Our Legendary Story

As best we remember it. Written up with the help of AI, so it’s probably in the wrong order and a few details will be off. Thirty-odd years is a long time and none of us were taking notes.

Legendary. Selling candles.

“Legendary, mate. We sell candles.”

That’s usually how I explain it, and it’s only half a joke — we did sell an absolute mountain of candles. It’s just easier than the alternative. If I say “shop,” people picture something normal, and it isn’t. If I say “head shop,” we’re into a whole conversation I can’t be bothered having at a party. And if I say “festival trader,” that’s a different conversation again.

So: candles. Down some stairs. Legendary.

For the record, Lowthian Street isn’t a dodgy backstreet. It’s a perfectly respectable street in Preston. It’s just that going down a set of stairs into a basement to buy incense and a four-foot bong doesn’t sound like a normal shopping trip, and I’ve never found a short way of saying it.

Down the stairs. Somewhere in the nineties.

Before all this

My mum died when I was young, and I went badly off the rails afterwards. Not in a colourful way. Just a few years of proper chaos where nothing much mattered and I wasn’t thinking further ahead than the weekend.

One of the mates I went off the rails with didn’t come out the other side. I’m not going to write him up as a life lesson — he was just a mate, and he isn’t here, and that’s the fact of it.

I came out of it more by luck than judgement.

The factory

I started at a fibreglass factory when I was nineteen and I was still there at twenty-three.

Twelve-hour continental shifts, filthy work, and mostly older blokes — a lot of them ex-pit, laid off when the pits went. Jaded, bitter, damaged, and some of the funniest people I’ve ever worked alongside. That combination does something to a place.

There was an Irish fella there called Clonas. Early on he asked me how old I was, and I told him nineteen.

He went absolutely mad.

“What the f**k are you doing in here? You can come back and do this kind of shit job when you’re older.”

He wasn’t being kind about it. He was furious, in the way you get furious at somebody about to make the same mistake you made. And he was right — you could look down that shop floor and see exactly what thirty years of it did to a man.

It took me another four years to act on it, mind. That’s usually how good advice works.

Growing up in a field somewhere

The rave scene is what actually sorted me out, which isn’t the version people expect.

Nightlife round our way in the late eighties could be aggressive. Wrong look, wrong pub, wrong night. The rave stuff wasn’t like that. Different music, different crowds, and people from completely unconnected worlds all in the same place for the same reason and nobody squaring up to anybody. I met people I’d never have met otherwise. It made me a bit less of an idiot.

Somewhere in there, me and Big Paul drove down to the Ardèche in France in an AX GT to see our mate Kev. We slept in the car, at the side of the road, in a tent when we could be bothered putting it up. It wasn’t a journey of self-discovery — it was a small French car full of two blokes who hadn’t washed.

But something about being that far from the factory made it obvious I wasn’t going back to it.

The name

The name comes from a rhyme we all chanted in the playground at primary school.

Bum tit tit, bum tit tit, play yer Willy Banjo.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. One of those daft bits of nonsense that lodges in your head at seven years old and is still in there thirty years later, making no sense whatsoever when you say it out loud as an adult.

It seems to be a Wigan thing. People from round there know it instantly. Everyone else looks at you like you’ve had a small stroke.

I told my mates we were going to be legendary. They pointed out you can’t call yourself legendary before you’ve actually done anything.

That was rather the point.

Starting out

Markets, to begin with. Candles, incense, jewellery, posters, whatever we could get our hands on and shift.

Hindley. Tyldesley. Bolton — Ashburner Street Market, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Wigan Market on Thursdays. Borrowed cars, knackered gearboxes, early starts, and learning what actually sells by finding out what doesn’t.

Barry and Phil were in at the start and did a lot of the graft nobody remembers. Nicola was integral to the whole thing — she had the Manchester connections, which mattered more than anything I brought, and she could talk to people in a way I couldn’t.

There was no business plan. There was a car boot full of stock and a rough idea that this beat the factory.

The flyers from back then tell you everything about how seriously we took ourselves. Hand-drawn, every one of them, by our mate R. Baron. “The Legendary Willy Banjo — Purveyors of Fine Smoking Utensils.” “Paddling in the shallows of ethnic glamour.” “The Little Shop with a Big Heart (and sore lungs).”

And the one that ended up on half of them:

If your mind is a garden and your thoughts are seeds, then you can grow flowers or you can grow weeds.

Which is either genuinely quite profound or complete nonsense, depending how your week’s going.

R. Baron drew every one of these by hand.

Finding the shop

I’d been in that basement before.

Years earlier I’d gone down there with Kev to buy a Frank Zappa poster, back when it was somebody else’s shop. So when I found myself looking for somewhere in Preston and remembered the place, it wasn’t really a discovery — more a thing I already knew was there.

Zarina next door gave me the landlord’s number.

He didn’t want us. Took one look and decided no. Which, in fairness, was a reasonable read of the situation.

Then Nicola went to see him.

She came back with the keys.

Damp walls, low ceiling, rough as anything, down a flight of stairs off the street. Perfect.

Building it

It started with strip lights, homemade shelving and a lot of bodged DIY. It grew a bit at a time, usually whenever we had money, which wasn’t often and never for long.

Friends helped. People we met at markets helped. Everyone who came through added something, whether they meant to or not.

The basement in the early days — part shop, part DIY project.

We built the counter ourselves — a great white thing with arches and columns, like somebody had tried to build a small cathedral out of MDF in a basement. It’s in the photos. I’ve no idea what we were thinking and I wouldn’t change a bit of it.

