Within my memoirs I’ve documented the positive effect that Punk Rock had on the fifteen-year-old me. I was one of the Bored Teenagers of whom The Adverts sang.

The rip it up, do-it-yourself ethos of the early days inspired me to create my own shirts and fanzines.

‘We made our shirts with sprays and knives
We saved up for weeks for Malcolm’s strides.’
Generation X: ‘Promises Promises’

Of course I could not travel down to the King’s Road in London to buy clothing made by Vivenne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. Therefore, energised by their controversial template and photographic reference points in the music press, I spent many finger-pricking hours with a needle and thread taking in flared trousers to make them streamlined narrow-leg, and I tore and stitched, stencilled and sloganeered on old baggy white shirts either liberated from my dad’s wardrobe or bought from the charity shop for a few pence. This was before the arrival of the acceptable cartoonish uniform now forever identifed with punk: studded leather jackets and enormous dayglo-dyed Mohican hair. Punk Rock was as much your approach to life as it was as a sartorial manifestation of disgruntlement.

“It ain’t just about the clothes you wear.”
Johnny Rotten

Four decades had passed when, in the summer 2023 Matthew Chesney, CEO of Backlit Gallery invited me to contribute to the Punk: Rage & Revolution exhibtion which was hurtling towards Nottingham following highly successful tenures in Leicester and Northampton.

In September – on what was officially the hottest day of the year – I was interviewed for the exhibition by Panya Banjoko, poet and founder of The Nottingham Black Archive. The hour-long session which covered my formative years in St. Ann’s was subsequently edited to a more manageable length, and interspersed with images of me and my fanzine covers. For the exhibition it played on a vintage television set with headphones attached for individual enjoyment, and a copy of That Boy Of Yours Wants Looking At on the top.

Illustrating my history of non-conformism, also displayed was a photo of me aged nine wearing one of my everyday wear comprising a home-made crepe paper wig, with glitter beneath my eyes,  and a DIY feather boa looped around my neck.  At the side of it is an enlarged cover of my ‘Eat Me’ fanzine, for which I hand drew the lettering based on the logo on the debut album by The Clash. As there were no capital E or M it meant that I had to design my own. I was honoured that, in homage to the fanzines I made when I was fifteen, the young arts collective ‘Pending’ created their own impressively super-sized ‘zine.’