Career Moves

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars (The other side of the Screwdriver)"

Career Moves... (who knows?).

It was great fun for the first half hour or so. The commonest epitaph, surely.

Employer # 1. Cantrell and Cochrane. In the summer of 1965, after leaving school and while waiting to find full time employment, I worked in the fizzy drinks warehouse just opposite the slum where I lived in College Road Bromley, Kent. Every day, lorries would deliver crates of bottles all over and around town, returning with crates full of empties. The bottles that were "foreigners" were destined for the rubbish tip (before anyone ever even spoke the word "recycling") and my job was to smash them against a brick wall to save space. There was me and there were the bottles and there was the brick wall. When the pile of broken glass grew to be the size of a small car, the fork truck driver would shovel it all up into a skip and I then began again, creating a fresh pile.

As I said, it was great fun for the first half hour or so. I lasted a whole week.

Employer # 2 Quite reasonably, after leaving Grammar School with 6 'O' Levels, including a distinction in Mathematics and also a distinction grade in 'A' Level Art, it was a forgone conclusion that I should be smashing bottles for a living for £3 a week but I had set my sights a good deal higher than that. My second employment was a lot more demanding: - for three weeks I was selling fruit and vegetables and cooking beetroot in a greengrocer's shop for £5 a week. Addition and subtraction in pounds, shillings and pence was adequately covered in my primary school education so the cash register held no terrors for me. The career opportunities here were obviously almost limitless (one only has to look at the career and truly sparkling reputation of Margaret Thatcher) but I had a real and genuine ambition to do much better.

Employer # 3 My father would have made a perfect stand-in for the Alf Garnett character of the ancient black and white T.V. series, "Till Death Us Do Part" and his thoroughly bigoted and narrow-minded opinions had inevitably affected and coloured my home life as a child. Nearly all of the money taken by the radio and T.V. repair shop he owned went over the bar of the pub across the road. This meant we lived as a family in virtual poverty. Nonetheless, he maintained a staunch conservative upper-class snob attitude to the world and it was this distorted and twisted viewpoint that adversely affected many important decisions in my impressionable young life.

For example, despite being a talented artist himself, his attitude to art students and art college was, rather surprisingly, completely negative. Alongside this weird set of intellectual blinkers, anything that didn't smack of a regimented, ultra-smart turn-out was disreputable, untrustworthy and definitely to be shunned at all costs. This meant that the "jazz fans" or "beatnicks" were worse than terrorists and on that basis, all long trousers would have to be styled with turn-ups at the end of the leg. Drainpipe trouser wearers were all to be shot without trial.

Even sporty drop handle bars on a bicycle were far too "way out" for him - or was that my stunted and broken imagination? Possibly so - but the merest hint of sideburns or hair-length approaching the shirt collar at the rear was strictly out. Rock and Roll got a bumpy ride from him, naturally and The Beatles, when they came along, sang the absolute death-nell for civilization and foretold the end of the sane and safe world he had fought for in World War 2.

So, even though the obvious choice for me upon leaving school was to further my artistic talents by going to Art College (like my best mates had and did), this was frowned upon as being a sure-fire short cut to Pergatory and Eternal Damnation. And probably Jazz.

The proper thing to do for an ex-grammar school boy upon leaving was to either go to University - (entirely out of the question - see education chapter), or go to work in an office in London. Do what? Ah, well, my mate Martin Clarke had done just that a year previously and was now earning fabulous money (£8 per week), commuting on the train to a West End advertising agency print-buying office. He had started out in advertising as a Post Room messenger and that was to be the way in which I would follow, late September of 1965. That job involved taking letters and packages around the building, delivering and collecting the office workers' post.

Douglas Adams wrote, "Brain the size of a planet and they ask me to close the door!" I was that robot.

The kid who 'showed me the ropes' was a real live wire by the name of Andrew Jakeman, known popularly around the office girls as "Jake". He was completely in tune with the modern world, unlike myself, the completely repressed "square" son of Alf Garnett. Jake's ambition was to grab some of the action in the world of rock music and I believe he fulfilled that ambition by co-founding Stiff Records.

By around about Xmas of that same year, the powers-that-be had worked out that I possesed a brain, albeit a damaged one and they offered me a promotion from the mail and despatch office up to the sixth floor - the Media Department. This new job involved looking after copies of all of the newspapers and periodicals in which the agency had placed advertising. Another part of the job was maintaining a "Kardex" filing system, recording the advertisement campaigns as placed, space bought on paper and time bought on the airwaves: - radio and T.V.

About as tedious as mildew on the scrotum and seemingly a pointless, out-of-control landslide of inefficiency and chaos.

