Chapter 1: Humble Beginnings

1980 - 1990

I was born in late 1980. Thinking back to the first ten years of my life… there’s a lot of good memories. From the evening story-telling of my parents, going on adventures outside, usually with my younger brother in tow. The cartoons and spin-off toys and music - it all kind of inter-connected into a playful, care-free childhood where anything was possible. I have two brothers now, but my youngest brother didn’t arrive until I was 12. So for now when I mention my brother, I refer to the one two years younger than me.

My mother was definitely an artist, but never really called herself one. She always had good ideas - they came in many forms, from subjects she’d suggest to draw or paint, to fun activities to keep drifting young minds occupied. She had an abundance of creativity - and continues to be my biggest creative influence.

The earliest memories I have are rainy days stuck indoors in the early 80s, feeling gloomy as all I wanted to do was play outside and build dens and climb trees with my younger brother. 

Not today… the coloured paper was coming out, my mum decided we were making life-size clowns! Another day we’d be making finger puppets, that would also become permanent ornaments for the family Christmas tree!

Music was a big part of my life from the beginning, I can remember my first Fisherprice music box with brightly coloured chunky discs. Before swiftly moving onto a Fisherprice record player that played actual vinyl! I remember the earliest 7” vinyls included The Birdie Song, Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite, Shakin’ Stevens and pretty sure I had the Doctor Who theme tune on vinyl too! One of funniest musical memories I have is listening to The Wombles album, and running in circles around the lounge with my brother, dripping with sweat to one of their songs Exercise is good for you (laziness is not) - listen to it and you might be able to understand the appeal to hyper kids with too much energy!

Fisherprice music box, phonograph and Reet Petite 7” vinyl cover artwork

Now that I think about it, that was another TV programme that definitely had an effect on me at a young age, I can remember being really scared of Daleks, Cybermen and other villains on that show, that would look a total joke compared to today’s special effects and costumes.  

Seeing the artwork and the music video of Reet Petite, it featured a freaky plasticine model of the singer. I began building little scenes with figures and objects from play-doh based on seeing that video - but always usually ended up with a brown sludge where all the bright colours had been mixed together.

Growing up I must have had hundreds of stories read to me, and I was fascinated not just by the words and the imaginary worlds, it was the pictures too, I’d spend hours looking through all the artwork and cover designs. The earliest ones I can remember are Topsy and Tim, Funny Bones, Rupert the Bear, and all the sinister Ladybird classics like The Gingerbread Man and Three Little Pigs.

I had an obsession with pop-up books too - in particular I remember a pirate chest thick card design that unravelled, and of course Fungus the Bogeyman with it’s clever intricately moving ‘snotty’ parts. There was another amazing cleverly designed one I remember called The Haunted House.

Let’s Find the Treasure by Richard Fowler, Fungus The Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs and The Haunted House by Jan Pieńkowski

I can recall being intrigued by my father’s vinyl collection - War of the Worlds being a particular choice with it’s vivid and frightening inner sleeve art. It’s seeing scenes like this (plus watching Jaws and Alien when you’re far too young) that set a young mind into overdrive. I went through a shark phase after Jaws, collecting many books featuring makos, reefs, hammerheads, tigers and of course the great whites.

Artwork by Peter Goodfellow, taken from Jeff Wayne’s musical of War of the Worlds vinyl booklet

My dad was an engineer - intricate, patient and methodical. He would also secretly build toy boxes, a children’s shop counter and post office in the garage, and my mum would paint and decorate them and bring them all to life.

Dad was a whizz at maths and physics, I remember seeing his books on the shelves and feeling baffled. His work eventually took him into the Space industry - the thought of what is out there beyond Earth has always been fascinating. It feels crazy to focus your mind when there is no sign of the outer limit, outer space goes on and on, and we don’t know where the end is… it allows your imagination to be free and come up with anything you want if you put yourself into outer space. It has to happen, there will be something amazing we discover soon and probably in our lifetime too. I noticed he shared this interest as a youngster, as he had loads of science fiction on the bookshelves.

He tried really hard to get me interested in maths when I was young, with private coaching and assistance with homework that otherwise I might not have completed, but he did enough to help me get through the school exams that came later on.

