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 told me that Elaine knew David Bowie and as my parent’s house was two roads away from the house in Irvine Way where David Bowie took saxophone lessons, 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 rework material he was not happy with. By using the cut-up technique a writer could rearrange writing at random joining fragments from different sentences to form a new narrative. In this way Burroughs would sometimes weave the words of other writers into his own, like a more sophisticated version of the parlour game consequences. 
I had read about the cut-ups in an underground newspaper but the method was not made clear in the article. I devised my own version and applied it to some poetry I had written. Elaine wants to know more and I produce the result of my labour on a food tray that I have hidden under my bed; a few drawings and some poems, some of which had been dissected line by line. Elaine asked me to explain further. I described the procedure. I had read about the cut-ups but did not understand Burroughs and Gysin’s description so I invented my own variation. I took a poem cut the poem into strips, line by line, and rearranged them at random. ‘It’s supposed to give a new meaning to what I’ve written,’ and mention Burroughs’ name so as not to take all the credit should the experiment work. But it was not an entirely successful demonstration, I read a few lines, a couple of sentences seem to interact but I felt embarrassed and as I was putting the tray back under the bed said that they might be alright as lyrics. Having shared my literary efforts, I half expected my guests to make their excuses and leave, but Elaine had more questions and I started to feel put on the spot. She asked what I intended to do next. I was surprised she was interested. I answered, ’I want to take some more drugs’. ‘I want to see another band,’ I told her that I had seen the Grateful Dead at Wembley. ‘Anything else?’ she enquired and so I said ‘commit suicide’, quickly adding that I was joking and did not even know anyone who had committed suicide, which at that time was true. I added that Ray did, but the look in his eyes indicated that Elaine was not going to be impressed by the story he had told me of the fellow from St Mary Cray who dressed in black, was into witchcraft, and had jumped to his death after listening to the first Velvet Undergound LP under the influence of LSD. 
Complaining that his fans were continually pestering him by calling at Haddon Hall in November 1973 David Bowie move out rented a flat in Maida Vale, then moved to a rented house in Chelsea. There were other reasons to leave the area; he had seen his best friend and his step brother sent to Cane Hill. In the same month a meeting was arranged for David Bowie and William Burroughs by Craig Copetas, who worked for Rolling Stone magazine. They met in London while Burroughs was still living at his Duke Street flat, near Piccadilly Circus. Bowie had apparently read next to nothing of Burroughs’ work but referred to a chapter of ’Nova Express’, called ‘Pay Color‘, a description of the future that describes ’People City’ and ’The Subliminal Kid’. After meeting William Burroughs, David Bowie started to read William Burroughs’ novel the Wild Boys, sometimes out loud to his inner circle of friends at his flat. He assimilated William Burroughs vision of the near future merging it that of Orwell’s 1984. Bowie’s was about to record his ’Diamond Dogs’ L.P. which starts with a description of ’Hunger City’ set in the near future. Though they did not discuss the cut-up technique in a transcript of their meeting published in Rolling Stone magazine, by spring David Bowie could be seen in the recording studio with his lyrics and a pair of scissors. He even posed with scissors for a publicity photograph.
By the early seventies Burroughs use of the cut-up style that had appeared dramatically over his sixties novels, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, Nova Express, was beginning to run its course. Syd Barrett had recorded his ‘Word Song’ of apparently random free associated words. In the early seventies Captain Beefheart aka Don Van Vliet claimed to use a bag of words. Anytime that he needed a new word he would pull one out of the bag. In 1922 Tristan Tzara caused a riot at a Surrealist rally by creating a poem by pulling random words from a hat. David Bowie was able to introduce literary influences to popular music raising the intellect of his work for his mainly young audience. 
In 1974 Alan Yentob filmed David Bowie for a BBC documentary ’Cracked Actor’ during which he describes how he does his cut ups. 'I don't know how William Burroughs does his cut-ups, but this is how I do mine' Says David Bowie quite clearly. This is not as Burroughs described in his books The Job, The Soft Machine, Minutes to go, or The Third Mind. David Bowie is shown to apply the cut up technique to his lyrics for 'Sweet Thing'. David Bowie then goes on to demonstrate the procedure of cutting a poem or lyrics into strips, horizontally, line by line, the very same procedure that I had demonstrated to his friend in 1973.  I started to wonder if Elaine had passed on my version cut ups to David Bowie or whether he arrived at a similar conclusion. Though David Bowie has been accused of stealing ideas and has admitted this himself, how he arrived at the method is not important. Brion Gysin recognised the similarity between the results of cut ups and ‘automatic’ writing, directly from the subconscious bypassing conscious criticism and editing.. As a young man Gysin had been invited to exhibit with the surrealist but was expelled by Andre Breton at the last minute. Gysin thought that writing could evolve in the same way as the modern painting. Just as he had been inspired by the art of the mentally ill, Andre Breton was inspired by the automatic writing of Helene Smith, a French woman who claimed to be in touch with Martians who communicated through her. 19th century psychologist Pierre Janet encouraged psychiatric patients to write automatically. Schizophrenics when writing may start anywhere on the page, write for a while then continue somewhere else on the page. Schizophrenics may write down what their voices dictate. William Burroughs spent a month in psychiatric hospital, was diagnosed schizophrenic, and whether this diagnoses was accurate or not he maintained an interest in Schizophrenic art that is reflected in his own paintings. The work of mentally ill artists seldom follows trends but to this day contemporary artists are inspired by the art movements of the 20th century, not least the Surrealists the DaDa artists and the Expressionists, who in turn were inspired, in part, by the art of the mentally ill. It could be argued that the art of the mentally ill helped free the canvas for the contemporary artist. Sadly the mentally ill remain stigmatised by a society that conveniently prefers to believe the myths of mental illness rather than the reality. If the public were aware of the contribution that the mentally ill have made to the art world they might start to overcome their prejudices.

