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Where to begin?
Well, first Hiya, mate - good to hear from you. How many years is 1967 - 2004? Where to begin?Been meaning to put a potted autobiography on my website for some time now, so will take this opportunity to write it to you and use the copy for a page on my site:- (and now here we are)...You may remember my keen interest in all things guitar and art at school. We had a couple of "stars-to-be" contemporary with us at Bromley Grammar through 1958-1965:- there was Peter Frampton and also Michael York; Martin Clarke pulled a couple of strokes later, too, by writing and producing "Nice One Cyril" and becoming an EMI exectutive on the strength of it. For me, with the guitar, what had been a couple of hobbies later turned into a career...Being the son of "Alf Garnet Incarnate" (remember the "not-a-pot-to-piss-in" father with staunch Conservative views on everything?) - I had no idea upon leaving school what one was supposed to do with a distinction O-level Maths and distinction A-level Art, with 5 other meaningless O-levels thrown in, so followed Martin Clarke's example and took a job in an advertising agency in the West End (Mather and Crowther - later Ogilvy and Mather) - as a messenger boy!Well, they soon realised that I had some kind of brain lurking in this skull and promoted me to the esteemed position of filing clerk in the Media department and shortly after that to "Assistant Time and Space Buyer". This was 1966 - well before the time when computers were in common office use. It was my job to collate clients' account information and book ads in press and on T.V. - getting the audience measurements analyzed by an outside computer company. Boring.Absolutely the wrong job for one such as I. My parents were going through the horrendous divorce thing as it then was and combined with the stress of being in the wrong type of employment, the circumstances led to a really awful stomach ulcer and ill-health has dogged me ever since. The drugs they prescribed at the time were later pronounced obsolete and dangerous; by 1972 it had all got out of hand and the only option was surgery. Better described as crucifixion, I'd say.Through 1965-66 I'd been playing keyboards in a Tamla-style band called The Oggy Band. Martin Clarke played bass and a couple of Biggin Hill guys made up the rest of the team. Did a lot of gigs on the Radio London and Caroline circuits and supported some great bands:- Geno Washington, Marmalade etc; in 1966 met Noel Redding (spelling?) whilst touring in Cornwall. At the time he was playing lead guitar in a rock band called The Concordes and we spent a week together having a real hoot. He was great fun.Some weeks later we met again in Charing Cross Road and he told me he'd just been for an audition to play bass for "a long-haired coon who played guitar with his teeth" (Hendrix) - and he'd got the gig. He called later to say that they were playing down in Chiselhurst Caves so we (the band) went along to see...The sight and sound of that "experience" made me decide to switch back from keyboards to guitar (!)...?!?At the Ad agency they'd realised I wasn't at all happy, so paid me off to go away and I took some time out to look around to find something more suitable - which turned out to be a job in graphics:- as a layout and retouching artist at Letraset Ltd. - the old instant lettering system. This was still long before computer type-setting so everything was done longhand with knives and brushes on lith film over light boxes - I learned the now obsolete skill of master stencil cutting and could retouch with a double-0 sable down to 5 thou of an inch.It was during this period of London - Bromley train commuting that the idea of producing a reactionless force from flywheels and magnets sprang to mind. This is a seriously flawed blind alley but that didn't stop me from experimenting for several years with the idea attempting to design a "gravity drive engine". If we'd had the Internet back then, I would quickly have found out that many, many others had tried this approach and failed. Quite simply, it doesn't hold water but nevertheless, I was convinced it could be done.Then I stepped sideways into a silk-screen production company with my new-found skills and was responsible for the lettering on the majority of the new style of British Rail signs in the South East UK around 1968-9. Good money (for then) and I bought an expensive camera and got into photography; this provided some extra side-income during the following year or so.Next I was head-hunted by another firm which was just setting up in Dartford - they'd nicked a chunk of the British Rail sign contract and I became a one-man department, learning sheet metal fabrication, welding, spraying, stoving, on-site erection (!) and how to breathe toxic fumes in an unsafe environment. This was the last straw for my ulcer and, together with the confusion caused by drug abuse, I dropped out to be a rock star. That was the plan, anyway. Dohhhhh!Always having been a terrible natural show-off and being surrounded by people telling me I could make it, I believed them and it took some years of abject failure to realise that it really wasn't going to happen. All of this, despite having been "discovered" by the man who turned down the Beatles, Tom Jones and the Rolling Stones:- Dick Rowe at Decca Records. (Dick Rowe:- "Go back to Liverpool Mr. Epstein; four-man guitar groups don't make it anymore...") Painful days, indeed; but back then I was seriously into painting and was working on an oil on canvas board of "The Garden of Eden":-~ and it was a period of the almost inevitable soft drugs and shoulder-rubbing with Beckenham locals David Bowie and Arthur Brown of 1968's Fire! fame - ( Arthur came to live with me for six months during 1972 at the infamous 84 Overbury Avenue flat). Those early 70's Beckenham days led to my first demo recording. Bowie (by then with Angela, and I was with David's ex, Mary) listened to the results of the first sessions and told me that I was very talented and asked what I intended to do with my talent?My reply was that "I didn't see myself as a star but would like perhaps to work in Childrens' TV.If I made any money from music I would put it into antigravity research".Bowie replied that I should not be afraid of success but rather aim for the very top-most shining stardom and a week later called me to say he'd written a song for and about me. My prescence was requested and Bowie sat at the piano and played and sang to me:~