I always returned to the creative side - and got lost in the make-believe world. From feeding my brother imaginary lego meals in our fake restaurant, to recording entire audio-only episode of Neighbours on cassette tape, complete with all the 1980s character voices. 

The cast of Neighbours, in the 1980s

My brother and I had a really fun childhood, with many visits to science, history and biology museums, plus art galleries and even went down a coal mine - I can re-call wearing the most impractical velvet jacket and white jeans for that trip! As well as culture, we were burning energy doing Coca-cola sponsored gymnastics, trying to earn all the badges, but I was never quite as good as my younger brother, as he has no fear whereas I always held back a little. We both did loads of swimming - again collecting what seemed like hundreds of badges: from 10-1000 metres, life-saving lessons, including jumping in with pyjamas on, only to then get them off in the water and creating make-shift inflatables.

The earliest computer-based memories I have are a BBC computer frog game where you had to catch flies. My dad also had a really primitive fighter pilot 2D game, maybe with a cockpit view, and I found it stressful to watch him play it for some reason! Even those early 8-bit pixel graphics and ridiculous chip tunes must have caught my imagination somehow.

Hours of exposure to cartoon series and toy marketing - this is surely why ‘the hyper bunny club’ was born - I created a series of cards, different categories of rabbits hand-drawn, and I’d be giving these cards out to kids in the neighbourhood - “here you go son, you’re in my club now”. 

I’ve got this addiction to doing things to make others feel like they belong to something - I think again my mum might be the influence, and she was always organising social events, hosting parties, making costumes, baking cakes… if you help entertain other people, and they have a good time, then the feeling you get from that is so rewarding.

Super Carrot, Hyper Bunny & Super Tiger - as I vaguely remember them

I can’t remember exactly when, but my writing phase took off one day at lightning speed. I’d decided writing and illustrating books was my thing (probably after discovering Roald Dahl), and I used to pre-staple A4 paper together ready for each novel piled into a big crate - sometimes with coloured paper wrapped around for the covers. The first fictional book I remember making was ‘George’s Marvellous Dragon Friend’ - a total rip-off of Dahl’s George’s Marvellous Medicine, possibly with a hint of cartoon dragon thrown in for good measure. I was heavily pastiching all his stories, and I think Quentin Blake’s illustrations also rubbed off on me too, and I loved his rapid expressive pen and ink style. Some of his imagery will always flash into my mind - The Twits grotesque hygiene and eating of worms being a couple of examples!

Following this, I can remember creating another series involving a ‘Super Carrot’ character with sunglasses, not sure how many stories I had in the series, but there must have been a few. Another was ‘Super Tiger’ - you can see a pattern developing, and it also coincided with those early Christoper Reeve Superman films that were always repeated on TV! There’s a particularly infamous robot scene in Superman III that always sticks in my memory, had many nightmares about that…

Those scenes from Superman III when a woman gets turned into a robot by a computer

So not surprisingly, one of the next series involved a half boy/half-robot character, i’m pretty sure it was also around the same time as discovering the existence of The Terminator films. I can remember for those stories I think my book format may have shrunk down to around A5, and spending a lot longer on the detailed ink drawings - involving more gruesome bloody scenes. Boys are so weird.

I wish I still had all these books - god knows what happened to them all - but I literally was like a factory churning them out, hours and hours spent writing and illustrating entire series - I don’t think I ever pre-planned too much, just dived in - next story in the series, and each one evolved on the paper in front of me, I never seemed to get writer’s block, I must have just been constantly regurgitating mirror images of other stories/tv shows/films I’d just seen and then converting them into a re-worked format, involving my own characters and mixing them all up to create something new.

I think collecting The Beano became my thing for a while after this, as well as the standard 80s annuals! I loved a good sticker album too - I especially have fond memories of Thundercats, Transformers, Mask and many more. I also was intrigued by these 1960s narrow thin card booklets where you collected little cards from teabag boxes to stick into your album! I think my grandad always saved me the cards  - he had a decent collection of these - but I can see why now, as the collection tended to be birds, wildlife, airplanes, boats, cars and other sensible grown-up stuff.

