3 4 was the most exciting thing I had ever done. I remember my first print: a Magritte-type man in a bowler hat in front of a London underground sign. I pulled the squeegee with the colour across the image, then lifted the silkscreen frame. The ink pushed through the silk, shimmering on the fabric’s surface before soaking down into the cloth. It was thrilling, and I was hooked. I spent another year scraping through exams and applied to the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London for a textile design degree. It was an old-fashioned school where we learned to mix colour in a hazardous Victorian basement using Bunsen burners and sulphurous-smelling glues known as zinc formaldehyde sulfoxylate. Huge square tins of powdered dyes lined the shelves. Methyl violet, rhodamine red B, acid yellow, magenta, methylene blue 2B. Just the names sounded dangerous. It was heaven. Recently, I read that I am on the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts alumni list along with Tim Roth and Mike Leigh. Dead chuffed! Tell me about your fascinating life and career between punk and the New Wave era? When I graduated in 1979, there was high unemployment and many textile industries closed. It was a period when you had to invent ways of surviving the grey and depressed London. I shared a derelict basement flat with Dave Henderson who designed the costumes for Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee (1978). The best music of this New Wave period was from the independent labels. All my friends were either in groups or trying to play in one. Bands got together in empty factories to rehearse and many played in pubs. I saw The Members, Joy Division, XTC, The Jam, The Specials and many more in a smoke-filled basement of the local pub. Dave started a low-budget label called Dining Out Records, signing up local bands and printing the record sleeves. It was a time of creativity in music, film and art when nobody had any money and you could only work with the tools you had at hand or borrowed. It was a hand-tomouth way of life. I began printing t-shirts on a very low budget. I had to improvise, so some of my screens were made from seed boxes with the bottoms punched out. There would be all-night printing sessions and t-shirts hung on washing lines across the room with record sleeves. I sold my shirts at Camden Lock Market, so I was up by 6 o’clock, queueing for a stall come rain, come shine. I became part of an underground lifestyle mingling among youth cultures like punks, Teddy Boys, New Wavers, rockabillies and ska. The designs I printed on the t-shirts were a potpourri of images like colourful guitars, budgerigars and abstract shapes. Band members were always hanging around our basement flat day and night, smoking weed and drinking beer; all dreaming of billion dollar record deals. My absolute favourite record of the time that I used to sing my head off to while printing was Goodbye Girl by Squeeze. It’s a catchy song about a regretful one-night stand that went pear-shaped. The unusual arrangement of clicking drums has a perfect repetitive rhythm for printing. And I printed whatever I felt like every day. Then, when I got fed up with a print, instead of buying more mesh, I poured bleach over the screen to remove the emulsion. Then I cleaned it with Ajax. Sometimes the emulsion didn’t come off, so when I exposed a new image there would be traces of the previous design. Very exciting. Nothing ever came out as I designed, but that was the beauty of it all. For a silkscreen print to adhere to a t-shirt, the image had to be ironed with a very hot iron. So I used to get band members to iron for me. In return, I would give them a free t-shirt. Eventually, I had loads of musicians wearing my prints, recognisable by the scorch marks! My market stall was a great way to sell my work. I sold to the Eurythmics, 23 Skidoo, and when The Cure played at The Music Machine in Camden, 25
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