Capt. Wardrobe

life stories

For 25 years, Captain Wardrobe has made stuff & then given it away for gratis on this little website...like a total fucking idiot!

Here follow a few stories & links to stuff I've piddled about on over the years...built from fast fading drug & drink addled memories. moving through fun experimental 4-track tape madness of Falmouth Art School days into Techno dub & ambient. The meandering ambient synths polarise against political albums & pretentious electronik punk off into nutty nutty breakcore, jungle & hard fidget house. It gently comes swooping in to land in the present with the timestretched ambient guitar drones made in the Med Via Apt 9 & a brand new Gizmochimps album.

was it all a waste of time?...nah..of course it wasn't.

How many people can say they have music they have created that acts like a scrapbook of memories - every tune has a story, a visceral reaction ...I place myself in this time machine...this is memory enhancement.

None of the music on this page is made for aspirations of a career, money success or anything other than the sheer fuck of making it happen. I just make it for the pure enjoyment of exploring sound vision & stuff.

& so i share it with you now...click on a song - it will play in a new tab

revel in the sheer sillyness of my daft life. Or point & laugh. It's up to you pal.

When i listen to music - i sit and travel back in time... a series of notes, noises, beats are like the Machinery of a clock. and it's product is my memory.

or the soundtrack to making of ones anew.

I expand on that within.

The Clock is always ticking:
it is an existential metronome

Sitting listening to music has become the major way I deal with the crazy situation. I write this as an arty farty weirdo outsider psychonaught facing the creative exterminators who are the prescribers & addicts to the notion of 'normality. Over the last 20 years- in, to my mind, a regression... the world has become more unwelcoming, distant & downright alien to me as a 53 year old human being, trying to exist as a funny little creature stuck on a rock floating through space & time.

So for longer than I can remember I have been involved in & am a product of, a bunch of funny sequence of notes, & bangy sounds as noises. When these are all placed, arranged or just seem to happen in a certain order many people will be instantly familiar to it as Music. These broadcasted signals illicit a range of reactions ranging from meditation & sleep, to dance & pseudo rioting.

The Artists, The Albums, The Sounds, The Form. The Look. The Pose. The Business. The Vapid Scam. The quest for integrigty versus the meat & potatoes on my dinner plate made possible by playing to tourists. Imagine now the screen now going wibbly wobbling and we are going back, back, wayback in time:

Being born

I was born in 1969 in the upstairs bedroom, in the bed of a house on Rossfold Rd in Sundon Park, Luton belonging to Graham & Helen Cobbin(ne Hall); My mum & dad had moved from a Highbury flat to Luton because Dad had a new job offer in Luton as a printer, but i don't know where he worked early on, only that after he stopped being a tearaway, and calmed down a bit he went to learn his trade, at night school at the seminal Elephant & Castle based, London school of Printing. He later worked for Robert Maxwell as part of Waterlows in Luton. Mum Worked in the ball bearing factory SKF just down the road. She also went on to work at Caesar's Palace Casino chain under Arabic command as a waitress & VIP maid - providing the stars like Dave Allen, Tommy Cooper & The 3 Degrees with a bit of booze & whatever else they needed before they went on stage.


The house I was born in

Mum looking all Helen Shapiro

Dad at London print school

The garden I played in


The Factory where Mum worked

Went to school for 1 year here

Luton Town

Let's rewind and I'll tell you what little I've managed to glean from how these two met & what they did. My Dad was brought up in Tottenham by his parents Rose, who at one point worked in the perfumery Lentheric & Cyril, a pipefitter foremen in Gestetners. Grandad was a biker from his youth & I've got the photos of them on Old Enfields & Triumphs with sidecars attached & a little sod who became my father in their laps. My Dad was born in Blenheim Palace - Buckinghamshire after Nan was moved out there because of the WW2, & those pesky Germans bombing London to shit. Bastards! Dad was trouble at school, knocking about post war in the bombed out ruins with Mike Reid, who went onto telly fame as a comedian, host of kids show runaround & eventually UK mega-stardom as Frank Butcher in Eastenders. Rose & Cyril knocked about in Whitechapel & were satellites of the whole Barbara Windsor & The Krays scene, partly because they used to own a boozer called the Crooked Billet.

In 1994 Nan showed me where she was born, in Dalston, within the sound of the Bow Bells, which meant she was a cockney, & I was a Mockney & I was living just round the corner. She also showed me the flat my parents had lived in before moving out of the area to Luton in 1968. My Parents met on the Watling street bikers scene. Mum was working in the Cafe dishing out fry ups to a jukebox playing rock & roll, while dad was on his Norton Dominator with a bunch of dodgy fuckers riding the Watling Street run as the ton up boys.

Going back further into family connections with music, I was stunned to discover via Nanny Rose, that my great Grandfather in his youth, used to play piano on the Mississipi steamers and Honky Tonks around Louisiana. So when I see old Cowboy movies where the piano player stops playing before an ensuing ruction, I like to think thats my Great Grandpappy right there tinkling those Ivorys on a chugging steamboat replete in dandy refined suit with waistcoat, big Hat & cowboy boots. Yee Haaw!


Nan & Grandad Hall getting married


My Parents Tying the knot in Markyate

Excuse the boring family list (its fascinating to see if my memory is fully functioning)

My Mums side were all carrot crunchers! Thats what my dad used to call them - with the majority of the family all coming from villages Markyate or Tebworth. My Nans sister Ivy & Alec had music in the blood with her youngest Graham playing Jazz Piano & Trumpet. Times spent at their house as a kid are just so amazingly vivid, watching gliders come in to land on the massive field, playing in the green grass hunting rabbits playing football & sitting at the piano making things up with Graham teaching me octaves & structure, (many thanks!) Home made steaming hot Jam tarts fresh from the oven - A house with an outdoor Lavvie & a old larder full of newly baked cakes. Cold meats & roast Taters with lashings of salt on. These places were very Cider with Rosie, type eternal English Villages.

There's a little Gyspy life too creeping into the family history here as most of My Mums Mum, Nanny Halls Mum, My Great Grandmother Nanny Meads side were living in proper pimped up caravans right up to the second world war breaking out.

Mum was eldest sister her younger siblings being June (& Ron) Denyer with daughters Zelda & Ruth. Brother David (& Anne) Hall, had daughters also; Marica & Shona. The Jones side of the family are Welsh in origin, my Cousin Chris, son of Uncle Eddie Jones & Aunty Joyce. He is a guitarist too & he patiently taught me the basics of blues rock guitar & took me to gigs with his club band Levente. Other daughter to Joyce is Molly (much missed; Bob was a brilliantly jovial character) & their sons Anthony & Phil & another one I can't just remember the name of for the life of me. There's also Aunty Margeret mother of Christine &(Russell bros family ran the local M1/A5 tow service & repair shop.) Anne Halls parents, proper characters Jim & Eileen Anchor had Melanie (& a brother i'm again lost in recall his name) I'm running this all down to try and prove myself I can remember how this side of the family works. As you can see it's all very confusing. Carrot crunchers breeding like rabbits they were!

So most of the eldest generation of the above listed, attended Markyate Church where my Mum & Dad tied the knot. I'm wildly guessing that my Parents met, danced to the jukebox went to Cafes, Pubs, Dancehalls & the pictures, rode up & down The Watling Street A5, fucked like rabbits & then had little old me.


My First school was in Lutons Sundon Park lower, & I have vague memories of watching what I called "Choochoo Garlis" (it took my parents ages to figure out this was Captain Scarlet!), Joe 90, Pipkins, Magpie, The Tomorrow People, Dr Who, Thunderbirds, Star Trek, Adam West / Burt Ward in Batman & Lee Majors as The Six Million Dollar Man. The latter 2 were very influencial as I ran around the playground with my parker over my head making it a cape to be Batman - or just running around really fast doing the Steve Austin bionics sound effect!

By the time we moved to Dunstable I had to start the same year again all over because the age catchment were different for Dunstable schools. It made no difference to me as I was reading & writing ok by 3 years old, thanks in part to an excellent babysitter Mum had got while she was at SKFs in the day, called Shona or Sandra, something like that(?). She would take me on trips to the shops & even the cinema as a tiny nipper to see Disney movies; The Lady & the Tramp, Herbie Rides Again. I loved Herbie because of our family car, a bright orange VW beetle. I think Shona-Sandra did a bit of basic pre school teaching on me too. I have a lovely memory of sitting in a photo booth with her.

I also have memories of learning to ride a bike when my Dad took the stabilisers off my tiny black & yellow ELF. I tried to ride it down the road with my parents watching from the kerb. I distinctly recall throwing the fucking thing down the road, I got so frustrated & angry at the challenge, but I perservered without Dad stepping in & he put and arm across mum, and just let me get on with it. I got there in the end, & remember vividly the joy of getting the bike going pedalling like a kid possessed. I would ride down the massive hill on Rossfold Rd possibly channeling the speed freak genes from my dads side of the family. One time I went wandering off through Spinney Woods and ended up on a building site, completely lost getting stuck in wet concrete. I was pulled out of my little yellow wellies by my frantic mum, (or was it the babysitter?) My brother Andy was born in 1972, and we eventually shared a bunk bed in the top bedroom.

Sometime after Andy was born, we moved from Luton to a 3 storey town house; 70 Beale St, Dunstable. All of us in our Junior School, Beecroft were dressing in whatever was de rigeur on Tellys top of the pops or Guests Magpie/Blue Peter had on them. In 1978 the whole school went through a mini rocker phase due to the musical Grease, which saw John Travolta & Olivia Newton Johns "you're the one that I want" go to No1. There was also The Fonz from Happy Days & I had a t-shirt with him saying stay cool on it. Also there was the super cartoons on Saturday morning telly, & Mork & Mindy which made me try & act all zany, like Robin Williams. Cool eh? or maybe not, come to think of it!

It's a knockout!


Top row from left Steven Burgess, Darren Noon, Sheridan Pretty & little old me.
Ice playing football nutters in Mrs Mills class of 77.
Future World Trampoline Champion Andrea Holmes & my opposite in a future school play, Joanne James; centre bottom row 5/4th in from the right

So one day there were were - freezing cold winter dinner break & a bunch of us are playing football. On Black Ice. so one obvious expression of physics enabled another & the back of my cranium came into a nasty cracking contact with ice covered concrete. It sounded like a coconut inside my head. Next thing I know I'm being taken to hospital & end up there for quite a while. The ice cream was nice though. Mum sprinted all the way from home like a mad banshee & I was told my eyes went full on horror show only showing the whites like some possessed demon child. I just remember a sicky sickyness feeling.

Fond memores of playing football, this time on the much safer grass, at break times on the playing field that had a dirt hill in the middle of it, we used to chuck each other off it rolling around getting muddy dusty, dirty. Drinking the free milk, all in red crates upon the table, with a little Tunnocks chocolate cake as well upon getting back nicely lined up in the classroom. I used to nibble all of the chocolate off the dome of the cakey and then gorge the marshmallow in one bite. Come to think of it I still do that now! Funny what stays with you isn't it? Needlework with Mrs Lines was a memorable class. As was English with a lovely Welsh choirmaster. Our headmaster Mr Lunn was a soft spoken man, and it was rumoured that He refused to administer the slipper for naughty boys or girls. A rarity in schools of the time. But Lower school was nothing like what we were to face as we were toured around Brewers Hill Middle school, with all the big kids learing at us & nudging into us & spitting punk style in some cases, as we went through the dauntingly grey corridors in crocodile fashion.

1977

Ok this is going to be hard to relay, but my Silver Jubilee was a particularly memorable one. Somehow I'd managed to piss my Dad off so much that he became violent & lashed out at me. My ear was swollen, blackened & bruised. I spent the entire Queens 77 day, and indeed the next week... in bed, all while the sound of the street parties were wafting up from what seemed like a million miles away at that point. This was only made worse by the fact I could hear my schoolmates & their parents asking where I was, with my Mum & Dad telling them I had a bad case of the flu. Liars! It's an awful bad memory.

While all this was happening, we as a family were going out to Cyprus on a regular basis to visit our Nanny & Grandad (my dads parents). They had retired there in the early 70's, but were settled in Famagusta. One day Grandad was sitting on the veranda sipping a cool G&T, the next thing he knew was soldiers dropping out of the sky running around shouting waving guns about. so as you can imagine, off they skidaddled to the British Embassy. They never saw that place again. They tried the whole thing again after 1974, but this time choosing Aya Phyla, a small village north of Limassol. We would all visit from 1976-1980, with some gorgeous memories of the village life, local families, weddings & BBQs - and winters spending Christmas swimming & playing on the beach. One year I was sent over on my own. I had my own passport issued in 1979 and duly popped off shepharded by perfumed 70's Airline stewardesses to Cyprus to spend 8 weeks of summer with my grandfolks. Quite why this was arranged is a mystery. But I can guess. Fond recollections of walking the hills near the village, going into Limassol on the bus with nanny...dancing & singing at parties held by expat military types like Major Bob & Edie. Being there on my own with old people everywhere, it was a time I spent in introspective reflection. I remember I had a morbid facination with sharks, and used to lay in my bed with a sheet over me wondering what it would be like to be dead. The darkness was overwhelming at times. I regularly walked in my sleep, finding myself waking on the couch in the living room for no reason. I believe I was sent there to get some discipline, perhaps because I was becoming unruly at school. I was a scrappy weird kid by then, for sure. My grandparents didn't hold back on that side of things, with chores ranging from cleaning, mopping the terraces, to retrieving all the heavy bottles of Beer & fizzy drink mixers from the shop in the village. There was a black & white TV - & because Cyprus was very slow developing in comparison with other places, we had maybe 3 programmes a daily & some news. I remember watching Harold Lloyd & Bagpuss. In 1978 we had watched some of the the World Cup too. Here's some writing I did from a few years ago; about the time in Cyprus & my head trauma. One of my big questions is: Did my head injury cause me to change personality? Did it make me unstable?

My first record

Now I could Lie, be all flash & say that my first record was The Specials, Madness or UB40 or something punky - but it wasn't - My first record I ever owned was given to me by a girl at a party when I was 9 or 10. Sarah Campbell was Scottish, from the year above, wore black lipstick & had spikey black hair, dark clothes & was all mysterious like only a Souxsie Soux goth could be. And the record? Darts – It's Raining / Messing Shoe Blues (1978). Nowadays in the post modern woke bland world we live in - you might not believe what the fashions were like and how they affected kids from 9-16, but we all adopted styles that the older kids had in our junior schools like our lives depended on it and partly because not being cool ended up more often than not with a kicking in by older, harder boys. I think Sarah had a little crush on this handsome young blonde bomber with braces on his teeth & big ears & I took the record home & listened to it. It was alright. Rock & Roll, part of what was playing at that kids party; Gary Numan, - Talking Heads - Wreckless Eric, Blondie. What are your average 9 year olds listening to today?

My Nutty boy phase, as the Late 70's / early 80's Ska revival hit the South East UK in a whirlwind of energy that made a lot of us feel punkier than we were. It was because we had just missed that boat due to our ages...that it came all came with a rudeboy attitude that possibly masked the bullyish tendancies, and hard poseur stances of playground & street fighting, running around in gangs with The Mods hating the Ska / Skins & the leftover Punks & Souxie goths were just yawning along with the more mainstream 80's pop styled bleached out hair. Watch any "teenage" John Hughes film...from the time & then watch Bill Forsythes Gregorys Girl...well that was us.

Memories of school fights that encapsulated the entire playground bring back memories of names like Ashley Waller, The Prestine brothers, all Mods who were really nasty violent cunts. There were full on gang skuffles in the park after school & for a few years walking home from school, running a daily gauntlet forever being chased by one faction or another was a sport in itself. Many had to become Mods, Rockers, Goth-punks, New Wave or Ska rude boy just to stay a bit protected. Pop Music eh? Things always go a bit sour and when The racist skins were hunting down Asians "going Paki-Bashing", many of us felt sick, opted out after that ridiculous shit. In Luton, where I come from, things were getting serious & stabbings were very frequent. 10 a week in the local paper. In reflection this nasty twist in the culture of the time, helped me decide what way my bread was buttered & woke a lot of us up.

Many of us moved on, into other things.

Our "Other things" was breakdance, and for a while we all got Fila / Tachini tracksuited up, on our hooves were Nike hightops, Pumas or Adidas trainers. We rode around on our BMX's, bought for Christmas, by Maximum overtime working parents, after seeing E.T on dodgy video rented out of the back of some blokes car. I estimate that millions of families, at the very least, sat around a bad pirated copy of this film all together in living rooms, crying rivers of tears at the end of the movie.

Electro & early rap were happening big style...this fused along with Kraftwerk, Tangerine dream, & Jean Michelle Jarre, into a love of synths that crossed into the pop of pioneers like Gary numan into stars like, The Eurythmics, Duran Duran & Depeche mode et al. This got me into my favourite band of all time. It was the moment in 1982. John Peel played the 12 inch of New Orders Blue Monday. The next week I sat under the bed covers with a tape recorder...started recording it back to back every time i heard it...the tape was never off the system.

1979 Brewers Hill Middle School, and Music class with Miss Rickards was amazing! - When my behaviour became a little too Batman in the classroom she often sent me & my partner in crime Jason Parry to a small room with a (at the time amazing, now a bit crappy but still amazing;) casio keyboard in it. She would tell us to write a song & present it at the end of class. Which after a short period of just pissing about for a lark, duly did. I can honestly say I have found myself spending valuable time in that little keyboard room for best part of my Adult life. Another creative element at school was acting. I was in 2 school plays & also helped with the scenery in early drama club at middle school. I played the lead in 'An Episode of Sparrows' which was all directed by Miss Rickards & Mr Grahame. It was a demanding role - with Joanne James being the Female lead we spent the whole play onstage. Now for 11 year olds thats a BIG DEAL! Those teacher rocked my world. I would also be in West Side Story as one of the Jets. Years later, I would bump into Joanne James at The Treworgy Tree festival in Cornwall - both tripping our balls off! She had taken a path off the main road also. I felt at the time, and still do that it was a singularly life affirming moment for both of us.


Mr Walker & inspirational Snowdonia

Gimme my Motorhead!

Eventually my tastes reflected a time spent many different lives...After the Breakdance phase, I became totally obsessed with The new wave indie techno of New Order, but after learning that the only fuckers having a decent good time up in my suburban Stavely Rd area were all metal rockers sitting on crappy lawnmower pretend choppers dressed in leather drinking cider I decided to go full on grebo. Actually thats not entirely the case but definitely a factor. It was my brother who got me into the harder thrash stuff when he discovered Anthrax first, blaring it our from the tape player we both stickered them up with mad idents to look cool, like on the cover of Malcom Mclarens Double Dutch. I went to Germany on a school exchange, & the douchebag who I exchanged with had metal fans as school mates, they got me into Megadeth. I came back from Europe with New Orders Low Life & Megadeths 'Killing is my business and business is good' lps. I also met a Dutch geezer on holiday in Spain who got me into Scorpions & Accept. And there was Stuart Monk a neighbour & school mate. whos family were all rockers and let us drink 3.5% party lager / cider, with Meatloaf, ACDC & Whitesnake blaring out of the open garage doors on school nights. So I went totally Heavy Metal, growing my hair & donning the ubiqutous leather jacket & denim sleevless overlaid with patches & paintings of all the various Logos & Idents they all had. I still LOVE my classic rock, metal, thrash, death & doom. If it's extreme i'll listen to it.

I was sort of in a little band at school with a few of the nerds from the computer club. I sang my little heart out but it lasted all of 4 days. As a long haired grebo monster all bum fluff stubble & denim, I warbled my way through Stairway to Heaven but I dont think I was nearly nerdy enough for this Colin geezer who loved Aztec Camera, Thomas Dolby & Devo.

School for me as an overall experience had been a meh, ok experience. I had managed to figure out I was not the just fit in & do as your told, type of person by the age of 13 really. So when the others were all being buddies in cliques I was learning to hover & migrate between them all as I saw fit & was picking up on how to just do "me" in the process. I found all this anti-socialising an extremely important journey of discovery. Meanwhile awareness of the world outside was helped inordinately by School trips with our amazing Geography teacher Mr Walker who took us to Wales a couple of times, walking up Mount Snowden & camping, & learning proper orienteering and survival at Blue Peris adventure park. I had also been in the cubs & scouts. I was known as 'Monkey' for ages but fond memories of June our grey haired kind and decent Akala are still with me:

There aint no flies on us
There aint no flies on us
There may be flies on some of those guys
but, There aint no flies on us


Dunstablians under 13s

We used to play orienteering & castle keep on the Dunstable downs on dark nights. All night. - taking eggs and flour as the weapons necessary for essential night manouvres - this type of thing would never be allowed today. It was fucking brilliant.

All this made me appreciate the landscape of Britain - After walking the Hills of Cyprus on my own back in 1976 my appreciation of nature was all starting to make sense. This all became formative for my future travels enjoying the outdoor life & knowing how to cope & ultimatly enjoy the full camping experience.

I love playing Rugby & Football at school and because my dad hung out getting pissed with the teacher types who played for Dunstablians Rugby club, all lived along from our 3 floor house in Dunstable on Beale street. So we joined too and I ended up playing for the under 13s - as a flanker / center / winger, getting the championship that year & scoring the winning try in front of Barbarians crowd up in Northampton.


Dunstablians under 13s winning the trophy!


