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I can remember the first day.  it might have been the first week. we were given a project to…; this is me having having studied painting at Colchester School of Art where are we had tutors like Francis Bacon and others. We were given a project to draw a balloon which was inflated and positioned in front of a piece of a graph paper. And that was our project for the first month and, and I thought there's something weird going on here. I think none of us stuck to the project and I think that's when Dave started bringing the chickens in to the studio which got a little bit weird. There was still a bank of students there from the third year who were painting  But none of that was encouraged. It wasn't discouraged exactly, but that was not what we were set to do.

 

And it seemed fairly obvious, fairly quickly, that if we wanted to do anything creative we have to do it somewhere else. My memories of it are not good, so my memory of it is not good either. I found a lot of animosity. I found a lot of my fellow students were pissed off. I was already very friendly with someone who was extremely rebellious anyway. Pretty rebellious too. And so we just started doing other things. 

 

When we moved to the new art school what seemed interesting to me was, we were on the top floor of the building, the windows were high up on the wall, you couldn't see out, and there was no natural light. And this was the painting studio. In my second year when I decided I was going to do sculpture, because there was obviously nothing happening in the painting department, as far as I could see, we were told that Stone had spent the entire budget for the first, for our year. on his own exhibition. For materials, so we had no materials. So we started collecting rubbish and making stuff out of rubbish. Which we did quite well actually. 

 

The only teachers I thought anything of were Fawley, who came in the second year I think, the sculpture head, and Gibson.  For totally different reasons, the three of them. Gibson was, I don't know what he was but he seemed to be round about our age group, and he was totally off the wall. very amusing, and fun, and he liked to drink beer. And he liked girls. But he was an interesting guy to talk to. Fawley was fantastic, she was really alive she was, she brought things out I think in all of us. which had probably made us want to be at art school in the first place. and we'd forgotten about it because of all the bollocks that was going on. And the head of sculpture was a real technician, a real craftsman, and that was interesting to be taught something, and no-one else was teaching anybody anything.

 

I think I've blotted out a lot from my consciousness since. When I left Midville I was in London doing some concrete poetry, and cooking, I sent the copies of the magazine which were probably quite valuable even then, back to Coutts in a sealed plastic envelope filled with  disinfectant. My conceptual piece.

 

Even in Rauschenberg there was something to do with the romantic side to it, there was something to do with the poetic, something to do with the music. Conceptual art at that time, language stuff, in my view  was completely dry. Without humour that one could see. Basically obfuscating. and it was obfuscating students. it was so confusing that it confused the students. And it made them feel uneasy. Those tutors were experimenting on us. So my inclination was to withdraw from it. 

 

I was interviewed by Stone who came down to Colchester School of Art looking for recruits. and he just said to me, I was about to apply to St Martin's, and he promised all kind of things, it's this wonderful new opportunity and these wonderful new technical departments that were going to be available to us. And he persuaded me. It wasn't an interview, he persuaded me to go. I thought well at least I'm certain I can go there, I might not get into St Martin's.

 

There was a woman she was South African I think she was very pretty, called Fawley and she came and showed us holograms. I thought that was amazing stuff. And that was really inspiring. The way that technology was going. And I think a lot of us felt that too, it was really interesting. How that fitted into what we were doing at art school was a bit of a mystery. The second year one was feeling a bit more confident about being anti-establishment. I and a lot of other people had delved into Dada, As a resort. At least you're producing something. Rather than writing. Someone who was at Midville described us as The Typing Pool. Because the whole thing was to do with words. Joseph Kosuth came from America and he tried to persuade me that I should go to New York. I think at that time I had made the black window, and I had done all sorts of experiments with polythene. And it was the time of happenings. Chris, made a happening which was most bizarre, but he couldn't really do anything with his hands Chris, so everyone else had to do it for him. A bit like Damien Hirst.

 

But it was an interesting time in the sculpture department yes. I rebuilt the front of my mini with fiberglass. 

 

(Discussion with Kerr). It could have been Stone. It sounds like a sort of Stone conversation. We very rarely met him, I was asked to go into his office, yes that's right. He had a bottle of whiskey on his desk and he was drinking out of it, and we had a conversation. 

 

(Discussion about not having the A Levels). I can imagine that being true.  In the second year I was sharing a flat with Chris and Joe, and a philosophy student, a really interesting guy I can't remember his name. He was at Midville University. At that period we used to spend a lot of time at the university. I used to go to the philosophy department and he said why don't you come to some of the lectures. And he introduced me to Wittgenstein and various other things.

 

That was a really interesting period when I became very inspired by philosophy, but that doesn't mean I was becoming a conceptual artist. 

