Post art school – Amusing the very rich

By this time I was living with a girl in a flat in Islington, on Upper Street to be exact, above a laundrette which was handy, as I simply waited until all my cloths needed a wash, and then with a towel around myself I would go down to the laundrette, stuff my things into a machine and go back upstairs to my room to wait until they were finished, and then nip down, bung them into the dryer and back up again.... This was a very simple and good solution to my dirty cloths problems.... I did this for several years with no problems from anyone.

I was also rather forcibly introduced to the different usages between American English and English English in this flat. One of the other people in the flat who was away on holiday had arranged to lend her room to an American friend who was passing through London. All well and good. But on the evening before she was due to head back to the USA, she told us she needed to be awake early to catch her flight... So in all innocence I said “Fine, I shall knock you up in the morning”. Poor girl, she was terrified I later learned, rushed off to her room and locked the door.....

As I was unemployed (and to be honest, more or less unemployable too) I was very relieved when a flat mate got me a job with a party designer called Adam Pollock who specialized in creating decors for parties for the rich, their clubs and window dressing for shops such as Hermes. This was a fun way to earn a living, Creating amazing environments for the super rich to celebrate the 21^st birthdays of their kids, decorate the gambling and dance clubs they haunted, such as Annabels and similar. It was all totally over the top stuff... I still remember us buying all the gold leaf that there was in London, finding a small army of art students who knew how to apply gold leaf and covering the entire ceiling of Annabel's with that gold leaf when we turned the club into a sort of Russian palace for a two weeks special... Then it was all painted over with emulsion paint... So it is still there in fact...

To give you another look at the insanity of the seriously rich, we were also involved in designing the décor for a private diner at the Savoy hotel for one of Adam's customers, which was for the man and 7 of his friends. We placed live palm trees in the room, complete with coconuts and live monkeys and all manner of stuff. This meal cost the guy £75 000. To put that a bit into context, at that time a worker in Britain was paid about £12 a week.

It was all really very surreal to be honest, but it paid the bills at least.

So I spent a couple of happy years serving the rich of the land, and having a reasonably enjoyable life with my friends. I also found myself coming into contact with the members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band at about this time, a curious and eccentric collection of ex-art students who actually were pretty good musicians as well. This is where I acquired my rather large tuba, as Uncle Vic (Vivian Stanshal) who played the tuba and sang in that band wanted to change to a sousaphone instead of a tuba, so I bought his from him – still have it amazingly enough.

Rather later I found myself designing the lighting for a performance they did at the Royal Albert Hall, a strange collection of performers, The Bonzos, Humble Pie, Joe Cocker and strangest of all, Tiny Tim among others.

During rehearsals Tiny Tim was led by two large minders to the microphone on the stage, and when it was time for him to start singing, one of his minders gave him a nudge, and like some sort of robot, Tiny Tim went into his act... And after he had finished, his minders took his arms again and led him away. Very strange creature.. He was remarkably tall, and absolutely pear shaped. In the actual performance he didn't have his minders and performed perfectly.

I also made a huge pair of buttocks for the Bonzos as a prop for some song or other of theirs too... Life was full of such silliness.

After a while Adam's work dried up and I found myself unemployed and at a loss as to what to do with myself. A very difficult period in my life began then, basically I was unemployed apart from pick up work with various outfits like Manpower, doing things like cleaning out the American Embassy offices, helping people move their possessions into their new homes, and so on.. relatively interesting, but tricky. I became an expert in fighting off old age pensioners in grocers shops for the cheapest cuts of bacon and such like... and pretty well lived on Spaghetti for the better part of that year. A year I remember with not too much pleasure, but it had its moments I suppose.

I couldn’t afford to buy my social security stamps, but didn’t want to go on the dole, so I simply ignored that side of things, and scraped by. After about 9 months of this a man from the social services appeared at my door one day asking why I hadn’t paid any of the various social charges one had to pay. I explained that I could just about manage to live on what I could earn, but there was no way I could also afford to pay their charges, and I had no desire to go on the dole.....

But the idiot wasn't moved by all of that, and told me that I had three choices, I could refuse to pay and thus be sent to jail, I could pay up till that moment and then go on the dole, or I could simply pay the back log and continue to pay every week as I was legally obliged to do....

I tried to argue with him saying that if they left me alone I could get by, and had no desire to have anything to do with their system.. but he was immovable.. So since jail didn’t appeal, nor did going on the dole, I managed to borrow the money to pay the back log and then struggled to pay them their dues each week.. made my life a thousand times more tricky than it had been before they came and bothered me.. Damn their stupid eyes.

But better things were just ahead of me.......