Typicle 70's Dad on holiday - Big sideburns, pint in hand, Vauxhall Viva


Me (left) my brother Andy (right), drinking 8% lager at 12 and (centre) My Nanny Hall from my mums side


Poor Mum, comatose with her bad leg up

Football was totally different with it being the more popular sport - Parents all angled to get their kids into popular teams. I was a decent enough goalkeeper & had trials for the county, but even my Dad got fed up with the politics of over eager soccer parents who wanted to make the next George Best or Andy Gray

The closest anyone got to stardom was one of my best mates of the time, Jason Cook, who went from County stardom, renound through school he was an amazingly talented player, our; Maradona of Northfields. Going on to play for Southend & eventually having trials for Tottenham Hotspurs, before his knee gave out on him, poor sod. His dad Pete used to play Semi pro Saturday League & used to take us along with Jason. Many fond memories of eating pies & hot dogs & listening to the results on the car radio while driving home as it got dark. Pete also worked on the lorries and ran up to Northampton & back to get all us skinheads, our cheap factory seconds Dr Martin boots.

Dad was getting boozier & boozier by the year, and he became full on enamoured with home brewing. The cupboards were stacked with bottles nicked from the Alpine lorry, a service that providied crap pop to neighbourhoods in Dunstable & Luton. Cider, Lager, Bitter & sometimes Stout and wine were all attempted. We all took part in drinking it. The earliest photos all have us with ubiqutous pint in hand, me at 13 & my brother at 11 drinking 8 per cent wicked brew. Obviously this had had consequences. Oh well - thems the rubs. Dads drinking sprees reached a dangerous pinnacle when, after a night at Ceasars Palace trying out his latest "gambling system" - he drove his Ford Granada right across the central reservation of the Luton to Dunstable dual carriageway crashing into oncoming traffic. Weirdly, after watching panorama road safety special aried the night before, he clunk clicked & decided to wear his seat belt for the first time on the very day of the nasty crash. He was bruised but ok.

By this time mum, who had gone from working in the SKF factory to Caesers Palace onto being a home help for Luton & Dunstable Social services - the job entailled her walking all over the town visiting her elderlies. This probably didn't help unknown-to-her, a quickly developing arthritis which was getting painful, but like many devoted Mums do, they take the pain & stay silent. She ended up having an operation on her knee which changed her life considerably for the worse. The surgeon botched the operation and they had to remove her kneecap. So mum became an invalid, registered disabled & pumped full of gold label & painkillers daily, still managing the housework, but most days we would come home from school to find her asleep on the sofa.

I stopped playing sport in clubs when I discovered art was 'my thing' & a visit from a past student (ironically one of those old bullies from middle school Gary Prestine) showing us his portfolio was all it took for me to want to go to Art School. The sports teachers gave me time off lessons so I could go to the Art studio and make prints, draw & paint stuff, purely on the promise I would continue to play in the school teams.

Apart from fighting & being obnoxiously spotty and long haired School in the latter part of 1984 was ALL shite. Most of the kids were robots by now. So aspiring to be successful in exams so I could stay on at 6th form, like many were - seemingly so they could all stay with their mates in a clique pretending life was the same as when they were little kids, was not an option. I'd had well enough of Northfields Upper School. I could not wait to say Fuckety Bye to it all.


It's a knockout part 2

It was in my final year at Northfields that I had another brush with head trauma. We were playing UniHock - a version of indoor hocky with plastic equipment & somebody swished past me & I felt a crack to the skull. The weird thing is, that I did't feel unwell for 2 hours later, after dinner in French class. We all filed in to our usual seats to see a piece of paper in front of us. It was then I noticed not only could I not really understand the supposed French writing, but all of it was complete gobbledygook - just weird symbols. I started to sweat, feeling anxiety rising glancing up at the clock did not make things any better. The symbols that denoted the hours were all in weirdy woo too. Now many of us suspect that Time is an illusion, lunch time doubly so (sic. Dougla Adams) but this was not right at all. It seemed i had exited the matrix in some strange way. I sat quietly & did nothing. No one seemed to notice, so I just sat there, gormless. I was awful at French & poor Mr Cadigan probably thought I was just being, as usual, absolutely useless. It was the next lesson in Art, my favourite lesson in the whole wide world, that things took a turn for the more physically bizarre. As I thought I was the ruler of the roost Art wise i tried to make sense of what we were supposed to be doing, but I still couldn't decipher anything or even attempt to draw or paint something. it just seemd out of my grasp. My best buddy Stuart Monk looked at me and noticed something was not right. I promptly stood up smacked him right in the head. I was rushed out of the class to the nurse. Next thing I knew the nee naw people were coming to take me to hospital.

Lorna & Katie

1985 - That entire summer before the last year was a weird journey where I awoke sexually after meeting Belper (Midlands UK) lass Lorna O'Neill on yet another family Holiday in Benidorm. She was 16 & I was still 15 in that summer - with that holiday ending up with me connecting with Lorna in London after we returned. For 8 months I would escape every single weekend down to London on the National Express - to go & be with her...work in her Parents Pub - The Fox on The Hill in Camberwell. The rest of that year saw me working as a pot washer to earn my keep - proper pay packets made a difference too except I had to lie about my age - maybe I'll get more pension. yeah, right! sure. It came to an end when both sets of parents agreed to split us up for the sake of both our futures - I was facing O'levels, Lorna was facing motherhood. Yes when I met her she was 3 months pregnant by some other 21 year old cunt who worked in the pub called Neil. So this all woke me up & a daunting level of prospective maturity hit me big time. I was still going out with Lorna when she had Little Katie. Wow! I learnt how to prepare bottles do the nappies etc. Alas I was supposed to be preparing for my last year & the school work leading to exams had gone totally out the window big style. Of course, I was utterly destroyed by being left at the bus stop in Camberwell staring at Lornas crying face moving away in the back of their car at rapid speed in the driving rain. How I got the bus to the National Express coach station in Victoria, so I could get home to Dunstable without totally breaking down in endless tears is beyond me. Hey, it's that first true love, right? it always kills a little. Actually it fucking nearly destroyed me. I coped by toughening up into a bit of a cynical, sneering young man. A bit of Bastard to be honest.


chalk drawing of Lorna



Joe Cool with the Les Paul copy

I was 16 - and I found myself working weekends at a boozer called the Crown, on the Dunstable main high street, collecting glasses changing barrels & running Ice & crates from other boozers when they needed it as it got busy packed with people listening to Bon Jovi Duran Duran & Level 42 - Big haired heavy metal does not fit with the pop-soul scene as I walked around the bar with pint glasses piled up many of these Casual football thugs brigade lager louts would elbow me in the ribs for giggles with me dropping many a stack of glasses out of pure rage. My initiation on the first night at the Crown is the stuff of legend - A guy called Vic run the place, and his managers Stacey & Rowena, who I knew from school, would let me have a couple of pints after every shift. As this was the first night. they proceeded to seperate me from my trousers & chase me up to the toilets where in terror I hid in the cubicle in shaky nervous laughter. Over the top of the metal door came their guffawing heads with a camera flashing. Was I bothered? No it was brilliant & they were all gay - so it didn't feel rapey or pervey at all. My experience here proved invaluable to me in dealing with pressure in a situation filled with drunken knobheads. Thinking about it that summed up my homelife in a nutshell as well. I went on to work another place just down the road, a poxy little Wine Bar run by yuppy wannabes - My long hair was getting out of hand so they persuaded me to get it cut for charity. I got in the local papers made them a couple of grand for their charity - then they fired me the next week. Cunts. Hows that for gratitude? Where did my hair go? aaargh! By now - I wanted to leave this shithole very, very, very much indeed!


all my lovely hair gone...eeek!

Escape plan

Barnfield was a strange place I ended up deciding to go to because, being a bit thick, I didn't really fancy A Levels at all. It was an interesting time, while I was still finding my feet regarding any type of meaningful identity - at 16 into 17, I was a diffidant & challenging individual. I mixed with age ranges up from mine to divorcee mid life crisis sufferers who wanted art back in their lives. The Tutors acted like they hated me, as I suspect many of the students did. Barnfield couldn't find space for all it's students, So the first year was spent sitting outside in a cold hut. Massive shout outs go to Derrick Tomblin (a Markyate born new wave new romantic), Neil (no i'm not Billy Idol), who I had a great time in Amsterdam with on a drunken & freezing field trip in which I remember the Rijksmuseum showing all those Dutch masters & MC Escher exhibition being highlights.

In the summer I worked at the Luton town hall printing dept. Dad had managed to find a job in the reprographics dept. (photocopying, basically) after unceremoniously losing his Printing Union privelidges when Robert Maxwell took all the local jobs in the area & moved the to the Midlands. Dad had gone up to train some of them in Nottingham. The Unions scabbed him out & he was fucked for a job in the industry. It kind of destroyed him inside a little, but he plodded on in the Town Hall under the steady guidance of Ted - head of the printing dept. It was Ted who gave me my first Electric guitar - a Les Paul copy called a 'satellite', complete with a little amp that I loudly terrorised the neighbours with in our garage at home. I had a ball that summer doing shitty repetitive jobs collating & microfilming with all the odd characters in the Building, ranging in classes through the floors it seemed, it was a really valuable experience with me loving being in the basement with the lower class scum. Friday afternoons in the boozer were special.

Second year at Barnfield was a little better with us actually being inside & having student devoted spaces we could do our work in. People like Mark Hammond & John Bichfield were older ex-punks who didn't like me at all & we butted heads a few times. Funnily enough they were easier to get along with on their own as people. Were these people Bullies? I wasn't into making friends with some of the very posh types in the year, who all seemed like they had stepped right out of Aussie sitcom, Neighbours. But we had some laughs too. The only person who I felt really 'got me' was an American Contextual studies tutor who I fancied the ass off. She told me I reminded her of Joey Ramone & Joe Strummer, but I didn't have clue then who that was at the time really & that may explain those bully punks above perhaps thinking I was totally clueless, which I no doubt was. The main tutors, all crass 70's throwbacks, seemed a million miles away from my thought processes, sandal wearing elbow bepatched painting & sculptor tutors were headed in the dept. by a strange scraggly woman who thought she was Chelsea hippy royalty.

Gotta get away

Here's some advice for anyone in a shit situation. Try to get away every weekend & do something else.

It was while I was attending Barnfield College that I ended up going out to Leighton Buzzard every weekend to hang in the basement of a flat with Mark, Cheryl & Paul. We started a crappy rock band & playing things like Born to be wild & Sunshine of your love & All Right Now. Every Saturday, without fail, a few of us practiced with a crate of lager or 2 getting seriously raided while nights were a carry on watching a local band down the boozer or a full on party in the yard out back. There was also the draw of Sarah, a precosciously redheaded biker chic who loved fucking anything that moved or had a pulse, or didn't for that matter! - unfortunately for me her boyfriend was notoriously fucking hard, (as in fighty) & had connections with the biker crew down the road. These Mechanics used to cut bikes & cars up making Mad Max type vehicles. They would ride through Leighton Buzzard GWAR-like to crowds of gasping & tutting onlookers. They came past our window one afternoon & poked their head in to see what the racket was all about. Did we want to play at a biker festival in Woodstock? Us? really? We said yes before any of us remembered we were shit. So we did. But sadly the drummer totally bricked it, pulled out, went AWOL and left me on Guitar & Paul on bass, just the 2 of us, playing to 500 pissed up gnarly bikers - we did ok - I was getting the hang of playing a bit metal but was told: "listen mate you're pretty good - but shut the fuck up for a piggin' minute will you? I'm trying to talk to the crowd dickhead..." - That festival & another one, a massive stage all dayer ruckass with about 10 bands, I attended with one of the nice people at Barnfield, Tina; in a wood near Woodstock, were things that would awaken me to possible futures & after experiencing them - noted mentally that if i ever had the chance to do that again, I should leap head on into it with nothing less than full on hedonistic abandon.

Oh & in case you were wondering; Yes I did (w/Sarah), but had to leave that scene. Immediately! It was worth it.

The first year at Barnfield ended on a high as the last days were full of events & fun things to do, I actually did 'Blind Date - to a bunch of very cynical students. I had entered the talent competition, as a solo guitarist. I borrowed my Cousin Chris' Jackson Charvel metal guitar & I was just going to let it rip & see what happens. Other acts were reflective of the hip hop scene & indie bands & dancing was all performed. The lads around the Asian/Black scene at Barnfield considered everyone who wasn't them a redneck, but this kind of changed after they had hit their decks, giving a really amazing scratching and beat laden set. I was on next, so I did the whole Eddie Valen Halen solo type deal swinging the guitar around the joint to perplexed onlookers. Then I beckoned to the Hip Hop crew to give me some beats. Which they, with a shocked look at each other at first, duly did. We jammed, played a variation of Walk This Way by Aerosmith / Run DMC & I won the competition. That's how I remember it going down anyway. We high all 5'd afterwards & it was awesome! I hope that's how it all happened, there may be an alternative ending here where the HipHop posse just blanked me rudely as I was trying to get them to join in - & I swivelled on my hips mid solo & carried on - & won the damn contest anyway. I like the first version better!

That year I was playing guitars with a fellow called Dick, who was into 50's rock & roll and we would muck about on luchbreaks in one of the huts making rockabilly noise. By that time I'd aquired an old beat up Hofner guitar for a tenner. I'd hang about with him at his place in St Albans many a weekend.

Dad had let me learn to drive in our shit brown old Austin Allegro, and he gave me the car after I passed the test. I drove it into the ground going to & from College every day, usually bump starting it down the drive & getting other poor sods to push it to adequate speed for the journey home late afternoons. The poor little car lost both its wing mirrors in the first week! Eventually it came to rest hitting a wall in a pub car park somewhere off Whipsnade, when the power failed & the brakes went too and I went straight down a massive hill, across a major road artery, narrowly missing a passing lorry in the process. I phoned Dad from the payphone in the boozer, & he came & stood by me & the crumpled & fucked motor, despondantly shaking his head.

Proper Art School!

Late 1988 - That was the year I first took acid. And it was during that night that while long haired and unshaven, while wandering the hallowed corridors terrorising Lamorva House that Andy Long proclaimed in his thick Yorkshire accent, as I outstretched my arms along the walls in christ pose:

You are totally fucking wardrobe!

I replied:

I am the Captain of wardrobe.

So there you go.

So anyhoo. I was just managing to scrape through with a Merit award Btech in Art & Design & to the surprise of all the tutors- I managed to get accepted into Falmouth School of Art & (FSAD). At last! I was finally leaving Luton & going right down to Falmouth was a dream come true for a spotty herbert like me all full of piss, vinegar & a bad attitude. The place was amazing. Gorgeously remote & romantically windswept in the winters, while just sunny & beaches in the summer. I went up for the interview with all my work in a little white van driven by my Dad - the interview saw me explaining my paintily reliefs and weird huge cardboard structures - plus a massive portfolio full of stuff & 20 odd sketch books. I think I got in by overwhelming them with endless parade of silly old tat really. The Tutors Jeff Hellyer & Adrian Breggazi & a beautiful male efite student from the 3rd year sat in the interview & it went well - I finally felt even at this stage I had met people I could engage with. Later, in the second year, Jeff would offer me outside for a fight after I was being particularly confrontational. A fight with a tutor? what utter fun! It never happened though - I was a proper intense wind up merchant becoming playful with other peoples in-set ideas & stuck in the 70's conceptual concretism.

So...Hurragh! I had managed to escape dead end jobs & monotony that a normal life in the South East of UK may have ended up being - & I had a fucking ball into the bargain! Result!

Late 80's Art school provided the amazing cross section a radio ruled by John Peel, accompanied my ever continous learning of my beloved Guitar, meeting people into Blues & Jazz that at the time, i was just learning the basics of.

The First year at Falmouth was spent living in a tiny room in a holiday resort Swanpool House, that was let out to students during term time. It was where I met old Phil & Vim Shah, Andy Rollo & Bernie Boyle. Frequent partying was commonplace in the little pool room with a small tape player blaring out Souxie, Joy Division & the Fall. As the Art degree course progressed off my journey of discovery went, into the craziest music British Indie & Americana could provide via Rough Trade, CZ, ShimmyDisc & sub pop type indie labels and experimental alt rock.

Swanpool was also a very spooky place. As I recall you had to walk down a massive hill right past an thicky wooded old cemetary, with gothic graves dotting the hillside, then one had to meander through a lagoonside winding path with overhanging arching trees, to the gates of this old holiday home. woo. I had to walk Phil Minns home once - he was shitting bricks poor lad. Year 1 also saw the beginnings of a little clique, of which I'm really not sure i was totally a part of. Mid term of that strange first year saw people allign & change - all going to the Chain Locker or Jacobs Ladder for lunchtime drinkies that turned into full on mad all day sessions, sitting watching oil tankers come in to roost in the deep harbour on rainy afternoons. My memories span from accompanying Mick, a 35 year old Painter & divorcee on drinking his settlement in Guinness, while an old blues player played memphis slim tunes on an old piano & impromptu wild harmoica as we sat amazed... life veered irratically for me from those life affirming experiences to the situation of wondering how much grant was left, writing endless Midland bank dogdy cheques, living on pasta, vodka, horrid Spars own cheap baccy & red sealed black lebanese cannabis, kipping down not arsed getting back to Swanpool for days on end, at the halls of residence in Lamorva House, in Ben Phelps room with him, his new flatmate a young conservative, Julian Weaver & Yorkshire stoic hardman Andy Long. The room was the basement level & it had a ground level window which people would knock on and jump through. One of these people was Tariq. An oversees student from Qatar, A crutched up polio victim - he would slide into that room via the window with such grace, sliding his legs round to plop into one of the chairs, rolling a spliff, all at once in a kind of beautiful choreography. Times spent playing blues together high as fuck are etched on my brain.

Artwork 86-91 Art School years

Luton Barnfield College / Falmouth School of Art & Design

We Are Krill!
Degree Course - 2nd Year Show Exhibit

IDENTITY: final Degree show 3rd Year

book #1 - presented as part of 3rd year show as pamphlets

Year 2; Spliffs & Acid

Year 2 was the year our year went totally rave - and this was reflected in the studios via many budding artist back then, My fellow student peers such as Phil Minns (the most influencial), Rob Ramsden, Pete Fowler (now mega famous cult graphic artist) & Mark Lloyd were all doing very weird & conceptual neo pop art. The whole thing was contagious in a positive way. Others like Andy Rollo & Andrea Maclean & AJ, a foppy drunk born in The Falklands, and who, for a while became a massive drinking buddy, well, they stuck to their guns, formally rooted in more traditional styles & later became would become proper renound artists in their own little ways. Both Andy & Andrea managed to get their work into the National Gallery. Looking at the recent webpage the Falmouth University now expanded and corporatised beyond belief it's amazing to me that FSAD do not include them on their alumini these days. But that is, sadly a sign of dark times for us pure artists many could see coming in those olden days of free expression - it is a theme that runs through my life as a purely artistic endeavor. Sellout cunts who really have no integrity, are littering & polluting the landscape built from sellout ideas & money first, elbows out, aspiration culture which destroys the enitire cultural landscape; This is tragic & Darkly hilarious to me now as no one knows what anything is supposed to be. It either makes money for the elite, & is highly visible or it doesn't & is lost forever down the memory hole of convenience.

Getting back to the times at hand: Phil Minns really pushed the boat out on the pop art style - taking over the studio with mad colors & popular icons in post graffiti that now seem everyday. He got an old armchair ripped out the seat and put a record player in it - painted it all graffiti wylde style & voila! Post-modernism. He was a shoe-in Student from Hull - who came on the back of painting in the thick overly painted neo fauvism style of Frank Auerbach. It was the Auerbach himself who saw Phils work in Hull & recommended him to FSAD head staff. Everything was possible; Phil Hughes show was a astroturfed area with cabinets containing old dolls & curiosities - Paul (Moose) Howes show was a bunch of lights in a cupboard. Kevin Carters was a wall, moved diagonally across the space. Simon Pike made lightbox Canvasses of Arnie in full pose, Pete Fowler did a spectacular painting of the gunshot head explosion in the movie Bad Taste. Andy Long made a room full of furniture made of corragated cardboard. Ben Phelps painted rows of fire extinguishers on canvas. Owen Thomas made lightboxes with corporate logos on. Funnily enough a lot of the female work was really large abstract paintings & traditional landscapes. with Rachel Stephens possibly being an exception with dead birds & other creepy shit happening in her work. Other feminists were doing the whole 'huge paintings of vaginal shaped thingys and sculpures of slits & clits...What the fuck were these tutors making of this? eh? Furthermore, this was happening all over the country. Post modernism, witnessed in glossy art magazines gleamed from the excellent on-site library gave anyone access to works of Frank Stella to Jeff Koons and had hit the Art school world. Except in our case it had that ravey dance culture drug fulled edge in many cases. Personally, I would recommend anyone to stretch a 6 by 6 foot canvass and simply sit and look at it. That experience in itself lends one to fret about filling it. The process is paramount.

year 1 & 2 1989

Andy (?) & Ben Phelps; in our 1st year



Actualy in the studio doing work; Ben Phelps / Andy Long & Me doing mad headbanging

botttom: Vim Shah

Other fellow shipmates, like Jo Neary, were 'doing fashion' & putting on funny little plays in peoples front rooms. She went on to become a comedian/child entertainer/teacher & actor on telly welly! A special Mention goes to Claire & Rik, who went to live right out on the Orkneys, making a lovely arty life together. Rik sadly lost his battle with cancer a few years ago & when I heard, I cried my eyes out. He was a truly gifted special, lovely man, never to be forgotten.Those who are worth any decency all got on facebook to pay tributes. I'm not on that insipid social media bollox these days - so if you are reading this Claire, I love ya - keep going mate. Another weird thing that happened over that time was the last 3rd year fashion show, which saw myself being hijacked into a world of wearing the most silly but altogether lovely post modern regalia for a show which was the fashion depts final show. I boomshakka massively enjoyed the occassion, modelling outfits for the beautifully and outrageous and outwardly gay. I walked that cat walk like a diva. and got to know a little more about myself in the same process. A few years later I would hook up with one of those designers, who when we were all changing costumes backstage would make me so sexually charged it simply all had to spill out later, over 4 years later, into a full blown sexual indulgance. She was called Charlotte. Surprised? I was.... And I still love the memory of her very much. We had a few weeks in London and Oxford. A certain place on Dunstable Downs will never be the same again for me, and even my mum could she she was 'a goer', well because of my mums old days connections to Ceasers and the 'scene' - my Mum has a decent eye and a decent radar - we ended up in the timespace of a weekend living a life - and when we got to Oxford to visit some of the Goth boys who were on the last years of her & my last year degree in Falmouth, some who I knew - we all ended up mortal...Mortal is a state of mind. and when you know your ride is broken, you move on. simple as. She was a lovely lass. They were great lads. Her heart was somewhwere else. Move on I say. Move on. These lads had a band - they were pretty good - Charlotte ended up on tour with them. Who can compete with that?