 

(2nd  Year Show). I think that was the one  where I did the performance. I think I had to do quite a lot of work for it. I seem to remember Chris did a piece which was probably after Joseph Kosuth. He had just had an exhibition at the Kasmin gallery in London. He'd exhibited 12 sheets of blank paper and Chris thought, you do an exhibition of coat hangers. Oh no it was a chair, Kosuth did a chair. a drawing of a chair a real chair and I can't remember, boring. Chris wanted to do this but he couldn't draw, and he couldn't work out how to do various things, and I did them for him.

 

The diptych is a piece of 2 by 2 by 3 feet bit of wood x 52. Someone suggested that I stand for student union president and I think it says in the book that I didn't win. I didn't enter; I was going to enter - I was very friendly with the guy who did win who later became head of ICA  galleries in London but I forgot his name.

 

It was a lecture given by Fred Brooks who was an expert on Kurt Schwitters. And we didn't know much about Kurt Schwitters so we all read up about Kurt Schwitters to see what the guy was about before he came. I think we were plotting, we would probably put on some universal takeover of art schools or something. You have to remember that we were taking an awful lot of drugs. A lot of drugs.  Anyway Fred turned up, that was in the lecture theatre a really nice space, and it might have led me to do the performance thing that I did later. He had a projection with Kurt Schwitters stuff on it, and he was talking away, and we had set up an event which start with the boot. which was thrown by Joe, on a piece of rope, on a pulley in the roof that we had set up earlier, hit the screen, pee and beer splattered everywhere, and there were lots of dogs barking. And then there was a Mickey Mouse balloon I seem to remember which was held in front of the projector so that it danced. it was just tomfoolery.

 

(The performance based on numbers) it wasn't actually based on numbers it was based on War and Peace. I did it in the typography department. it had a beautiful little booklet which sadly no longer exists. It was a beautiful piece of typography. It involved several of the students, they had to be hermaphrodites, they had to wear skin-tight bodysuits, and the girls had to have no tits pretty much, Emma was one of them, and I can't remember who else, it might have been Rose. Joe was one of them and he stood out because he was very muscular. They were on a grid and the great had numbers on it and overhead was the projector with the key to what the numbers meant. Like a game of chess, like in Lewis Carroll, people moved about on the chessboard and enacted things that happened in relation to the key. Battle, victory, loss, death,  which apparently in the book is said to be very boring but what was extraordinary was that all the third year students stayed to the very very end, because the last piece was when the hermaphrodites disappeared. and it was left to the audience to continue the game. 

 

I worked at a bakery every summer since being in school and would probably have been quite happy to do that to earn some money. The second year, things were becoming quite difficult for me and quite a lot of others. We didn't  really have a lot of interest in the college of art. Chris and myself moved out to a cottage near Stratford-on-Avon and we got a dog. So we hardly went into the art school, and that happened again in the third year. for the last part of the third year I don't think I went at all. and we did stuff. We took a lot of LSD, and went to a lot of pop concerts, and watched Shakespeare and went to Midville University. Which concerts? lots of them, Family, Free, - Chuck Berry I remember came to Midville Uni and did My Ding-a-Ling. Brilliant absolutely brilliant. We could have had the Jimi Hendrix Experience for half the price it cost for Chuck Berry.

 

There was a very interesting guy who did work there for a bit who looked a bit like Alfred Jarry. I got very interested in the Theatre of the absurd, it might have been how the performance came about.

 

I've always wanted to be involved with art in one form or another, and despite would it says in the book I've never become dissatisfied with painting as an art form. I'm grateful to Midville for just being introduced to Gurdjeff, but it led me onto other things, it led me onto ideas- looking at things that  wouldn't have happened otherwise. When Fawley showed us holograms, I can't remember what it was now something simple like a cube and breaking it in half and each half would still have the cube on it. That was magic. and had I not been at Coventry at that point I wouldn't have seen such a thing 

 

I befriended the small girl who did very flowery pictures, very flowery paintings, and this was considered to be rubbish. To this day I think that women do have a hard time in our to, despite Tracey Emin, they do, they're not regarded as real artists. 

 

They're all distant memories because I don't keep in touch with any of them. I remember Joe very well of all of them. Dave who I remember affectionately. Arthur, and Harold. Harold was extraordinary. He did the most amazing installation piece which now if you put it in the Serpentine Gallery now people would be queuing up to see it. it was a whole series of objects tied to a resin cast of himself I think, sitting on the chair. and one of them was a rope that came out of the person's hand attached to a cube of resin which he had managed to make clear, which was quite difficult that, with Gombrich’s history of art inside it.

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The second year exhibition wasn't looked on with great enthusiasm by the staff I think although most of the students found it interesting, because it was different, Completely off the wall in some respects. You've got to remember that for me I was beginning to discover the difficulty I had with my father dying at such an early age. and it was beginning to come out. so that was a psychological direction that was nothing to do with Midville School of Art.