Ray and I had a common interest and that was music. Since 1972 we had tried recording on domestic tape recorders. We were aware of psychedelic music but I was aware of electronic music through my friend Norman. Norman’s father was a HI-Fi enthusiast, they built acoustic speakers from scratch, when his parents were out shopping or away for the weekend we listened to records on his father’s gramophone. Besides the psychedelic rock that was fashionable at the time, we listened, on Normans’s sister’s advice to anything that sounded strange, like Moroccan music or Terry Riley. Norman had a recording of Moroccan music that had a polystyrene ceiling tile as part of the cover. With Ray I would find unusual records from the library and record shops. We weren’t looking for ideas but I noticed that ideas would show up in our recordings that we had not deliberately put there. In other words I might think I have an original part of a tune and on playing back the recording recognize the same tune as something I had heard before. The tapes were little more than work tapes useful for vetting the recording. If I heard something that sounded original might remember to play that next time. I borrowed ‘Composing with Tape Recorders’ by Terence Dwyer from Orpington library, and made tape loops around coffee jars with random pieces of improvised guitar music. I weighed the coffee jars down with anything I could find but the experiments, like the cut ups came to nothing. Still these basic editing exercises were useful. I could see that writing and music need not be limited by conventional editing techniques, and they were not expensive either. 

In April 1975 I had bought a practice amp from a shop called Wings that was at that time next to Bromley North station. The amp was a Triumph ’Leo’, probably the cheapest in the shop it was about two foot high and had two inputs and a vibrato effect which you could turn on and off and adjust the speed of the effect. It was valve amp designed for use with an electric guitar and if you turned it up it would distort and feedback. I also bought a Hohner pick-up for the ’Eko’ acoustic guitar that Steve sold me as he was buying a new guitar. 