"There's a Starman, waiting in the skies;
I performed a completely "race-tuned" total rebuild on a brand new (otherwise horrid) CBS transition Fender Stratocaster for Jeff Beck, who used it to record the million selling album "Blow by Blow". Steve receives no credit, of course. To the contrary, Beck insists in interview when asked how he gets the great sound on the album, that he does all of his own guitar 'tech work. This is the shape of things to come...That summer, too, I shacked up with Ann, my wife-to-be (of 23 years!). In 1976 we moved to Lewisham, into a flat provided by the music shop on the main drag there, South Eastern Entertainments. Failing to take adequate safety precautions whilst working with two-pack plastic guitar lacquer nearly killed me with massive peritonitus. A blood count of 2½ out of the normal 14 and an open wound requiring daily salt baths for three months is no pretty sight... and the smell...In 1977 I spent a few days with Marc Bolan to fix ("race-tune") all of his guitars, including an ancient Gibson Les Paul given to him by Eric Clapton, who had covered it in white emulsion paint, strings, pickups et al. That particular job was to keep Clapton's paint job intact but make the thing work again as a musical instrument. Perhaps naïvely keen to let Marc hear some of my own latest recordings, I suggested a brief listen to cassette and Bolan's last words to me are, in a taxi from the studio:- "There will be time!" but ironically Marc died in the car crash the following day leaving his favourite guitar on my workbench; the roadies were quick to collect...
During the years at Beckenham, a close mate, Bernie Frost (whom I'd taught to play guitar back in the '60's), had taken up with Status Quo, doing session and gig harmony singing and by 1977, he'd gotten into co-writing with Francis Rossi. Quo became my customers and when Ann and I moved out to our first mortgaged 17th century cottage property at Yalding, Kent, I took Quo on as private customers. This resulted in a 2½ year association with the band as their exclusive guitar tech, travelling to a wide range of studios and gigs and building them several custom instruments. Their producer at the time was Pip Williams and he "talent-spotted" me, intending to make me his new project but after hearing some tapes, insisted that I sack the band with whom I was playing at the time. Hard thing to do but it's a hard world and I was getting old fast; I was by then 30 and it was late.Pip's manager, David Walker, who also had started to claim publishing rights to my music, reckoned it was already way too late for me as a performer and suggested a Wombles-type format project, using my music and animated characters. So I invented, designed and storyboarded a whole corporate identity based around a charater I called Oggy. Bendy Toys (remember them?) prototyped the family of dolls, Chidrens' T.V. programmers were taking the bait and record companies were queueing up...Then Spielburg's E.T. happened and the carpet was snatched from under our feet because the publisher had hung out (and hung out) for a better deal. Nobody was listening to or looking at anything similar so it all just died a natural death then and there.The guitar industry is a just as fickle as the music industry it supports and supplies. There was never a season to it; completely unpredictable. "Feast or Famine" was the way of it. Around 1980 you just never saw a guitar band on T.V. because of the meteoric rise of the synthesizer bands (and tone-deaf talentless one-finger merchants). It used to make me really angry - a complete waste of energy, of course.Sometimes it all would get busy again but you couldn't depend on it (guitar tech-ing) as a living, so with bread to be won and half of the cottage in a state of re-build and the roof off, in 1984 I had to get a regular day job at the I.C.I. chemical factory just outside of the village. This turned into a 3½ year epic, during which I learned how to drive a fork truck and pump weedkiller. Great, eh? How the mighty are fallen...Then in 1988, somebody tried to buy a guitar from a friend, a guitar I'd built some 10 years earlier. The offer was refused and the guy came on to me to build him one. At the time, I'd given up the building side of things but £1,000 was tempting so I agreed and did it, only to have an immediate repeat order for another one in a different colour. Recording the time it took for the second build, I found it had only taken 24 hours from pencil drawing to fine tuning of the finished axe!"Sod this fork truck driving", I thought and went back to it all, working from my cellar, back to a Workmate and simple hand and small electric tools. It wasn't a straight line growth graph, though and the work took time to build back up to a reasonable level. Build up it did, though and soon I was back to popularity as a guitar builder and repair tech, servicing seven shops in Kent with a "travelling doctor" service, moving Transit-loads of guitar repairs and even paying casual labour.When we'd moved to Yalding, Ann had immediately bought an Old English Sheepdog puppy (much to my chagrin, having been a cat person for life up to then) and as predicted, I got to