Tim Staffell Newsletter

[Q-Freddie]

1982: Cool Clear Water...
All day I faced the barren waste.....
Tim Staffell
Oct 13

Liberation Days…
Once I had truly settled into my new career as a Film & TV Modelmaker and Artist, I began to relish the work. It was everything that the music business wasn’t. I’d always felt, privately that the fundamental criteria of producing saleable music had been not that the music was particularly good, but that you could persuade someone with resources that it was; PR and promotion would do the rest. (It’s still a prevalence in my view - presentation is everything). What distinguished my new career was that the created product could not, generally be defined as a matter of opinion. It was always, initially the subject of a brief, and as such could only be right or wrong within the context it was intended for. It was a fantastically liberating feeling. During the first workshop I had a space in, I absorbed an awful lot of new techniques, I learned better how to sculpt, mould and cast in different materials, use bench machinery which I had never dealt with previously - brushed up on (and in many cases, realised) how to measure accurately, finish and refine surfaces, polish, groove, slot, cut, turn on a lathe, use a milling machine, a spray gun - apply paint and texture effects to surfaces.. it was a mind-bogglingly creative time of experimentation and revelation..

What was particularly stimulating about the experience is that it was feeding a commercial industry that was increasingly hungry for visual novelty. In that respect we were being asked to simulate and create all kinds of cinematic legerdemain in the service of retail branding and movie fantasy. The UK SFX Industry had been cutting its teeth on shows like Thunderbirds for a decade or more, and there was a wealth of experience and techniques that had developed from sources such as the studios of Gerry Anderson and Ray Harryhausen. I’d been working on ‘jobbing’ projects for a couple of years when the opportunity came to work on a project at Clearwater Films, a three-studio complex with their own workshops, camera equipment, and lighting gear over the river at Battersea. They were, at that time, the premier stop-motion animation house in the UK, with a team of superb animator/modelmakers - and their reputation was growing such that they needed to recruit to keep up with the increasing workload.

The Best Job in The World…?
My time at Clearwater constituted a rich and varied experience that further cemented my skills as a modelmaker, and intriduced me to the art of stop-motion animation. Although Clearwater primarily had a reputation based on its amazing stop-motion output, the core of the production team had come from the studios of Gerry Anderson, and their work with miniatures and effects was of the highest standard. For a couple of years the team of in-house modelmakers worked full-on, on a series of innivatively written commercial films; there were (eventually), three studios working flat out. The list of ‘Above The Line’ (Top Brands) commercials read like a catalogue of household-name products - Lego, Cadburys, BirdsEye, Hersheys, London Docklands, Hartleys Jam, Armstrong Floors, Presto Supermarkets.. etc etc. The one common factor to all of these was that the scripts all required some spectacular use of effects, (filmed and post-produced) to achieve stunning results. We pulled off some pretty astonishing feats in those days, establishing the reputation of the the studios in the process..

The Trainset generation…
All through the fifties, when Christmas rolled around, and my folks would face the annual dilemma of what to buy the pre-teen boys, there was a reasonable possibility that a toy would be railway-related. Consequently I became the recipient of tin trains, later, small electric sets, maybe a train guard’s uniform… you get the picture. I’m pretty sure that on several occasions I found a little book from Awdry’s original railway series, and I had grown up with the vaguely nostalgic memory of the little steam-engines with their silly faces and petty operational problems. And now I suddenly found myself elected to be supervising modelmaker on the development of the stories for TV. It didn’t, of course indicate that I was a particularly skilled modlemaker - in fact, I’d say that 75% of the team were far more skilled than I - but I must have been seen as a decent co-ordinator, and I WAS a fair sculptor, so I got to make a lot of the original faces, the small (and large-scale) human figures, and engage with research, procurement of rolling stock, landscaping, backgrounds, and peripheral things like smoke effects. I suppose for the first series, it was about eighteen months in the making, from initial pilot episode to completion. I wasn’t party to the logistics of the actual filming, but we had a tight schedule to build all of the set-pieces that would furnish the model locations for the storyboarded episodes.

