I’d been in London for a while, 2 years perhaps, I’d got a job firstly at a smallish ad agency on Picadilly facing Green Park. It was a job I didn’t really understand and they gave me a tiny office next door to a large office where the Creative Director occupied his time. I was supposed to be his assistant. A sort of ‘Gofer’ , go for this or go for that. It was not a job I enjoyed very much but it put me in contact with other assistant art directors, in particular with a bloke from Pembrokeshire called Graham. We became friends and chatted about all sorts before moving on to get jobs with other ad agencies as was the theme of life in those days. I’d started at the first agency on £850.00 per annum salary. Much Less than I’d previously been paid for delivering cakes in Oldham and the North West ( where I saved my wages to enable me to go to London and find fame and fortune )

Graham and I moved to different agencies on salaries of over £1,000 per year. We both thought we’d arrived in some way.

At the time Graham and his wife Margaret ( they’d married young! ) found a place to live in Shepherds Bush, a small bedsit flat that they did up to make a lovely living space. It was in a big house which these days would be described as an HMO: house in multiple occupation. The front room bedsit occupied by a quiet bloke who worked in acccounts somewhere, the back rooms by Graham and Margaret. Upstairs front bedsit was Derek and Carole, he a budding ambitious lawyer from Worksop, she a Californian girl who liked England. At the back was Miss Tritton, a quiet mouse of a lady, possibly the model for Eleanor Rigby. An open landing then lead to the unoccupied and somewhat run down top floor, which had three rooms, a kitchen and bathroom. It looked like it hadn’t been touched since the War, the First one, though it did have a gas fridge.

Meanwhile I lived with my good friends Dave and Alan from college days in Princes Mews, Bayswater in a small flat over a garage where the owner of the place did panel beating repairing bent cars. Literally bent, not stolen. The noise did not bother us as we were all three out at work all day.

Then I was made redundant from my latest job , saying goodbye to my career, some prospects and quite a few friends. In those days one was obliged to ‘sign on’ at the local employment exchange, mine was in Marylebone and one queued up each week to claim one’s benefit. I recall a morning in the queue asking a fellow signer what he ‘did’ for a living. ‘Opera Singer’ he replied smilingly. I wonder how he got on?

I started a round of job seeking taking my portfolio along to dozens of interviews at different ad agencies. I got thrown out of one very smart place down Baker Street, by a woman I called ‘The Blond Assasin’, she was not going to let me litter her reception area, especially as I had no appointment. I even looked back North, going to one ad agency in Liverpool where the bloke interviewing me said with a long sigh : “You don’t wanna werk ere!” In a kindly manner.” Why not?” I replied. “Just take a look at the shite on the wall” he said. On the wall was some of the worst pieces of mundane advertising work I’d ever seen, framed in gold frames. It really was as shite as he described it and I said thanks but no thanks and left. Jobless.

After six months on the dole and no luck I was beginning to feel a bit like nothing was going to happen for me. I was also getting some ear ache from the panel beating below.

Then Graham was made redundant from his job.

He came around to see me in Bayswater and said ” Why don’t we go into business ourselves, we know loads of people in the business, and there’s a flat at the top of where me and Margaret live where we can make the front room our studio and the back room can be yours to live in?’

Sliding door moment.

I said ‘yes’, sadly deserting my friends in Bayswater but giving them a bit more room, and moved into the busy house in beautiful downtown Shepherds Bush. The landlord agreed to let us have the flat there and we set about making the business. We gave our business a name, and Rooster was born. Goodness knows why we chose that name, but it worked. We worked hard to build it all up on very small capital. A loan from the local Barclays Bank of 100 quid, went to buying flat doors to make the desks along a wall and a sort of plans chest for paper, and all we needed then was a phone, anglepoise lamps, layout pads, cow gum,card, carpet and a lot of decorating. I got our office chairs from my Dad who’d sourced them from a police station where they were being thrown out.I recall that they were wooden solid chairs with a curved back, very comfortable unless you were being questioned. Graham had to climb the stairs to work, I just had to walk along the landing. He generally whistled to himself on the way up as a sort of incoming warning signal as the place had no front door, just that open landing.

Graham and Margaret’s ambition was to return to their beloved Pembrokeshire in due course. After a four year partnership they did. Four very eventful years in Sinclair Gardens. We were very successful. Working for a wide variety of advertising and design companies from a room in Shepherds Bush. I stayed in London until the early 1980s, but that’s a longer story.

The sliding door moment was Graham’s idea. Thanks Graham. We spent almost very day with each other and some nights working together, for four years with never a cross word. I could fill a book with the events and histories that happened in Shepherd Bush, I recall that one day with nothing better to talk about we discussed what we would call our autobiographies, I settled on ‘Dandruff in my Cow Gum’, it’s a work in progress as I write.

I’m still in touch with them and later this month am going to visit them in Pembrokeshire. Graham and Margaret built a different life down there, Graham essentially started again, graphic design and advertising was not a common business in the south west of Wales then, but he did it and then developed into one of the leading landscape artists in the field of colour pencil work: stunning stuff. Take a look here. We will no doubt spend all the time saying things like “Do you remember that time…”. I’m really looking forward to it.

The other day I was listening to Desert Island discs and someone was asked, what was the moment that changed your life. I thought to myself “How would that apply to me?” I immediately thought of my bearded friend at the door of our Bayswater flat saying he’d got an idea.

And the record? It’s a toss up between Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” or Elton John pre hair rug with “ Rocketman”

Elton shades it! Happy days.