I wasn’t very interested in being a virtuoso musician. I had no aptitude for music and ot having learnt music in infancy I could not practice without making mistakes and musical mistakes are noisy for neighbours who soon informed me of their displeasure. I know Beethoven moved seventeen times in one town because of complaining neighbours but he was an exceptional and dedicated musician and I am neither of these things. I thought, like others that rock music was becoming to sophisticated and intellectual. This was not just sour grapes. Musicians seemed to be using their virtuosity as an exercise to show how clever they were, and they seemed not only happier than their audience but also often had a superior attitude. I thought about  Fauvist and Expressionist painters, how they seemed to simplify painting yet their work had an emotional content that more academic work lacked. (This was before the idea of expressionism was adopted by David Bowie, surely that really was coincidence.) In the way that expressionists seemed to use fewer brush strokes to describe their subjects, I thought musicians could use fewer notes. At the same time I realized that a lot of hard work went into learning an instrument and that not all these virtuosos were show offs, that some were obsessive, and in any case some people wanted to see a band enjoying the hell out of their music, and in some cases expected a certain amount of arrogance from their rock stars. Steve said that he didn’t think I wanted to play well and he was, in a way, right. I did not want to play rock music that was challenging classical music in its complexity. The route has its merits but it was not for me. This was just before Punk Rock and people were looking for something new. Hippie music had become played out. With the end of the Vietnam War it had no cause. They were left with their virtuosity, but did not have anything to say. The music seemed to be inspired by cocaine and like most people did not crave and could not afford such a drug. Cocaine distanced the musicians who used it from the audience. Steve and I had tried to form a band as we had jammed together a few times. It was Ray’s idea, he was far a more accomplished musician than I would ever be and besides my main interest was in visual art. 

Ray made another friend. They met at registration. Mark was a fellow who was conspicuous for one reason , and that was when it came to sitting around smoking cannabis, as a few students did in those days, and it was his turn to put one together, he invariably would not put as much in his joints as anyone else. Thrifty as this was, it annoyed the other smokers, but despite their making comments like ’Did you remember to put any in this?’ he remained adamant and consequently the joints he rolled were passed around like  hot potatoes. To add insult to injury he would invariably have his girlfriend Emily in tow and though she wouldn’t ever roll a joint, she would happily smoke anything passed to her.  Emily liked to be called MT. Cannabis was not cheap it carried a considerable risk as the penalties for possession were higher and the attitude of the public was more hostile. So Mark’s action caused some resentment which expressed itself one afternoon soon after College had started. Ray, Stev and Sharon myself, Mark and his girlfriend went for a walk in Chislehurst woods. Pre-warned of Mark’s unsociable habit, but unable to believe until we take time to stop along the way, Steve is offended. Walking through the woods Steve and I become separated from the others and walk down the path towards Chislehurst Ponds and the Queens Head. I wondered if we should have a smoke while the others weren’t around but John laughed and said no. We would be as bad as Mark if we did that two wrongs don’t make a right. It was a bit of an Indian summer, a precursor to the notorious hot summer of the following year 1976. Steve gathered some of that wild grass with seeds like ears of corn and when we rejoin the others he throws them at Marks back while he is not looking. Children break off the tops of these plants and throw them at other children’s pullovers. Then Steve asks me to throw a couple of darts at Marks pullover.  Then when we stopped again Mark notices his pullover is covered with arrows and who gets the blame? Did you throw these? Mark accused me. I admitted that I threw one or two. There was no point in telling him that John had handed me a couple of darts urging me to join in so that he would not have to take all the blame. I didn’t say anything about Steve who had by now covered Mark’s wretched pullover with about thirty darts. Steve wanted me to take the blame so I did. I wasn’t going to grass. Mark had his culprit and starts having a go at me asking questions, to get me back for throwing arrows at him.

 Hoping that he would embarrass me and thinking he had a card to play he asked me about the band Ray and I were trying to start.‘ It’s a bit weird ‘I said, hoping to put him off. With the work that accompanied starting college I had forgotten about any band. ‘Well we know a band that’s really weird,’ replied Mark, cattily. I’d had this before with Ray, when he brought his friend of Bowie, so I knew when I was put on the spot he would leave me too it. I had to say something because this time I was also speaking on his behalf. ’Well we improvise,’ I continued, again hoping that this was enough for him to drop the subject. ‘What chords do you use?’ he asks ‘I don’t use any chords. Ray knows chords ’ I reply, and though this is fair enough for me after all I am playing solos over Ray’s rhythm guitar it is not a fair description of Ray’s playing. So I look to Ray hoping that he will join in and be supportive. But I am digging myself into a hole and he just smiles. I have read an interview with Fred Frith in the Melody Maker and I remember the phrase chord fragments. I quickly decide that a chord fragment is two or three notes played together that sound like a fragment of a chord, so I say’ we might use chord fragments,’ he does not question this but asks about ’vocals’, not words or songs or singing. I suggested screaming.  I had dug myself into a hole just because Steve had thrown a few grass darts at a skinflint so why drag everyone down in to it? 