Out of all proportions….
I’m not sure that any of us involved in the actual build, had an inkling of how significant ‘Thomas And Friends’ would become; but on reflection I think it does have something to do with the care that went into its development and construction. In the event, Clearwater Films would not have a particularly extended life as a company - I was remote from management, so didn’t have much of an idea of how it was being run. In retrospect, any revenue generated by the series seems not to have found its way back as working capital. There were political struggles, jealousies, recriminations that I was on the sidelines of, such that an offer I had once filming had started - to join Red Baloon Films in Central London as Art Director, came as a blessed, and welcome relief. By this time, I had begun to dabble in animating simple scenes, and I would soon become much more closely involved in the filming process…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2nL5sSSvd0

Gordon & Thomas from the first series of Thomas The Tank Engine
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz… The Vogon Captain -BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide….

[Q-Freddie]

Broad Horizons Part II
It opens out like a flower........
Tim Staffell
Oct 21

Liberated from the confinng straightjacket of my early grounding in the blues, and subsequently ‘pure’ rock, I had absorbed first the songs of greats like David Gates, Jim Webb, Bob Dylan, Lennon & McCartney (of course), Holland,Dozier, Holland, Smokey Robinson, and a broad range of contemporary material before I discovered the Great American Songbook. From there I began to take an interest in an even wider remit. Frank Zappa’s irreverence and articulate perceptions of the music business hooked me in, and from there I began to notice individual players and soloists, and more importantly, what set them apart and gifted them with the skills that they evidenced. A particular epiphany for me was the gifting to me of the book ‘Bird’ - the biography of the great tenor player Charlie Parker. I had acquired a 7” E.P. (extended play) vinyl of four tracks of his at around this time, and his melodic imterpretations hooked me in. Given the social and economic difficulties that Black Americans had faced during his time, Parker’s skill as a player was a living rebuttal of the prejudice that prevailed; musically, though, there were strong resonances with my own responses to my aspirations, my self-confidence and the durability of my motivation...

The Mothers of Invention’s ‘Raspberry’ to the masses.

[Q-Freddie]

1984: One Red Balloon.....
I cut my teeth on film & animation
Tim Staffell
Oct 27

It was the year that we discovered that George Orwell was closer to the truth than expected. The broadcast commercial industry was booming; in the service of the perpetually expanding economy, film production companies were popping up everywhere. Jaded by my experience at Clearwater, and disappointed with the inneffective and insensitive management, I jumped at the chance to join a small outfit in Central London who were fielding a number of commercials directors and taking on work from all over Europe. I was initially employed as Art Director; supplied with a car, a parking spot, and a retainer, and so joined the team working on a number of medium-profile brands from across Europe. The first such film that I became - I’ll say ‘embroiled’ in - (because it turned out to be a an Anglo-Italian political joust), was for the Italian company Motta, whose flagship product Pannetone, was up for a Christmas relaunch using the best SFX that the UK had to offer. I have to say that we did a cracking job. We built a HUGE model set stretching back into the darkness of Filmfair’s studio out near the airport - Twinkling Alpine village in the distance, sweeping fields of glistening white snow, and a huge forest of miniature Christmas trees in the foreground, branches draped with literally THOUSANDS of fibre-optic harnesses, each fed by a projector complete with rotating colour wheel. The effect was quite astounding.

