was brilliant to hear back from his partners in crime more than three decades on.

"I was actually on a solo tour earlier in the year and I met one of Mark's friends at the merch stand after the gig," he said.

The friend asked if Galbraith's story of helping Hunt escape the tour was true.

"And I said it's completely true," Hunt said. "He didn't want to believe me."

Galbraith will be at the opening of The Wonder Stuff's tour at Newcastle City Hall on Thursday night, though his mum says she will not be picking up him, or Hunt, afterwards.

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