   ‘We are interested in playing experimental instrumental music that goes on for a week night and day, a lot of the time it could be just drones.’  I continued. ‘like Indian music‘. We had been experimenting, and practicing for a few years. We had focused our ideas individually but did not talk about them. I was always finding odd L.P.s to play to Ray and Steve when they visited. Sometimes they would be amused sometimes angry, and if they liked the record would try and borrow it, sometimes succeeding. Though they would take an interest in the experimental sounds I was finding, Steve was not keen to join in. His folk style of playing depended on how confident he felt and he did not have time to improvise. Ray was keen to experiment with the limited resources we had, the two track tape recorder, the acoustic guitar with a pick-up, the twelve string guitar and anything else we could put to use.  I ended by saying that I left my guitar resting against my  amplifier  when I went to the shops, turned on and feeding back but Mark  turned away and started to talk to his girlfriend in the middle of the sentence, he seemed satisfied that he had embarrassed me enough. I had said enough to cover for Steve, and diffuse the situation.  The guitar feeding back left against the amplifier vibrated changing pitch, apparently playing themselves. Some noisy rock bands finish their ‘sets’ this way. If he had let me finish the sentence I would have added the last part of the formula, the part that would made some sense of what I had been sense but he was intent on showing me up convinced that I had covered his jersey with grass darts.
Mark wants to know about our band does he? The truth was that Ray and I had hardly discussed the matter, we had played together a few times. Ray was far more competent at conventional music, he had a great aptitude for learning chords, I didn’t like them. I thought we should invent our own music. I wasn’t that keen on western music. I had learnt scales but then I found out different parts of the world had different scales. I wanted us to invent our own scales and then make chords from them. Tony was never going to agree with this. I practised some melodic phrases which I would string together and play over Tony’s rhythm guitar.  Like many musicians I did not read music., though I had been given piano lessons for six months when I was twelve, practising scales and arpeggios for half an hour every evening. However it seemed best to reply to Mark  as he was so offended. 
                                                                                                         
Soon after we started the college course Tony became superior in attitude as I was no further use to him. He had used me and now had new friends. As we were only receiving a grant for tuition fees, we were staying in a student squat in South Croydon started by Martin Rawlinson. I never felt that I had fallen out with Mark, he was also a resident in the squat. Early in the term we all went to see Tangerine Dream at the Fairfield Halls. Mark was hired for the night to help move the synthesizers and other electronic equipment the band brought with them. Also helping was Chris Carter. I have reason to suspect Mark knew Chris Carter. We were impressed by the concert, when Tony asked me what I thought of the band I said that they sounded industrial. What do you mean asked Ray. Like the Ruhr Valley I replied.  
It was hard work drawing all day nine to four, often being told to sketch the corridors or listen to a lecture about obscure artists and their obscure or unaffordable techniques. ‘If you’ve got a thousand pounds to spare we can get you on a video course, that’s where the future lies’ we were told. Neither of us had the money

Martin Rawlinson was a student from Croydon College, Martin called himself the Martian Warlord. In the evenings Martin used to listen to the New York Dolls, with his entourage. He liked to stalk the streets in a long hair sheepskin fleece coat and a wolf mask and once was brought back by the police. Nowadays it is exceptional not to do these things, part of the syllabus but in those days the College was strict.  They had had trouble in the sixties, with Malcolm MacLaren and Jamie Reid.  While MacLaren managed the Sex Pistols Jamie Reid designed their artwork and one of the tutors reminded us of this one day when Ray and I were making a noise with a violin we had found lying around in a studio. Martin studied sculpture and had melted a radiogram and a television into strange landscape sculptures, which he called Martian sculptures. Eventually he would show these sculptures at Croydon library. Some of his drawings might be considered pornographic. His parents had him put in Warlingham Park before he became an art student. Perhaps he should have asked them before he melted their stereo and television, perhaps they should not have left him on his own while they went on holiday.