There’s Always a Catch…..
Yes, it was spectacular, (and expensive)… but the fly in the ointment was Luciano the Art Director from Milan. He hated it. For years he’d presided over a procession of safe, live action Motta Christmas commercials, and suddenly, the agency wanted to change tack and go for some cutting edge model animation. It was a fiasco. We couldn’t get beyond his incessant need to keep changing things. Now one of the differences between stop-frame animation and live action is the sheer logistics of setting up a shot. With live action, you can shoot your scene with actors, and then, spontaneously, if an idea occurs, you can shoot a different version, and the ability to create ‘on the fly’, as it were, is a major component of a good director’s vocabulary. Real-world Stop-frame, especially if it is pre-synched to a soundtrack, needs to be written like music and bar-charted. Luciano didn’t like that, he didn’t have any experience of animation, aand didn’t see why we couldn’t shoot endless variations. We had to school him. With Live-Action, 35mm film passes through the gate of a camera at 24 frames per second, if an animated shot takes, shall we say four seconds, then that’s roughly a hundred frames. A complex animated set up might take ten minutes to move every element before the next single-frame is taken. So that’s around a thousand minutes, or a little over SIXTEEN hours for a single four-second shot. (from a thirty-second commercial) That’s roughly two days of studio time - in those days it was very impractical to stop a shot mid-way and carry on the next day, because physical elements in the set could relax under gravity overnight - lights start up with a slightly different colour temperature, flag or reflector stands might sag a little. I’m exaggerating somewhat; these days it’s much easier to digitally process things and minimise the glitches that used to be impossible to resolve back in the day. Anyway, We got it (nearly) right in the end. Luciano wasn’t happy, but the agency and Motta were - so we moved on…
Cutting My Teeth…..
I’d been working as an Art Director for a few months for the company - Red Balloon Films, when the Executive Producer said to me - ‘Why don’t you shoot a short animated film of your own, and then we can sell you as a director, too…’ This was a great opportunity. I’d been around commercials studios for around four years by this time; watched countless commercials being set up and filmed - sat through production meetings, discussed shots, got to know cameras, lenses, lighting - rigging, and the process of calibrating model and camera movements in single-frame detail well enough to sit in the director’s chair. So I made my film - it was a minute’s worth of glorified product shots (sadly lost in the archives, somewhere) - I made the models (fruit, amd little sculpts) - storyboarded the succession of shots, bar-charted the thing to the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ sonata, and we shot it over a week, (I think), in the company’s studios out near the airport.

The opening shot was somewhat concerning. We were masked and gloved because it involved placing progressively coalescing drops of mercury on to a flat surface in time with the music, until they formed a mirror, which we then carefully replaced with a conventional glass one. Then the action began, reflected in the mirror, and the film proceeded. Fruit sequentially fell into shot, was rolled away, transformed and animated; the surface dissolved into a richly textured oak table, ,and the film drew together as a panorama of a carefully arranged composite of fruit, cheese, wine - silver bowl, and tastefully composed velevt drape…. the point being to create a stunning ‘beauty’ shot that would be attractive to a potential advertiser as an example of what we could achieve as a company, with me at the helm… ‘Look how good we can make your product appear!’
The Balloon Bursts…..
In the event, my career with Red Balloon Films as a director amounted to about fourteen films - European Commercials, and ‘science clips’ (product demos) - It was a stimulating time, I learned a lot, and it prepared me for my next professional engagement - with Oxford Scientific Films, who at that time were the premier natural history film unit in the UK. They possessed an armoury of cutting edge camera equipment, with motion-control rigs, high-speed capture, and rooms full of novel rigging gear. which I was very happy to employ as a director for their commercial wing…. Mostly, I shot the short, ‘in-commercial’ scientific product demos, close-ups of washing powder doing it’s thing - shampoo curing dandruff, milk splashing in slow-motion onto cornflakes, etc etc. In these cases I would make the model, create a storyboard, and film the sequence. I lasted for about a year - I was actively engaged in several other roles in the industry at the same time. OSF Films tended not to venture into the realms of stop-motion animation, but I was animating commercials here and there, as the opportunity arose… Some of them were quite prestigious - I worked with the highly influential director Tony Kaye on a series of British Rail Commercials:

At this time I was on the cusp of broadening my remit in the industry, and striking up a relationship with FilmFair - and the great Animator Barry Leith - responsible for Paddington Bear - The Wombles, and various other high profile TV shows.. From then on there would be many, many commercials which were regarded highly by the establishment…. I either worked as an assistant - or I did the animation; When there was little animation work around (it came in phases) - I would concentrate on modelwork & illustration. By this time, my network was fairly extensive, and the work didn’t have too many gaps in it…..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ8e0PLFDeY
An Electron Microscope Image - part of a Washing Powder Commercial
Liquid Mercury

[Q-Freddie]