Clothes, candles, incense, glass and whatever else fitted on a shelf.

The sign we painted on the door said:

We sell all kinds of weird and wonderful things from around the globe. Do feel free to negotiate the stairs and have a look around. Remember, no under 16s.

If you are easily offended, go shop at C&A.

This is definately the most exclusive and original shopping experience in Preston.

Wild and wondrous things from around the globe — that bit was on the wall long before it became part of the story.

“Definately” with an A. Hand-painted, with a devil in a fire underneath it.

That was thirty years ago and it’s still about the size of it. The spelling’s the only thing we’ve fixed.

Looking at the old ads now, the stock list reads like a museum of the nineties. Candles — Dragons, Barbarians, Lovers, Stoneglow, Christmas puddings. Celtic jewellery. Mushroom pipes, electric pipes, credit-card pipes. Over twenty kinds of skins. Babydoll clothing. Bobble Car clothing. Hardman jackets. Technics merchandise. Laser spex. Stash cans. And DJ mix tapes — Sasha, Jeremy Healy, Graham Park, Stu Allen, hardcore to handbag, singles to twelve-packs.

We really did sell a lot of candles.

We had a Cones Hotline. An actual phone number, for cones. It’s still the shop number now — 01772 887772.

The Xmas Bashes

For a few years we put on our own Christmas parties, and the flyers for those are some of the best things in the archive.

“On a mission from WB.” One of them promised a ticket entitling you “to one hell of a night out.” Another was a midweek Xmas Escapade on Anecdote’s Street — Wednesday 28th December, half eight till two, three ninety-nine on the door, DJs to be confirmed and “a few local boys to show the big boys how to do it right.”

On a mission from WB.

There was also Willy Banjo’s Winstants, a prize draw in November ’95. A quid a ticket, a five-chamber glass bong as the top prize, and the tagline: “You know when you’ve been banjoed.”

I’d like to tell you there was a marketing strategy behind any of this.

Festivals, bike shows and general chaos

Festivals weren’t even half of it.

We did the first Phoenix Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon. We did bike shows. We did markets, one-offs, and a long tail of random chaos events that are hard to categorise now. If people were turning up in a field somewhere, there was a decent chance we’d have a go at putting a stall on it.

The first ever stall. DJ mix tapes, poppers and a four-foot bong, advertised in marker pen.

That’s our very first stall up there. Hand-painted signs, DJ mix tapes, poppers at four quid, and a four-foot bong advertised in marker pen. It’s the least subtle thing I’ve ever seen and I’m still quite proud of it.

One of those signs says “herbal highs”, and it’s worth saying what that meant at the time — herbal blends, sold openly, nothing like the synthetic stuff that turned up years later and gave the phrase a completely different meaning. Different era, different thing entirely.

Some were brilliant. Some were disasters. Some were just plain odd.

And we did Glastonbury for twenty-one years, which has its own story — twenty-one Glastonburys as a festival trader — along with all the Leeds Festivals, which came to an end this year.

The Transit. Note the chair on the roof rack.

I once watched a genuinely nasty fight kick off at one of these things, which rather undermines everything I’ve just said about peace and love and everyone getting on. But there you go. Thirty years of stories are never entirely consistent, and anyone who tells you their version is has forgotten the bad bits.

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Big Bad Bob — RIP

Bob was one of those characters who became part of Willy Banjo folklore. On our first website we even built him a Big Bad Bob’s Bullshit Button.

You pressed it, and it said “bullshit.” Or “Big Bad Bob says: sup wi yer.” Or some other bit of nonsense, picked at random.

That was it. That was the whole feature. It was exactly the sort of pointless rubbish we thought the internet was for back then — and, to be fair, we were probably right.

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The one about the police

Coming out of Glastonbury one year, we got pulled by the police.

The copper started explaining some obscure rule about articulated vehicles over three and a half tonnes needing an operator’s licence. Chapter and verse. I remember looking at him and saying something along the lines of, “I reckon there’s only you and Eddie Stobart’s dad who know that rule.”

What he didn’t know was that we also had two mates tucked away in the back who’d been robbed at the festival and needed a lift home. Entirely against the rules, obviously.

Packing up. Somebody else’s litter.

It was that sort of era. Vans overloaded past any sensible limit, people sleeping wherever they fitted, stock stacked everywhere, decisions made at four in the morning, and absolutely no idea how we kept getting away with it.

We weren’t trying to be criminals. We were young, naive and spectacularly casual about rules that nowadays would have somebody doing a risk assessment before breakfast.

What’s changed

Plenty.

The high street has changed and mostly not for the better. The way people shop has changed completely. Preston has changed. The pandemic did serious damage to independents, and some good places round here never opened back up.

The corporates operate on a scale we can’t touch and never could. That’s just the fact of it, and moaning about it doesn’t move a single unit.

But where people choose to spend their money still matters, and it matters more now than it did when we started. Every quid spent in a place like ours goes somewhere different than a quid spent online with a warehouse.

Today

We’re still here. Same basement, same stairs, still full of wild and wondrous things from around the globe.

We’re not rich. We’ll probably never be rich. Thirty-odd years in and I’m not sure that was ever really on the table.

But we’ve built something that’s genuinely a community, we’ve tried to be decent to people, and we’ve had an absolute laugh doing it.

Come down the stairs. We’ll sell you a candle.

13a Lowthian Street, Preston. It was 13 when we moved in — they changed it to 13a somewhere along the way, something to do with the rates. Same stairs, same basement, one extra letter.