 I returned to the deserted Burnt Ash Hill Squat away from the drugs and the college. I thought I could travel by bus but I had no travel grant and was on No Fixed Abode counter payment. I carried on with my art work sketching the room at the top of the house. The house  had been deserted for some while, since the murder in fact. Usually such houses are vandalized by local kids but the house was strangely untouched, though to say that it had been lived in was an understatement. Years of use by hippies who had little regard for tidiness or housework had taken their toll, yet the house retained an eerie Marie Celeste atmosphere. It would only take a little exaggeration for local gossips to place the murder in the old squat.            I put up with the old house for a while but could not endure the journey to Croydon. The old Victorian four story houses at 123/125 Burnt Ash Hill are pulled down  now replaced by modern flats.

Given the choice between attending the college more regularly or leaving, I chose to leave. The Head of The Department made a comment about my not being happy at the college but what was making it impossible to attend was the fact that I could find no accommodation nearby, because I could not afford the months’ rent deposit required by landlords. I should have asked to see the social secretary but it was clear that they wanted another scapegoat. They had already expelled a female Muslim student for drawing with traditional Muslim perspective. ’You’re here to learn western art,’ said the tutor for still life and life drawing but she insisted in sticking to her medieval technique. Medieval in as much as it did not observe the rules of the vanishing point. They wouldn’t get away with it today, and would now perhaps encourage her cultural difference, but they in the seventies the staff felt that they desperately needed to make examples, lest hippies and foreigners occupy the dining hall and hold another sit-in, or daub a Situationist slogan on the concrete walls again, , like Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid had in the sixties. 

I went back to my parents yet again but they had had enough as well and though I held out during the hot summer of 76, as I, started eating less and less, and became more withdrawn the psychotic depression set in and I started to believe things that were just not true. No-one would sell me drugs and I became too agoraphobic to visit anyone. People stopped visiting because when they did I would look at them as though they were a murderer, the vibe was in the air, but I did not know where it came from. I thought it was something I had said or done, I still had not been told about Mary, which was the real reason everyone went paranoid.

A year later, I had left the hospital, because Ray helped me find a flat in the house in St Pauls Cray where he was staying. Ray eventually confided in me about Mary. Mary was a girlfriend of Ray’s who had been murdered around the corner from the Burnt Ash Hill squat, by another of his admireres, called Sue. Of course I was shocked and it has taken longer than I care to admit to make sense of the situation. It would not have been fair to Ray to ask too many questions at the  as he was clearly still grieving, I merely inquired to where the murder took place. I thought that explained why the house at Burnt Ash Hill was deserted yet un-vandalized. 

To change the subject I asked him if anything had become of the band that Mark had told us about, the one that was really weird. ‘Oh they helped make the cover for ‘Animals’’, (the Pink Floyd LP), but as the subject seemed to bring him down even more I did not pursue it. 
Here I think that Tony may have been referring to Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson who not only worked for Hypgnosis, the company that designed the cover for Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ LP, but also played in ’really weird’ experimental band ’Throbbing Gristle. Chris Carter was also in Throbbing Gristle. During  1976 , between Art College and admission to the  Psychiatric Unit at Farnborough I had made the journey to London, to visit the record and book shops. At Compendium bookshop in Camden Town I bought two issues of Sandy Robertson’s punk rock fanzine ’White Stuff’. I was surprised to read an interview with Genesis P-Orridge, of the ’Industrial’ music band ’Throbbing Gristle’. In it he said that he too left his guitar leant up against his amplifier while he went to the shops’. At the time I put it down to mere coincidence. Later, in November 1977 I read an interview in ‘Sounds’ music paper where Throbbing gristle  claimed to have introduced the idea of no chords to music. There were other coincidences, they too were experimenting with weeklong drones, they described their music as industrial. Throbbing Gristle, like David Bowie, had been compelled to meet with Burroughs. In his writing Burroughs had no problem with requisitioning the work of others and incorporating into his own work by means of his experimental techniques such as the cut-ups.  Throbbing Gristle’s singer, Genesis P-Orridge, had introduced himself and visited to Burroughs when he was living in Duke Street, in 1972. In 1980 Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson  of Throbbing Gristle flew to America to collect a shoe box full of Burroughs cut-up tape experiments.  In Simon Ford’s book ‘Wreckers of Civilization’ artist and band member Cosi Fanni Tutti  (Christine Newby), is quoted as saying of Genesis P-Orridge, ‘He never exposed himself to real life, preferring instead that others bring it to him and then utilize their experience, ideas and information. It strikes me clearly that he conspired to invent himself via the talent and ideas of others’. David Bowie describes himself similarly in his interview with Cameron Crowe published in ‘Playboy’ magazine, in 1976.
        David Bowie, in Chris Welch’s book ’We could be Heroes’ is quoted as saying that, during the recording of his ’Young Americans’ L.P. in 1975, ’Every day 20 kids would be waiting outside and we’d let them into help out and give ideas‘.    
It would not surprise me if Mark had remembered and passed on my ideas, after all he was a student with the requisite skills. Patients in the community often have no end of ideas but have trouble putting them into practice. The so-called sane in society are more likely to have the resources to put ideas into action, but for them ideas are often thin on the ground. Though the patient in the community may be more in touch with their subconscious, it is often to such an extent that their actions are inhibited, either by the intrusion of the subconscious, the voices and other hallucinations, or by the effects of the medication taken in the hope of containing such intrusions.    