Broad Horizons Pt III
The Epiphanies come thick & fast....
Tim Staffell
Nov 4

The Floodgates were open at this time… It was as if my prejudices had fallen away - I no longer felt constrained by any genre, and really since that time, I’ve become open to a lot of material, it also allowed me to broaden my horizons in a retrospective fashion. Much material I hadn’t quite understood from my earlier years qualified for re-evaluation. I suppose I was in my late thirties - I was listening to such an eclectic mix of material at this time… new players, writers, bands were being added to my inner playlists… At the same time that I discovered Handel and Bach, I came across Dave Grusin and Lee Ritenour; In a couple more years, When I got Cable TV - I discovered mainstream Country, On the one hand I was listening to ‘Migration’ and ‘The Gershwin Collection’ by Dave Grusin, and at the same time ‘The Rite Of Spring’ & ‘Pulcinella’ by Stravinksy, interspresed with ‘It’s Your Call’ by Reba McEntire, and ‘Cheap Seats’ by Alabama, Of course, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal were still scratching my Blues Itch, and I’ve never let go of Bob Dylan, or the Band, or Little Feet or The Neville Brothers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b61MBAMOUWo

[Q-Freddie]

Mit leichter Verspätung

1994: Minding My Own Business...
The Millenium Flag flutters in te breeze...
Tim Staffell
Nov 17

When I was a kid, the millenium seemed to be a flag waving atop an impossibly distant high-rise… a normal response; I would have half a century before I could make out any detail; so when the ‘nineties eventually rolled around, and I entered my fourth decade on the planet - (having been engaged now in my ‘career’ for something like fifteen years), I could see the millenium flag of my life in high resolution, clearly fluttering in the breeze. I had been mostly working as a freelance Artist/Modelmaker in Film & TV, but with intermittent forays into music and songwriting, My millenium flag read,as always, in bold letters: ‘52 years old’.

During the ‘Tommy The Tank’ years of a decade before, I’d made a raft of friends from all corners of the visual arts fraternity (and sorority) -and I chanced to run into an old colleague, Tom Vane, in Richmond in about ‘94 when I was between commissions. He had landed a plum contract to build a large landscape model for a Centerparcs commercial, and was crewing up to complete. He had a small workshop above the old firestation in Richmond - accessible only by rickety wooden stairs, and appropriate for only small tabletop work, and the occasional middle-sized construction that could be broken down and reassembled for transport. He ‘recruited’ me, which is to say that he suggested that we share the job (thus creating a temporary partnership) and we set to analysing the logistics of the thing.


We kick off together…
It was long before the appearance of drones, and helicopter footage of the real thing was prohibitively expensive, so it behove us to plan & build a 40’ square landscape model with full topographical detail (including the model of a Centerparcs dome) - to facilitate a snorkel camera shot flown by crane above it. This would link with live action shots at the real location, and serve to cement together a ‘holiday brochure’ ad, proclaiming the benefits of a stay at the Parc. This was not, as you might think, a lacklustre recipe for an ersatz substitute of real aerial footage - because Lighting Camermen are real artists, and they can illuminate and shoot model sets (or anything, actually) in the most delicate and creative ways imaginable.

Due to the physical limits of our workshop, and not wanting to lose a lucrative commssion. Tom & I looked around for workshop space to hire, to build the landscape. We needed a substantial floor area, as the required model (a spread of rolling downs, crisscrossed with little streams, farmtracks and incidental buildings, as well as the clients resort complex, was forty feet on a side) Now Tom and I had both worked on Tommy The Tank, and were well versed in landscape models of this sort of size. We managed to hire a deserted ward in the veteran’s hospital on the top of Richmond Hill - The Royal Star and Garter Home, This was at a time when the hospital was in it’s decline - it was at this time, more of a hospice for elderly injured soldiers from the world wars - and has since been sold an redeveloped as ludicrously expensive apartments. But at that time, it was to a large part, empty… and suited us admirably, and the build was completed in relative (if sometimes slightly eerie) peace, with the ghosts of old soldiers looking disapprovingly at us across the gulf of time.

