Eddie suggested that perhaps there was a way in which a writer could be celebrated with a t-shirt. I was honoured that he asked me plus I liked the idea. What image would work for such a project? I quickly settled on cats as several of the musicians I’ve interviewed over the decades loved cats. I have had a few, but the best ever was Bubbles aka Bubbly, a wonderful Maine Coon mix with whom I had the most special of relationships. He would sometimes hang upside down off my lap with his ‘dead’ face, an extraordinary sight that I photographed often. One particular capture just screamed ‘black metal’, and that is the image we agreed on. Next came my name. Look, it ain’t a market banner, but I felt that given the unintelligible ‘Scandinavian-style scrawl’ it could work very well with the image. Eddie and his team hit that one out of the park too. Finally, the ‘writer’ bit. How? We agreed to send a fanzine-style photocopy of one of my pieces of writing, and given the general ‘black metalness’ of all this, I chose the first story I ever wrote about Venom for SOUNDS magazine back in 1984. Warts ’n’ all. Finally, what to do with the lorryloads of loot which was destined to cripple the Brinks truck network. Give it some of it to folks who could do with some help of course, which means a portion from every shirt sale will go to Crisis UK (a British homeless charity) and the Tottenham Food Bank, two charities I learned about in the wonderful yet heartbreaking book Broke, which contains a series of first-hand perspectives on poverty in the UK excellently edited by Tom Clark.
Finally, thank you for honouring Bubbsy. He passed at the decent old age of 14 in 2022, and I still think of him daily.
He was that special...
