“During the gig his trousers split,” Gift chuckles, describing how Strummer asked if anyone had a safety pin and a shower of the punk fashion items hit the stage. At a Clash gig in Leeds he even caught the eye of the singer, Joe Strummer. He fell into the Yorkshire city’s punk scene, where his black leather jacket, dark skin and blond hair earned him the nickname Guinness. Moving to Hull aged 11 was “a shock – there were only two other non-white kids in school”, but Gift never felt unwelcome. Because everyone was black or brown or Irish. “There were no signs in our street reading ‘No Irish, no dogs, no blacks’. “There were black actors in films like Scum or Scrubbers,” he remembers, “but that’s the joke … they played characters in prison.” The son of a black carpenter and white mother who ran secondhand clothes shops, he spent his early years in Sparkhill, Birmingham, one of the UK’s first multicultural areas. Growing up as a mixed-race kid in the 1970s, there were scant black faces in adverts or on television. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photoīut then Gift never expected to be famous. View image in fullscreen ‘We became an “arrive separately” band’.
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