In a nutshell…
I was born in Preston in 1977, I went to school in Preston and went to college in Preston. In 1995 I left to go to Leeds University to study geology for the sole reason that I was good at it. I finished university with an alright degree in a subject I was very bored with. After this I went traveling many times for many years. It got to the point where I was going abroad for long periods, coming back for six months to work in a crap job to earn money to go abroad again. Eventually no one would give me a good job as I’d never stay very long. I decided to go abroad teaching when I was 26 as I wanted a qualification that’d enable me to work and travel. The masterplan was getting qualified as a teacher, going to Japan with a work permit, DJing soul and reggae by night, meeting hot Japanese soul girls, teaching by day, selling some of the records I’d been playing, jetting off to the car boot sales of New York, buying different records so I had continually new play lists for the soul clubs and eventually different records to sell.

What really happened was I went to NYC, bought loads of records, kept them all and played them in my bedroom. I taught in Indonesia for a year (they paid for me to do my qualification), where I met my girlfriend Jen. We went traveling after teaching and ended up in London on Jen’s sister’s sofa, broke, applying for any job to get some quick cash. The job I got was labouring for a landscape gardening firm, which turned out to be quite nice. Within a year, I was managing the company and now years down the line I’m still a landscaper in London, just in a self-employed style. Now age 33, I’m what and where I am by good fortune alone.

Chance…
My whole life has been like that. Happy go lucky. Maybe because of that I’ve never persisted or tried to be anything in particular. When I was a kid, I never had a job that I wanted to do. I think I just wanted to be happy. School was easy, I got straight A’s (apart form a B in French), without having to try too hard. I never really had big aims or goals, just taking things in my stride, which was nice when I was young but maybe left me directionless in life in my 20’s, at least work-wise anyway. Since stumbling into my landscaping job I think I’ve got that bit of direction we all need. I still learn a lot, as well as teaching apprentices, which is pretty cool. It’s nice to like something a lot and enjoy putting effort into doing it. Direction is easier to achieve when you can see the end product; for me it’s pretty sweet at the end of a job, to be able to think to myself ‘I built that, it looks great and the standards are pretty high’. It’s nice being able to have pride in your work.

Sidelines…
Ilike doing art things, but my one failing is that I don’t specialise in anything, it’s nice to try everything, Jack-of-all-trades style, master of none! In the past I’ve done courses in photo etching, drawing, screen printing, photography, etc, but at the mo I’m trying a bit of self-taught oil painting. There’s a guy whose work I like called Billy Childish. He does his work quite quickly with the idea that when you take a lot of time and plan everything it’s too thought out and maybe not purely from your natural self - too constructed. That’s the line I’ve been taking with my painting – I’ve been knocking out pictures and giving myself half an hour to paint’characters’ out of the Metro newspaper. I bought oil and household paints fron the car booty and work on bits of old plywood I get from work. Yesterday I did a picture of my girlfriend that was two metres by one metre on a cardboard box that I took out of a skip down the road. I gave myself an hour to paint it on my front room floor. It’s not very good but it was quite mad to paint a massive picture! I also have a little dark room in my garage. I’ve kind of lost interest in taking pictures with my camera though, but I do like going to car boots sales, buying old negatives, developing and enlarging them and reworking the new photo into a collage or something like that.

Childhood…
As a kid I liked Lego. Starwars and Lego, nothing else really, no Action Man, no toy cars. As an only child Lego was good solo entertainment, I’d build stuff by myself. Maybe brothers or sisters were needed to race those cars and fight with. Teenage years were spent with friends – all my free time was spent out of the house, 365 days a year, every single day, no bullshit. Christmas Day, rain, snow, wind, every day there’d be me and 20 friends cruising round on bikes. I’ve always liked being around people. We were never bad kids or anything, we’d just go to the park and sit around, play football, no thieving, no vandalism, nothing like that.

I’ve always loved music since my dad bought me a record player when I was 12. I think half the reason that he bought it wasn’t because I was crazy about music but because it was the new concept thing to have - a Midi Hifi- twin tape, yeah baby, two tape decks (!), radio, record deck all in one big square unit. It was an Amstrad Midi Hifi from Argos, £99, boom! I got one at Christmas and went out and bought Queen, A Night at the Opera, my first record. The next time I bought Run DMC, Tougher Than Leather and Beastie Boys, Licensed to Ill. That was pop music at the time - it wasn’t like I was a hip hopper, I was only 12! Those boys were probably just top of the charts.

By the time I was 14 in 1991 the Manchester scene was massive. I couldn’t get into clubs but I’d been to see Happy Mondays, Charlatans, Stone Roses, Verve, etc by the time I was 15. It was nice being able to get on a train with some friends from school and go and see those kind of bands. We thought we were part of it all! We’d have paper rounds, save our dinner money from school, then go to Affleck’s Palace in Manchester once a month and buy clothes and second hand records from Vinyl Exchange. Life was sweet! Buy a sixteenth of weed on a weekend between three of you, £2.50 each, talk about the tunes you’d just bought and your Happy Monday T-shirt and that was it, wicked! The first ‘rave’ I went to was the 808 state In Your Face Turbo Rave, 31st March 1991, 10,000 people in G-MEX in Manchester, a proper eye opening night. I still remember it so well. We thought we had made it as genuine cool kids! The first time we saw loads of people completely off their faces, crazy tunes, dancing, visuals, it was all new and all good. Things like that night probably had a massive impact on me as a kid.