Memories of year 2 have us eating cannabis laden curries at Old Harrys place. & getting stoned with Pete & Simon in my crappy old car sitting wrecked out the back of the bottom studios. Living off Burgermix, rice & meusli. Riding a pink BMX around with crappy plastic gold sunglasses on & wearing now hilarious baggy light blue dungerees with an old Mod full fishtail parker! Going for 3 days high on microdot acid, wandering the Falmouth Gardens marvelling at the flowers. Meeting a badger. watching electric blue lazers fly along every surface like TRON, watching the streets dance along to my footsteps like an old time cartoon. One time I was tripping in my room & watching Jaques Cousteau underwater adventures on a black & white portable TV - only for the entire room to turn blue & me to end up swimming around in it! Thank fuck there were no smart phones with a camera on in those days. It would have also caught me running away from our Ginger Tomcat, which had become a green & purple Tiger. eek!


from left to right top row Deirdre Leyden, Julian Weaver, Rik Hammond, Phil Minns bottom: CW & Alison Love

But none of these times from 1988-1991 were really as whacky or original - as we all thought they were. Take a look at this classic piece of Falmouth School of Art history from the 1970's here. Amazingly Mike Wilson was still a technician when I was there. He really helped me with Video production - loaning me cameras & use of video editing equipment, out of hours. Unfortunatly the videos I made during that time & many of the sound stuff i made are lost forever. They were amazing. or crap. oh well. fuck it.

as far as creativity is concerned: Unoriginality is not the problem: as I wrote in my 2nd year show statement piece - stealing & lying are the only virtues of true artists.

Sampling is an existential experience.

Back in those days we really could have done with a sound studio in the art school - so imagine my surprise that back in the days of the early 70's those lucky bleeders had a full studio to fuck about with installed in the Art School and fully functional to professional levels. We - in their future, however had to make do with the now seminal 4 track Fostex multi tracking recorder, stuck at home feeling like outcasts for it not being seen as proper art. Times change, right?

acknowledgement:

The following 4 track recordings would not be possible without the awesome work of Jacko (Anthony Jackson) - the sound dude...he was an hairy hippy legendary for his lovely petuli oil stench & old classic high top Van converted into a no fixed abode paradise. But alas...in the early college dayze of yore - there was a time of mysts and great hollering..these were the times of weirdywoo

Jacko appearing through myst - presents an awesome sound module he crafted himself, while working for Allen & Heath in Penryn.. - an article that was made of the essense of god in my mind - it proved true for me at least, fiddling with the sampler & delays built into this early sound module. These tracks recced on tape were all improvised & just made up on afternoons when i really should have been at Art School, doing important work. Were we all fucked while these were being made? Yup. stoned out of our tiny melon minds. awesome times. Everyone should have a shot at making a mad 4 track album that does backward weirdy woo thingys too. It is a portal to another dimension.

These recordings were my first real attempt at making music on a multitrack - and its rough badly done in many stoic traditionalist eyes and i think very funny in parts. It wasn't really supposed to break any boundaries as I was aware of Chrome & Helios Creed, Zappa + Beefheart, Zoogz Rift & the Butthole Surfers, Eugene Chadbourne, Weird Paul, Daniel Johnstone, Jad Fair & Kramer, negativeland, Devo + also Julian Cope in his weirder ambient ThighPaulSandra connected ambient psychoraves... making mad shit I was getting wild on & copying but not copying out of sheer love & adoration of these idols found through lifes eternal audio awareness ever-wandering. Later i would tune into archives The radio of The subgenius & discover we were all doing similar stuff way way ahead of us art school pretentious middle class shysters.

Recently, I wrote an e-mail to the very reverand Ivan Stang, subgenius chief of operations, & to my utter suprirse & me reacting goofing off a loud Yeah Man woagh! he actually replied - telling me about whats occuring and commenting on my lifes work; "my you have been busy" - what a lovely dude for acknowledging & taking his precious time to probably chuckle lovingly at us all. He is our Mekon. A huge ever pulsing brain at the centre of the universe. (hint at another major influence, right there)

We had parties, or should I clarify? More accurately we were truanting from art school halls of the course, as smoking afternoons, arranged by just turning up - at my next-door-to-Hawkins-House flat & I would just get the red button pressed- usually before anyone was aware of it...as a must-keep record of whatever happens next - that would be rehashed as a movie later in my experimental-dream-of-a-life existence. I would just sit with a few bits & bobs casios, guitars and fun things found at Trego Mills and adding Jackos sound unit to the mix, we'd sit, spliff up and make mad shit on all this lovely cheapo equipment. This is the beginning of it all for me. Cheap nasty and fun. Thems the rules. Again memories make a warm fuzzy glow in my belly. Joe Neary & Rob Ramsden helped write / create / play / sung on some bits of these recordings, and we sat in Robs place to develop a way of drawing lines on graphed paper which gave 4 tracks a marked progressive scribble or just odd shape - or even a emotional reaction, which kind of turns the abstract expressionism of say, Cy Tombly, into an audio transcription via notation. These lines are devoted to a chosen instrumental line to follow. Drawn in crayon or in the blood of a rabbit. Rob would love that. We should get awards from the god of nonsense for this. I still wait like that poor rabbit in dazzling headlights for some kind of creative retribution. It will come, I have told myself year upon year to no avail. ha! Acknowledgement means nothing in a glass timepiece we exist in, sand flowing the direction it wants to purely out of blind ambition to make stuff, be madly uncompromising and ultimatley get something out of it all as a viscerally memorable, experiancal happening.

Thinking about it all now - we could have made a proper group effort, gone to the Head of college Alan Livingstone & the stuck-in-their-ways-tutors and proposed a new art-music club / movement - to be ackonwledged as part of the degree course. Hindsight, years later, is a bastard! I wanted to, but at the time that seemed like madness.

Experimental 4 track Tapes 1990-91

Big Spring Summer side 1

1.death this is murder

2.mary had beautiful life

3. can you hear bats?

4. lord of the flies

5. information trip

6. mess on your shoes

7. the blues

8. the rich

9. i'd died and gone to heaven

10. big spring summer

11. the returen of the return of the flies

12. theme for a lazy afternoon

Big Spring Summer side 2

1. when he said meanwhile

2. jazz from airstrip 1

3. a baby (is there?)

4. the pasty song

5. fugwompytracheaclumpet

6. looking at flushing

7. requiem for our lives

8. the journey southwards

9. walking talking singing

10. wonderful life

11. moving instrumental

12. where's my egg?

13. our lives as a film

Universal Album side 1

1. introduction

2. the wary eyes

3. 1-2-3-4-5

4. worlds best disco

5. the man on the hill

6. intermission

7. the secret society

8. something in my head

9. Jimmy Page is my dad

10. jam with a weaver

11. nasty tickly cough

12. hello goodbye

Universal Album side 1.2

1. cup & crisp packet song with Rob Ramsden

14. am i the hero

15. intermission part 2

16. biccys & tea (with ned smarbor)

17. woop woop - (conceptual but humble beginnings medley)

18. kill your self

19. intermission 3

20. trying to be similar

21. the symmatry of silence

22. 5-4-3-2-1

23. sometimes it helps to close ones eyes

24. finale

25. wardrobe says goodbye

Universal Album side 2.

1. forget our differences

2. where are we?

3. copy touch (with Big Ron)

4. i got rhythm you got rhythm

5. police with no fear

6. crazy sex life of a crazy witchita outlaw

7. the story so far

8. in remeberance of something...

9. auto-advance

10. god & jesus & it

11. whiplashers

12. have you a heart me hearty

13. galloping together

14. jugular

Bank - the band that appaerently never really existed.

In another seemingly different meandering timescape I ended up playing guitar & singing in a band called Bank with a few people who really had no connection to the Art School - this was good for me to not get bogged down, with just art school people, one has to remember that we, as these alien, UFO pod people, invaders of traditional ye olde Cornwall, the dockers, druggies, layabouts & all the normals running shit...it has to be good to align with some locals characters get shit done, get along & be progressive. If that sounds far too empirical: I needed a break from pretentious idiots.

Meeting with Luke & Jeremy happened via Paul Anthony, who was running Victor Dragos a lovely place we all went to to see the bands he put on - various dub infused World music bands like African Head Charge & Dreadzone, some classic underground Punk outfits like Poisoned ElectrikHead & proper good rave indie techno DJ nights. They had a stage. Now that's a start. And when I got to be there regular we talked together about music & life, eventually me & Paul went upstairs after hours to mess about on guitars. I would hear nothing until;

so, when we had jammed wait! I hate that fucking term, let's call it met musically, we connected. Paul recommended these 2 herberts from 6th form in Falmouth/Truro; Luke Vibert - a drummer who was in several punky bands & his bestie from school Jeremey Simmons - yes they were that young 17-18 year olds that just astonished me with their telepathic musical connection. When we had our first meetings with them all auditioning me as guitarist, without them realising I was also a singer too and started rehearsing, and it literally came together in an afternoon. I remember them all saying I was in the band..and I remember thinking how fucking chuffed I felt for the chance to hang not only with people not directly connected to the art school lot but how lucky I felt to be here in this time in Falmouth, so much was going on. Like my earlier experiences at school only really a couple of years ago - I was meandering scenes not really being totally immersed in of any of it but trying to make things happen.

All I had to do was be me. This felt good to me.

so we played a couple of lovely nights at Victor dragos

The lads & I, did an acid jazz night at club International with Vim Shah giving it saxophone

Then it all went south, nasty weird and fucked up due to all of us being - well, us and the woke (in context of the time) agenda of a girlfriend getting jealous and spiteful , and me thinking I could be a knight in shining armour protecting her made up bullshit. That's for you Mr Anthony sir, I do know man, and you would laugh at the way I ended up being considered the pervy old fart by idiots, years later in the 2006 onwards; Whitley Bay scene...

Kids of yesteryear, finding their feet. no matter! I'm honoured to have been a part of it. Despite our respective differences. it was a time worth writing down here as a way of me keeping hold of what is left of my sanity. Luke went on to be internationally renound techno producer. I went on to be a legend in my own mind of lunchtime and Paul Anthony is still putting on lovely small music nights at the Jacobs ladder. I hope. Jeremy made an album with Luke which went ballistic, and i suspect still hangs like the proverbial bass player, more influencial than he can ever know.

The Fabulous Paul Anthony (front & center)

Jeremy Simmons, Paul Anthony, Luke Vibert
& little old me, looking somewhat bored


Pretentious? Moi?

Myself I flirted with the bright graphics of neo rave art but then mixed up everything, Eventually, in my final year made all I was producing synchronise about 'identity' & started writing more than I was Painting really. Doing writing was a great way to sit and think. I really found my voice thanks to Little Jim a third year in the Graphics dept, who was assigned the duty of giving me some essay writing lessons by Mr Firth of contextual studies.

It was possibly prompted by a particular time in space defined after a trip to Paris which saw many doing the familiar rounds of art stereotypical; Louvre, Pompidou centre and the rest of it, encapsulated by brainwashed notions of what ART actually is. My observations of how the group were acting prompted me, in a moment of bored anger and frustration, to do my most audacious attempt at art piracy yet. The Pompidou centre is steeped in art mythos a centre devoted to the halls of unquestionable culture positied and asserted into the public main frame awareness via crass tourist public relations & slight of hand illusory control of what Human creativity actually is.

So when I walked around this hallowed place I decided, Pad & sharpie in hand, to write what would become the Truisms/falsism faux quotations / statements seen here; place them stuck into the description plates of some of the most well known artworks of the 18th 19th & 20th century and simply walk away and see how long they would remain there.

No security appeared.

I waited.

the papers remained next to the paintings for the entire afternoon.

I went to sit on top of Montematre on the steps, watching the street artists paint the toursists faces badly, with a couple of lovely bottles of wine, to celebrate an obvious victory. Kachink! When we got back to Falmouth, we were expected to write an essay detailing experiences backed up by notebooks which would verify that we were paying attention to what we supposed to be doing and not just, well sitting up on montematre getting mortal for a week. So my presentation followed as thus: On these boring travels through hyper-reality (read Umberto Ecos book) I had bought a bunch of very touristic postcards from all the places we had visited over the week - and glueing them into a pad, I also added a black and white cut out photocopied generic image of my head & shoulders - proving I was there. what fun. The supporting essay which was presented, supposed to be 1500 word of coherant written recollection & deconstruction was in fact a random series of words, collected & hand written in series until the magic number of 1500 words was achieved - and then at that page, a blue and white chequered tape was place as a finishing line to end it.

My essay had become abstract art in itself trying to prove that LIFE IS ART!

It recieved a 60% appraisal mark. (really!)

oh yes - My writing must have been pretty bad back then. I wonder if I have improved at all?

My art started incorporating notions of Identity with Gameplay - inspired by the excellent book, Finite & Infinite Games by James P Carse. The pieces (above & right) were game boards to be viewed with hand made 3d red/blue goggles. The tutor Jeff Hellyer thought it was crap. He may have had a point - look at those gamepieces made out of matchboxes! This was a degree after all. lol. I had spunked all my grant on booze & drugs - and had to pilfer the art dept basement for several rolls of transparent plastic film - I got given loads of extra credit on the photocopier by super cool admin staff, who while winking knowingly, helped me through the weird difficult second year. In the final thrid year things would become so ridiculous, when the bank refused me any more overdrafts and I had to beg borrow and yes, steal the elements necessary to make my vision of a final show complete. The local Midland bank manager received private xmas gift that year - a framed version of the letter the fuckers wrote to me informing me of being cut off from funds and my scrawling art over the top calling him a cunt! I do hope his family saw it! The motion sensors and many of the clipframes used in the show were all shoplifted from Trego Mills - that old MOD Parker jacket had very deep pockets!

hey! where did my locker go?

Eventually I would mix elements of chaos made from improvised concrete poetry all made on the desktop publishing suite as part of the graphics dept - The very kind & loveley Mathawgnwe, and a few other graphics tutors turned a blind eye as I used up all their printer ink and kept the queue for the printer terminally slow for a good 6 weeks, as proper graphics students pumping out designs for their projects tutted & cursed.... The stuff I was inventing (all pre internet, don't forget) - utilised layouts / fonts, basically anything the program had to offer in terms of potential weirdness. Influenced by the sort of anarchic art of Stuart Holme, Billy Childish & Sexton Ming & Iain Hamilton Findlay - within a kind of order presented as Identity as self investigation. For the 3rd year show I presented an installation office environment - a carpeted area contained 3 lightboxes salvaged from old lockers, each with an encapsulated framed in polystyrene protection - family picture in the door area in front of movement activated bulbs were standing in a group of 3.

Nowadays I see pictures of server farms & cannot help compare these attempts to house chaos in perceived order. I am still rather obsessed with this theme & you can see similarities in my designs of the Renegade Pharmacy record label & the Poetry site The Padded Cell


top right Alison & me, left Ben Phelps & Simon Pike pose on my 21st B-day!
Bottom Left Alison Love & Phil Minns replete in Out of the Ordinary T-shirt - in the flat where we recorded 4 track tapes & The 1st of only 2 gigs Bank played at Victor Dragos

Back to the 60's?

The time reflected a truly 60's style movement that encompassed many types of expressed lifestyle from weekenders of townie casuals to full on crusty ravers of the bus dwelling "no fixed abode" variety. Ozric tentacles & Hawkwind, Punk & Reggea fused with community groups like Spiral Tribe & the Luton based Exodus Posse making base camp of an old hospital that landed somewhere between the lot. Falmouths version of the night club consisted of 2 places called Shades & Club International. The isolated region of Cornwall often made everything slightly sad, ironic & a little bit dated. Timewarped Cornwall in 1989 was amazing. Pubs would have a tiny black & white telly in them to show the FA cup final - cricket or even the snooker, (yes the blue is behind the pink). Locals drank out of their own tankards. The art school lot were like aliens landing out of spaceships from ' up Londun'. Falmouth at its best was a perfect mix of clever arty musical theatrics & wise old time fisherman / docker people all trying to get along. It didn't always pan out quite as utopian as all that - especially if you rubbed up Dave Mason, often replete with a 4 foot python around his neck, the wrong way in the Laughing Pirate! I did that once. ouch! But Falmouth had a Oasis, Victor Dragos! A place high upon the Pendennis Castle Mount where us weirdos could all go - some to be in bands - Others put on a DJ night called Out Of The Ordinary. Djs Jim Collela, Kerry Curtis, & Grant spun hip hop & baggy indie & the latest Rave tunes to strobeheaded youngsters around a carnival of installed artwork fresh from the Falmouth School of Art studios.

mmm beans!

look at those dungerees!

left to right; Georgie Turner, Kida, Jo Neary, me & Phil Minns in the posh London, probably protesting about student loans or something.


Me, with Julian Weaver, who went on to become an
art director for TV History programmes


pictured; Jon Warbuton (Skater Jon) on board the big blue bus we bought after the Treworgy Tree festival.

Crusty Paul - a phase...!

I went through a traveller phase after attending the Treworgy tree festival sometime in 1989/90.( see here for the usual normal bollox that says it was a nightmare)

It's all very acid haze. I went with Jasmine & John, a couple living in my residence at Glasney Rd. We stuffed ourselves into a packed Band van with amazing world fusion indie band Jaroma who were playing at the festival. The musicians around the scene, many ex students or higher up in year 3 FSAD, or locals with family rich musical or poetic, lineages... were all exceedingly good and people knew folk & the roots of most things, Felix, a smooth precursor to Ben from pop group Curiosity killed the cat , is a superb example of that extraordinary talent. Many art students were versed in classical instruments & played in the local pub Jacobs Ladder - as violins, banjos & Irish drums mixed with those lovely old pipes in an old worldy fusion of lovely memories of getting fucking mortal to a decent soundtrack that was so very of the times! Long arran jumpers stripey tights, and classic French short bobs nicked from 60's into 90's post modernism cinematic rehashes in the ladies (mmm).

So...yes...back to that festival... We somehow managed to get wristbands to get full access, for free - posing as musician tech! That weekend changed my life. A dusty haze covers my memories of 3 days of reggea, punk, crusty psychopunk as mad max vehicles roamed the landscape - filled with hundreds of busses, trucks & ambulances all modified for life as No Fixed Abode. Myself John & Jasmine bought an old Bedford bus that used to be a bike racing teams private support vehicle, all kitted out replete with kitchen, toilet, and bedrooms. I lived on it for a while - up by Victor Dragos in the Lorry park. Many a night was spent around fires smoking drinking with The Brew Crew as they were known. These characters were off the hook, & we regularly went off in search of aluminium - which we would find on an old caravan - to strip & weigh in to get crates of Special Brew lager. This is where I met Jacko (see 4 track tapes),who himself was in a vehicle at that time & a regular round the communal fores that raged onto those timeless night memories. We had lived on the vehicle for about 6 months and the cops were ever present - riding past 3 times a day in what seemed like a comedy of harrassment. Eventually after many nights of zero problemo mixing with various oddballs, who would just tip up at the site, obviously on the run or falling through the cracks of UK society - a complete dickhead ruined my bliss. Half priced Phil would enter the fray. Being a total juiced up skaghead living in a 'bender' (rudimentary tent) by the site we inhabited off in the woods - he also, I fear got one of our best mates, Howard into the gear, a few years later I found he lost his battle with addiction via Mo at megatripolis festival in Bude. Ultimately Howard traded his life - I fell in love with these pilfering dickheads, who were just brilliantly fucking no holds barred out there ALL the time. Shamelessly thick, unschooled & sharper than your average scooby doo. The crew were Howard, Mo their hangers on & occasionally Iain - the drummer from Jaroma (and brilliantly devoted Reggea DJ) and a few others who are in my brain imaginings, but remain not forgotten but sadly nameless. One mad morning Half priced Phil asked me to borrow the Renault, a shitbox bought for 50 quid from the local Gypsie contingency - it was not legal but we rode it into the ground for shits and giggles. So there I am 8 o'clock ibn the morning - sleeping in the front of our bus - and someone, of the crew stuffs a fully loaded pipe in me as I wake up - mmmm nice! I'm now fucked as Phil asks to borrow the motor for a routine weigh in. A likely scam from scammers I well know are on some sort of angle. It worked though, as i rumbled through a stoned haze of promises of lots of brew and tack after whatever they were up to was finalised... lol!