The Media Department was, pretty much, otherwise, a fairly pleasant place to be. At least I was out of the Post Room, the money was better (£11 per week) and the girls were pretty. "Jake" Jakeman was still a messenger and called by my office daily to keep up with the rock and roll gossip of early 1966. He and I had been to see The Who at the Marquée club in the week that "My Generation" hit and he even managed to get me up to Carnaby Street to buy some "proper" clothes. Jake's ambition was boundless and he was a big fan of the English band called "The Birds", whose lead guitarist was then Ronnie Wood, later of the Faces and Rolling Stones. Ronnie was persuaded by Jake to write a song for a band that I was then co-erced into playing guitar for, called "Chameleon" or "The Method", depending on which fantasy week we were living through at the time.

The song that Ronnie wrote and got recorded by us was "You Are The Sweetest Thing". He taught me the guitar part and insisted that I play the solo exactly as he'd written it, although of course, nothing ever got "written" down. On the day that Jake took me to Rickmansworth in North London to meet up with Ron at the Birds' rehearsal session, the fledgling Rod Stewart was there doing vocals. I'd never heard of either of them except for Jake's enthused burblings. The mp3 that's posted on Soundcloud is taken from the scratchy old 45 r.p.m. acetate white label disc that I still own from that 1966 session. That was at R.G. Jones studio and was my first ever studio session.

Rolling through that year, I got my first electronic organ. In those days, a small-time rock band had the choice of two keyboards that were, on a budget and at the same time reasonably portable (and at all useable polyphonically), the VOX Continental (Alan Price in The Animals - "House of The Rising Sun") or its similarly dreadful sounding partner, The Farfisa Compact. (early Pink Floyd). My choice was the latter and I built my own version of the Leslie rotating speaker cabinet for it. I was playing in a band called The Oggy Band, doing mainly Tamla Motown covers and it was during that summer that some other connections occurred...

The Media department was really not for me, though. My parents were in the horrific throes of a messy divorce and my guts had already gone badly wrong (starting at the age of eight to begin with) and were now boiling away in tune and in time with my brain, which was also hurting in its own special way. The whole of 1966 was spent running backwards and forwards between the Media Records office, which I was soon running single-handed, and a computing company, across London. This was in the days of horse-drawn computers, whose only means of communication was massive quantities of data, input by hand and punch-card, spitting out reams of dot-matrix printed paper, literally by the hundredweight. Nobody in the advertising agency had their own computer, or indeed knew anything about them, except one bright spark called John.

John was a jazz pianist and all-round mathematical genius. He had written an analysis program which would render a figure to describe how efficient the advertising buying on T.V. had been that month. After massive amounts of computation by an external independent computing company (the other side of London) had churned through all of the data provided by Jictar (that I had then labouriously also copied out by hand from those reports), John's program would show us the strengths and weaknesses of the media buying. Human error inevitably rendered the entire excercise virtually pointless and a thing of utter futility. It had to be done every month, though and I was the sucker who had to copy out all of the data longhand before the computer would close the door, sorry, look at it.

This was getting me down. About the only benefit to be gained from working as the Media Records Librarian (and longhand data copyist), was that I got to discover some interesting magazines, like "The Muck Shifter" and more usefully, New Scientist. From then on, I read New Scientist Magazine every week up until 1986. After leaving the advertising agency, I still needed to feed my science information habit and it became necessary to order that publication on personal subscription from my local newsagent. That had to end, quite rightly, when the editorial staff in 1986 allowed a two-page spread advertising some Guru Maharaj-who-dunnit or other's Message of Peace that needed massive contributions of money to help us all to find ourselves at one with the Great God-In-Chief (Blesséd Nuisance Forever Be His Name). Subscription cancelled forthwith. New Scientist?! Pah!

Adding machines were at that time mostly manually operated mechanical monsters. They had a handle that one pulled to perform the selected addition or subtraction function. They were a maze of levers and cams internally, quite noisy and the computations were output printed onto a paper roll. Anita was one of the first manufacturers back then to produce an electronic version. It cost over £2,000 and the Media department at the agency just had to have one. It had rows of numerical buttons in long columns and the output was read via a row of L.E.D. lighted digits in a window on the front panel, instead of being printed on a paper roll. A true marvel of the age. The problem with it though, was that it was soon found by scurrilous staff to be entirely possible to attempt to divide by zero on it. Which would fry its brain instantly. Poor thing. "Down time" for neural path repair surgery was its main thing.

But further to the subject of adding machines, When I eventually left Ogilvy and Mather in the summer of 1967, I went for an interview for employment as an adding machine mechanic. The most popular mechanical machine had for many years been made by Burroughs and that was the company to which I had applied for a job. There were two tests involved at the interview, designed to test aptitude, dexterity and spacial awareness. The first test was a written excercise, involving diagrams of levers, pulleys, cams and pistons etc., requiring problem solving for a range of technical and mechanical situations described in drawings. There was a room full of probably 50 people, all keen to gain employment. There were 100 questions and I got the 100% mark. The next highest score was just 45%.

The second test involved being left in a room with a set of tools and an adding machine. In one hour, the examiner would return and expect a detailed description of how the thing worked, based on one's findings having dis-assembled it. I explained it all to him perfectly, for another 100% score. The money was shit so I didn't take the job which of course was then being gleefully offered. Glad about that really, considering where we were shortly and rapidly after that in a technologically advanced world with no more mechanical adding machines to be found, anywhere on the planet.