do all the dog-sitting and related stuff, which had severely limited my availability to the rock and roll industry for work (touring etc., was out although Beethoven was very well known in recording and film studios all over the U.K. - long before the film of the same name) - and his presence had been instrumental in turn in contributing to my having to close the previous business. This had caused much bitterness between us, unfortunately.Anyway, in 1989 the dog died and, whilst waiting for the vet to come to deliver the fatal shot, I wrote a silly song to sing to him in his final hour. Next day in the 24 track studio where I'd been working on a single, I decided to sidetrack and record the song I'd written for the dog as a tribute.The engineer was unfamiliar with the desk and was locked out, not having the password. Waiting for the owner to show up we had time to chat and it turned out that he'd been commissioned to write humourous jingles for the local F.M. Invicta Radio top night time D.J. (a certain, very popular at the time, "Caesar The Boogie Man"). The engineer had his own studio but no ideas for the jingles so upon hearing my silly song realised that we could work together to supply the music.So we set to work and suddenly I was on the radio every night - several times. Great, I thought, automatically becoming a full member of the Performing Rights Society and with an audience of several millions - and a free hand to record whatever nonsense I thought fit. This was easy since the brief was to insult the D.J. as much as possible; frankly he deserved much worse, as it turned out. There was a scandal involving funds raised from the sales of a charity single (with my name on it) and although it had nothing to do with me, it all fell apart in a very ugly way and Caesar got sacked from the Radio Station after I'd refused permission for him to use my material anymore. He went to Radio Essex and a similar thing happened. Nasty stuff indeed. Not being on the radio was an ugly shock. It's amazing how blasé one gets and I pity anyone who has sampled real fame only to become a has-been. Fortunately this was only small-time local radio and I got over it all quite soon and settled back into ignominity, which as a respected guitar builder was fine. Having just got into field archery as a wonderful sport and gained a competitive medal, I had plenty to relax with. Also, I still had a very beautiful and intelligent wife, a good pub just across the road and business was on the up and up. Life wasn't too bad.By 1993 I was into a new workshop in liason with a shop in Tunbridge Wells, charging £80 per hour and keeping busy, doing nicely thank you very much. Ann and I were dual-income, no kids ("Dinkies") but nothing lasts forever.Come January 1995, the D.J. from Hell, now calling himself "Caesar the Geezer", called again (much to my disbelief) offering me a similar gig, this time on national radio. It seemed that an American consotium had block-bought the entire third floor of No. 76 Oxford Street, London and had kitted it out to run into the digital radio age, setting up a commercial station calling itself Talk Radio U.K. (now Talk Sport). Caesar had landed the top night time shock-jock spot and was offering me the promise of huge royalties (£48 per airplay). Could I supply a new set of custom jingles? Shocked, I nearly puked there and then but said I'd think about it.My current project was then the development of a plastic acoustic guitar. This was going really well and I'd got some fearsome prototypes made and sold some, too. A couple of major guitar manufacturers were looking at my invention with serious intent and I was feeling pretty confident with life in general. Also, I'd met a character called Mac, who was a wonderfully prolific poet, a member of The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Artists (BASCA) and a very hard man, physically, too; he was a kind of genial minder-type whom you definitely wouldn't want as an enemy, if you catch my drift. We formed a kind of mutual admiration society in the realisation that together, with his words and my music, we could do some good work.The offer from "Caesar" was disturbing but, having thought it through, I contacted Mac and suggested that we get together and have a go. We went to the radio station and met several presenters. Anna Raeburn, Tommy Boyd, Scott Chisholm, together with producers and other staff. It was clear that millions had been put into the project and we therefore assumed that we'd be safe. The broadcast system worked on floppy-disc samples which were compiled for logging artist/royalty etc., due etc., so we thought we'd be even more secure - guarateed, even.The problem came when, after self-financing 18 weeks of 24-track studio time, we discovered that the royalties due on each single jingle per airplay were fractions of a penny instead of the £48 we'd been told and the radio station insisted that "Caesar the Geezer" was responsible for any commissionings that he made and that he was sub-contracted anyway. Problem.10 - 15 airplays per night @ £48 per play, 7 nights a week for 18 weeks works out to £70,000 (I'll spare you the trouble of working it out) - and not to mention that Mac and I had effectively left our self-employed day jobs to work on the project. In both our cases that meant 20 years of customer goodwill lost.Non of the official bodies were powergul enough at the time to fight the American media/radio consortium and we were well and truly stuffed; no income and £70,000 down the drain. We had to pull permission for the jingles to be played (120 of them) and retire hurt. And hurt it did. This was June 1995.Taking a holiday away from everything. Nashville, Tennesee was targeted as eventual gameplan #1; sell everything and go to Nashville, via Ireland, I thought...Didn't happen. Came to Wales instead. Liked it. Stayed.