"Phil! do NOT drive this fucking car through Falmouth...ok?"

SO...I'll give you extra points for observation if you can guess what this absolute bell end did? three weeks later the Nee Naw men pull up outside the bus - and a week later I'm in court for no tax MOT or insurance. Oh bollox! Another 500 quid is going to have to come from somewhere.

When I heard my second year assesment gave me a borderline pass for the year & I was told to buck my ideas up or I faced the heave ho from the art school degree course. Big decisions were deliberated.

bye bye scumsuckers!

So I left the bus life and Jasmine & John, to their lovely lives - to go back to House dwelling in student land. I didn't regret it. But Jon kinda made a big deal out of it - treating me like a traitor to the life. which was a shame, but we did hook up many years later to chat and reconnect. After a gracious offer of a spare room - I moved into a house on the Fish Quay right by the lovely sea, with Pete Fowler & Simon Pike & eventually, after many days with them as possibly the best housemates one could have, & late nights eating fried mushroom sarnies & getting woke up as they tried to get me to attend college at least after 12 lunchtime with the anthem 'back to life back to reality' ringing loudly permeating the house along with stone roses and other great tunes - this time truly rocked my world - they were great to be around. Eventually, I stayed in the property longer than they did, not before ending up with 2 of the rowdiest people I have ever met Dick & Rodger (porn names?) These 2 northerner prats were on a proper Macc Lads mission. The only problem - everytime they got pissed they forgot their keys - and; Young Ones Style, would kick the fucking door in at 12 midnight. Twats. The landlord was notoriously hard to get along with, but he loved me when I finally managed to get the fuckers out. Deals were done. It's how you survive when the grant money disappears & the poxy Bank won't update your overdraft. Dole was easy back in those days too, mind. It was easy to remain friend with the 2 D's when they had moved out down the valley towards Mawnan Smith - I have great memories of going down there to party & play football on the green with a few other people whose names escape me now. Julian & Deirdre, Micheal & Lise, the Irish contingent were also omnipresents throughout it all.Liz, Big Phil & Ron were another lot all involved in the times. Many of these are on the 4 track tapes in the background.

Outdoor raves were in old warehouses or just in fields...with, shushed tones on landlines, photocopied flyers at house parties and word would get out, careful as to not alert the cops. Trails of cars following each other down windy roads & motorways to a pre prepared venue all lit up complete with sound system and decorations lighting and projections awaited the initiated and the curious brave. And they were free. Did i mention they were free? Well, they were cheap...rubber stamp on the hand and away you go.

smells like teen spirit?

Drugs drugs drugs...yes...thats where the funds came from...but never as important as the music. The tunes ruled. Fact!

The pure lovely being there of it all is this: once you realise that life is safe and that if you accept what you are doing is safe and ok...a playground is perfectly ok. They have left this idea to rot. because the best playgrounds only need subscriptions to a fraction of available possible economic drivers.

when the balance of those drivers is out of whack...that's when culture stops being creative & starts being a cartel.

an enterprise

a corporate drive by.

from disco to the hitman & her

a Hilarious slice of 70's Australia

click on me to witness this shit!

Eventually the scene for me, all went tits up. Moving to London made me see a different kind of (ware)house party, at first these were places like the Labyrinth - & Old streets jungle techno/indie band hook up joint. Free nights were held & the music was sparse, heavy & Belgian. There was something very dangerous & ultimatley appealing about it all. Venues such as the Garage, The Powerhouse & The Sausage Machine were also influencial. I virtually Lived in Reckless records at one point. I think i can remember the exact moment Rave,(now called clubbing) went shite for your truly. In 1989 techno-trance. which saw clubs in Belgium Holland & Germany making headway, Dj's & artists defined the genre, was absolutely at it's zenith...Jungle Techno, was rising...by 1997 - it was all shit. Thousands of sound a likes, and so called classics appearing on cloned compilation albums...the market was completely saturated. even The Prodigy became a band & fucked a lot of it off.

For me it was a rave in South London 1997, we had all partied all night - but there was a vibe. By now raves were common Knowledge, and big business, with the rise of the Superclub creating demagogery big doller DJ's and a public now made up of casuals, and weekend part people from offices and building sites & Gangster Wankers, both pretend and VERY real. A few years before Nightclubbing was a sleaze fest meat market popularised by the late night telly programme The Hit Man & Her. Pete Waterman & Michaella Strachan would present this utterly crappy & yet strangely compelling piece of televisual evidence proving beyond doubt that the majority of people in the UK, & around the so called 'free world' are really just mindless KRILL who buy vapid pop music & get pissed up & ogle each other at 'the nightclub', a post 1970's cultural hangover, an existential vacuum so expertly satirised by The Specials in the 80's.

Wigan Casino it was NOT!

The scene was becoming normalised. Coming from acid house parties in old churches & fields to how this was all developing was a culture shock. Not to be a snob, but when you are in a room full of people on ecstacy and some builder cunt headbuts someone - you really don't want to witness the group comedown witnessing blood everywhere and screaming. That was that for me. The whole thing lost it's sheen in an instant. I was disillusioned perhaps in a good way. The spell was broken & I went forward becoming more eclectic than ever. To be clear while others were popping up to 10 pills a night - I have taken less than 30 in my lifetime - I took that feeling it gave me & channelled the way the music sounded to me on that pretty amazing high. That was the only use i found for MDMA. The whole love buzz bollocks is a goof for a while. When the effects wear off most people are normal cunts again. While many people took acid & themselves WAY too seriously, like the cliquey weekender clubbing pricks of the north end of Holloway Road (Irish Eammons crew come to mind!) My ex Falmouth peers were all living in London too. Truth be told, many couldn't quite manage to get away from each other, to the point where they all married off , like bland career obsessed American sweetheart college graduates!

rave scene gone wrong?

What it all started to look like to me:

Hackney'ed stereotypes
only in it for the crack?

I had moved up to London after meeting the then lovely & bubbly Georgie Turner in Cornwall. We became an item on my last year at FSAD, meeting on Gyllingvase Beach & living in a gorgeous flat overlooking the sea next to Hawkings House at the top end of Falmouth High street. We had moved from a place with Philip Minns on Well St,Hackney for a year. I spent that time invariably on the dole full time, getting pissed as often as possible - & attending amazing blues parties in North London. Reggea & Soul were merged with Techno House and there was me, up in the top flat of Wells Street next to a Gospel Church, huffing Amyl Nitrate and typing out cut ups on a classic old typewriter, like some deluded bargain basement version of a hyper-real William Burroughs stereotype. I also got myself into a Poetry club, which met at the Prince of Wales on Mare street, called Poetry On my Shoulders.. The group was the most dissolate bunch of creatives I had ever met - ranging vastly in Quality, styles & attitudes. It was another awakening experience culminating in my good self becoming host to the alternative music & poetry night held down south at the Castle pub in the Elephant & Castle. I was in my element! I used to spit my shit & in between bands - this purposfully crappy politically angry poetry flew into into a crowd of neo-punk / casual yobbos who would heckle me for giggles resulting in me & my ego loving every fucking minute of it.


chalk drawing of Phil Minns in our Well st Kitchen

Here are some of those angry silly old poems...I managed to get into a few issues & get myself barred before it all ended. After falling a little for the landlord of the Prince of Wales, Simon. I managed to get my Truisms/Falsisms hung in the bar. Claim to fame: Gaye Bykers on Acid singer, Mary Mary, who I gawped at in astonishment and awe while tripping balls a few years previously at that damn festival in Cornwall was playing there with his band Hyperhead and after having a lovely couple of pints with the band, he loved my work. cool huh? A thoroughly nice chap who I had a few speed fuelled drinks with later in the Astoria. Being told "you're down to earth" by this lovely man made my fucking year.


Haven East Mews - Mum & Dad with Georgie & CW

Dalston

The dreaded Flat deposit was lost thanks to another FSAD graduate, Kevin Carter, who fucked off like a dodgy slippery eel, before we could work out what was happening. So we had to find another gaff. We were incredibly lucky & after what seemed like an eternity scouring Loot paper, discovered a posh but alarmingly cheap flat in the gated, Haven East Mews in Dalston, replete with it's own entry phone / Gym / Sauna. Unknown to us was the fact that the landlady was a bent estate agent & after 6 months of us living there she'd done a runner & fucked offsky back to her native Ireland with a load of dodgy dosh .

Around this time I started hanging around at the Trolley Stop in Dalston - a lovely slice of life back then regularly putting on great jazz, funk & fusion bands & having a decent jukebox. I met up with a black crew who came from the exotic bar next door Big Johns Juice Bar. It was there I first met up with Music Producer, Trevor Ramikee. I also met a few people involved with the acid jazz & jungle scenes - Ronnnie Jordan appreciated my lovely old blues Hofner guitar. Paul the drummer from seminal band Marxmen, told me all about being on Top of The Pops & Nellie & Brigitte - yet more strange underground party-people who assured me they were behind some massive jungle hits she'd sung on, as part of Shut Up & Dance. Some of us became mates after partying upstairs from the Trolley Stop, on a ridiculously overcrowded private Jungle night in Big Johns living space, which was more like an entire floor. People were actually doing Kung Fu / Wu Tang moves to Jungle & Reggea...wtf? It was dangerous & beguiling. That whole Juice Bar episode came to a weird & rather sad ending really. AIDS was still a major problem for many homphobic people in the Black arena, and one night while asking for another drink, I caught Roger the barman throwing my pint glass in the bin. I asked him what he was doing & he told me it was because I'd been hanging around with Trevor Ramikee, who was openly gay, and they thought I might be a dreaded batty boy too. Well what could I tell him? I was horrified. Saddenned & affected I told him firmly with no trace of fear, that my allegiences were with whoever is the victim, and that was that. I didn't bother telling him I was Bi-curious at that time - but Me & Trevor remained firm buddies & hung out for a few more years.

Ironically, while the Juice Bar was buzzing in one direction, things were happening downstairs, next door, too - I fell for the barmiad working dayshifts at the Trolley Stop, a charming & effete French, leather clad, blonde indie punk called Innes Dassonaville from Montpellier...we connected, shagged which meant subsequently of course, me & George were over & done kaputt. Me & Innes parted ways quickly after a mental few days after a mad punk night in Stoke Newington that saw me kipping on the floor of a squat full of dreaded up, rag wearing riot girls reminiscent of L7. The place had no roof on one of the rooms upstairs. Guess which room they offered me?

Another character who I ended up frequently seeing was a weird dude from Pakistan called 'Pal' - He was always in the boozer hanging with these odd indie types wearing a suit & looking the business, really. His house was never locked, had a 15 foot satellite dish in it. A big screen constantly played a mix of MTV / shit porno / world news, hooked up to satellite broadcasts globally - I recall one mad night when he showed me how to cook rice & potatoes in 2 minutes using square metal pans - amazing! He also showed me his Gun Collection, he jokingly, (I thought) said I could fire one of his Berettas. But then grabbed the gun and placed it in my grasp, held my hand as i pointed it out into the back garden downwards, because otherwise the projectile could go for miles and kill some poor fuckwit in Brixton! Ah...happy days. Bang it went & there was a ringing in my ears that was a moment of clarity. Pal was definitely some sort of Intelligence operative. Who am I hanging out with here?


Haven East Mews - Mum, Georgie & CW

loonies the lot of them! Middle right The Ronalds Rd posse! Bottom right; me & me nan.

Another crowd at the Trolley stop was all seemingly spinning like a centrifugal force around the local dope dealer Stella. She and her lot were indie weirdos one of whom worked in HMV and would regularly get me cheap records, recommending me things like Medicines second album, which is a corker. Me and Stella got together for a wee while & it looked like her Greek family really took a shine to me, feeding me was, as ever with mediterranean families of paramount importance. Alarm bells were ringing though, when her brother Dino took me to one side and told me that her flat was actually a rape safehouse, and that poor Stella was still traumatised by a horrific ordeal that I shan't go into here. So, one sad afternoon by regents park canal, she tearfully told me all about it, and we hugged for a long long time, agreeing to part amicably & remain friends.

Georgie ended up moving out up to Hackney, where my concern grew as she became visibly frought with the signs of a, now becoming tiresome to me; clubbing lifestyle.

There were even more connections made when George made a more than friends connection with a guy called Chris who played Congas in a 10 piece jazz soul reggea fusion band called The League of Nations, I was Happy for her to meet a musician and I was welcomed into the fold to hang too. These were good times as Chris rolled around in a beat up Jaguar car, & the infamously naughty & dodgy fuckers Michael & Malcolm, The LaL twins took me to see various mates making music in their basements & some great up & coming rappers guitarists & singers were all witnessed. This also gave me my first introduction to the Triangle Workshop in Stoke Newington, but only as a casual observer.

After a hectic 2 years. Georgina became involved with a Techno House producer called Haywire (also called George, bizarrely). Me were Georgina were well finished, thankfully. She wasn't all quite there, while Haywire sold £150,000 of his music equipment out of his studio, for rocks. She lost a lot of weight & I became increasingly worried. I once had him come to my place in Dalston to sell me a leather Jacket. He was a nice bloke that was desperate for crack Cocaine. Georgy girl was looking dodgy at one point too. Out of pure lazyness & the sheer pose of it all, I ended up squatting the Haven apartment for a year & but, that all crashing down when the naffly gentrified media cliques & posh residents realised my game & was unceremoniously made homeless for a while - with all my my furniture getting repossessed.

DOWN WITH THAT KIND OF THING...

This was just before the NU-Labour corporate fascistas came to power in London, but the signs were all there - The area was becoming gentrified by media types & middle class vegetarian jugglers & kite flyers. I am thankful to old FSAD mates Julian Weaver & Deirdre Leyden, who let me use their spare room in Ladbroke grove for a while. That was a funny time where while dossing on their spare room floor - When I wasn't ingratiating Julian or Deirdre, I met a perfectly gorgeously lady called Zena, while drinking out at the corner bar in Ladbroke grove...This lovely place held me for a good 2 months as the amazing people running it would get me fucked up without question, not only on ganja and connections but on, now this may be a new one; the Jelly Tots in a massive vase behind the bar counter - left for a few years these jelly tots had made a wonderfully potent mix for achohol which they had been soaking. and so, on an amazing afternoon...we downed the lot. eeek my head spins in recollection.

For ages, well since I had been in their vicinity in London, from cadging a sofa in Streatham, up from Cornwall now living in london being an old old pal - Julian, Deirdre & an another artist called Andy were pushing the notion of becoming involved with a art collective - I would be interested enough to apply for the chance of maybe getting not only a studio, but a flat as a neighbour to this group of artists.

Ha Ha fucking Ha. Myself & Zena spent a good 4 weeks doing the nasties but bringing her back to the digs in J&D's place possibly proved too much i have to admit. Zena, herself found this attitude pointless so we managed a simple dating relationship, she was post divorce with 2 young children, living on the bad side of Ealing, "stuck down in nowheres-ville" as she would say - I ended up being one of those people - supossedly normal people fuck and talk about later. That of course is perfectly more than ok, I guess. Zena was a gorgeous all black & proud lady make no mistake. damn! I was stricken with her... and we hung out as mates after for a while until inevitable things like just not being bothered took over. Those scenes are better than ructions and love for sure. Go your own way. All cool i say. Zena remains a love to remember for me. Not a triumph, more someone i'd simply love to see again if I had half the chance.

Myself & Zena were perhaps sleeping at J&Ds a few too many nights - and maybe it was the sex noise that ended it all. who knows. (aw dont worry - sex noise is actually music)

I could, by now, tell that I was a overstaying my welcome a little.

The kicker to the whole deal, was when I managed to amazingly to them, wangle my way into the Chelsea Arts club for drinks while J&D worked behind the bar like the pointless little slaves they could sometimes act like...There I was chatting to the members sitting in a leather high arm chair replete with red wine & fine Port talking about the Spanish Civil war while old soak ladypoets danced on the piano as it played & artists like Eduardo Paolozzi brought in there daughters to look stunningly gorgeous. That was all one night, by the way. There were all these proper artists poets & old historians, with proper backgrounds established as artists - talking with me like I (capt Wardrobe) was one of them, conversing, swapping stories, laughing joking and drinking merrily...I will never forget how they made me feel like a million dollars. They knew what was happening too. This underground artist was being schooled.

THEN

Julian & Deirdre got the green eyed monster, never forgave me for either bringing back Zena for loud sex or that little fun indiscretion in the Chelsea Arts Club, and so all hope got kicked out before they would have to tell me that the arts group application that they had filed for me, which would see me not only get a place in a studio, but would have garaunteed me a place to live, was all absolutely fucking bollocks. They destroyed the papers & sent me on my way.

Life as Art eh? no...apparently that kind of thing is not allowed.

Luckily Georgy girl made it out of that one alive too & we ended up being pals for a bit as the dust settled. & the crew all hooking up regularly at ex Falmouth, Out of the Ordinary DJ - Jim Collelas gaff, Joe & Kida, Georgie & Dave DJ Ace (pictured right). But a special hola hola shout out goes to a utterly charmed & quarkian strange character who I met while clubbing in North London called Paulo. He was by day a cake delivery driver. By night? a proper mental. I'll never forget him regularly turning up at Haven East Mews with a boxed cake and an 8th of gear. Fuckin' mental times. Cakey wakey from Paulo the cake man in his little white van. He used to sit and talk drug infused bollox in a thick Italian accent, persuading me to go out on mental nights. He was FULL ON.


The Ronalds rd Days - DJ Ace, Joe, Jim & me


Chalk drawing of Jim Collela with his brother in Ronalds Rd


photomontage in free gallery pamphlets was my thing


A subvert of one of my old self portraits

Artworks - Post art school 90's London

Truisms/Falsisms

Photo-montages in an Art Catalogue

Book: "Greetings and Seasons"

Book: "Speed without wheels"

Book: "Source"

Book: "Race into Space"

Book: "Virus! Source"

Chalk Drawings on Black Paper

Photo-Montage - We Are Krill!

Assorted Zine mods / Photo-Montage / Paintings

A phrase popularised by Casio Smith


A bit of a book

Highbury & Islington

Back in 1994 - I ended up sharing the large double flat downstairs in Ronalds Rd, with Jim Collella for a bit. It was when I was living downstairs with Jim that my Mum would phone me. Sound odd doesn't it, but Mum phoning me was a complete rarity. You will be amazed to learn that she has personally been on the other end of a phoneline to me for less than 20 times over my complete lifetime so far. She cannot program a video recorder, or work anything remotely technical. I suspect she is possibly dyslexic, & that was why when I had my head trauma I lost my language radar as this may be a genetic family inheritance. As I type these words some of them are coming out backwards & I am constantly rescanning the document for errors & spelling. The word frustrasting does not seem to adequately cover how I feel doing this.

Back to 1994 - so this out of the blue phone call i'm receiving on the landing up the stairs in Ronalds Rd. Well as I heard her voice, I knew something was up. She and Dad were splitting up, it seems after 20 odd years of marriage he's just had enough of life. He was leaving her. So on the National express I jumped, to go & see what the fuck was going on. Indeed when I got there Mum was inconsolable, but I was glad I went to stay with her. She didn't know what to do. She was the housewife & knew nothing of how to pay bills, she couldn't drive so she was isolated up in our suburban Staveley Rd house. Eventually the dust settled & she moved into Dunstable town centre with them both taking a decision to use each son as a weapon during the long & shitty divorce. I didn't know this at the time. So I was helping mum try and sort her life out, while Andy was being mollycoddled by Dad now living in Luton. It was wrong & extremely unfair of either of them to do this. Mum came to stay at my place one weekend & after much persuading & alleviating of trepidation & fear we hopped on the tube westwards & went to the Brixton carnival. Mum came out of her shell that weekend & she listenied to reggea & the orb while chilling out in my room. At the Carnival she had simply disappeared off with some old Rasta into a puff of ganja & rum. It took me ages to force my way through tight crowd to find her sitting in a park a bit stoned & pissed enjoying herself thoroughly! The whole day, confirmed to me something I had suspected about a major difference between my parents. And it pains me to say this it will make sense when I tell you about Dad, who on one afternoon in a gloomy Luton boozer, with his gormless mate Gerry in tow, proceeded to tell me all about why we nearly moved to South Africa in the mid 70's - They gleefully, with a snidey sneer were telling me, a possibly obvious bi-curious art student, how Gerry was an ex paramilitary deeply involved with Apartheid policing which was actively murdering the people of Soweto by burning a tyre around the neck, & that they were both card carrying members of the National Front. In the past Dad, always drunk when he said it, would never fail to mention he moved us all from Luton to Dunstable because their were too many pakis & wogs (sic, sorry) moving to & living there in those days. As you can probably guess, I was utterly horrified. This type of person was involved in my upbringing expained my nervousness in school & college - I'm fucking glad I broke that evil spell he tried to weave in us kids. Later I think dad repented. I went to see him after he had gone to India to see the place & experience it for himself. None of us knew he had gone, & he came back seemingly a changed man. In his flat in Luton, we drank a bottle of whiskey each as he sat & cried his eyes out. I was shocked. Something was not right at all. All he would say was "what a waste of life" over & over again. He had been shocked by the levels of poverty & illness over there. I wondered if he perhaps realised he had been dealt a better hand in lifes little game as had many of those families who came over to the UK. It was my chance to tell him it was ok to change your mind about these things in life. I don't think by now he either liked me, or trusted me. Sadly, I would discover by what measure all this ill feeling & stupid nonsense would entail onlya few months later.