My last months at the advertising agency were truly terrible. In early 1967, I was promoted to the position of "Assistant Time and Space Buyer", responsible for some of the donkey work under a fully-fledged and proper "Time and Space Buyer". The guy whose wing I was under was really cool and we got on fine but he soon left and a very different, sweaty and nervous individual took over his place in the Media Buying Department. After a couple of months he went mysteriously missing following a period of days and weeks off due to "illness". The police were eventually called in as he really had disappeared off the radar, even at home.

There were problems, it seemed with his buying skills and er, integrity. It was discovered that there were invoices and orders for television advertising time stuffed down behind the central heating radiators around the office walls. After the damage assessment it was estimated that there had been approximately £50,000 worth of over-booked commercial slots that were past cancellation date and that this was obviously what had been playing on his mind and the true reason for his absence. Oops...

The orders for time were spread over all of the T.V. transmission areas as they were then (seven in all, I think). It was a flat out panic and emergency situation. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of television time buying was allocated a portion of the lump sum to re-distribute over the accounts of other agency clients. I was given Cape Fruit for April/May 1967 with a budget of £10,000 or thereabouts. The campaign featured a film clip of Sid James commenting upon just how sharp and clean were the teeth of a young boy (due to the Cape Fruit apples in his diet). "There's a set of strong white teeth - and sharp too!" If you remember that advert, it's because I put it on the tele.

My lack of experience meant that I did a fairly mediocre job but get it done I did. To say it made me ill with worry and stress would ignore the fact that I already had a raging stomach ulcer before all of that had happened. The media director was a thoroughly good guy and, understanding just how traumatic the whole affair had been, took pity on me and let me go with a generous severance deal. That gave me breathing space (three months' money) to find something more suitable in the way of employment. That's when the Burroughs adding machine interview occurred. Next, I found something much, much better...

Employer # 4 Letraset Ltd. My favourite subject at Grammar school had been Art but the mysteries of lettering had completely eluded me. Lettering demands a feel for the afore-mentioned "spacial awareness" and a sense of balance in composition but beyond that there are some basic ground rules, like the three-chord trick in musical composition, which need to be observed. I had become aware of "Letraset Instant Lettering" when I was still at school and had seen it used extensively by the art department at the advertising agency. At the time it (many years before desktop publishing) it was the only quick and cheap alternative to full-blooded longhand typesetting with metal type and ink.

Guilty M'Lord... I loved playing around with the stuff and it was easy to have away the odd sheet from the art studios in the agency. It was great for designing record sleeves in black and white which could be photocopied for our acetate white label 45 r.p.m. discs. That way I got quite a bit of practice in with the lettering sheets I er, borrowed. It was horrendously expensive; at the time it cost seven shillings and sixpence (7/6d.) per sheet, so part-used sheets were pounced on by all interested parties, myself included.

The product is screen process printed on to polythene sheets and by rubbing at it, the letters can be transferred to artwork on paper, resulting in very clean, sharp lettering in a full range of available fonts and point sizes. After the adding machine interview, I saw an advert for a "Layout and Retouching Artist" at the Letraset factory, Waterloo, London, just south of the river and applied for an interview there.

That interview was intimidating and, to be honest, quite a bit frightening. At school I'd got pretty nifty sploshing about with hog's hair brushes and powder paint but nothing had prepared me for the manual dexterity required to weild a fine double-O (00) sable with any precision. The nice man (the art studio manager) gave me a practical test comprising two parts. First, I had to show that I knew how to use a sheet of Letraset and that part was easy - the fashion in mid 1960's graphics was for very close letter spacing, partly because of the flexibility of text justification made possible by the use of Letraset itself. I loved the way that modern trend looked and had become fluent with the style. Done and dusted in no time flat and a neat and tidy job was done and delivered. The studio manager gave me a 100% mark for that.

The second part of the test was not such an easy ride; in fact it was an unmitigating disaster. Placed before me was a black and white print of a company logo for Shell Oil in cartouche format. Part of the framing line and some of the letters had been obscured during photographic exposure and so were missing. The test was to repair the damage, using a double-O (00) sable brush with indian ink and process white retouching paint. Dohh!! They might as well have asked me to flawlessly play some Django Reinhardt pieces whilst ice skating. No chance.

There was nothing for it but to try my best and unsurprisingly, the result was utter shite; a completely kindergarten-styled mess. The brush strokes had built up to maybe one millimeter thick and the whole thing was smudged, ragged-edged and ugly. I'd had absolutely no prior training for this kind of precision but I tried desperately hard for the allocated half hour, failed and the time was up. The manager surveyed the damage and before he could say anything, I admitted that I simply couldn't do it; I'd made a mess of it and given up.

His response was "Well, that's honest, at least! Congratulations: - you've got the job". Wow. Somehow I think that kind of reaction would be pretty rare in today's environment of dog-eat-dog commercial graphics studios. That being said, maybe honesty is most often the best policy - can't be always true, though, eh? That day, it obviously was.

