I’ve been telling stories for over 20 years. Your stories, fuelled by my own passions. The lyrics may have changed, but the song remains the same.

1995-99

So, the mid ‘90s. My first mobile phone and the recent discovery that you could do a job that was fun. The Golden Age of Hip Hop - in fact we were named after one of the greatest hip hop groups of all time: Main Source, but it was to the UK that we were looking and the first genuine homebred scene - jungle, drum & bass. The template for all the UK scenes that have followed. I think we worked with pretty much every label that mattered, and some that didn’t.

So here’s a question for you: in a pre-digital age how do you push 10-12 minutes of music with little to no vocals on unlabelled records to a wider audience. You have anything from 1 DAT to 200 white labels. Answer: from the ground up. You go to every club night you can, you speak (yes, actually speak) to every DJ you can, you go to the record shops, you go to Music House (where you know every DJ is going to be on a Thursday/Friday cutting dubs) or to their girlfriend’s house. You phone every DJ for a reaction and you threaten to cut off the supply to any DJ who doesn’t fill in their reaction sheets. In short: you know your consumer because you are that consumer.

There’s no way that we knew that jungle would become the world-beating genre that it has or that it would soundtrack tampax adverts one day. We just loved it.

This gave me three solid lessons which still inform how I work today: #1 limit availability to build demand (still true now, as app launches prove time and time again). #2 don’t alienate your core audience while building a bigger one #3 don’t bs your client (they’ll be in the dance).

1999-2013

If the previous few years taught me how to have fun at work, the next decade and a half taught me how to have fun AND get paid. Jeff and I didn’t know each other from Adam but having done a joint pitch for a video game (too raw for the client) we did know that we had found our partner in crime. Freewheelin’, named after the Stacey Peralta film about skating, was born. Coming from different backgrounds but sharing a mutual love of youth culture, we brought completely unconventional thinking to an industry which in thought was unconventional but in deed was very traditional. We waged war on those conventions and the clients loved the results. Along the way we hooked up with a likeminded artist and ended up putting on his inaugural London show in Rivington Street. That artist was Banksy.

You had to sign up via hotmail and receive a Metropolitan Police forensic evidence bag. The show was legendary. Jeff, Banksy and London Dave dressed in official looking overalls and painted the walls of the arches white in preparation for the stencil work, I went to my uncle’s shop to buy 300 beers from him. We hired, from an old dready I knew, a van with a petrol generator powered sound system and I was DJing out the back of it. I’d felt safer in some death trap warehouse parties that I attended. There was no constant documenting then but I think in the first year of trading alone, we launched Betfair by parading a New Orleans style funeral though the City of London (still cited as a model launch 17 years later did Banksy’s show and bought the World Cup Skateboarding to London.

Banksy had given us a logo for our help in putting on the show so we decided to use that logo for a long cherished dream of a skateboard company, Clown Skateboards. We were suddenly flavour, profiles in the nationals. Channel 4 made a documentary on us called Cheeky Monkeys which followed our campaign for Dexter Wong. In fact the BBC were suitably impressed and they made a documentary on how we launched the UK flagship store for Diesel’s bastard offspring 55DSL in Soho. This was the embarassingly-titled Commandos of Cool. Embarrassing or not, this got us a LOT of work not least of which was the Converse account which we won and held for 7 years. When Nike took over the UK franchise they were shocked at how small our team was and the impact on sales. Never ones to stand still we cemented our love of music and events by going from producing festivals to eventually owning a couple.

2009-2013

Because we weren’t busy enough, we continued with our passion for art by opening a permanent space, The Orange Dot Gallery in Bloomsbury. As well as putting on artists with whom we had a personal connection through the worlds of graffiti, music, tattoos and comics, the spot also served as an office/showroom and white space for record fairs, makers’ markets and supper clubs. Not saying we were the first, but we were definitely early.

2013-Today

Time for another leap, this time food. Transferrable skills. You hear a lot about that these days. What it means in practice is that if you really understand what you’re selling (and we’re all selling something, make no mistake) and to whom you’re selling, then how you sell shouldn’t present any problems. The Gate was and remains one of the top restaurants out there, in any category. From 2013 to 2016 I was their Marketing Director, responsible for the relaunch of their original site in Hammersmith, the second site in Islington and then a third in Marylebone. We went from analogue to digital and created a brand that is synonymous with quality vegetarian/vegan food. Everything I have learned in the last 20 years of telling stories from the worlds of music/art/fashion with the added advantage of technology fed into the marketing of food and led to the creation of Social Diners. The song remains the same, it’s just a change of lyrics.