Of course this is all circumstantial, likely to be dismissed as a paranoid fantasy of a sad old failure. Because of this uncertainty most of this has been left out of the book. However recently, because after ten years silence David Bowie has made a new record and that there is an exhibition of his stage costumes and other memorabilia at the Victoria and Albert museum there has been a revival of interest in the Man who is arguably the most influential Rock singer. In a recent radio programme on Radio 4 called ‘I dressed Ziggy Stardust’, Shyama Perera describes how she sent a sketch to David Bowie and it eventually became one of his many stage costumes. The programme concluded by diplomatically saying, as it was so long ago in an era of drug use by David Bowie, and others, that memories could be unreliable and we could never say for sure.
The creative process is often more complex and involves more input than is evident in the finished work. A cut up is an editing technique with work ending up in the bin like film on the cutting room floor of a film editor. Ideas passed around in stoned conversations may be fair game. But there is a difference between someone making a mental note of an idea then passing it on in innocent enthusiasm and using it as social collateral with malice aforethought. Taking other writers work and blending it in with his own, Burroughs considered that he was avoiding the pitfall of ‘originality ‘ that was preventing him from writing more. Brion Gysin pointed out to William Burroughs that he was already using phrases that were not original. William Burroughs took this criticism as permission to requisition other writers work, and using the cut up technique turn it into new prose. The writer is rearranging the words he knows anyway, William Burroughs was doing what all writers do but consciously. The same process occurs in music, consciously and unconsciously. How many times have musicians complained that their music has been stolen? How many times have musicians doubted their own originality, thinking that they must have heard a tune somewhere else but cannot remember when? Big Jim Sullivan, a session musician who played on many records in the sixties once said that if he complained every time someone stole one of his ideas he would not have time to record at all.
David Bowie has often been accused of stealing ideas and admits this. Musicians such as Keith Christmas Pete Townsend and Mick Jagger have all accused David Bowie of stealing their music or ideas. Ian Dury accused Johnny Rotten of copying him. Again sometimes the musicians will not even remember, events are lost in the past and/or in a drugged haze. For a while Genesis P-Orridge claimed the phrase Industrial Music had been coined at a meeting of the band Throbbing Gristle by himself and artist and musician Monte Cazzaza. Mark Paytress credits Peter Christopherson with inventing the phrase. Even if this meeting predates my description of part of Tangerine Dream’s Croydon concert by a few weeks why wasn’t Peter Christopherson given credit? If Mark repeated what I had said I was hardly being original myself. On the cover of the l.p. ‘ No pussyfooting’ by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno there is a copy of a book called ‘Futurist Manifestos. A student friend of Normans had obtained a copy of this book. Norman showed the book to me. The book seemed too intellectual for me but I noticed that Marinetti used the word industrial when describing his artistic vision. In any case these ideas that were controversial in the days of Da Da and Futurism seem to have crossed over via literature to inform Rock and Pop music.
With internet access artists and musicians no longer have to source ideas from repeated conversations and library books. They no longer have to wait for friends to teach them skills that they can now acquire from the internet. Downloading is obliging many musicians to play live to make a living where before they might have been able to sell records that were not so easily copied. 
                                                                                           David Beales