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"At that point it was like well ok I’ve not got into the London SS, I can’t find any other people to form a band with, so I went back to Leytonstone and picked up on the punk records that began to come though. I started reading about the Pistols and Clash before I even saw them. My first brush with punk would have been Patti Smith on John Peel. I then went out and tracked down 'Horses' and bought it.

By 1977 I had  worked in an office for a couple of years but ended up on the dole for a long period. During that time I just got totally bored and thought 'no this isn’t the life for me where’s this all going’. One of the things that kept me going was going to a community group theatre called Soapbox in Stratford E15 and I fell into alternative theatre. I’m quite shy and quite timid in a lot of ways but I used to go to their dramatic improvisation workshops and was asked to join the group. It was great because you didn’t have to be qualified in any way but to just have enthusiasm and I would go every week religiously. It turned me on to the idea of communication through stage acting, music or whatever and it made me feel that I could get out of myself doing this. I could go out like other people and be different!!

It was strange though. After never living outside of home I had to live in a commune and to cook for people when I had never cooked before. I remember for my first meal I made spaghetti; I put it into the cold water and heated it up. It must have been a nice dinner of mush! 

Being community based we did some social plays, children’s theatre, and some stuff written within the group. It was a real mix of good and pretty awful stuff. I did 9 plays in a year and worked my way into writing and singing some songs for the plays and doing the lead bit in a play and I enjoyed it. We did a play about the homeless in a theatre in Aldgate and we used real homeless people who joined in the play. There were characters in the play playing DHSS people and these drunken homeless were on the stage abusing them for real and we had to act around it and hold the play together. It was really fun.

But bar a couple of songs there was nothing in the group that was my own writing so it wasn’t my own vehicle. I did see some of my performances on film and I thought shit that’s really bad acting but I enjoyed it anyway (lol).Did the theatre equip me for being on stage? The answer is in a lot of ways yes and in a lot of ways no.

I also worked in an advice place called East which was part of the same group ‘soaking up other people’s problems’.

“Certainly his familiarity with other people’s problem’s gives him an insight into their minds, and there’s still much of the actor in him. He can take up a stance of detached observation of the lives uncongenials - trendies, swinging babysitters, the bingo crowd – or use irony to describe horrific situations effectively, as in ‘George’, a song about the encounter of an innocent with the police backroom boys. Sounds 1979

Oh yes, he’s a goody goody two shoes
He says he has an alibi – our fists will play a lullaby