Music was always a driving force during my teenage years in the 1970's the main source of information came through music papers such as the New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Sounds. I had been given a Watkins Rapier guitar by my uncle when I was about 11, about the same time I also acquired a Kodak Brownie camera so music and photography were constant themes at that time in my life. Initially music dominated, playing guitar with various bands but ended up being offered the chance to join a band called Bazooka Joe where the bass player Stuart Goddard had left to form his own band Adam & The Ants and by coincidence I had been at school with Stuart. At that time I did’nt play the bass but jumped at the opening and quickly purchased a white Fender Mustang bass from Macari's music store in Shaftesbury Avenue and started learning the scales.
At age 18 I started a job at Colour Processing Labs in Warren Street London where I was an apprentice trainee processor earning £13 a week. My job entailled collecting clients film from the reception, loading the film onto racks in the darkroom where a mechanical arm moved the racks along the chemical tank process and then moving the film into a large dryer. The final part of the process was for me to cut the rolls of fim up putting them into clear plastic sleevs and returning them to the reception to be collected. The process was repetitive and after a week I learn as much as I needed to know about machine film processing however what intrigued me was not how the film was processed but what was on the celuloid. Constantly cutting film up meant I had to look at what was recorded, I needed to understand the process of getting an image onto the film. That inevitably lead to the next part of my journey, I needed to work for a photographer and I did'nt need to look too far as my father was a photographer, a famous one at that. I asked him for an assisting job but to my surprize he turned me down claiming he already had two assistants and so I continued working at the labs but after several more months of pestering him he finally caved in and said I could be a third assistant but my duties were merely to sweep up and make coffee. It was a start and I was in. Over the next 7 years I worked my way up to studio manager and travelled the world with Duffy on photographic assignments finally starting my own career in 1979. Needless to say photography won the day over my fledgling music ambitions with no regrets.