The summer of 1967 was an absolute treat for my soul. The working environment was so very different to that offered by the strict office procedures of the advertising agency - it was an art studio, after all! It was also a very good introduction to the photolithographic film processeing side of print reproduction. Everything was done in line work, i.e., parts of any image were either perfectly black or perfectly white, with no greys in between (unlike Roswell). This was and is typical for monochrome lettering and sign reprographics: - no tones are involved. My job, as a "Layout and Retouching Artist" was to preserve that perfection in the image on the photographic film: - microscopic pin holes in the black emulsion and black spots in the clear areas on film were what I dealt with exclusively to begin with.

The tools I learned to use were that damned double-O squirrel hair sable (soon my first and best love) and the stencil knife, which was later to take over my life almost completely and earn me really good money (for the time). Hundreds of hours working over a light box honed my untrained eye and hand to a better standard of craftsmanship. I learned to retouch down to a lineweight of five one-thousandths of an inch with a brush, working under a magnifying glass (called a "linen prover"). Once the film image was flawless, a perfect "silk screen" stencil could be generated from it, ready for the print production of Letraset instant lettering transfer sheets.

Letraset Ltd., the company, had their own way of doing things when it came to production methods. One needs to be constantly reminded that in 1967 there were no personal computers and there was no computer typesetting anywhere of any really good quality that would merit copying from, to create new graphics at a commecial standard. Letraset was the industry standard for fine lettering quality.

Letraset sheets then as now had rows of the same letter in repeating rows, proportional to the frequency of use for any given symbol. The layout method used to compose the complete design for any sheet in production was totally "Heath Robinson" but very ingenious. Today, you can just hold down any letter on your keyboard to produce an endless string of the same letter along the typing text line. In the darkroom at Letraset, an old fashioned manual typewriter was utilised to move a piece of film across the top of a light box, one exposure being made at each depression of the space bar. This would produce lines of the same letter across the film when developed. Sheesh!

Once all of the strips of lettering were assembled as required to enable the layout for a specific Letraset sheet production run, it became my job to cut them apart and stick them down onto a base film against a printed grid, to keep everything square. It sounds tedious and it was but I was working with and alongside some very talented people and I found their skills highly inspiring. Having missed out by not going to Art college, I felt really privileged to be working as a professional graphics artist, no matter how lowly. Some of the more specialist tasks being carried on around me were fascinating to observe and I wanted to learn those skills. Especially lettering.

To see a process camera that filled two whole rooms was something of a revelation but that is the kind of gear which I suddenly found myself surrounded and involved with. At the other end of the scale, there was the diminutive stencil knife, a small but powerful tool which I took to my heart in a big way. Some typefaces use really beautiful curves. At Letraset, I encountered methods for the creation of big, long graceful curves without the aid of "French Curve" guides for the first time and this had a definite bearing on my future as a guitar designer.

The guys there who did the fonts' master stencil cutting used a wooden stick about a foot long with a heavy weight strapped to the end with a Stanley carpet knife blade attached, to get the smooth, long curves needed for a master letter in any font. These master letters were cut at about six to nine inches in height in a plastic masking film and the huge process camera would then reduce the image down to the various point sizes for print runs on different Letraset sheets. I badly wanted that job; it really rang most of my bells. Dunno why. Power, maybe.

Working along side me was an Indian artist of the "Old School" in the print trade and he showed me how to make my own small stencil knife, instead of buying a commercially produced one or using the huge lumps that the other guys used. That was a much more personal tool. After some weeks of the layout and retouching work, I started to practise stencil cutting, using my hand-made knife on odd bits of stencil film off-cut in my lunch hours, so much did I want to learn how it was done. This didn't go un-noticed by the senior staff and they soon started to give me simple stencil cutting jobs for real.

The department would make up custom sheets of company logotypes to simplify those companies' advertising agency artwork layouts. Having their logo repeated on a sheet of instant transfers made strong commercial sense. I soon got into cutting artwork for commercial logotypes and heraldic coats of arms etc., and even took up screen printing at home as a hobby. That there summer of 1967 was the era of what was arguably the Beatles best and weirdest stuff and that's when I bought a kaftan jacket. We all did (and no excuses).

Back in school, my first guitar student (ever) was Barry Pyatt. As of some years ago, I gave up giving guitar lessons because I found the success rate to be so low that the frustration at students' lack of practice, motivation and dedication made the excercise too painful to be worth the money. Barry was one of the other kind of would-be guitarists who actually followed it through and got to grips with the problems of pain, concentration and dexterity to the point where he conquered it. The other difference with Barry was that he did it all immediately. Within three weeks of my giving him his first lesson, he could play everything I could; that which had taken me several years to work out for myself, he nailed straight away. Bastard. Anyway, I sold him his first solid guitar - one I'd made for myself (I think).