My brother and I played a lot of games and puzzles too - some of the more interesting ones I’ve re-discovered when writing this included Ghost Castle, Hero Quest and Space Crusade. These latter 2 games being my tentative move towards model-making, although I never really caught that bug unlike my youngest brother who still dabbles today. 

Hero Quest, Space Crusade, and Ghost Castle board games

Toys of the 80s, there was such a rich selection of new ideas - and even then it felt really cool and highly sought after. From He-Man to Thundercats, Star Wars to MASK, Transformers and Go-bot Rock Lords. Outside - many of the make-believe adventures usually took place with my brother or a few neighbour pals - I was really into sandpits and remember them being the centre of my world for years - I remember spending hours building airports, streets, tunnels, and bridges for my toy cars. I’d spend hours patiently smoothing and adding water to the road surfaces by hand, building mini sand kerbs and obsessing over the smallest details - construction would easily fill a whole day, until an annoying younger brother came along and knocked it all down!

Building sandpit airports was heavily influenced by our first flight abroad to Majorca - I can remember that excitement of being on an airplane for the first time! Even the terrible plane food was amazing to us! And whilst we were in Majorca, I remember being on the look-out for the hottest toy of 1988 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! No one could get hold of them in the UK, even after queuing outside Woolworths before store-opening - all I came away with was Splinter the rat! Eventually we were in luck, finding a Spanish toy shop that had stock in, after an initial cheap market imitation of Raphael had started to fall to pieces.

He-Man, Thundercats, Go-bot Rock Lord, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure toys

Outdoors me and my brother were always dressing up as our favourite characters - I had a hand-made Superman cloak my mum made me, and spent hours running around the streets, obviously I was flying everywhere - and this carried on into my dreams, where I had many flight-based adventures. I think during a particular outdoor flying episode, I found some green poster paint in the garage, and decided the whole street was my artwork - so started throwing the paint literally everywhere - without even thinking. It didn’t take long, before the neighbours started to emerge, and the reports of my activities soon arrived at my parent’s door. I remember having to get a watering can and brush, and the cleaning up took long enough to put me off doing that again.

I can remember owning the small Lion-o plastic toy sword and pretending it would grow into a full-size sword when I shouted the catchphrase “Thundercats… Ho!” My dad then went one better by making us full-size wooden swords and shields - hand-painted with metallic paint by my mum! Hours of fun, and probably a few play-fight injuries along the way. Then there was the Ghostbusters phase - that was another scary film for young kids! We made our own Proton packs out of shredded wheat boxes and toilet rolls sellotaped together for a gun - at that time, the simplicity of making anything from rubbish was amazing, and I was totally chuffed with my construction skills and colouring in - I’m sure my mum would have been instrumental in pulling it all together.

Garbage Pail Kids bubble sticker trading cards - they were super popular at school, but quite messed up when you consider some of the imagery. I remember at one point all the kids were swapping them in the playground and it was so exciting to find one you didn’t have in your collection. I think they ended up being banned as everyone was getting so distracted from their school work.

Garbage Pail Kids trading cards

As I approached 10 years old, I was drawn back to music and home-recording, but this time I’d be trying to record the latest pop songs I liked off the top-40 radio chart show. I was always trying to hit start/stop to capture as much of the song as possible, cutting out the annoying presenter pre and post-chat. I remember illustrating the cassette stickers and sleeves, then having them all lined-up neatly on my bedroom shelf - probably all numbered and dated. Hmmm… maybe my dad did have more influence on me that I realised! 

At the end of a long day, I’ve got fond memories of waiting for my dad to get home, then we’d go for a walk along a long narrow alleyway from our house, into the village and across to the pub - they had a stable door at the side and sold crisps and chocolate - this was a real treat, especially when our dad taught us to make a crisp sandwich with chocolate in the middle. We always had strict instructions to get a Turkish Delight or Walnut Whip for my mum too.

The colourful nostalgia and vivid memories I have of the 1980s really had an effect on me, and I’m eternally grateful to my parents for giving me that childhood. The sense of freedom I had back then, I hope to keep a part of that forever and continue to explore it through my art.