I shared the downstairs double flat with Jim Colella until one day I discovered he was making unscupulous capital out of my housing benefit cheques like a proper knobhead. So I faced him up about it & I kicked the cunt out. Eventually but had to move upstairs. You'll see that all that weirdness & stupid bad vibe led invariably, as life is often want to do, to yet another daft chapter in my odd little life.

Ronalds Road was the archetypal The YOUNG ONES student House except we weren't students, but-on-the-dole writers & musicians all living in little rooms doing our thing & saying a mild hello on the landing. A saxophone or electric piano could often be heard from Pauls room up the landing from me, & next door to him Danny would skulk in & out, looking awful & not saying much. He played in band with the delightful monicker 'Custard Gun'. Occasionally we would hook up show each other what we were up to, smoke a spliff, go to bed buzzing. I ended up meeting up with Flatcap Richard, another student from Falmouth, when I went to visit Julian & Deirdre, then living in Clapham. These stayovers were a welcome break from life in Highbury, it's just great to get a tube jump on a bus & end up in another of the mini urban villages that make up The city of London. I also ended up going to Catford/New Cross a lot to see his art in his studio, get mortally drunk. It was this period where, thanks to Richard, Julian & Deirdre, I managed to get some artwork shown in a small gallery in London Bridge. As it turned out, the managers of this little place deep in the heart of the city, were tight knit brothers from Richmond were totally fucking clubbing mental!

And for a while these 2 lads, Tony & Mark became my managers. They set up a photoshoot for an artists promo and i wore my grandfathers old 60's suit for it - Little did I know but they were hawking around my little portfolio of slide art - which consisted of negatives & old slides found in the basement of FSAD years before all cut, pasted scratched up with needles & burnt, some of it near falling apart, held together with sellotape. This collection went to secretaries in the offices of Moschino, & the pilfering gaze Philip Salon & Tomato art group via Andy Weatherall. I had a mash up fly-by visit one afternoon with him and he tried to sell me one of his bombs & guns flashy pin-striped suits to no avail. How could I afford 3 grand for a poxy suit. Dick.

The whole situation was an utter goof. With these wild Brothers taking me out clubbing at places like The Arches in Waterloo, Turnmills & Kings Cross - getting my face seen all for free! What a amazing time. And it went absolutely nowhere. To add a final twist to the proceedings - my work in their Gallery was removed due to a visit & subsequent legal advice from London Bridge constabulary for public decency. ha ha ha, how infamously brilliant! The offending pictures - part of the truism/falsism set were innocent pictures, cuttings taken from the Sunday Sport & some old 70's porn mag. Hardly Robert bleedin' Maplethorpe was it? Again I found myself asking; what strange universe I had woken up in this time?

Around that time a selection of choice neighbours were all dotted down Ronalds Rd. Dave & Wiley were mad into Hardcore punk and used to come over and listen to all my old college tapes of mad bands, informing me about all the latest underground hardcore punk gigs going on. Most of them were 'straight edge' & I found the scene a little up it's own arse. As an alchoholic you would though, wouldn't you? As I walked home from those, probably pissed up, I used to see a pair of legs sticking out the bottom of some rustbucket car - and the sound of soul old skool reggea blissfully blaring out the radio. It was Ray Esnard, and invariably nearby, his brother Lenny, who showed me a little more of the dread / black experience & North London culture - sometimes I would sit and smoke with them & his crew in his room - His mum used to make me goat curry in little tupperware boxes as a food parcel. A lovely family. I'm glad I never told him how much I fancied his sister though. They used to make sub bass speakers from plastic beer barrels! Ray used to come over and we would talk about music & life - He took me to one side one day and in whipsered tones admitted to me that not only was he a mad Micheal Jackson nut, but that one of his fave bands was in fact Queen, but he didn't want any of his mates to know that, in case they thought he was a batty boy! Ah there's that strange attitude yet again. That family showed me something I had never seen before - and that later I would come to appreciate. Poverty is only part of the story - and when you see a house that might need a little work done on it - or is perhaps a little rough round the edges...in Black Britain of that time & no doubt earlier through UKs not so great socio-cultural History, getting things repaired by racist white workmen in groups, was simply not an option for anyone who didn't have the right skin tone. I experienced it years later while with my future wife, Carmen, in Whitley Bay when we were getting our windows replaced in the new house, we experianced such bigotry, ending up with the workmen leaving the job of replacing our windows with it all supposedly complete, but not before secretly scratching them all, giving them a final clean with grit in the rags, to make their sickening point.

And so my days are often littered with shades of memories...time projections on the back of my brain are interesting, if not selective. What i can say is that back in those heady days...i found like minded people sitting in the local pub who were a little younger than I, as a 2 year descendant of my degree in Art Falmouth having meandered through times living in what most people consider a really dodgy place to live North East London - IE Hackney and Dalston. In my previous experiences I had propelled myself into the heart of darkness - a mythical place that boring people call dodgy & dangerous - I call these boring people racist bigots now, just like I will face up anyone who calls out my hometown of Luton as dodgy because it's full of darkies because I have had the privelidge of the experience of living & learning around there & North London for several years. It is astonighing to me that this racist attitude is seemingly very prevalent still today. People all say something tinged with a dumb assed ignorance everytime I am asked where I'm from. Either that or it's an immediate eyeroll from the reference to that crass 80's Cinzano advert with Leonard Rossitor & Lorraine Chase: Luton bleedin' Airport! If I had a penny for everytime some dull, vapid "normal" made reference to this, well I would probably have around about a £5:34p!

Around the time of living in my little bedsit, I found myself going back to the Triangle music workshop, a bus ride away down on Stoke Newington high street, by that big old mosque that they have there. Entering the place was, not an ordeal as such, unless you were stoned as fuck - which I was- so the Rasta suck lip charm of the initial meeting was notable -

"who is this white bouy?"

I heard them think

and then something happened; the people all around, wiry hard looking dreads in smoke filled rooms turned from being something of legend to reality. I walked in unphased because of my earlier relations with the Lal twins. The man in charge came to see me & we talked about what it was they were doing in the place & it was quickly established I would be put into rooms, differing in styles and sounds from soul to reggea - on to fusion to sit and learn...and to give & take as an equal always.

and so On I went into each room. Each had it's own teacher. And with each I learnt band dynamics and musical values that are just priceless. I have to thank these amazing people. When you see a drum room being constructed that has a circle of 5-16 year olds - on a daily basis - being led by a shamanistic musical leader. When people acknowledge you are adept to a certain level. This is the beginning. It was and will always remain, a focal central point to how I felt wanted, and appreciated for one of the only times in my musical life. I was taught pure band performance dynamics on a live level - a showcase of how to make bands run and be happy together as a functioning unit, playing and keeping the vibe alive. It will always stay with me.

I'll make no secret of it. I was, and still am in awe of the potential for that kind of workshop environment.

and so I had the best musical experience ever in the triangle workshop thanks to that Rasta massive! Massive shout out goes to Hogan Cooper (Dr Dean-I) & his bandmates of that time. We had a few Jams in a crowded room, 8 of us, i think! I was loving the music & the opportunity to play with these Reggea people. I was absolutely fucking stunned into glorious smiling when Hogan invited me to join them & go on tour in Japan that summer. Sadly this all happened, I got a phone call from my Dads boss at Luton Town Hall telling me my real dad was dying of the big C laying in a convelescent home in Luton wasting to the bone, and that Dad was being really cagey about it all & didn't want anyone to know about him dying. As these things tend to do; it all got a bit got too much for me. I'll never forget their really concerned caring attitude when I tearfully had to say no to the offer. I was in bits & torn up. For private reasons, I now wish I had gone with them & left the dead, & fucked off to the other side of the world, with the Dreads. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Dad passed & the next 2 weeks are a blur of absolute shite. I got left out the will - and so as oldest son was left to feel like i'd done something to deserve this utter heartbreak & guilt over something I simply could not control. My little Brother was just drinking to cope & was out of his box, promising me half the money dad left him. Then he smashed up a shoeshop in the Arndale centre one afternoon, & I just went home. Fuck that! I don't blame him for any of it. He was 22 years old, unprepared for this unexpected bolloxy shit. Fuck those times. Eventually My brother came down to stay with me in London, and eventually we got him a room so he moved in with Toby & Ed Callaghan. Then it really did all start to fall apart. My relationship with Andy came crashing, imploding in on us both after I nastily conquered a girl he had designs on while he was working at All Bar One in Islington. Everyone rightly thought I was a cunt. When I moved up to Tottenham with Carmen, Andy came to stay & I ended up on that acid i'd liberated earlier that summer - we went on an all day & night trip. Most of this excursion was brilliant catching up on old times. But of course, with self control & inhibitions less than monitored, eventually all that had happened bubbled to the surface & it all came out. Andy was bearing a massive grudge for my indiscretion, & I was livid to the point of no return over the way my dad left the inheritance & I'd missed out on a possible tour to Japan, which at the time was the biggest musical break i'd ever had. Inevitably, it all kicked off in the street coming back from a massive LsD session where Andy tried to rip my shirt off my back angrily. I turned, psychotically into a complete howling animal & jumped up & down on him for a full 5 minutes then ran home. Carmen would return from work, finding me sitting in a heap, crying in the shower, and would try & figure out what the fuck had happened.

Andy had gone to hospital but was discharged with a few stitches, cuts & bruises. It has taken nigh on 20 years to get back on speaking terms with my little brother. Its on/off. Families eh? All he needs to know is I love him, silly bastard.


Me & Dad


Dancehall legend Dr Dean-I


Alpha 2 - Krill - Gizmochimps Mk1

1995. I had had to move up the stairs in Ronalds road to a tiny little room, with a sink in it & toilet, I had a matress on an old kids snooker table & my amp and music stuff was stored under it, in the corner was the old family telly. I cooked on a little baby cooker. The room was up the corridor next to mad Micheal. The crazed delivery driver who in his little midget van used to work freelance, bringing his particular brand of weird joy to central London. The guy was unhinged in a lovely way. A real character. He had an American accent that had a faint west-country ring to it as well. He often shared a cup of tea and stories of being in Texas during the oil heyday of the 70's & his travels around the Racing bike circuits & desert psychedelic scenes in New Mexico & California. He took me to see Super bikes at meetings in Mallory Park & Brands Hatch. Micheal was forever to be seen, F-ing & blinding at his Van outside with the hood up - tinkering with it every single weekend. He often used to just piss in his sink while offering me a sandwich. mmm nice! Ha, but he was one of those people at that time in London of the 90's that just poodled through in cheap accomodation doing those menial jobs people in higher positions take for granted. If you watch the series 'Spaced' you would think it was a cartoon amplified for comic effect. But those odd people kipping for the moment, in houses just like where I was lodging were dotted all over every city in the UK.

I had been going to the Flounder & Firking for a fair while. The real ale was made on site & you see the barrels poking down from upstairs iin the glass behind the bar. It was where I met Toby Holloway - an ever present boozer propping up the bar. He had lost an eye, and had a plate put into his partially collapsed skull from an horrific childhood motor accident whilst living in Africa. Only recently I discovered he lost his fight with the grim reaper - and will always treasure going back to his flat just off the Highbury & Islington Library, to witness his bad drumming, ineffable mentalness, huge appetite for after hours red wine & falling over suddenly & erratically.

Here's a life lesson if ever there was one - He died a young age when compared to many but his injury meant he was only supposed to maybe hit 30 before facing problems - everything he had while I knew him he considered a bonus.



Alpha 2 - Tom Sweet (AKA DJ Mr Tom), Rich King & me..plus the boozy drugged up spliff monsters IE, the crew.

So I was excited to meet a new bunch of student types hanging about the pub at the bottom of the road. Tom Sweet is a gangly toff whose infectious perma-stoned laugh was dangerously infectious. Richard King is a lovely lad from Skegness, a North seaside town, and he basically ended every sentance with "...er like, so...um". It wasn't annoying at first. The house they lived in was a pretty nicely kept middle class posh student type affair. A million miles away from many of the crappy old divey digs we had in Falmouth. But then again, these people were all at the London School of Economics doing proper learnin'! These new Islington people, were all spliffs & heady psychedelic trance and proper bang on techno acid full on fuck it mentality, the house was a nice chilled vibe though & all the flatmates got on well so I got to know them, Ben & Emma, Ed Calaghan, Andy & Chaya, Dan, Barney & Lucy Coomber...some of these lived there or round the corner. We had some mad times as a crew, going to gigs & festivals at Megatripolis & Womad - and that excellent night at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, where - yes it was archetypal rave love, blissful snogs, pilled up hugs & fucking fabulous clothes & music - all together in our tribe. Circles of faces sitting around fires in our brainboxes lit with ecstacy, nice weed & melodic chilled out armchair IDM & techno / early psytrance ambient music awakening.

We made a band, Tom & Rich played & composed on an old Amiga using an early version of Cubase linked up to midi controlled DX7 + racks of other synths & I had no idea what most of it all did. Rich was always twiddling the knobs on a little 101 squelch unit. I heard them for the first time in Toms top room & just ran home & grabbed my guitar & sprinted back. This was my chance to be Steve Hillage / the Orb or an Ozric Tentacle/eatstatic type player.

I did it like i do everything

for the sheer fuck of it.

Alpha 2, never really went anywhere except Toms room. I recall playing our only real gig in South London after Sarah buffy Hitchens a blonde dreaded supersmart biochemist Tom knew, got us a gig in Rotherhithe of all places - the place was renound even in Londons supposedly rough areas. it was mad. Sarahs place was slap bang in the middle of a fucking nightmarish place. We played both her house and another venue - the name escapes me - There is a live recording of which I have 1 tune. The rest of the recordings I have are taken from a late session where, by that time all moved in with Carmen, who sat in on bass & fit right in...I wish now she'd have joined in more really but hey there you go. Krill was enough for us at the time. Alpha 2 should have toured, but maybe the lads college work was important to them as well. you never know do you?

Another person living in the House was Jasper de Beauviour, and his name sounds just as efite & posh as he was. He was a lovely dude, who worked as pianist reciting classics & jazz standards in restaraunts for a bit of extra cash money spondooliks. He invited me to play bass in his band An-Ting - Now these guys HAD played many gigs around the circuit even showing me a video, so I was glad to actually go to a rehearsal studio in Camden to meet the lads & try something out. This ended up being the first and last time they would ever play. was it something I said? Anyway I managed to play pretty well along with their odd little indie pop tunes on Carmens Aria Pro bass. Afterwards we all went along to Pratt St and sat getting pissed up downstairs in the Greek Taverna. It was a really nice experience & one I wish would have lasted just a little longer. This type of stuff was happening all the time around the scene - I remember getting asked to DJ a night in Camden after a last minute drop out from a DJ. So I turned up with a crate of records and mixed it all up - my favourite mash up being - the Wombles being played along with Love will Tear us Apart by Joy Division! Try mashing it up - it really works -

"Love, love will tear us apart / remember you're a womble, remember you're a womble..."

and I remember people shouting up as it was blaring out of the speakers, raising a pint glass to me & laughing their heads off at that. The other DJ on the night was Paul Kaye, who was famous for being Dennis Pennis on The Word, which seemed at the time a grotesque characatuer of me in that dimensional place & space really.

The Crew circa '96 outside The Flounder & Firkin, Holloway Rd. N.London a strange mix of posh middle class students & working class midland types -


pictured; (top row) Jasper de Beauvoir, Tom Sweet, (wotshisname?), Trevor Docksey, Johnny B, Elaine Docksey?,(whathisname?)
(bottom row) Barney Coomber, Rich King, Captain Wardrobe, Bernie Boyle, Geoff (the legendary Casio Smith)
not in photo; Honorable mentions; Lucy Coomber, Ben & Emma, Ed Callaghan, Andy & Chaya. Ray & Lenny Esnard from Ronalds Rd.

North London Techno Band Alpha 2

The only record I have
of an awesome gig
in south london @Sarah Buffys
drugged up pimp den!!!

1996 - Alpha 2 -

with Rich King & Tom Sweet
w/ additional Bass by the ex-missus Carman Curran

01.my_amazing_dream

02.fucking_stoned

03.boingy_bass_on_a_sunny_day

04.carmen_plays_bass

05.guitar_curry

06.hum_drums _live-17-12-96

07.helical_brain_scan_live 17-12-96

But thats not really the whole story. That feeling you get when you meet someone akin, on a lot of little lovely levels was love for me, ex-punk? check - awesome lovely smile? check? A curious lesbian who does not appear to hate men & actively does not give a fuck about being on any side? of anything? check... and I fell for Carmen in a big way. My strange ORK brother Andy will testify...In the Flounder & Firkin, as ever, during the 1996 Euro footy finals, on the glorious night England thrashed Germany 5-1; i proclaimed:

"i like the look of her"

So after the game I sauntered up to her, and asked her what her & her 2 mates, Paul & Jaqui Johnson were doing afterwards; They went off to the Hen & Chickens and we followed & in that pub got a little more aquainted. (Paul & Jaqui would often be present visiting from Wallsend to come to the T-Rex anniversary parties in Camden.) After my "bastardish charm" had worked a proper treat - we started hanging out and after a few weeks I moved into her apartment on St Johns Rd, off the Seven Sisters rd on the way to Tottenham - On the dole, getting free money by way of housing benefit as a sideline, we started a band called KRILL - (with super heavy shredder Tim Flood on guitar) We were a 3 peice and could never, ever ever... find any drummer who looked or sounded the part. The need for a mental headbanger who would take an extra pittance from us at the common and cuntish pay to play gig system in London expired after a all day session at a studio costing Carmen and Tim money and me, well foolish pride...we had 7 people - turn up and play they were all cunts. So we soldiered on with the trusty drum machine and the set was tailored around it set to impossible purring speeds, pushing the envelope of what we could memorise and use as cues, like New Order do. (yes a major influence) - making our set totally subservient to the machine - and the only fucker who got it was a decent German fellah in the Bull & Gate doing our sound one night who made it the focal point of the sound - he understood the pur. thank you. oh I suppose thats probably where I got fascinated with programming little machines that make super odd noisey things sound quite nice.

actually no-i did that before - right? and as you can see we evolve through learning to existensial path as experiencial psycho jumble puzzle - erecting jenge to get then dismantled only to rebuild in another way, right? right? - taking our past as we go and not forgiving or forgetting.

- as me and Carm morphed into an "item" - we played around London in indie wannabe gig palaces like Club V at The Garage, the Bull & Gate & the Red Eye & Walthemstows big gig place I now forget the name of - only pausing to recall the posters were all changed from 'krill' to "KRAP" - ho ho - I was impressed - i never let things like this tell me no - I pay a massive hey hey ho ho to indifference, but a few errant pop stars like Sarah from St Ettienne were perfectly lovely to us, as were the lovely Gay riot girl boy new wave punks at Club V who introduced us to a totally mad gay/bi punk indie scene the Carmen had helped pioneer with her previous band. People & random witnesses gawped at our musical ineptitude & sheer gall. We hung with three man riot - another band on the scene who Carmen knew from shady pasts - were the salt of the earth...Reg Ad & Tom remain my archetypal punk memories of those days - all worked in social services - Their noisey mess were a post punk agro noise unit and was a vicseral reaction to the many things they lived through with the people they aimed to help and care for. They played hard as lovely geezers. They couldn't help make an impression on me, coming from Stevenage the shittest place on the planet, perhaps eclipsed by the Luton & Dunstable twin hometowns of my bored youth. We are made by our memories. We also hooked up on several occasions with another weird and wonderful set of humans - Sophie Sledgehammer a noisy bastard 3 piece who were in my opinion awesome laughs disturbing, in a puppy love way, and a brilliantly twistedly funny too. They also played sufficiently badly & loud enough to kick serious ass.

Carmen was previously known as 'Bacteria' in her heady punk days - she used to be partners with L from the Au-Pairs and I met Lesley once or twice - nearly got a gig playing the Astoria as guitar bloke for a reboot of the old band, but was slightly tempered by the fact that she apparently wanted a little more than my stage presence! Hilarious nonsense like this was commonplace, and petty jealousy is all but a high fellating part of the make up of not-quite-but-nearly-showbiz. I wonder how it all looks to Carmen these days, now a high ranking representative of fire services? I hope you read this remembering the good times, darling, what can i say.