Ahead Full……
The impetus of that one large job set Tom & I off on a journey that would last for nearly a decade, albeit with some radical changes on the way. It became apparent that we would need to relocate, since we were now being offered work that was too big to site in the Union Court premises…We chanced upon a 1500 sq ft. ‘four-waller’ in Sheen Lane, close to Mortlake Station, a couple of miles from Richmond. It was the annex to a substantial office furniture warehouse, and it suited us just fine. We installed a spraybooth, a mezzanine floor, an office, and we were away!

From that moment on, in 1994, we had a fun time with a succession of, (and a huge variety of), different commissions creating sets, models, puppets, theming, decor, live effects, animations, renovations - you name it; our work was of decent quality, and we were reliable, and reasonably priced. There was a good deal of what you might call ‘below-the-line’ work, that is to say, commercial enterprises of national but not international repute, with a corresponding reduced footprint. We worked regularly in museums and on exhibitions, providing theming and large-scale installations, then home-grown domestic products, every variety of consumer commercials and every now and then a Global Brand (with proportionately lucrative budgets) would come along: We had enormous fun building models and sets for the re-launch of Captain BirdsEye (The nautical fish-fingers figurehead) as an alpha-male superhero-type. We shot two 30 sec. TV commercials in the space of twelve months - one in Milan, the other in Toronto. The list of models called for (amongst others) a large model schooner, an animatronic Pelican, and a futuristic Flying Submarine.

Disney & Beyond
Born in some Adman’s drunken reverie no doubt - the effect on sales of the relaunch of the character proved to be completely underwhelming to Findus, the parent company.. and not long after the advertising strategy reverted to the persona of a kindly old sea captain; Who knows what haoppened to the models; they were all very lovely, especially the animated Pelican!

In any case, we made money, and we were well into the project after next by the time they dropped the dashing young Captain B in favour of his Granddad.

During this period, We were producing a lot of feature bottle and container design prototype

s for ‘personal grooming’ products - mainly shampoos and conditioner, hand creme and moisturiser - that sort of thing. These were largely children’s products, and as such often depicted popular characters from Film & TV; We worked for Disney, George Lucas - Beatrix Potter Estate, and, coincidentally, the Thomas The Tank Engine franchise producing Bubble Bath Containers - Soap Dishes etc.

Expo 98
We had our ups & downs, of course - I spent four months in Lisbon project-managing our work on The Macau Pavilion, Expo 98, arguably the best (and to date the most high-profile) job we had ever done. The job was a triumph - a 120’ giant sculpture of a chinese dragon coiled round the whole of the installation pavilion - several themed shops and buildings from the Portuguese protectorate (soon to revert to Chinese administration).. feature sculpts and incidentals - a huge architectural model of Macau rising on a hydraulic platform out of an eye-shaped pool and many painted and sculpted effects and treatment to the whole installation. Unfortunately, the other job we had for the same exhibition (in the Shell Pavilion) - went, as they say, tits-up. It was a disaster. We lost bearly eighty grand on making it right. There’s nothing so awful as having to work on a difficult job that has gone wrong, fully knowing that it’s bleeding money every day. Horrible. It was around this time that my long-time business partner Tom revealed that he was suffereing from hereditary multiple sclerosis; the outcome of which meant that he would be stepping down. This was a blow, but We recruited the services of an administrator friend who was able to fill in the shortfall, and was instrumental in helping us trade out of the deficit. By the time We were beginning to gear up for the millenium, We were back in the black, and firing on all cylinders…

And so we continued as before; and in fact as we approached the Millenium, we began to pick up Millenium commissions. We took on an extra 6000 square feet to allow us to gear up for the increased workload - At this time we were employing a score of people on prjects as diverse as a static replica of a 1956 Bentley Continental for the Berlin Motor Show, a complete Victorian Street for Kirkstall Abbey Museum in Leeds, The Millenium ‘Amazing Brain’ exhibition in Bristol - The NAtional Space Museum in Leicester - and of course the Millenium Dome, for which we were commissioned to theme two zones - The National, and The Local.

