Cavendish Avenue
'When the girls sang and the boys played'

I was flailing around in Scotland having just run away from college in Edinburgh after enduring a very unfortunate series of events involving robbery and shotguns! So now I was back home in the Dundee area wondering what to do when I got a call from an old school friend known only as 'Chambo'. He had graduated from Stirling Uni and moved down south to start a new computing job in Cambridge. Thing is, he was renting this house with a friend and there was a spare room going...did I want it? Too right I did and I was on the next overnight coach to 'poof city' as my Scottish friends so charmingly dubbed it. I loved it there. It was such a welcome change of scenery and lifestyle. The warm air and mellow vibes of this ancient university town were a salve to my troubled soul, coupled with the fact that it was flat and cycling was 'de rigueur' made it the ideal place to be for a boy like me. Pretty soon we had fleets of visitors arriving at all hours of the day and night from up north. It was hang-out central for a long glorious time.

As luck would have it, my gran inherited some money and duly sent me 500 quid! I immediately ran out and bought a Fostex X-15 cassette multitracker with one of those strange orange rubber-ball punch-in things, (these machines were only just recently invented at that time) along with an Arion analogue chorus pedal, a Tandy reverb and a second hand Dynelectron longhorn bass from a shop on Mill Road..and that was that...money gone. It was worth it tho, I could so easily have squandered it on beer and cigs but instead I invested it in my useless music career..bravo! So now I have these tapes, a cozy mix of visitors and friends, instruments, experiments, good times bad times, and a solid dose of youthful exuberance.

I will always remember my time in Cambridge with great affection, it was a time of friendship, love and skateboarding..our worries were few. We even built a ramp in the back garden, much to the neighbours chagrin..I don't blame them tho', the noise of us shredding into the night must've been awful. Happy daze.