The year: 1964
The Beatles took America by storm…
The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show
By 1964 I’d moved on from being a general dogsbody at the first studio I worked at and ended up, albeit briefly, at a so-called advertising agency, but it was more of a classified ad sweatshop. It was situated in one of the side streets of Smithfield Meat Market. At the time, it was rather like Covent Garden, with much of the surrounding area being a major infrastructure to the market.
The studio I worked in looked down on to a meat processing company: directly on to a line of large galvanised wheeled bins full of the most horrific looking entrails and offal. I have always been a vegetarian so found the whole environment quite disgusting. Needless to say, I only lasted there a couple of months. But while there my day was lifted by listening to this…
Radio Caroline started broadcasting and was the first of the pirate stations and a breath of fresh air to the grey, claustrophobic BBC of the time.
Meanwhile, this new programme appeared on TV, complete with its first presenter. Yes him, now slowly crackling in hell…
Top of the Pops 1964
And for me this was the film of that year…
Stanley Kubrick's Dr Stranglove
I moved from that Smithfield hellhole to Ludgate Hill close to St Paul’s, to a firm called Chevron Studio: an intimate little set-up where I assisted a ‘commercial artist’ called George Smith. A man with a passion for using Arbutus and little else (see my earlier post here). Here is an example of the kind of thing I had to do there…
A catalogue cover for a model manufacturer that I produced while at Cheveron Studio.
But my evenings were spent pursuing a new book that I had bought…
It ignited my desire for the potential of a new world. I was on my way.
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