Back To The Future….
After the Millenium, the work dried up (of course - most of it was turn-of-the-century focused. We downsized to shed the increased overheads, and laid off the extra workforce; we worked on in a reduced capacity, for another year but by the time the Twin Towers came down in 2001 We had determined to close the company dow and call it a day; Movie work had been almost entirely subsumed by digital designers, and the Museum and Exhibition clients were no longer in a build phase, now that the Millenium had passed. We had taken a hit in Lisobon, but we had traded back up, and though we were no longer in debt, we decided to quit while ahead. My next move would be back to Music… and that for another time!

The site of our original workshop, in Union Court, Richmond.
The Star & Garter Home… put up for sale in 2011
The Flying Submarine and The Schooner - both about a metre long.Borne
Pocahontas and Darth Vader - both reimagined as BubbleBath bottle toppers
The Dragon’s Head and the shop interiors; Macau Pavilion Expo ‘98

[Q-Freddie]

Reflected Glory...
An ongoing story of enlightenment, guilt and trepidation
Tim Staffell
Nov 18

A few days ago, I downloaded (for my Kindle) Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Lecture. Dylan to me has always been pretty much the apotheosis, as regards songwriters who drifted through my cultural demographic and that I might have felt socially akin to…. I was interested in hearing a first person overview of how things seemed to him back in the day, and to contrast it with what I myself had experienced… I wasn’t disappointed. It seemed to me that the promises that the music business had flagged up for us were similar. We both wanted to emulate these guys who were strutting their stuff on stages in front of us - and we wanted to be KNOWN for doing it. Dylan, of course proved to be far more erudite and articulate than I, a better singer (in terms that I would come to accept), a better guitar player, and, clearly, better at negotiating the badlands of the business.

I, so to speak, fell by the wayside; broken partly through the survival imperative, and partly through emotional resignation. At the time I consoled myself with the fact that people who were able to negotiate the nasty music business successfully, were, no doubt, less sensitive than I. (I was trying to hang on to a vestige of self-esteem, but I’m not oblivious to the fact that many musicians have been through hell in the pursuit of the holy grail)...

[Q-Freddie]

2004:A Fitting Conclusion
I take up teaching.....
Tim Staffell
Dec 15

The Fall of the Twin Towers marked something of a paradigm shift for the world. Previously such flamboyant images had been the sole province of Hollywood and the effects men - Grand destructive gestures such as this hadn’t been experienced since the war, and never in isolation. The population was stunned. We were in the process of shutting down our business; Sited under the flight path to Heathrow, in our workshop, there were several days when the roar of a commercial jet on its final approach filled us with terror.It took a while before we were able to settle down, and consider flying again. Regulations were ramped up. Eventually I plucked up courage to get on a plane again. I had returned to the life of a freelance artist/modelmaker; During the post-millenium years, work opportunities had dried up somewhat, as if the furore approaching the date had left clients and advertisers alike sagging aginst the ropes, waiting for a fresh impetus to create.

At this time I took it into my head that whatever else I was going to do, a solo album was going to figure in there somewhere. My eldest son Andrew, exposed to my taste in the house during his early years had chimed wiith the style of music I liked, and consequently, with the drum kit I bought him, had become a fine drummer. I was still in contact with Richard Lightman from ‘Tailfeather’ days, back in the ‘seventies, and together with John Webster, a guitarist from Kingston, and Peter Hammond, a terrific jazz pianist from Twickenham, we laid our plans to record my first album of songs.

Cherché les Florins….
Although I had some money from the dissolution of our business, I still needed to work. I answered an Ad in (I think it was the Guardian) for a Theatre Set Carpenter role at a prominent North London Musical Conservatory- and, although it was somewhat out of my comfort zone, I had little doubt that I would be able to hack it. And so it proved; I was salaried again, and I had a musical project on the go. I packed up fags in celebration (after having smoked for half-a-century) and began one of the most enjoyable periods of my life. Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts had begun just after the end of the second world war - founded in Crouch End by Peter Coxhead, and gradually had grown into a formidable educational institute for young actors, musicians, and theatre technicians. The College relocated in the early 2000s to a number of separate units in The Chocolate Factory, Wood Green - original site of Barratt’s Confectionery. I was sited in what had been the Transport Garage for the distribution vehicles; adapted into a fine high-ceilinged workshop with twin shutter doors, and a mezzanine office in one corner. We built something like 25 shows per year; some located in external theatres, some in the few small performance spacees that the college actually owned. I came to the conclusion that Theatre Techies are amongst the nicest people in the world. They perform a massively creative job for (generally) very little pay, and even less recognition. But they are devoted to what they do - and they do it damn well.