The Bull & Gate was the place to be for sure. Bands such as Huggy Bear, Blood Sausage all played indie punk shows to biggish crowds. Other up & coming new bands all lined up wanting to support these cutting edge underground units. Blood Sausage' guitarist Owen Thomas was another old Falmouth mate. I used to visit him, & his partner Christina Lamb (ex FSAD too) in his top floor flat on Holloway road before I moved up the the big glittery London for real. He was a nice bloke til' he hit stardom. Then I witnessed the real nasty pose of it all, possibly another moment of dissillusion as one day after not seeing him for a while, I said hello to him on the top deck of a bus going into town. He totally blanked me & as he walked past me to get off, gave me such a look of entitled distain, it confirmed what I knew. Being a Melody Maker & NME cover star does indeed make you a proper cunt. He went on to play for Blur Guitarist Graeme Coxon. Other ego maniacs I have met include Johnny from Radiohead who told me arrogantly he was the best guitarist in the world while I was drunkenly trying to cag a fag off, Steve Lamaque, a hip-to-the-kids Radio 1 DJ stood at the bar of The Camden Monarch. Nick Heyward of Haircut 100, was a humourless cunt when Me & Carmen gigglingly asked him if he was having a fantastic day. The same sort of ego trip was true for Debbie Smith of Echobelly, an old cohort of Carmens, who had both posed for gay icon Della Grace in her photographic works. One strange night early on in our romance, we attended a party in her gaff, only to be questioned by hardline lesbians about what comes out of our pelvises and why I was some sort of bastard. While Debbie simultaneously was digging at Carmens percieved vulnerablities accusing me of fixating on this dimnutive indie guitarist, instead of making sexual socio political point they only succeded in appearing like a immature re-recruitment drive for rampant femi-nazis. There was a strange turnaround years later at the Edinburgh festival while Carmen & me were at some after show pissup - out of the ether came Debbie Smith, only this time she was skint living in a hotel room, DJ-ing indie faves to crappy tourists for fuck all money as part of the remainder of her failed record contract. Can we buy her a pint? Did we buy her one? I honestly can't remember. But I do remember feeling an ironic twist of loving empathy for her. I simply could' not be nasty to her. It was proof of existence of the trap, after all. That may have been the same Edinburgh year that Melvyn Bragg provocativly winked at me as I passed him on the street, Noel Fielding blew me a lovely kiss, John Shuttleworth chatted amiably to us. The amazing Bill Bailey gave me a knowing nod while onstage & we all found out that Comedian Adam Bloom was in fact mr Blobby via a really lovely & friendly Jerry Sadowitz. I also got to see my very old friend the so very talented Jo Neary - doing her live show, chatted afterwards. Some of this may or may not be true - but it definitly happened in those absynth soaked days!

Special shout out goes to Danny from Supergrass who was of the nicest pop stars I have met. He was sitting in The Water Rats, bored after breaking his arm on tour. Nice to the last.

Indie stars "Dodgy" played the scene, as did Kula Shaker. Both bands started as bigger in personel, & had slightly more punky/hippy edges to them. This is when I started noticing people like Feargal Sharkey hanging around the scene as A&R men who would go on to destroy some of the best bands around. The record companies would cherry pick the musicians, kill the bands & repackage them for potential Indie fame. Can you see why I never wanted to succeed like that now?

Owen Thomas with me & Georgie

Kular Shaker

Dodgy used to be a 8 piece 'Dodgy' Led Zeppelin tribute act

Debbie Smith

Bands such as Scotlands (rare & well sought after) The Jennifers played in pubs to handfuls of people. The best band by far, in my mind was a strange outfit called Brain Of Morbius. A very good & uncompromising band in their attitude. Another band that stick in my memory were Earl Brutus, the guitarist was a bloke who knew a fellow Joy Division nut called Barney, who I still love dearly. They lived in the same North London student house as another old mate from my Falmouth days, Morgan Hague & his german girlfriend Martina. I used to terrorise this house of wannabe indie popstars who were just like me, really. Earl Brutus were very rude & drunken abnoxious in a totally loveable affable Camden swagger way. This silly old sod jumped for joy when I discovered their album on some random blog recently!

We would have several Parties at St Johns Rd seeing all the disperate crews come together from Club V / Alpha 2 / The Derby Contingent, Three Man Riot all at the house mingling & swapping creative juices! One memorable night we were watching The Riot play a particularly noisey set in a tiny pub to a load of bored Hackney punk wannabes - I looked over to the bar to see a thing-a-majig fall on the floor as some bloke pulled out his wallet - so I sauntered up next to him, looked down & saw it was a little plastic bag full of blotter acid. Did I do the decent thing? Did I fuck! I promptly stuck my boot on it and ordered a drink, waiting casually for the daft fucker who dropped it to fuck off so i could 'do my laces up'. So that summer was spent mostly on Acid with Three Man riot & others. This was a fucking ridiculous time, sitting in Finsbury Park at 6am watching the Krill robots go to work in endless traffic jams - Joggers & dogwalkers strolling past us wide eyes fuckwits watching the sun boil into the sky in a multicolor spinning of pure acid psychedlia. Crates of strike 5 obtained from an off license on the Haringey Ladder, was the cheapest bet, & the worst lager in the world. Just as cheap & nasty was a job lot of Alcho-pops called Brit-pop, which made us all guffaw in irony. were stacked in the bath & bolted down double quicktime to hide the awful taste. It was the only decent thing to do.

The whole idea about the gizmochimps came to me while me & Carmen were standing on the platform waiting to go up spend a mad weekend with Three Man Riot in Stevenage. The weekend was frought with violent reactions to our weird haircuts & Carmens skin colour. Standing at a bar in the town centre only to have 6 blokes leering over like demented casual thugs, having one of them punch you in the face, all waiting for you to kick off in retaliation. Luckily we all escaped this routine humiliation that I was well used to having been through it endlessly in Luton & Dunstable growing up. We ran loudly goofily laughing at all the fun...far far away to another pub down the road! Being chased down the road by dicks was normal.

Anyways The Gizmochimps started as myself & Carmen playing some old Krill stuff that was never played live & making up some dance orientated mad alt funky stuff. We did a couple of gigs but then after my 26th Birthday bash decided to stop the whole live thing. Moving little black boxes around for fuck all money is bollox basically! I wanted to go in the studio (that little room of Miss Rickards back in middle school!) and record more synth ambient kind of stuff. But as luck would have it after finding a program called Mixman on some magazine demo CD I started making dancey tunes- I could never get my head round cubase properly and found it stupid. So when I eventually got a PC with win98 on it - this little crappy bit of easy to use software was installed I got into doing dancey things adding recorded loops I had made of the Juno6 synth, bass & guitars & vocals - mashing it all up with breakbeats - some just obviosly nicked from the sample cds everyone had by then - and some actually sampled from our, then quite nice record collection.

Eventually another software demo was added to the process - Fruityloops - then soundforge - all these lovely early versions of the programs were all given to me by one of Carmens work collegues in the fire sevices. Dodgy copies of everything from Satellite TV cards to the latest games & movies were all being routinely swapped shared throughout the station. So thats how it all kicked off - as the programs got more defined - with both Mixman & Fruity loops adding a playlist sequencer I ditched Mixman and moved on to the Fruity loops for all my writing - using Soundforge Vegas as a post production sequencer to master somewhat naively.

1998 Indie Duo - Gizmochimps MK 1

me & Carmen Curren
played some gigs
in North London as The Gizmochimps - here's

the demo tape...Juno 6 & live Guitars by CW & Bass by Carmen.

After a few gigs we decided to give up live performances. I got stuck into new digital studio technology & playing my brand new synthesiser, bought as a gift to me by Carmen as we mooched around on Tottenham Court rd. (Eternal gratitude)

first projects on the new computer

1997 - AMBIENT LO-FI - The Gravity Suite

1998 - Captain Wardrobe - suck on this


Early stuff made with Mixman Studio

We ended up seeing Three man Riot split up after Reg got married to some American tart. We all ended up going to San Diego to witness this madness as he signed his life away to some heiress of a Tobacco fortune in a posh Hotel downtown. It didn't stop us wishing him all the best with his future though, but you could tell Adam & Tom were a little bit gutted. We had an absoloute ball in the U.S.A eating chimichangas & real US style pizza with the yanks all in tow. Riding around the Jazz district in shopping trolleys nearly got Reg & Ad on the wrong side of an all too eager cop. I took great cocaine after being on a mad night, abducted by this dealer who insisted on driving me to the outskirts of town somewhere so he could show me his gun - sell me the coke, then proceed to take half of it with me. At gunpoint. When i returned, thankfully alive, Carmen was not amused. I was fucking out of it so I didn't give a flying fuck to be honest.

We went over to Tijuana on the Amtrack, sitting taking in the sights of the lovely San Diego Railway stop - The trip wound through Big tech black box complexes dotted around the hillsides & when we finally made it over to Mexico, we saw Tijuana for the Benidorm of America it really is. A Sad, evil place full of US military & College Jocks getting off in wild abandon. They all lined up along a conveyer belt over the border for a pseudo macho hyper reality theme park of strip shows, cheap narcotics, fights & fucked up vibes. (amusingly, our future Whitley Bay would turn into something like this in a few years time.) Totally crass. Yawn. Other fun things around the place were all the sights & locations I could remember from 70's telly. Starsky & Hutch & Knight Rider, Petrocelli, The Rockford files, 6 million Dollar man, were all filmed here as were many other Aaron Spelling productions - Too much TV as a kid meant it did all seem strangely familiar. The Cinco de Mayo festival was on too. So we chickened out a bit & hit the family day to be safe. It turned out we did the right thing as on the Sunday the major festival saw 5 people shot dead. Fuck that noise! Moody tempramental fuckers those Mexican-Americans are. All of it was a lovely holiday.

Tragedy hits

Bernie Boyle was an old mate from Falmouth - I was moving upstairs because RENT & I had just finished to move into a tiny one bedroom closet with its own sink and shared loo - was walking down Holloway road & there she was with her fellah Trevor carrying a big Jar of change to the bank - So as luck would have it, they moved into my block of 'spaced' type muso's & arty people...in a house just off Holloway Rd. The group I had met morphed nicely with her old mates that I had known for 4 years already....after 2 years - tradegy struck. Bernie Boyle passed while exploring in India, fainting into the sea. This disparate group, half Islington techno stoners & Derby indie weirdos never recovered from the shock of it all. I think of her most days. And of the times we had getting trashed in the Flounder & Firkin - and bobbing about being on the dole...counting change raided from the leccy meter - for another sesh of cheap ales & the inevitable lazy haze of hangovers spent playing amiga games listening to tunes.

Another note of thanks goes to Trevor Ramikee of Utindi Studios, that was located just off the Highbury roundabout. We connected musically & started hanging out at the studio constructing electronic music that never saw the light of day. I sessioned bass & guitar parts as he made recordings from African & Carribean musicians who sold tapes on Dalston & Ladbroke grove Market. I got paid in beer & spliffs, nights out in the Gay scene with him Big Vernon & his fellah, a dead hard taxi driver who sadly I can't recall the name of. The occasional cash reward came in handy too topping up the dole beer money. Did I mention all of this...ALL of it was while I was on the nash...? Get a job? I HAVE a job, thanks. Being me. It's hard work being a psychonaught sometimes!

After Krill stopped playing out of sheer boredom, I hooked up with this singer I had met called Austin. He used to play with a band which I think was named GHB after the date rape drug, who had Skunk Anansies bass player, Cass Lewis in them...and lived in this posh gaff up in Hampstead. He was fucking loaded, and I don't mind saying it...It made a frigging change to spend some time with a professional musician knocking out tunes while getting extremely high. After meeting up with Skunk Anansie recording in the studio for an impromptu session, Austin revealed to me he was trying to recruit Cass into our potential band. The Audacity! the nerve! I had no idea. I saw Skin recording a lovely little acoustic thingy, but she didn't come out to say hello. Intense lady for sure. The lads were bored & stuck in there. It was then I realised I might be edging towards something that terrified me. Being successful. Mainstream. Acknowledged. Now many of you may think thats all stuff to be aspiring to. But even then I knew; its a fucking trap. I hijacked the whole deal. Austins house regularly had mountians of cocaine on the table with the whole sad stereotypical kit & kaboodle of rock star managers, sychophantic rich-bitch hangers on, while we hawked a set of new music around, eventually playing to a crowd in some posh bar, to record executives. I got pissed & fucked it up on nerves. It all imploded & I was glad of it. Austin is a fucking amazing singer - a great bloke. It was with Austin I would meet Tom Jones in a Top of the Pops beamback recording at John Henry studios. He came right up to us with his massive orange face just smiling ear to ear. Austins son was in awe. He shook all our hands saying "alright kiddo?" Don't you just love these little titbits? Beamback recordings are what TOTPs does whan an artist pretends they are in America to avoid miming on the set to bored kids, or are tired from touring, (or just fucked up on substances). They just record it on a roof or somewhere, like Bon Jovi did one time, then mime to the cameras - then the editing department they just add a 35mm sketchy treatment to the recording to make it look like it's being beamed from the states.

Anyway, it was after I realised that the music scene was a lifestyle that could possibly end me & Bernies shocking death, Carmen & I decided to get the fuck out of London.

Whitley Bay - The seaside town
they forgot to bomb!

The Dome Whitley Bay

Moving up to The North UK was a massive operation. We hired a removals company who took way too long so we were in an empty house for around a week.

We took that time to wander around, getting aquainted to the area. It was a far cry from Tottenham, a slower pace & a lot friendlier. There were a myriad of proper lovely old Pubs dotted along the coast up & down from Whitley bay up into Cullercoats, Tynemouth & North Shields. Well we just simply had to try them all out, which we did in no time at all.

This time spent up in Whitley Bay became the most prolific creatively as I bunkered down in my little bedroom studio as Carmen worked Fire-fighting 2 days, on 2 days off at Newcastles main Fire Station... day shifts into night shifts.

I produced lots of new albums & CD ripped them and tried to sell them in the little record shop at the end of our road on Victoria Terrace.

Again we seemed to gravitate towards the outcasts of the area, finding a bar in Whitley Bays famous Dome. Fast Eddies was a dark dingy dive that had pool tables and cheap beer - We saw this as heaven. I still do. Where are these places now? The 2 Pauls; Montgomery & Burroughs ran this place like their lives depended on it, (they did!) and put on open mic nights while they invested into developing the main Dome into a full Music Venue.

I was making techno & breaks as Gizmochimps, The first of which in the town was called Turgid for Curly after a fellow techno fan, Curly John, labelled my music turgid. Gee thanks! Ambient music was constructed & jammed on my lovely old Juno6 / Kawaii Midi keyboard & I was also putting together electro dub beats as Full Spectrum Analysis, as well as putting out 2 solo albums which had proper written lyrics & everything. wow. I got to DJ some of the Gizmochimps/FSA stuff on one of the early nights of the newly refurbished Dome Venue. I also managed to sell a few Truism/Falsism artworks in their original clipframes which gave me a few quid no doubt wasted on boozing it up (what else?).

Sadly, we witnessed the amazing rise & ultimately, depressing fall of this venue. It went from hosting, Robert Plant, Faust, The Selecter, The Fall to no-wheres-ville bust in about 3 years.

Looking at the place now, putting on it's Christmas Fayre it's hard not to notice how clean & normal, ultimately bland, vapidity that Modern Uk has become. It is beyond bad taste...Beyond Chinse - whatever happened to artistic merit or standards? yeesh! This is what arts & crafts look like in Hell.

Early Gizmochimps collection: Made on Fruityloops 2.5 & edited on Soundforge / Cool Edit Pro 2.0

Many a night was spent at the Avenue Pub, opposite The Dome. We were meeting up with lots of lovely people & I ended up many a late night hanging around a total looney bastard called Mad Mick, until 'The Av' as it was known shut down as well. It was really, really shit. Was it something we said?

These lovely old boozers with loads of history, everything that was sitting on prime coastal real estate was getting boarded up & left to rot for ages, so that the corrupt Cuntservative/Nulab fingers in development-scheme-pies could dip their greedy beaks, solving the 'unsightful & dangerous' problem they had created in the first place.

here's report from the Chronicle (and here) detailing the downturn WB saw.





The whole scene was so familiar to myself & Carmen - that it was like putting on an old smelly pair of socks. We fit right in as old hippy punk scenesters meeting a whole new bunch of people all from the 88-98 generation all used to bounce around a now long shut & demolished Surfers Bar, cidered up and spilffed alongside us London Types with Carmens Northern origins growing up in Wallsend, another thing they all had in common.

The area was chocked full of old time folk heroes & ex punk & rock musicians. I played my original songs on many an open mic night, and became known on the scene a little. It was lovely, really. It's where I first met legends, Micheal Linden & Colin James.

I, however was a southern shandy drinking poof, and was told this by a man serving pricey beer in plastic recepticles in the Newcastle football stadium on a dreary rainy night while watching them play Chelsea on a beamback. He heard me try a northerner Geordie accent for a goof and guessed Immediately I was from Luton. Thats some feat. I attempt this accent all the way through Captain Wardrobe Must Die & yes, it makes me wince now. I can only guess at the incredulity others must have had of me in those mad times. I'm a bad actor at the best of times, it seems.

The north was not all rose tinted & the majority of the pubs along the coast were all delapidated, demolished or shutting down to drooling & greedy developers & as we continued to live there we witnessed a frame of referance to a sad era of political corruption, and cultural ambivalance that really was a corporate drive-by.

On the hight street the signs of a coming economic slowdown were,over the period of 2 years, becoming evident with second hand charity shops opening up where other local businesses had had to shut. I like a good rummage with the best of them, but when Furniture, Hardware stores & bookshops that had been there for 30 years start to disappear from the local landscape, you sit up and take notice. Things changed from thriving local town to franchised corporate fast food & fun pub laden / bed & breakfast-making-a-mint-from-the misery-of-asylum seekers shithole in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

I experienced a little insight into this while reckying for a venue for the first Renegade Pharmacy night, where we were shown upstairs at a pub called The Bedroom on Whitley Bay high street. As I was being shown the layout of the venue a few suits started preparing tables for a meeting between some shady Retail PR / sales organisation I asked on of them what they were doing, and was informed that the meeting would be examining the high street for 'footfall' and demographics for future investment in the area. Could it be that these corporate robots were watching the consumer slaves to see which shops would stay & which shops would be considered expendable? It sure looked like it to me.

Married life, however, was blissful for ages & ages, and we spent many years travelling around Britain in our crappy little cars - touring, camping - just having a fucking ball! I was a house husband...and loving it.

Road trips up to Scotland - Edinburgh & the festival, Oban, Carlisle, down to Wales, along Cardigan Bay to Abararon & NewPort. (where we met the Flock of Seagulls lead singers dad!), along & down the amazing Wye Valley, on down through Devon, into Cornwall...back home through the Midlands HIT THE NORTH! I showed Carmen my old haunts around Falmouth & we slept in our little tent on Swanpool campsite Just up from the guest hose I used to stay in as a first year way back in 1988.

Both sides of Ireland (a lovely holiday recollection)

The strange things that always seemed to happen to us by pure happenstance were evident throughout our travels around Britain & Ireland. We had gone to Belfast for a few nights staying in a lovely B&B deciding on the spur to book a week in a place called Ballycastle recommended by the bar staff at a brilliant club venue just down the road from where we were getting our heads down. We hopped into the hire car & took it up the north coast of Antrim to the ferry terminal lorry park around the past the giants causeway into BallyCastle - the trip was a decent look at the difference between Catholic & Protestant towns - with the latter being what could only be considered ridiculously patriotic with cobbled pavestoned kerbs all painted red white & blue and union flags everywhere. They really wanted people to know what side they were on. We stopped in the town & noticed a frosty reception. Not totally mad or overly aggressive, but a noticable defensive atmosphere was present from the stuffy hyper normals dwelling there. It felt like an Open Prison for only one belief system. Now BallyCastle, only a few miles down the winding evergreen country road was the complete opposite. An Southern Irish enclave with no overt signs or paintings on buildings or evidence at all that they were south affiliated. And the people? As soon as were got the bags out the car, friendly faced locals said hello, told us where the best bar / eateries in town was, and said they'd see us later for a drink. WTF? So an incredible week was spent here exploring the area, & drinking with the locals. Looking out over the sea from the Giants Causeway towards Arran was a thrill as we had been over there to that wonderful town of Oban in the previous year, so it was kind of satisfying as the completion of a symmetrical travel experience. Remembering those Marconi experiments my memories feel like old radio signals as I write this. We also saw a UFO while lying on our backs pissed on the beach one night. There it was, what we thought was a satellite going on a perfectly straight trajectory, when, WTF? suddenly it took a sharp 90 degrees turn and shot off like a starship. 3 days into the stay I noticed this dude was kind of omnipresent. His name was Enda, so we chatted to him about stuff and he told us he was a poet & politicist from Dublin, living and working in Belfast. We exchanged numbers & thought nothing more of it really.