His career took a very different path to mine but we stayed in touch, on and off and his first live band involvement was with one of my gigging combos in the mid 1960's (you'll need Facebook for this link). Sharing a similar (although, of course, naive) sense of humour, we soon got together on another project entirely: - film. We had just acquired a taste for Indian food and one of the earliest Indian retaurants to open in the U.K. was in Bromley, my home town. We would get together for "scripting" evening sessions over curry and when we thought we'd got enough to warrant a start to filming scenes, we set about making props for our first epic production, "The Poisonous Cobbler".

This was to be a short comedy about two insane professors who seek out a mythical beast, in the form of an old boot with eyes and hands that would be stop-frame animated being chased by them across the hills and valleys of Wales. The final script for this 8m.m. "Standard 8" epic was written as a silent - but we wanted more, so launched into the world of sound. Barry had the engineering skills to enable the building of a magnetic-stripe projector and the film got adapted for extremely low-fi mono audio. Anyway, my access to the Letraset studio facilities meant that some crude titling effects were possible. The whole project was positively steam age but we had a great crack just doing it.

Speaking of jokes (was I?), being the rookie in the lettering studio, I was inevitably the butt of the "go to the stores and get me a bubble for a spirit level!" type of collective amusement targeting. There was one favourite sabotage trick that I had the honour to have played opon my person. This was to be asked to go to the big light box table at the end of the studio to cut off a two-metre length of acetate film from a large heavy roll. The way to do this, it was explained, was to put the huge roll of film up on to the table top, then to un-roll it across the glass surface towards the wall (so its momentum would be arrested).

At this point, the idea was to pick up the end of the sheet, run your hand under it up to the wall (being careful not to cut yourself on the sharp edge!) and cut off the required length with scissors. I don't know how many volts were involved with the static discharge built up by the action of unrolling but it had the capacity (pun) to hurl one's body across the room. Great fun: - the sort of fun probably not tolerated today, I guess. Anyway, I got well and truly "hurled"...

The American language has a different letter frequency to U.K. English. and in order to move with the times and to keep our U.S.A. cousins happy, without too many half-used Letraset sheets going to waste, it was decided during late 1967 to create a whole new range of sheets, aimed specifically at the United States. There was going to be a lot of work in re-creating the entire range of lettering sheets in all of the fonts and all of the point sizes and it was going to require an entirely seperate army of night-shift workers to be engaged to tackle the task.

The opportunity was there though, to transfer over to the night shift (for more money) and I went for it. Oh, dear... bad move...

The Night Shift, 1968 - really spelled the end for my health. I was living in my first bed-sit (after throwing far too much "Kevin and Perry" at my mum and "leaving home"). Poor diet, a four night working week of 10-hour shifts with five-day weekends and chain smoking. Those things were a perfect formula for disaster. At least I was fiercely anti-alcohol still or I wouldn't have made it through that bit, for sure.

The landlord was an aggressive homosexual and an outright thief. He had my record collection and most of my clothes away while I was on holiday - together with an expensive Webley Mk 3 underlever .22 airgun. The clothes I didn't care about but I loved that rifle. It had almost chopped my strongest guitar playing finger right off with it attempting to tighten the lever clip with a hammer! Bad move.

The following year he was murdered by his "boyfriend", who stabbed him in the throat. 13 College Rd., Bromley (Colin somebody).

Just getting to the night shift was dangerous. The train from Bromley North took me to Waterloo station and delivered me ready for the 10.00p.m. shift. The walk through the back streets to the Letraset studio was fraught with life-threatening confrontations. Meths drinkers staggering or slouched on the pavement would hurl bottles and muggers, imaginary or real, lurked in the shadows every step of the way on the half-lit streets.

Once safe in the studio, I would settle at my light box and begin the arduous task of spot-retouching lith film positives and negatives with the ubiquitous brown process opaque paint and the trusty 0-0 Sable. Staring into a light box all night for 10 hours is an eye-and gut-straining experience. Not to be recommended for peace of mind or peace of anything. It went on for a year.

Then the hammer blow fell. The company decided to re-locate to Ashford in Kent. All employees had to choose between redundancy or moving to the new locality. I chose redundancy which rendered a pay-off package of £65 - a huge sum of money(!) Briefly, very briefly, I was rich. I actually did that thing of spreading the money (in £5 notes) out on the light box in front of me to marvel at the extreme wealth I had suddenly accrued! That summer, my best pal Harry Croft and I had holidayed in Scotland and made friendly contact with an Inverness rock and blues band called "Sweet Soc" (but I don't know what that means). We stayed with them for most of the fortnight break and received the invitation to return any time and, in my case, to join the band.

I'd missed out on the opportunity to go professional in 1966 along with the other Oggy Band members who'd joined John Walker. Now I thought this was the chance to catch up with doing what I really wanted so I accepted the invitation and sold everything back home, borrowed a van and in the freezing winter drove back up to Inverness with the truly horrible guitar I'd spent all my redundancy money on.

The band had been evicted from their squatted flat, had their equipment re-possessed and were no more. Nobody told me.