Growing up…
I grew up in Penwortham, which is a suburb of Preston. It had a massive effect on my life. It’s quite weird speaking to Londoners as they don’t have places like that here or at least not from what I’ve seen. It’s a village of about 10,000 with about five schools. Everyone has a fair opportunity to have an alright life. The downside is that there isn’t a lot to do in Preston, there are cinemas and lots of pubs. There aren’t many alternative things to do. Penwortham is a place where you walk around and know everyone. I can walk around Norwood where I live all day long and see no one that I even recognise and I’ve lived there for years. In Penwortham I know every name of every road, I’ve been up and down them a million times. I grew up happy in an area like that, there’s nothing good about it and nothing bad, it’s just the suburbs! What massively shaped me was spending loads of time with friends and people. When you have nothing to do you amuse each other, making up stories etc, not making up lies but telling little tales and having a laugh, you get to talking about stuff. Maybe that’s why I have such a big fucking mouth!

Encouragement…
I did well at school so didn’t really need any encouragement from my folks, I just got on with it. My parents have always trusted me and never told me what to do either, even when I was a kid. They’ve trusted that I’d never do any bad to people or get in any bad, bad trouble. They gave me a lot but I never took too much. When I was 14-15 they wanted me in at 11 on a weekend - I’d be home at 10.55 like a good little boy! It made life at home easy. I think my folks would back me in anything I do, there was no beef when the boy they probably thought might be a lawyer or accountant turned out to be a gardener!

Likes and dislikes…
I love the fact that I work outside and that I’m in control as I run the whole site! Although I work on all the tools, my main job is organising. I co-ordinate with the client, my boss and the designer, organise materials, plans and all my boys on site. People skills and efficiency. I work out lots of bullshit stuff and plan the most efficient way of doing it. I apply that to all areas of life, which is a bit sad but that’s what I do. I think efficiency is a great thing. Things are easy when they’re efficient and functional.

I dislike the fact that I travel for up to three hours for work every day. I dislike people assuming I’m a bit dim as I don’t work in an office. I dislike the casual racism you hear on trade type jobs and the way people think something is wrong with you when you challenge it. I think that’s all there is to dislike about my job. There’s a lot of banter on a site, which is great. When you usually work in a small space with four blokes you have to get inventive with the chat, just for the sake of sanity. When you meet someone new on site you have to come with the banter straight away to show that you can give as good as you get. Not in an aggressive style, but in a way that says ‘don’t give too much jip’!

I enjoy working with people of all abilities, classes and backgrounds, from the posh clients on a £100,000 job and design types to labourers on site. I’ve always had that in my life. My mates from school were from all different sets, some clever, some not so, some richer than other,s etc. Our crew was a really big mix, whereas people I met at university seemed to hang around people of equal intelligence and similar backgrounds. I feel fortunate that I’ve always had different people around me throughout my life.

Collections…
In a chronic fashion, I collect records and furniture. As someone with a non-arty background, I collect things that I deem cultural. The culture thing is how I justify buying loads of records for myself! To me, music is a massive part of culture, I think some see culture as being the opera or fine classical paintings or theatre. Culture for me is music, art, design. Design is fantastic, you get something that’s practical and looks cool as well as being something that we all use. You can’t beat that. A nice chair, what what! Everyone in the world has some sort of seat in their home, you may as well get a fat one.

Records are such wicked things, you can go down to the car boot sale, spend 20p and get something that could stay in your mind forever. More importantly you can come home from work, put on some tunes and the music will change your mood. It makes me happy. I can’t think of anything that I can buy that make me as happy as records. I am a geek for collecting records. I’ve got at least 10,000 records all over the place, my mum and dad’s house, the garage, my loft, my dad’s wardrobe, my house in Norwood, all under the bed in my bedroom, spare room, etc. I am a collector and I love it, but at the same time there is a monetary aspect there as well. I don’t collect them because they’re worth money but I do know that if I need cash quickly I can go and sell say 50 reggae singles and get a few grand, if I was desperate. It’s the same with some furniture and other things too, you can buy quality and it’s not going to go down in value. You enjoy it while you have it. I guess these things are my little pension too.

Advice…
My boss once said to me ‘Regret the things you’ve done, not the things you didn’t do’. It’s great advice but I’ve not really taken him up on it as I’m no good at throwing caution to the wind. A posh girl in my maths class at college also once said to me ‘the wise man forgives but never forgets’. I took that advice and carried it on. Jen hates that about me because I have the ability to forgive, but still remember all those little shitty things, which is quite amazing for an ex stoner.

Inspiration…
I enjoy going to galleries and stuff like that, but the thing I really like is meeting weird people, odd bods, people who do strange things or who are massively eccentric. I’m a magnet for people like that. My girlfriend always says I attract those people, whether it’s the tramp on the street, the nutter at the bus stop or some aristocrat I’ve met while traveling. I never fear those people. I like talking to those folk, people who’s lifestyles are completely different to mine. I’ve even met a few murderers in the past, not that I go around actively looking for people like that, I just find it mad chatting to people who’ve had totally different experiences in life. I’m into books and music too, they tell me about people’s lifestyles and attitudes to the world, past and present, and keep me sane on the tube every day. Look to the past if you want to find out about the future, wise words my son, wise words!

People…
Humble folk are good folk, it takes a lot to be humble. It’s nice to remember other things that are probably more important or equally important as yourself. Someone like Curtis Mayfield was a person who I think was a genuinely good guy. I cried when he died. I still cry every time I listen to the Curtis Live LP (check it out). For me, it’s very, very pure. He was a nice guy who wrote and played great music at the time when society was changing a great deal. He was always able to say ‘let’s all get along’ with genuine intent, a quality not as common as I’d like to think. That sounds a bit hippy-ish, but Curtis had his fingers on the right buttons. James Brown is a musical inspiration or me but not inspiration for life, he was a fucking wife beater! I like people who are true to what they really like, that’s not always that easy, but definately a good quality (as long as it’s not wife beating).