When we got back to the bustling Belfast we got a phone call. It was Enda, so we met up. He had arranged for a Taxi driver friend to take us around the politically important sites in the city. Being naturally city streetwise & untrustworthy we initially thought it was another scam artist trying to get a few bucks from us. As it turned out the Taxi driver was just doing this because he wanted people from the mainland to know what his folks had lived through. Extraordinary stories were relayed to us as we stopped by the Falls Road, the Cemetaries & the ending up for a coffee in The Irish centre, where he told us that if we wanted to buy anything that day - doing it here would be the best thing to do. no pressure. What amazing people these lot were - to be sure. (x)

Later, we would visit Southern Ireland, so unluckily for them this time, it was Dublins fair city who got to suffer us. We rang Enda, and he took us out clubbing & back to his for poetry spliffs & the dreaded Poteen, then as we stayed up til around 5am, from his house, completely mortal drunk down to the docks where large burly workers told us jokes and held me up at the bar. The blistering hangover lasted several days. Fuck me, what a superb place Ireland can be. Huge Irish Stews from the big pub on O'connell street, the music scene - amazing, busy, bustling & many very glad to be alive people. The other side of the coin was a reality away from the touristic areas with housing estates with rough & ready but never threatening, pubs boarded up, with bars behind a wire security gate. People sitting getting mortal lost in a daze, while dodgy fuckers no doubt up to no good sorting out deals on anything that they could get their hands on. Excellent times I say. Nothing wrong with a little dodgy buisness now & again. Why do you think I eventually moved to an internationally illegal enclave in North Cyprus? Dodgy as fuck, me.

and then this happened:


click to read my account of the day we spent on 911

and so began another journey for me - which saw me responding to the utter ridiculous madness of the world after 911 making at first a simple rant on Indymedia UK - and then expanding that into research which became a full on website devoted to questioning authority & developing the skills needed to enable discretion, critical thinking - and an open mind.

Unfortunately, many people in Whitley Bay didn't think it a good idea to let me talk to people in public about this sort of thing - and engaged certain people towards efforts to make my life as difficult as possible. Harassment, ridicule & downright dangerous shit thus ensued. Was I being monitored? I believe so.

want proof?

ask 'Noise Bastard'

but this, my furry little friends was the 90's... Me and Carm got the big D in 2006 - it was shit all round...we had all in all some pretty wild and decent times...house parties and festivals became funerals of friends and were all part of us being us. we got married on the beach in the Bahamas worried about the overdraft... surrounded by people who were supposed to be doing other things - like selling trinkets - the fact they took the time means the world to me. Carmen remains an inspiration. I suppose I remain The Devil to her. All a Perfectly normal part of life. Please move along nothing to see here!

Artworks 2001-6
Whitley Bay
Down with the terror state

collection war on terror / toons stuff

Go Here for the
Full Spectrum Analysis
Electro Dub collection



2006 - EEK! Divorce!

Ok so this really was all my fault. After around a year of being continually harranged for not having a job... I was starting to suspect that the woman I married, I knew for 10 years now had under some kind of peer mass formation hypnosis change personality to resemble a 'normal' - I really don't think Carmen could put up with me anymore - her peers at work all probably thought I was a poncey lush dole scrounging house husband & the way she was acting, it looked like these disciples of the normal cult had recruited her into their sect. So, did the only thing I could - leave for a woman half her age & go gallavanting about in the first of many mid life crisis'.

Spookily, the divorce situation all seemed to revolve through the 6th June 2006 (666) wooo!

So I met Fidget Bronson, a mad little fucker & no mistake. We took on a whole new way of being, rode this relationship like a fancy race car...and it burned out like super 8 film, flickering far too long in front of a hot bulb. But not before she could introduce me to her amazing sense of humour, improvised spur of the moment lifestyle choices & her then infant son, Aidey. And show me her life & work as an Art Therapist at The Percy Hedley Foundation. She was one of those one in a million characters - and I suspect whoever she has met, known, been smitten with, shared a line of the devils dandruff with in a boghole in a crappy Whitley Bay bar full of other, through no fault than having a shit roll of the dice in this weird twisted carnival land of inopportunity, tragic single mums - fact of the matter is, that anyone who has laughed with her or simply said hello & took the time to witness Laura be her, just falls deeply madly and utterly in total exasperating infinite love with her.

boy what a time!

The Devil may care.

Hand painted T shirt design

 Renegade Pharmacy

This all started out as a live elements / DJ set improvising shit & with artists making stuff, We had Katy Buggerlugs & Sophie, My flatmate Brandrew, who saved me from homelessness then showed me i was a lightweight basically...The first RP night we got banned from the venue for

"making music that encouraged drug use" - cunts!

Fidget Bronson (Laura Sibbald) had the original renegade pharmacist name as her e-mail moniker...and yes...I knicked it...Ryan Siddal played and banged things while i messed with his output via a fx unit and pedals as the mixes played... Fidget made some art - I painted some T - shirts...but they all got nicked at the 3rd gig and thrown on top of a bus. They don't like people who are creative in Whitley Bay.

MIXCLOUD MIXES

mix number 1

- 59 mins. a mixture of ambient synth dub

mix number 2

- 54 mins of ambient dub / tekno

mix number 3

- 1hr30mins of Ambi-electro dub & Techno

mix number 4

-2hr2min spanning 8 albums of FSA

mix number 5

- The last 2 FSA albums [2012], Remojo & Above The Radar

Captain Wardrobes
punky song collection

smash the pubs up

little blobs

loaded

greed scheme

fuggit

pur

new american century

And so, these new chapters opened, or skipped like a broke old scratched up CD skimming upon the fucked laser of time.

Ryan Siddal is the founding member of Ryan Is Fun (aka Bugman), This band is one of those special bands that only come around once in every coastal town scene. These bands are the best of the bunch, but will never ever get real exposure or signed to a label. Why? they refuse to compromise in both their music & their life attitude. Their music was astonishingly energetic & original indie punk attitude that reflected those old Bull & Gate times I had way back in London. But here were a younger generation all doing that stuff! In my area too. Result!

So i met Ryan on the way to some gig on the metro - he was opposite me on the seats gawping out at the post industrial moving mosiac that progressed through from North Shields to Wallsend docks onto the Byker Wall & then TOON!

I could tell he was proper mashed up on something - I pulled out a small bottle of Brandy from my biker jacket always worn with my zebra fluffy wuffy wardrobe top.

he said "OI! gimme some of that mate will ya, mon?"
(Or something close to that). He was wearing a blue plastic pac-a-mac. And so we went to this gig together and became mates forever in my minds eye.

Ryan and his fellow band mates Iain, Joe, & Dan Peace had an entourage of old school friends, who were possibly the tightest knit group of buddies I have ever witnessed. Ellen Wood would introduce me to the Neo Rave scene - where I would do a bit of VJing for the little nights they put on in the pubs rooms upstairs. It was a hoot, and grandpa Wardrobe was in his element yet again. Trips to Edinburgh saw me DJ & VJ material made in the home studio, with Kenny Breaks Hosting nights at the wee Red Rooms, we went up a few times to burn the fucking place down with our madtronica.

A special mention must go to Keith Johnson - Aka Mr Frosty...a fucking lovely brother from another mother. He stayed with me for a long time at my place. He stays forever in my heart. I'm pretty sure Keith invented Dubstep. His knowledge of rap & electro, vintage training shoes & 'tack' is second to none. A fucking belter of a doylem. x

You can see some of these peeps in this video made by then media student Vi Ling Chong, where I talk about stuff reflective of my deep seated anxiety I think i must have always had. The feeling of paranoia being worried about being intensely disliked, by a certain few people in this cliquey & locally proud group of what are essentially fucked up middle class kids stuck with no options, in a seaside town they forgeot to bomb in WW2.

Many beach parties were had. Fires were lit. Drunken gigs where we all took too much amphetamines & Tamazapan - nearly caused riots & got us all chucked out are now the stuff of legend. At the time some people may have hated my guts. So what?

Dan Peace went on to go down to London & Berlin, New York eventually settling in Mexico City with his photographic work & gallery. Thats now a far cry from wearing his dopey little hat making silly bleepy noises with Ryan is Fun. Good on yer, pal

Another happening at the time was Turps Magazine - a funny little cartoon/art zine that contained the works of graffiti artists students & fellow layabouts. Downie & Dominic were the organisers & both very talented in their own right. I managed to get some of my crappy cartoons & my dig at the Whitley bay nightlife "now please wash your hands" (below) into a couple of early issues.


Poking fun at the new young scenesters

Artworks 2006-9
Whitley Bay

Digi-art, Cartoons, Photomontages & Paintings

Cyber Paintings - repo-man

Cyber Paintings - resemblances

Renegade Pharmacy T-shirts

Splats! #2

squarefoot

space cadets

barry the crow

Middle Aged revolting

free world?

the dangers of beans

Virus:Paintings

Death Star - Collages on canvas

Photo-Montage
Intentcity
Afterhours
Now Please Wash Your hands

Reality Postcards

Photoset - Coast

2006 - Renegade Pharmacy - Digibitch (with Ryan is Fun & .And remixes)

1.decibellisimo

2.willing_servants-(1st long-mix)

3.little dan dude

4.ryan is mashup

5.willing servants-ryan_remix

6.bleeps R us


CW Dj-ing at Newcastle green festival as part of Graemes Soundscape posse - for a crate of lager

volume 3

01.assembly point

02.crusher X

03.politrix

04.kinder

05.tv dinner

06.blast those martians

07.is your mind a pancake

08.hardcore is shite

09.seconds out

10.ding ding

12.RUN% COWARD

13.lunarsea

The Deformation neo rave Whitley / Newcastle posse in full effect 2007
They even let Grandpa Wardrobe do the VJ-sets

I got myself sorted with a Housing project called Nomad & moved into a flat - where I terrorised the entire area for 2 years had Keef, Ryan & Dan (plus the rest) round for regular sessions and a fucking asshole who stole my credit cards - the cunt. It was fun while it lasted. Actually it was grim and full of sad heroin addicts & alchys who wanted nothing more than to throw their plates at parked cars & play newmonkey awful pseudo rave. The entire housing estate apartment complex was banned from dial-a-booze! I nearly got arrested for playing vintage porn down the video phone. I ended up being barred from every pub in Whitley Bay after the Wetherspoons fake pub managed to intice me to smash up their glass collection area for barring me for 'swearing' - fuck these pricks. After the deed was done I went home & wrote & recorded 'smash the pubs up' that night while still full of adrenaline. The cops waited 3 days before I recieved a knock on the door & was escorted down the knick for a telling off that turned into the desk sargeant agreeing with me the Wetherspoons is indeed a fucking shithole, because his some of his officers had all been barred themselves after a couple of rowdy stag nights.

I ended up playing open mic at the hilariously shit pseudo-Bikers theme pub - the Avalon, but their strange & archaic macho attitude really didn't wash with me at all - the landlord Mick was a racist dickhead & a bully - we butted heads on more then one occasion. A little one sided skuffling ensued on many a drunken piss take of a night as Mick, a dwarvish monster sized fat biker often finally lose his cool to push me up against the wall telling me he was 'gonna fuckin' kill me'. I was stringey and underfed but not scared of cunts like this. Later i would be given another slice of the pie at the Wooden Doll, in North Sheilds. The pub run by Wilf Vissenga - who now makes guitar pedals sought after by top musicians. He was my champion. A brilliant attitiude and a huge heart, he gave me the opportunity to play in his house band with Liam Fender. I was also getting paid. Good times! At this time I also me 2 older guys called Colin James & Micheal Linden - who were busking around for years in the scene, before kinda stopping for a long time. I ended up playing bass with them as The Tallboys for a couple of Gigs until tradegy struck again. Michael died of a stroke. Colin was heartbroken, & disappeared into his house for a year. I eventually got him up off his sofa - into the Wooden Doll to play & meet the people in the scene. Liam Fender & Jamie O'Neill would take Colin under thier wing - and sadly, push me away from what became a sad & nasty little clique.

6 months later Colin died of a Heart attack.

I never really spoke to them again.

Ryan, Liam & Colin make appearances in the movie - see the interview clip left

Captain Wardobe Must Die (2008)

Simultaneously, seemingly happening on a branching timeline was also a chance hook up with fellow home studio techno producer Roger Armstrong (Laptop Acid Xperience) at an all dayer party. We met several times & did a couple of techno gigs at various nights before we decided to make a movie about life on the underground edge - to be filmed sporadically whenever Roger could get up from Harrogate from his dead end job he hated. It would be about our discontents, & the way life was treating us & our ego led reactions to trying & failing at being, well succesful musicians, which really meant to most people, vapidity represented by fame & fortune reflecting the notion of being successful people.

(what i referred to as The Trap earlier)

The movie, it took 2 years to film & compile & edit - then when we tried to get it shown at the Star & Shadow Co-op cinema in Newcastle, they nixed the entire showing on the actual night - leaving people standing like cunts outside. The whole ordeal upset me in such a visceal way that I had to consider that this now was all part of the essence of the movie itself as life imitating art - failed, doomed... unrecognised. But looking back now i realise this is in fact PERFECTION!

Go to this page to gawp at the incredible artistic beauty of it all, & learn what the fuck was going on.

Watch entire Movie on the dreaded YOUTUBE: Captain Wardrobe Must Die

spellcheck perhaps?

2010-GTFO of Whitley Bay
& moving to Cyprus

escaping The seaside town
they forgot to bomb!

Things had all gone a bit weird in Whitley Bay - I was claiming benefits as usual, now had to live in a smaller 1 bed studio flat upstairs from the 2 bedroom apt because the Housing association had enough of the parties & all the noise & mad goings on there. The situation was dealt with by social services who than went on to inform the dole office I had to be assessed for my continued access to this accomodation. So off I trundled on the Metro. And after a stellar performance I thought on my part, managed to convince officialdom that I was nutty enough to get full sickness benefit without having to sign on every pissing week. This shit was like getting the golden lottery ticket in Willy Wonka - How did I do it?

All I did was show them my conspiracy website! problem solved + free money!

But like all things in the UK - everything was getting shite. The corporate social impact squeeze was being felt - so I made the decision because nothing lasts forever & sometimes you have to slow it down a little, just so you can read the writing on the wall. It became evident to me as I still had to go in to the dole office to have chats with the benefits officer Christine, who was a really nice lady. I knew things were propely fucked up when - after she had asked me how my anxiety/depression was, proceeded to tell me all about pay & job cuts in her local branch & that she didn't know how she was going to cope with it all. That was an eye opener, for sure. The only person working in the dole I have ever had sympathy for.

My Mum & step-dad Jim were jetting off to Cyprus. Did I want to stay for a few months? Fuck yeah! I thought. So over the course of the next 2 years I went from visiting them & staying as a tourist, doing all the various sights & stuff you usually do on holiday, going round the island (north & south), driving up mountains & up old castles, enjoying beach cafes & bars, eating nice grub in posh restaraunts - to looking after the place for them between times they used the Apartment. Living there became full time eventually...so I sold all my stuff, tapes records - artworks were sold off & I left The North coast UK for North Cyprus with a guitar case with a electric Bass and several pairs of socks & pants, some jeans & t-shirts, my laptop in its case and a 1204 zoom fx effects processor! I had escaped The seaside town they forgot to bomb!

2009-11 North Cyprus memories

2012 - Meeting Debbie & the first jams

In 2012 I started going into the big City Kyrenia regularly, joining in at Joes Altinkaya Bar with Music jams, mucking about.

Here's a flyer for a little band made up of 4 Students from Iran called On an Island, we rehearsed until we finally got to play onstage at the Girne American University open day ...To start with they needed discipline & work. I sat in the background on bass - giving them a push in certain directions...by the time the gig happened everything was more than OK! What a brilliant bunch of lads.

While out shopping & mooching about I kept bumping into this strange South African girly. Eventually we became an item. She was a budding chef working at a local posh place in town; Efendis - she also took some lovely photos, juggled with fire Poi...and played a mean game of backgammon. After meeting her I met Rachel, her bestie, then a waitress at the same restaraunt, and we started doing music together, whenever we could get onstage, at those into the early hours, drunken, jam nights at Altinkaya.

2012 - Branson Paradise Inferno E.P

(edited/recorded @Altinkaya Bar)

U.F.O

elektrik deception

elektrik deception (other mix)

2012 - Acoustic duo - Karma (with Cod & Chips!)

2012 - Acoustic sets / Karma

Karma was a duo that played around the bars & posh nosh joints in North Cyprus. It was a...Job...kinda!

and some of it was a laugh - some of it was ok. Rachels still doing it - but now she has a sober, reliable backing track, crappy instrumentals played on a fucking laptop! lol..Things are so bad here in Cyprus, entertainment wise, I dont think anyone actually paid the slightest attention or even remembers me being around or part of those years, or that I actually played a live instrument in the background. Stll Bingo, pub quizzes, karaoke brings the money in for some poor cunt.

I remain in self imposed reclusivity - retired from an absolute shitstorm of predatory attitudes & overblown sub-cruise ship level performers with the egos of their own views of their talent & ability, that, frankly would make Robbie Williams, Elton John & Liberace look shy & retiring!

The reason I can honestly seem so high & mighty about it all? well...We actually managed to write and record our own material - no one seemed remotely interested in it, though really...They just want James Blunt, Coldplay & Amy Winehouse & all the other awful wedding reception muzak. ho hum. me? a snob? you fucking bet you're ass i'm a snob. It's better to actually have standards than have to keep fucking playing them like a stuck record in some museum that had its clock punched out somewhere in 1979...

Actually thats a little unfair. There are some decent acts coming over from Turkey, but you have to wade through a pile of Ok-ish 70's rock cover bands to notice them.

I dunno, when I play music as a job it tends to suck my soul from my essence...makes me feel like a robot servant to those ex pat NIMBY classes, all super entitled with expedient income. It, like everything else in my weird multi-life was an experience to learn from.

Live at Efendis 2012 (shot by Faruk Gencer)
Video & drunky drumming by Andrew Radford

from left to right: Crazy, In a Manner of Speaking, Where the story ends

So, as escape from working as a
Cd Player background musician- i immersed myself
into the home studio & made these:

2012 - Full Spectrum Analysis - Remojo

2012 - Full Spectrum Analysis - Above The Radar

Born in the flavellas on the slopes of Western Dunstable, Dubby Narwhal had an unremarkable middle class upbringing. It wasn't until 1985 when he accidentally sank the Rainbow Warrior during a particularly energetic game of Pooh Sticks that he took to the oceans and swam with Narwhals. Whilst creating beautiful whale song with his sperm whale lover he was cruelly plucked from the Mediterranean Sea by pirates and thrown onto the shores of Northern Cyprus. Naturally a furtive and shy creature, he can be rarely spotted but with enough patience and guile… and if you are lucky you might find him in his natural habitat of beaches and bars along the North coast of Cyprus.

(words by Gemini Clement)

The Gemini situation

In June 2013 - I had started a new act called Deuce with a singer, the very chirpy, proud ex Butlins red coat, Sara Cox. It was a Reggea based act with live guitar & electronic versions of classic backing tracks I had arranged at home in the studio (IE on the laptop lol).

We only played a couple of gigs & one absolute belter of a performance at Micheals (RIP) Oris bar. It was the Birthday party of an ex pat lady called Gemini, who puts on pub qizzes at another mates, Vicky & Unal Karacas place The Black Olive. That night as we reached the end of our set...Michael came over & said "i'll pay you double if you play it all again". So we did & I think that's the only time that ever happened to me. Michael was a bit of an Israeli hardman, with a rep for no nonsense business accumen. One simply does not say no to this guy. Sadly he passed on a few years ago. But whenever I met him he was always the gent.

After that amazing night it would not be the same for 6 mental years. Suffice to say that the next half decade+ would mean living up a mountain with a mad bastard of a Girlfriend, and 2 amazing girl type children, in a massive luxury Villa that did not function in any meaningful way. After an exhausting year extensivily overhauling & rejuvenating it from the absolute disgrace that either she or her alchoholic husband had left it in, it was sort of ok to live in. The story goes that Leon had apparently kicked her & the 2 infant girls (aged 4 & 6 at the time) out onto the streets. All 3 of them were now living in a single room at her friend Becky Turnbells lovely little villa in Karsiyaka. I always root for the underdog & learning that her Husband was away in Europe, we took the decision to break into the house & reclaim it for her & the Kids. Fixing everything up from initially clearing out the rooms off all the junk, rubbish, trying to make each room a homely environment was a massive chore on this 3 donnum (3 thousand sq mtr) estate. In the house itself everything was just higgly piggledy, chucked in random places. As if someone - (or a couple) had, after not being able to cope with the 2 young children & the burden of such a huge property, experienced a joint psychological break & totally flipped. Other stuff looked like it had never been unpacked. Like the hundreds of sci-fi books Gemini had inherited from her dad. It was very odd indeed. At the time Gemini maintained this was all the doing of her husband. Now? I believe otherwise. The Garden was just a warzone - vegetation completely overgrown, the Pool left to rot along with the pump house and the outside toilet facility. It was just tragic. As if they had both just completely given up. The question had to be asked at the time, why were the kids so very quiet? They were timid beyond normal boundaries. It took me an afternoon of frustration to get the youngest, Janet, to finally shout at me. It did her the world of good to find her voice. Jasmine was a little older & less shy but still - it took some time for them to adjust to the new way of things - eventually they were both back at school & doing ok.

In the end I became frustrated about the situation as I was not being let into the whole secret of how this was all being funded. I knew She & her brother owned the Nautilus fashion boutiques situated in Guernsey & Jersey, but not much else. For 6 years money just seemed to magically appear. And when it turned out that none of the school fees had ever been paid & when the electricity kept just going off for unpaid bills well...It wasn't adding up. If there was all this money coming in from shops that sold dresses & shit for hundreds of quid what was happening to it all? It was only compounded by the fact Gemini would tell tall stories about previous her life in London, Paris & New York being a buyer for the high fashion shop when her mum was alive, jet setting around & supposedly making ecstacy in a factory with her brother as a sideline - coming to Cyprus with the millions of quid proceeds. These stories, were amusing at first. Things that should have raised alarm bells like this were always occuring. Like her friendship with Diane Jones a woman who had escaped Wales after being a prominant Madam running a prostitution racket apparently bribing top police, judges & politicians into a fortune that saw her perma-living in exile on the Island. She was a nice lady at heart & helped Gemini keep some of things in her garage, & lent her a car. It should have maybe raised my spidey senses but I ignored the tingling, just because I was so in love with her.