The only course open was to eat humble pie and beg my mother for my return to a safe place under her roof back in Bromley. Of course she welcomed me with open arms and I set about trying to find another job. What turned up was employment as a stencil cutter and lettering artist at a squalid sign company in Woolwich. I had the skills but not the shop-floor experience of a screen print factory. It was all very different to the pristine conditions back at Letraset. It was a filthy, run down and very old-fashioned manufacturing environment in a cold industrial unit, populated by spot-welding ladies who fabricated wire-work display units designed to carry the graphics for which I was responsible.

Employer # 5 Wyndam-West Ltd., was owned by a "Terry Thomas" - like ex R.A.F type who drove a Jaguar sports car and came straight out of the Ark, in terms of old fashioned industrial relations. He was the Big Boss and we were the "lower caste" in total serfdom. Instead of a modern darkroom, there was a rough brick shed where I was supposed to produce all of the fine photostencil work for the print shop silk screens. The camera was a dilapidated old wooden bellows and plate camera. It had been designed for the original wet glass plate system. That's 19th century stuff, by the way. Well, yes, it did work but despite teaching me a lot about patience, frightened me half to death.

As had happened once before, the guy who was doing the job before me and who was supposed to teach me how the place ran, left shortly after I joined the company. Along with him, left the girl who had been doing most of the printing; they had been an efficient team but were heartily sick of the boss and his extreme right-wing attitudes. I quickly saw that the road ahead under that roof was bound to be a rough one so within a couple of months, started looking around again.

What turned up was a diamond.

Employer # 6 1969 - Doric Productions was another sign company but based in my home town Bromley. They were looking for a stencil cutter and that was the part of the screen print technician thing that I loved doing most. Leslie Baker, the owner, had acquired a major contract to replace all of the Southern Region British Rail signs with the new corporate identity. The new image used just one typeface, very similar to Arial or Helvetica and was all designed to a strict formula of graphical layout and design. The old green and white vitreous enamel signs were past their shelf life and destined to be collectors' pieces only.

The stencil cutting techniques I'd learned at Letraset were valuable but the main objective there had been total precision - 100% accuracy. When I went for interview at Doric Productions, the practical test seemed really easy but the guy interviewing me said I was far too slow. I was about to find out what good old-fashioned speed meant in the silk screen process industry. Ever since that job experience I can't take seriously the Art students who tell me they are "doing a silk screen project" at college. Playing in a sand pit more like!

Production at that sign factory was lightning speed. I'd never seen a system anything like it before. My days were spent stencil cutting almost as fast as I can write. The film was the old Stenplex blue and green and was water-based for printing oil-based screen inks. To cut the words: - British Rail in 6" high letters would take me about five minutes and I loved the work so much, I asked to be given harder and harder jobs. At top speed and fluidity, I could comfortably cut lettering with fair precision down to 10mm 'cap height' with ease.

The money was amazing and I started at £35 per week and I quickly pushed that up on demand to £50+ (1969) as they realised that production had gone up 300% because there was no backlog anymore. And as fast as they could get new commissions, I attacked them and they fairly flew out of the door, done and dusted. I had never been so valued as an employee, so could more or less name my price. Living at home still under my mum's roof was cheap and I started to acquire new toys. First off was a 2¼" square format camera - a Yashica 24. Photography interested me and I was greatly influenced by seeing the Rolleiflex cameras used on the moon landings.

And there's another story! Like many others, I stayed up all night to watch the first manned moon landing on T.V. and it meant that I couldn't wake up the following morning and didn't go in to work. The next day, the boss's wife came round with the wages and asked me why I hadn't phoned in to explain my absence. I said I'd discuss it with the boss and when called in to his office, told him, "I stayed up to watch the first manned moon landing on T.V and if you don't like it, sack me". He couldn't really argue with that and I gladly forwent a day's pay. Very fair, I reckon.

The firm moved to Beckenham and a larger factory. The autumn of 1970 saw an end to my employment with Doric but it was while working there that I first heard the song of the humpback whale on the radio. Anyone who knows me will understand why I mention that fact. Why did I leave? Read on...

Employer # 7 Reliagraphics, Dartford Industrial Estate. I was "head-hunted" once in my life and this was it. An ex-employee of the Bakers at Doric Productions snatched part of the British Rail sign contract and set up a fabrication operation on the Dartford Industrial Estate. It was a factory in an industrial unit and a potential death trap. "Health and Safety" wasn't a phrase heard in common parlance at the time and it certainly didn't have any relevance at all in that place. The money on offer clinched the deal, though; my wages nearly doubled overnight.

I was head-hunted by the boss, who needed a screen print shop setting up from scratch. The "studio" was the gents' toilet, with a board laid across the wash basins. Staff still needed the room for which it was intended, so there were frequent interruptions to stencil making. There were five of us doing everything. Complete sign fabrication was undertaken from start to finish, same as was done back at Doric but with a quarter of the number of staff and I was the printing department.

