In early September 1973 Ray visited me at my parents with Elaine. He still had his regular steady girlfriend Debbie, and was probably just trying to decide what to do with his new friend. She had brown hair, not quite shoulder length. Ray knew Pete and Zena Perrett, hehad been introduced by his heroin using friends. Linda and Barry. Ray   told me that Elaine knew David Bowie, though how well I do not know. I wa staying at my parents. Their house was two roads away from the house in Irvine Way where David Bowie took saxophone lessons on the advice of his step brother Terry Burns. It was Terry who suggested the young David telephone Ronnie Ross, the saxophonist once considered the finest baritone saxophonist playing in the West End, it has been said that other saxophonists would wait outside the clubs in the hope of hearing him through an open widow if they could not afford the price of admission. Besides recording in his solo L.P. ’Cleopatra’s Needle, Ronnie Ross went on to become a session musician, recording as one of ‘The Session Men’ L.P’s of cover versions of the Beatles and Tom Jones. More famously he played the saxophone  solo at the end of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. Ronnie Ross charged £2 per lesson, and David Bowie stopped taking lessons for three months, he had learnt to play well enough to join a band. I remember a local piano teacher telling me that she charged ten shillings, now fifty pence for a lesson but if a wanted to learn jazz I could go to Ronnie Ross down the road and learn Jazz, the elderly woman said this laughing with some contempt. In any case and with no reason for either Ray or Elaine to lie, I accepted this statement as true, and was a little in awe. Elaine asked me what I did. I told her that I had started to paint and write. I wanted to go to college to study art.

Cut-ups is a writing technique used by William Burroughs who was given the idea by Brion Gysin. According to Burroughs the basic idea is to take some writing, any writing and cut the page into four and then rearranges the writing to make new sense. There are variations on this theme, and variations on the use to which this exercise in experimental writing is put. It can be tailored to produce poetry, descriptive or even narrative prose, painting a picture in words, evoking a picture with every phrase to the susceptible. It has been claimed that the results can be prophetic in the same way as a crystal ball or Tarot cards, scrying with words for a glimpse into the future. Facts are reportedly gleaned from the rearrangement of random phrases tapping into the subconscious, like a Ouija board. On a more practical level William Burroughs used this technique to