Every Day’s a School Day….
I hadn’t, traditionally, been a massive fan of musicals; although back in the day, after I’d left Smile I auditioned for (and was offered!) a role in Galt McDermott’s follow up to ‘Hair’. I turned it down, more through an irrational prejudice than informed choice… who knows where I’d be if I had followed that path? My time at Mountview demonstrated to me that, as with all Music… beauty is in the eye of the beholder… or in this case, the ear… Apart from anything else, my time there opened up my mind… in fact, I’d almost go further and say that my whole existence has been a process of continual repeated openings of my mind to wider and wider appreciations. .. I was playing harp occasionally with Factory House Blues, a local band fronted by a very good friend Anita Rivera, a professional sculptor, based next door to my (college) workshop and a GREAT blues singer. Sadly, she passed away unexpectedly from a stroke one Easter weekend sending sad shockwaves through the neighbourhood. Mountview did not, at that time, have it’s own theatre space. I was privileged to be able to build and install sets in local theatres like the Pleasance in Caledonian Road, the Shaw Theatre off Marylebone Road, the Bernie Grant Centre in Tottenham, Jackson’s Lane Theatre in Hornsey, the Charing Cross Theatre, in the arches underneath the station, and several more. It was genuinely a joyous and stimulating time - I should say that I was sixty years old - and approaching my retirement….and things were buzzing!

Avenues Of Island Lives….
Of course, during my time at Mountview, I was taking on freelance work in the evenings… I built installations for shows for the King’s Head Theatre in Islington, Lansing College in Sussex, A scaled-up Gibson L-001 to be cast in bronze for the statue of Robert Johnson, the great blues singer in Felix Dennis’s ‘Garden Of Heroes & Villains’ in Warwickshire… (For The Sculptor Steven Gregory) - and an elaborate coffin for Cameron McIntosh’s touring production of ‘Evita’…. and, of course, I also found the time to write and record two solo albums; aMIGO, and Two Late… with my erstwhile musical colleague Richard Lightman - the talented Canadian guitarist who I had worked with in the ‘Seventies, and who I had kept in touch with, contributing occasionally to musical (and graphic) projects that he was engaged in… aMIGO was a hybrid of old material (reworkings of ‘Earth’ & ‘Doin’ Alright’), ‘Why Can’t We Be Free’ (also from that era) - two ‘Tailfeather’ tunes from the ‘Seventies’ and a bunch of unrecorded and newly written material. We cut the backing tracks at a small studion in Fulwell, W. London, and completed the vocal & instrumental overdubs, and mixing at Lightman’s small studio in Twickenham. It was a milestone for me. I had consolidated my belief in myself as a writer, and we had produced a very good album, for posterity, if nothing else. The boost to my confidence, though, was in many ways, the most significant thing by far.

…and Men of No Distinction…..
A few years later, I found myself in Paul Weller’s Black Barn Studio on Ripley Common, out towards Guildford on the A3, recording my second Cd… As I recall, it wasn’t originally going to be called ‘Two Late’ but we ended up not finishing it for quite some time, and it then became an obvious tautology; the album was my second (Two) and it was Late! With aMIGO, I had enlisted the help of my old friends Brian May, Snowy White, and Morgan Fisher to ‘guest’ on the album. This time, we hunkered down and got to grip with a batch of brand new songs, in a forward looking frame of mind, and made the thing our own… It had a special significance for me, in that it proved that I was still able to write material that was interesting and had some substance. As before with aMIGO, Richard Lightman and I collaborated on a couple of the tunes, but this time, the rest were mine.

It would be a few years, a life-changing BioPic, and a Pandemic before I found myself in the studio again, but first - I was about to retire from gainful employment!

In Black Barn Studios. With the great Tenor Player Duncan Eagles
Mountview in Wood Green Days. The Chocolate Factory is in the Background
The Daily Commute