The print shop itself was just a bench in the middle of the metal fabrication floor. There were fly-presses, folding machines, guillotines, lathes and drills and all the normal gear. Grinding and cutting produced a high volume of swarf and dust - just the thing for screwing up a screen-print operation, so a tent was constructed of fine netting to keep it out. That was the theory. The winter months of early 1971 were bitterly cold and there was no heating, either in the "studio" or on the shop floor. A paraffin heater was practical in the toilet (studio) but certainly not advisable around thinners and paint, as was demonstrated very effectively when the fire occurred.

The only fire extiguisher was a dry powder type and it had to be used so some time was spent cleaning out the silk screens.

The decision was taken to raise the screen print shop upstairs but there was no "upstairs" so we had to create one. This was achieved by fabricating a framework of 4" square and smaller steel R.S.J. beams by welding them together. Once that was done we also built a stairway by the same method and the whole thing was given wooden walls, a floor and a large window for visual communication with the ground floor. During that process, I was asked to hold an R.S.J. beam up in the air whilst a welder tacked it on to its mating piece. The earth wire fell off and I caught the full voltage and was catapulted across the concrete floor as the heavy steel beam dug into the floor.

By the time it was up and running, the upstairs shop, under the factory roof skylights became an oven, as the warmer weather had arrived.

This was aggravated by the positioning of the degreasing tank. Trichloroethylene is an extremely toxic and volatile liquid which should be avoided at all costs. It was needed (back in 1971) for cleaning the fabricated metal sign panels before paint spraying and printing. The tank was situated directly below the print shop floor and with the high temperature and fumes, I started to get even more sick than I already was with what was by then a fairly nasty stomach ulcer. At the same time the good lady at home was leaving me to live with her Drama tutor.

One day, late in 1971, freshly confused by my first encounter with L.S.D. I was driving my old Morris 1000 van to "work" when the realisation hit me that my life had gone horribly wrong somewhere. Half way to Dartford, I pulled into a lay-by and began the second major phase of my life - being me instead. I turned around and went home.

No. 84 Overbury Avenue, Beckenham, Kent was "home" at the time. I had walked out of a well-paid job that was surely killing me. It seemed reasonable that I should not have to be prepared to make that particular sacrifice.

I signed on as unemployed for the first time in my life and went about the business of becoming the famous rock star that everybody told me I would inevitably be. Yeah, right...

A variety of guests came and went during my days (daze) here and during that time I first made contact with Barry Mitchell at Wing Music, Bromley North. It was Barry that gave me my first professional workshop and thus began a full-time career as a guitar technician.

Then one night in late 1973: - "I woke up to the sound of plates smashing on the kitchen worktop - I knew we had a problem - I knew we had a fire..."

But, before that happened, Employer # 8 was needed for a while: -

Employer # 8 Silk Screen Arts, Shirley Road, Croydon. Nothing was paying me a living and pop-stardom wasn't working out so in the summer of 1972 I took a job as a stencil cutter again for about six months. My trusty old Morris 1000 van had died so after a few weeks I bought a Mini Cooper 'S'. It was orange so naturally enough, I called her "Sunshine".

"Sunshine" took me to Stonehenge that summer she also tried to kill me a couple of times. Just finding her first gear was an art form in itself so getting out of the way from on-coming traffic could be difficult when stationary. Then the return spring on the carburettor broke one day and the engine immediately raced up to maximum revs while cruising Lewisham High Street. Not good. Even so, she was a sweetie and it was maybe not heartbreaking but certainly upsetting to see her several years later upside down in a junk pile.

It was during my brief employment at Silk Screen Arts that I met Sheila Maclurkin. Sheila was an art student studying for a degree at Bromley Art College (as it was then). We got together at the absolute peak of my madness following my (very ill-advised) "adventure" experimenting with hallucinagenic drugs, as suggested by the puppet man, Brian Moore. This link is completely irrelevant but Brian ran a puppet theatre in Beckenham at the time (1972). David Bowie's "Space Oddity" had just happened and Beckenham was really buzzing with the proximity of his celebrity. Brian suggested that what I needed to get over my broken relationship with the lady who had just left me was L.S.D. To comply with that advice was probably the worst decision I ever made. My advice? Don't go there.

And there is something weird about that which I don't understand. For years, it seems that kids have been "dropping acid" and dancing all night at "Rave" parties. Excuse me - but the drugs they are taking cannot in any way be the same as what I sampled in late 1971. The Puppet Man gave me a tablet of "California Sunshine" and I can assure you that there was going to be absolutely no dancing going on. I was flat on my back witnessing the Universe in all of its glory. Sparko. Out there somewhere for several hours. Completely zonked. A hopeless basket case.

Paul McCartney was abruptly vilified for saying that he'd "seen God" under the influence of L.S.D. but to be honest, I think he was telling the truth. Whatever that word means, I truly believed at the time that I'd had the same experience. Someone later told me that a lady was freaking out on acid and confided that she'd seen, or actually was "God". The explanation he'd given her was that she was actually "just a little piece" of God and I think that about sums it up.

