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.”