FLYO & RIFF's COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS

Over the years, I have been involved in many collaborative projects with my old art-school friend Chris Richards, sometimes working under our respective aliases; Flyo and Riff.

Whilst I was growing up in Blidworth, Chris, the son of a Raleigh cycle worker was spending his formative years in the Radford area of Nottingham. Our upbringing was typical of working class boys born in the 60s - a world defined by TV adventure shows, comic book heroes, glam-rock idols, family holidays and adolescent pranks.

ART & MUSIC

I met Riff on the Art & Design Course at Clarendon College in 1978. We were both competitive and aspirational but quickly became friends, though it has to be said we looked an odd combination (and still do) me standing only five-foot-six and Riff with his six-foot, two-inch frame.

Sharing a love of sixties music, Hendrix and new-wave acts like The Jam, The Ramones and The Rezillos, we began to write 'knockabout' songs. This activity took place at the weekend before going out with college friends to the Golden Fleece or the Nottingham Playhouse, and sometimes on Thursdays which was the night local pub-rockers "Gaffa' performed at the Imperial Cooler Bar.

CORRESPONDENCE

Eventually we left Nottingham for arts degree courses. Riff went to Liverpool Polytechnic to study graphic design, whilst I did fine art at Leeds Polytechnic. In the first few weeks of Polytechnic we had established a regular pattern of postal correspondence: These letters were a rich blend of bizarre photo-montage, drawings,newspaper cuttings, satire, song lyrics and 'cut-up' and nonsense poetry inspired by William Burroughs and John Lennon. This postal correspondance has a similar quality to the kind of viral emails that would become commonplace more than two decades later. In the early 1980, however, Personal Computers were only really built by electronic hobbyists and of little practical value. That isn't to say that we weren't aware of the creative potential of personal computers.

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY

Throughout our arts degree courses Chris and I continued to meet in Leeds to write music, gaining experience with music synthesis and MIDI-equipped instruments (the now ubiquitous Musical Instrument Digital Interface). By 1984 Yamaha were already pioneering their MSX personal computer and by 1985 I had purchased a BBC MicroComputer and fitted it with a dedicated UMI music sequencer as used by keyboard player Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Erasure).

BACK TO ZERO

Between 1982-84 our artschool band The Smart Cookies gained in popularity attracting interest from Rough Trade Records but failed to sign a deal. The fun five-piece band became a trio and then vanished acrimoniously with the departure of bass player Bob Smith. Riff and I returned to Nottingham in the mid 1980s to get work and were independently drawn into the emerging fields of videographics and desktop publishing (DTP).

We returned to recording in 1985 under the guise of The Boys Beyond Midnight and later formed a new four-piece live act Ramba Zamba. The band's stage appearences were augmented with what we called our 'video-groovebox' - a series of spoof TV ads and video mash-ups that were aired throughout our performance.

Ramba Zamba folded in 1990 as I diversified into marketing and design, culminating in my present role as a multimedia producer. Riff concentrated on graphic design and apart from a brief spell working at the same advertising agency (Cross Hill Conwill) we were pretty much ' on our own paths'.

In 2002, following publication of his book 'Radford - Images of England' (Tempus Publishing), Riff and I worked together on a new local history publication, co-authoring'Nottingham in the 1980s' This was unlike previous 'boring' local history titles as it drew on our extensive archive of black and white photographs and ephemera - much of this material dating back to our student days at Clarendon College, Nottingham.

Since 'Nottingham in the 1980s' we have continued to collaborate on projects and recently re-recorded some of our Smart Cookies songs - now available as MP3 downloads. We have also completed several chapters of a comic thriller - Set in 1983, the novel promises a heady mix of teenage angst, eighties culture, sex, violence and black humour. It's a struggle with work and family commitments but some day we hope to find the time to finish it.

Paul Fillingham info@dreamtargets.com