North Cyprus is full of these types of extremely naughty people. The place is full of Old Essex boy relatives of people who did things like the Brinks Matt robbery, sitting all day in bars, staring into their beers unable to go home stuck in limboland. One of these blokes - Tony the Hat (no, really that's what they call him) used to be in a pub quiz team with Gemini when she was with Leon supposedly living in married bliss. I get the feeling they were doing more than playing pool & getting questions wrong in some pub up the mountian, while poor Leon was probably doing what I ended up doing. Looking after the kids, sitting at home drinking myself silly, wondering in full blown paranoid psychosis, what the hell was actually going on.

The eternal gratitiude of the fucked up mind!

North Cyprus is packed full of Walter Mitty types, pretending to be Millionaires to impress on the local scene. Fakes & ungenuine misleading & downright criminal, con-merchants & wrong-uns are commonplace. Gemini used her connections when it came to another situation which had led me to a desperate state of affairs. Over the period before meeting her a bloke had latched onto me, after I was caught doing taxi runs over the border for extra cash, when an idiot fare decided to fill a suitcase full of fags. The next time I went over the border I was given a 15 day visa and told I had to leave the island. Panic set in & I went to my local pub owner of the Kings bar Paul, Paula & Jackie to ask for advice. This proved to be an exceptionally bad move. He recommended a fix-it local who unbeknownst to me at the time was actually part of one of the 5 families of very dodgy gangsters. He proceeded to parade me around in his 4x4 Nissan, walking into the tax office & the police station unhindered, gaining access to top council workers, my bank manager, to find out how much I had in my account & the even the chief of police to try & sort it all out. Every week I was meeting him with a bundle of cash to pay off people & clear my name off the system.

One night he took his dads gold plated shotgun & drove us up the top of a mountain. I got scared. Was he going to off me right there? I was a little relieved to be offered the gun to shoot into the countryside, as a loyalty test. So I was run back down in the darkness, full of adrenalin firing the fucking gun out of his passenger side window.

So Supirse suprise! it was a huge scam which many a time I had to sit at gunpoint handing over brown envelopes under threats of being shotted if I didn't play along & pay up. Don't task me why, but why I didn't just leave the island for 6 months & come back again? Well I just can't answer you that one in a simple way. As the situation got worse I dug in & bedded into it & wanted to see what would happen. I simply didn't give a fuck about the money or anything. I wasn't that scared of firearms after a few previous experiences back in the day with them. It is my belief now, that I had, through the stress of it all, become dangerously unhinged, playing along at hanging around with this gangster to see how it would pan out. A chaotic, roll of the dice lifestyle. Gangster bloke, (who will understandably remain nameless) took me to the hospital one afternoon to visit his dad, who had a cancer on his foot. I was left feeling that some of the money they had squeezed out of me was going towards his operation. Why else would I be there? So maybe that would be that. I was wrong. While with Gemini, up in the mountiain house in Yesiltepe, he again rang me up saying I had to pay fines that I knew were all invented. So Gemini, who becoming very forceful & exhibiting assertiveness I had never witnessed before , drove me to the family house. She walked in & faced up the head of the family, where she plainly & loudly just told them I was flat out of money & to leave me alone. It worked. So in this desperate matter, I was eternally grateful to her for her intervention. I'm glad that little episode is well behind me. This episode lent weight to the possibility that Gemini had some serious connections that she was not letting on about. it was so hard to tell what was real & what was bullshit it all just became a total blur.

The last straw was her dopey brother Matthew, coming over for yet another free holiday and just leaching off us telling us how hard life was in the shops. I was not party to anything being said; wasn't being let into any of this at all & I was just sitting down in the studio for most of his last visit. I was particularly raw as I had also been up a roof for 2 months working a job with Gordon, the theater set maker for the RBL Pantomime players. So even though I brought in a hard earned cash to try & help, they treated me like a proper cunt. I had to end it, calling bullshit on the whole deal & packing my shit up after deciding for the umpteenth time I had just had enough of her "i'm a little bit crazy, a little bit ditzy" amatuer acting scholorship she was permanently engaged in. That was that sadly. Indeed there were good times. Actually there were life affirming & emotionally amazing times. I got to witness two little girls go from 6 & 8 years old, enter their adolescence, further into being the teen angst ridden newly 13 & near 15. From playing with littlest pet shop toys, bouncing around swimming pools & the sailing the sea at Sardunya Bay to near minecraft addiction off into sulky I-phone / Kpop teen obsessions. It was the kids who introduced me to the amazing Deathnote anime series after I set up the projector in the lounge & showed Akira to them for the first time. They have had a decent media schooling for sure - Monty Python, Red Dwarf, Star Trek TNG, HitchHikers Guide, League of Gentlemen, This Is Jinsey, Big Train, The Young Ones, The Royle family, Bottom... were all shown in Cinema style!

I treasure this period of my strange multi-life, especially for my parents sake & for those 2 girls, now all grown up.. All of them having those wonderful xmas' here with us all together around the real log fire. Gemini & the 2 J's eventually went back to Guernsey, & I can't be too down on her for what eventually happened. It didn't end well, & I left basically because I believed she was off doing a little more than galavanting with the Pantomime dame from the amatuer dramatics company "RBL theatre players". Well it was pretty obvious, Gordon had hinted at it, but i'm guessing didn't want to get involved. It was confirmed sometime later leaving me to guess for a few years. The whole 6 years was an important essential life lesson learned. All those friends & people who we'd drank with & shared 6 years of times, all satellites around Vicky & Unal in The Black Olive. Were they in on it too?

My ex-wife Carmen would agree that this was a classic example of Karma! (now an ironic name for that musical venture with Rachel too eh?) - I have had some serious time to reflect, after the way I left Carmen, I reckon I deserved some of that voodoo Karma back on me. Now I know how Lies feel. Not good. And guess what? I'm hard work too if truth be told.

Actually? I'm a fucking nightmare!

2014 -tHE mAN In tHE nEXT bED aLONG

2016 - The Man in The Mountain Vols 1-8 + more

2016 - Renegade Pharmacy - Mr Wotsit

Amen to that

boditee

forever & ever

toestep

Mr Wotsit video Promo; Amen to That!

extra! video Promo; Slingshot!

2017 - man in the mountain - on a mission

2018 - tHE mAN In tHE nEXT bED aLONG - The Zone of Safe Distances

Be careful what you wish for!

2019 - Post-relationship recovery position: The Abnormals

The Abnormals were a bunch of rowdy boozy politically incorrect ex-pats who got together to do gangshow type comedy skits & songs as a charity fundraiser for Tulips Cancer fund here in North Cyprus. Suzie & Martin really helped me get back into life in these times, getting me some gigs at their little place out the back of the Kings Bar, and involving me with work there. I started doing karaoke! The Abnormals had been a regular thing for many a year & late on in their history, I helped out doing some set designs & played up to my love of kinky dress wearing & being the attention seeking ego maniac I know you know I am...I fitted right in, until the eternal hangovers started making me slightly paranoid & eventually a bit wonky. You can probably tell I'm not doing so great in this pic:

We had a good laugh though, & even managed to put on a proper (ish) play called 'Beatles - A hard days night' perfomed in Esentepe theatre to a packed house. I sang me little heart out!

8 ball Paul

So in the in the immediate aftermath of the 6 year hole left in my chest, I decided to pull myself up from my bootstraps & make another stab at playing some venues, this time as a solo act - yes - i know, doing covers, tired old standards... aw, shit! You can hear some further on down the page as part of the Al Burn lockdown jams on youtube.

a short clip of some blues live@Tims Bar


a first tryout at The Fez
Karma; part 2; the sequel!

I tried doing it all again with Rachel and we got to play the top Hotel Cratos for 6 weeks - we played on a terrace overlooking various bars, had our own posters made and a stage set up for us. It was pretty cool.

Early nights saw the DJ's unwittingly crank up their sound to blot us out; but after 2 gigs they started pumping our sound through the PA right through the concourse. This made me immensley proud. We played a few lovely gigs at Cafe Deniz, Tims Bar & The Eagles nest & a regular spot at Taro & of course Efendis before I'd had enough again as the tourists weren't really here & the economy started to really tank - this was just before covid hit.

(Video right; live pre-set guitar jam at China Rouge Port Cratos Hotel)

2019 -tHE mAN In tHE nEXT bED aLONG - the universe rewards 2019

2019 - tHE mAN In tHE nEXT bED aLONG
ALT - ambient live takes

2019 - tHE mAN In tHE nEXT bED aLONG
along the beach 2019

2019 - tHE mAN In tHE nEXT bED aLONG
do you know?


another year another crisis

and then this happened:

and so began another journey for me - which saw me responding to the utter ridiculous madness of the world after Covid a full on website devoted to questioning the over reach of technocratic elites & their asserted politicised psuedo scientific authority over global humanity.

lockdown Videos 2020
cover versions of some of my favourite tunes

I remember the shitstorm of lockdown Covid bullshit happening just as I was getting into playing solo gigs - The Eagles Nest had booked me for a return after a great set the previous month, I was about to play at The Lodge, when blammo. Stay inside? eh?

To be honest I had a pretty decent experience & wandered about just as I always did - The car went out of commision, and walking to the shop a few miles away was free gym exercise, as was swimming & being frugal to the point of living off £25 a week - it's easy when you realise you don't need half the shit you think you do. Like Margarine, or sugar, or toilet roll. wait... eek... funnily enough I got so much out of the experience...After Covid, the economy went fucking nuts, & hyper inflation hit, as if we all hadn't had enough bollox! So now, I live pretty much the same now. I remain reclusive & isolated - fucking about on my guitar everyday, major piss up once a month to let off steam...Healthy eating & fitness is paramount - I have been the most productive in years, writing & researching like a mad prophet of doom, poetry, songs & pages of weird conspiracy flooded out of me like a bad curry.

What next I ask myself: WW3? or full on FAKE Alien invasion?

2021-present - Apt. 9

Covid: 2022 Captain Wardrobe on interweb-chat telly!
More videos here


click me

my first interview
with The Shift

I explain my background - tell some stories - & talk about some of the things i've researched over the years.

March 25th, 2022 - In this roundtable discussion host Doug McKenty discusses the first month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with Moscow-based journalist Riley Waggaman and long-time conspiracy analyst Captain Wardrobe. They expand on McKenty’s recent blog post concerning propaganda and its impact on the debate concerning this topic, compare a variety of interpretations as to the motivations behind the invasion, and place the conflict within a larger geopolitical context including de-dollarization and the potential influence of the World Economic Forum.

April 15th, 2022 - In this episode, host Doug McKenty discusses the controversial substance, graphene oxide, with returning guest Captain Wardrobe. This conversation utilizes Wardrobe's July 2021 article, “Graphene… and the Coming Robotnik Brain", to take a deep dive into a decades-long endeavor by military technologists to develop an electronic system on a nanoscale that can be used to both collect and transmit information to organisms jacked into the network. Now called the Internet of BioNano Things, this network utilizes graphene oxide as the principal conductor, which allows it to grow and function inside biological systems


stay up 4 eva
acid hermitage(massive mix)
acid chimp
acid reflux
acid injector
acid drop
die wurme
acid dayze
etch a sketch
intercine

2022 - Gizmochimps - Acidchimps

old skool acid house

acidthirst
acid erreur (404)
acid burn
graviton
acid temple
acidcore
acid smog
acid zone
flack attack
prism percept

(i'm stuck)

in Limboland

(the world is on)

Rinse & Repeat

The Normies

A lovely little rant to finish? ok then

It seems Normals never learn, change or grow emotionally, or become less in numbers due to evolution. No matter how many of them die of old age there always seems a new generation to take their place straight off the social fabric conditioner factory line. Now as ever, these zombie dullards are ever perrennial wherever I seem to have ended end up over the span of a 1/4 of a century. Here in the place I once regarded as a boy as an Idyllic North Cyprus, I have had my rose tinted spectacles thrown from my sunburnt face & trampled on by greedy, ignorants who seem to enjoy hammering nails that stand out, back into the drought stricken soil of an increasingly unfertile cultural landscape. I have found, to my amusement these morons, all UK/Turkish ex-pats can't help but sneeringly comment about everything from style, clothes, hair, conversations on life, politics or religion, picking on anything they don't see as fitting in for an easy excuse to offer me outside for an endearing hammering. I witnessed over the years what I call 'The White Club' from many people - these pricks think that because you're white you agree with them as they look around furtively to check the racial mix of the bar they are about to unleash their bollocks loudly, usually about immigrants asylum seekers or black football players. People actually have told me about their affinity for fascist groups like the NF or EDL, and then wonder why I don't really want to be seen with them or talk or socialise, or indeed have anything to do with them, period. This sadly means isolation here presently. Yes it really is THAT bad.

Don't misunderstand me, over the years here I have actually actively tried to avoid talking to normals about the various political machinations I regularly observe in my alternative online existence, indeed, while socialising I have often also steered myself away from mentioning my latest music or art projects too...just because it's not worth the aggro - even though electronic music goes back 60 years at least I find mentioning that I make this music for fun as a hobby results in cries of derision. Can you imagine me even trying to talk & engage with them about the poetry!

2020-present;
material in slow progress


click me for lyrics

Over the last year, since Lockdown saw the majority unquestioningly cowtow to the authorities, it's been slightly easier to discern who is or isn't a total dingo. Now & again I get bored beyond acceptable boundaries & venture out on missions to drunkenly deliberately provoke the dickheads who meet the 'normal' criteria for the sheer shits and giggles of my own entertainment. How do I identify these people? easy peasy...they call me names like 'mad Paul', comment during conversation how I would think everything is a conspiracy - all this without them seemingly engaging with the stuff i've made. So, inevitably it seems, I've now barred myself from my local bistro & refrain from even bothering with many residents. It's all just too sad & predictable. Everything I seem to do is dangerous and somehow radically alternative - a target for those who think 'normal' is being stuck in a timeloop that is anchored between 1955-73. The good old days, eh? I mean, conversely, I hold deep ridden disdain for the majority of 'post truth' hyper-normal pop consumer homogenuity with a passion, but not to the point i'd take them apart by wanting to cause harm physically. The simple fact is that their position doesn't threaten me, at all. I still ache to avoid any social contact with many of them - just purely out of wanting a peaceful time spent perhaps in isolation - but with that I also have the security of the knowledge that if I am out of sight I am out of their tiny gossip ridden little minds. I'm perfectly content minding my own goddamn business, eeking out an interesting, disciplined existence, frugally learning how to cope with what I suspect will be a full on global economic collapse.

Conversely alt culture, now long largely dissipated by big money & the 30 year war on individualism, is all but a shadow on the cave wall, projected & manipulated by the same big money elite interests. The total Extinction of rebellion (TM) is a reality that i'm desperately trying to focus on in my blurred old wrinkled eyes & possibly erroneous memory that fills in the blanks accompanied by the pops, clicks & whirs of my poor little errant brain sponge as it plopped out the stories you have read above. That alt-culture which I remember while part of me clings to unrelentingly, is still seen by many who fear of molotov anarchy crossed with homo-racial ethnically mixed hodgepotches of things they see as chaos that becomes problematic to 'their way of life'

Obviously something I'm doing makes them feel uncomfortable.

It's funny how the social engineering works isn't it? The corporate government corruption hive, is protected by it's own class of subservient obedient slaves as some sort of creepy mass hypnosis broadcasting system. It's all projection'.

Plato would have a fucking field day.

It does seem a tad ironic that many (not all, to be fair) of these ex pats, can often be heard moaning about foreigners taking all their jobs in the UK, whilst magically all being on benefits, (this is called Shroedingers bigot, by the way!) They sit gawping immersed on social media, while glued to their devices blissfully unaware that they themselves are living as immigrants themselves, taking advantage of an ever failing economy held over the heads of exhausted locals who are facing exponentially increasing poverty as the value of the national currency goes down the swanny. I plan on staying as far away as possible from a fake culture of shops full of tourist tat, overpriced fake goods, cafes & bars full of the herd that unwittingly sign their rights away to lawless greedy section of politically powerful business / property contraprenuers alongside corrupt politicians that tie everything rented to to the UK pound, Euro, Dollar or Rouble. I will try & avoid this obvious bollox, for the foreseeable future.

I just feel sorry for the poor blighters, & try to keep moving on. Years ago it used to be being Asian, Black or a Marxist Or having funny hair, or dressing in your own style. Or simply having ideas that would trigger the ructions. I have actually seen fights start over people slagging off the Queen, or Thatcher more often than not, via the usual patriotic BS about the Falklands or the Cyprus issue. And apparently you are not allowed to be against any form of military brainwashing - you know, the type we are seeing all over the digital landscape that used to be called Mockingbird mass media. Nowadays simply pointing out that everything from chips, devices to O/S platforms and the internet itself, all have their genesis in military-industrial future tech development programs instigated after the Manhatten project, gets you absolutely stricken from all those friends lists. I've been struck off from many social diaries for fear that I might vent my opinion on something. People are now not engaging with me for the simple fact that I might say something to them or their clique. The people running many restaraunts & bars are, as ever, simply not allowing, frowning on, or making life difficult for people to offer difference of opinion to that of the majority - It seems all they want their customers to do is consume their overpriced shit, sitting quietly, playing bingo, singing karoake, or talking about sport. This is what society has, over the course of 50 years, become concretised as. I have witnessed it everywhere from America, Europe, from London to Newcastle, Whitley Bay & over to Cyprus. The more things change the more they stay the exact fucking same.

CONTROLLED!

Now that's what I call progress!

As far as woke culture goes? It seems the funny styles & hair must accompany those, once undefinable & perhaps perceived as dangerous, myriad of socio-sexualities that (similarly to the boom in pyschological disorder diagnosis in 90's children that saw ADHD MSPD ODD Autism mass Ritalin push by Big Pharma), now humans must become completely defined, identified & labelled. Anyone who notices the similarities of this active engagement by huge too big to fail elite economic corporate behemoths & the times of pseudo scientific eugenic intolerance, which saw those Jews, Gypsies, mentally disabled dysfunctional & unwanted unfortunates who became (via technology invented by the precursor of IBM), identified, collated, tagged & slaughtered like cattle in Hitlers nightmarish Nazi Germany preceding WW2...are labelled conpiracy theorists & thus in many cases somehow anti-semitic, cast out from an ever controlling dystopian society built on the very same notions of a psycho-social human superiority complex. 21st Century NU-humans must Identify themselves as a knowable entity so that they can be brainlessly & obediently dealt with, whether defending their mental state, sexuality or colour with unnuanced & redefined Orwellian historical context or attacking them as a lumped in dangerous faux terrorist group of political undesirables - all of this at all costs to rational science or sanity. This is all backed by media conditioning, brightly coloured infantalised socio-economic forces. That kind of overt MK-ULTRA type programming will NOT do AT ALL! Obviously! Of course many of us saw it all starting with the whole swine fever / avian flu bollocks that was being gradually ramped up from 2003 onwards finally hearing the roar, perhaps distant echoes of 911 in those fully intact jet engines as they came on in to crash land on everyones doorsteps back in 2001. Only this time the global emergency was dressed up & sold to us as the Covid 19 megaproject, a huge insipid & creepy behaviourial economic fear machine. This push for 21st century level global 4th industrial Genetic Vaccine control operations that has led to WHO OneHealth Tyranny complete with total digitalised cradle to grave Digital ID tracking & tracing promoted as benevolent spying that comes with over obsessing the politics of security linked to identity. It masks it's intent with a paper thin veil of wokism, climate change & disease preparedness, that when drawn away reveals an ideology of god complex instilled technocrats grinning maniacally with the thought of retaining pure totalitarian control over the entire planet by having us all embedded into a timid & scared new world of an existence built on social credit scoring which would see any kind of subservience to or active rebellion against any of it as a credit to society or conversely, a criminal/terrorist enterprise to be punished or rewarded by a system moderated by access to all goods & service crucial to human existence via a blockchain based Digital tokenised central banking currency, seemingly to be moderated by full on Artificial Intelligent overseer set on autopilot management mode.

Not creepy at all, is it?

2022 - Trippy alt-Psychedelic album

Vortex into the Quantum Looneyverse

Promo!

an hour long hot sweaty very very bored of Planet Earth superduper summer album


click for mp3 audio in new tab

with thanks to (click on his name) Neil Miles who does amazing work on old clips that i have used in these recordings

If you want to find me. Use your loaf and look for the barely used twitter/X profile Capt Wardrobe - or look for me wandering the mountains, hills & beaches content with my lot. I exist now, knowing that perhaps in that other life... an enticing dreamworld that meant I was supposedly going to aim to be a hugely successful millionaire star, that strange other dimension in which I should have been obeying all the signals pointing me to aspire to belong, as a consumer slave full of the socially encoded values of willfull ignorance.

I have vacated the trap of hopes...

comfort exists in knowing i am what I really always aimed for.

To become a real outsider.

Until the end of the world.

CW