A Photographic Memory #9
eidetic • /aɪˈdɛtɪk/
Gary Numan and an ad agency in a train station. Part nine of my memory backup…
Following on from my previous post about Punks in Belgium. I returned home and back to my job at Carlton Studios, to discover they were in trouble. It was one of those economic downturns, and they were having to cut back… a lot. This meant that in October they had to let a few people go, mainly the most recent hires, which included me. At this stage in my career it kinda sucked, but they were incredibly apologetic and nice about it. They gave me a very generous reference letter, and said they’d pay me an extra month so I could spend time looking for another job. What I did instead was spend time in the darkroom upstairs making prints of my own photography for my portfolio.
By an incredible coincidence my mother had spotted an ad in the Carshalton and Wallington Advertiser, for a position in a local advertising agency, and by this point I had examples of graphics, illustration, photography and styling in my book. These all-round skills were a requirement for the job, so I responded to the ad and wangled an interview.
The interview was brief, and thankfully secured me a position. The salary was terrible, but it would only take me 10 minutes to drive to work from home, plus I saved on all the train fares to London. It was an advertising agency above an old railway station in Carshalton, and although this was a small agency, some of the projects were surprisingly cool, and involved designing concert programs and t-shirts for musicians like Gary Numan, and the Boomtown Rats, so that all seemed pretty exciting. There were far more mundane projects as well, naturally.
There was one particularly mundane job involving leaflets for some kind of woodworm protection that went horribly wrong. The designer stuck the word ‘woodworm’ down in the wrong order so it spelled ‘wormwood’. Nobody spotted it until the printed leaflets arrived, and she had to work the whole weekend sticking a corrected patch over a thousand leaflets to save the cost of a full print run. She left shortly after.
It’s strange to think back and remember just how long a simple half-page ad would take to assemble, compared to these days of Adobe InDesign. Paste-up and colour mark-ups were what we did, using typesetting, Letraset, photographic half-tone prints and sticking it all down onto an art board with rather noxious Spray Mount glue. I remember spending an hour with my colleagues looking for the word ‘construction’ that had fallen off and delayed the artwork from going to press. It was eventually found stuck to the sole of someone’s shoe!
After a particularly intensive design project for Gary Numan, Howard, the agent took the design over to his place to get it approved. We stood at the top of the stairs waiting with baited breath for his return, and when he finally showed up, he said “Gary loved it!”, and we punched the air shouting “Yes!!!” and then he said, “but his mum didn’t, so we need to change some of the photos”. It then became apparent that Gary’s parents were also his management.
After a few alterations, we were now responsible for the finalized program for Numan’s farewell tour at Wembley Stadium. As a bonus, we were all given back-stage passes for the opening night, so along with my colleague, Gail (who’d recently replaced the ‘wormwood’ perpetrator) we decided to take our cameras along.
Here are some of the photos I took with mine.
As we had ‘Access All Areas’ passes, Gail (above left) decided to push that to the limit. As Gary Numan made his way to the stage, I took the shot from above.
It was a pretty spectacular stage setup, and if memory serves me, Numan’s entrance was him seated in a custom, remote-controlled electric vehicle.
Support came from Shock, a music/mime/dance group, featuring Tim Dry, Barbie Wilde, LA Richards, Robert Pereno, Sean Crawford, and Carole Caplin. Shock was a prominent part of the New Romantic scene that Gail and I continued to photograph with our later nightlife excursions.
Backstage I spotted fashion designer Jane Kahn, and Sean Crawford, aka Tok of Tik & Tok who were about to perform that night. A few years later in 1988, I commissioned Jane to design fashions for characters in the New Statesmen, a dystopian, revisionist superhero comic series created by writer John Smith and artist Jim Baikie for Fleetway’s CRISIS comic. I discussed the series in an earlier Substack post.
Above: Dave Vanian of The Damned with his wife Laurie Vanian, chatting to Rusty Egan.
Rusty Egan was the DJ at the Blitz nightclub, and a founding member of Visage. I remember his record store called The Cage in The Great Gear Market in King’s Road, Chelsea. I took a few shots of him chatting to some fans.
I always wished I’d taken more photos, but back in the day film and processing were expensive for a 22-year-old with a crap salary, so every press of the shutter counted.
I took a few shots of people dancing in the aisles before the main show began.
Numanoids! I showed this in my previous subCULTURE Shock! post, but it’s relevant here too. All concert photos were taken at Wembley Arena, London, on April 26, 1981.
All Photos © 2026 Steve Cook
With just 3 days to go, the above shot and other photos are to be showcased in this most excellent subCULTURE Kickstarter, so I’ll give it another plug.
Brilliant post. I had forgotten about spray mount!
Fab, time-warp post, Steve. I wish I didn't, but I loved the smell of spray mount in the morning (or anytime, really)... explains a lot!