"Acid" screwed me up "good and proper". It took me many years to get over the experience and, as many will agree, it left permanent damage. The two halves of the human brain were separated during evolution for very good reasons and the confusion created by even temporarily joining them is huge. I think we were meant to be dumb. But what does it matter? The planet will continue without us, come what may...

Hey! Where were we going with this? Oh yes, the "career". The cottage that Ann (my ex-wife) and I bought in 1978 was a wreck. It was one half of a 17th century oak-beamed "long house" that had apparently been squatted by a couple after WW2. He was a German prisoner of war held captive in this country and she had been a local farm girl. She hated the oak beams, finding them "depressing", so he did the Barry Bucknell thing and covered everything up with hardboard.

Their Alsation (German Shepherd) had apparently been held prisoner in the house for all of its life and the kitchen floor was covered in a carpet that was "welded" to the floor with ancient dog's piss. Lovely. More to come...

Employer # 9 I.C.I. Agrochemicals, Yalding. Moving on to 1988, I was back into making guitars again after a four year break caused by the almost complete absence of that instrument within most popular music during the early 80's (due to the advent of the cheap and accessible keyboard synthsizer). During that, possibly the worst period in pop music history, I was driving a fork truck in a chemical factory, pumping and packing Gramoxone weedkiller into an endless conveyor belt of bottles in cardboard boxes and steel drums, whilst wading about in the stuff and breathing in all of those wonderful aerosol fumes (and crying a lot).

When I started to earn a wage again, my first purchase was a 4-track cassette "portastudio"; a very cheap one, which I had to superglue the control tabs back on regularly but it worked. This was my first multi-track endeavour, "My Friend Leonardo" was written in 1969.

Employer # 10 The Meat Pie Factory, Tunbridge Wells. After the Talk Radio episode I was a mess. Just about every aspect of my life was in shreds. No customers, a wife who despised me and even kids poking fun at me in the street. There was some kind of brain malfunction that occurred one day out driving my car. Whether it was a minor stroke or not I don't know but it felt like half of ny mind just shut down. Very nasty and it never came back to full functionality. My wife's career was sky-rocketing and mine seemed to have ended ignominiously. I was trying to work on songs with my then current band "The Ankh". I had a Fostex DMT8 hard disk multitracker and was learning how to use it.

It's amazing, isn't it, how fast technology grows. The Fostex was pretty much state-of-the-art at the time and cost £2,000. When compared to the Roland Boss BR1600 which I now use, it was almost "steam-driven" by comparison, both in facility and price. "That Olde Abduction Rag" was probably the most sophisticated thing I attempted with it. Kevin Paul Norris played blistering guitar. The gigs were awful though; unpaid as supporting warm up band to some other half-famous collections of has-beens was pretty demoralising and coping with nervous convulsions, deep depression with a marriage and business on the rocks falling apart, I didn;t handle it at all well. But I was thoroughly knackered.

"Flying Saucer For Sale" was our flagship live number; it was my thing at the time to strum fretless bass like a ukulele whilst singing lead vocal. I'd had the idea for many years that a music shop (or any other type of business) would probably benefit from displaying an old fashioned hanging sign on the street frontage saying, "Flying Saucer For Sale". When asked by any prospective customer for a view of the goods, one would simply answer, "Just sold the last one" - but the ice would be broken. Might have worked...

The kids' mockery in the village street was too much to take and I had to leave Yalding. The worst part of that was suddenly to be without dog, having spent the previous 20 years pretty much bedogged, with Beethoven, Marvin the android Airedale and Mac, a black Scottish Terrier. My first move was into a dreadful bedsit in Tunbridge Wells, quickly followed by a studio flat opposite a meat pie factory, W.A. Turner's meat pie factory in Broadwater Lane. I signed on for the night shift and lasted four nights of utter torment. It was that experience, up to my armpits in animal body parts, combined with the raging deep depression that sent me over the edge.

But the straw that finally broke the whatsit was 1st April 1998. I'd got into the habit of sleeping with the radio on, tuned to B.B.C. Radio 4. On the morning in question, I had lost the plot, drinking excessively to forget and not really knowing if it was night or day. We'd all been subjected to a couple of years of The Spice Girls and it felt like life couldn't possibly get any worse. Could it? It could.

On the radio was a news report that the film company which had been so successful with "Titanic", was casting about for a new project and had settled on the idea of doing "Telly Tubbies - The Movie". The story was that all of the top voice-over actors in the world were queueing up, keen to take part. This was not what I wanted to be hearing and at that point I decided that I didn't want to play any more, if this was the state of play. Enough was enough and I decided to end it. My method was to buy three bottles of brandy to go with the spirits I already had in the flat and drink the lot, along with every tablet I could find, then pull a black rubbish bag over my head and hopefully suffocate in my sleep.

When I woke up I was in a lot of pain and angry. Very, very angry.

Very, very angry.

"Where Do The Children Play?"

My Uncle Dick, The Spitfire Ace

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars" & "The other side of the Screwdriver".

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Barry Mitchell