The Falklands war lasted a long time and seems to have formed a backdrop for a number of cartoon strips and this one includes Sharko, El Maestro's manager. I can't remember if Benyon based him on a dude particular. However, there was one guy who could almost hypnotise him into taking on jobs that he knew were doomed. He could listen to an outline an idea that was amazingly stupid and be drawn into producing drawings or ideas for which no cheque would ever appear. "It's like Fagin, man, totally Dickens". In the 1970's Soho was littered with tiny offices with big ideas. Managers and promoters sharing corners of basements and meeting in local taverns for long beery meetings. "I'd rather have a beer in the company of insane dreams than no dreams at all". The desperate and devious had a magnetic pull.

Kevin Rowlands, erk alors! Wot an odd chap. First a working class Brummie on a mission: next an Irish fiddler in Walt Disney overalls and then a gent from the city. I'd say it was the fluctuating image  that did for him. In fact I was a fan of his first coming as a reincarnated Geno Washington and remember, well half remember, a night drinking with Jim the trombone player, a dude excellent.

Well, my visitor is still here and we've had some extended and confused conversations as we attempt to flex our memories. Mine is less corrupted with some files perfectly intact. Benyon's flat was discussed at length. People came and went and Terry Poole from Bakerloo Blues Line stayed for a while and joined a newly formed pop combo called May Blitz with Tony Newman on Drums and Jimmy Black on guitar. Tony had started playing with Sounds Incorporated when he was 15 and had just been playing with Jeff Beck. Jimmy was a Canadian who later returned to his homeland....I think.

Benyon claimed that Newman had suggested he design the band's album cover because he'd seen him draw a perfect circle. He invented an obese female cartoon character who could appear as a single cartoon style advert in the music papers. In other words the ads were small and cheap but it also got him a gig doing the Patto album sleeve and he did some other work for bands like White Mule, from memory.

I missed yesterday, it never really happened for me. Someone came down to check out the beach and we ended up in a splendid pub with a large fire and good bitter. He started off getting me up to speed with mutual friends who are still alive and coherent. It's good to know that some are still gigging but I started to loose the plot after hitting a strong westerly on the walk back. The sand beneath my feet began to crumble and my legs followed.

I wish I'd been alert because he had some good stories about life on the road during his time as a jobbing guitarist and I hadn't realised he'd stayed in Benyon's flat for a few months and claimed to have written a few songs with him. I've been so into sorting out the drawings that I'd forgotten about the lyrics he wrote for the Abasement Tapes. Anyway my visitor claims to have cooperated on a number that includes the line 'Mucho, mucho, mucho marvy. I've got a girl from Yugoslavey.' What a night that must have been? 

I was trying to work out what was happening in the papers when this strip appeared and without doing any research the obvious main subject was Mrs Thatcher combined with Eric Clapton coming out as having been on heroin. He was clean, and headlines about God being back were all over the place. I was at Art school when Cream played one of their first gigs for £80 and I remember being worse for drink and forced back against a wall by the sound.

I like Clapton because he lacks charisma so much so that I've failed to recognise him when sitting at the same table. My experience with Jack Bruce is rather different. I remember being driven by him in his open top sports car down narrow country lanes at speed, while he was shouting out a story about a band he was with travelling along the M6 late at night when they all saw a space ship land. Man,  I really gripped the door handle tight.

'Vasto Records' was one of my favourite Benyon names for a record company. Someone should have picked it up. The cartoon is about huge record companies owning small labels that were pretending to be independent.

No one would deny that Band Aid was a good idea and it was impossible at the time to criticise the event without being beaten up by pacifists. But the amount of show biz stuff going on in the background was much the same, switching off gigantic egos is not an easy thing to do. Even Bob had to croak his way into the spotlight and perform, but them it was his party. A lot of acts were pissed off they couldn't get onto the bill and show their charitable side to a world wide audience and were even more pissed off when they saw the impact it had on the careers of bands such as Queen.

I enjoyed the day and I know dudes who thought getting out of their heads and dancing was a great way to save the world, and who can argue. Of course we knew it wouldn't save the world and stop starvation. Famine in Africa keeps returning helped by politicians, religious divisions and demented gunmen. Band Aid certainly saved the lives of babies who have grown up and most probably had their own babies. How did they got on?

The Dury drawing advertised a TV documentary on another late great. Benyon had been asked by Ian  to do the ad which threw him into a state of panic because he was a huge fan of the man and also hated the idea that anyone had seen his work. It may sound odd but he couldn't handle the idea of people reading his gags because he claimed that he was doing them for himself but had to get them published to make what little money he did. He never accepted free tickets for gigs either in case it stopped him looking at the music scene like a reader who had to pay. I was with him the only time he went to the Speakeasy on the night that Roxy Music split up causing great interest around the member of the band present and he never went back. He thought it distorted how the news would impact on fans and never went back. Mind you the way he dressed made him look out of place, always in a short grey waterproof jacket and jeans. Somehow fashion always managed to avoid him.

A single cartoon that I managed to dig out. It features a retro mod at a time dudes were writing their life stories on their clothes. They do it directly onto their bodies these days. But there was nothing like a soiled Parka with lots of Biro script across the back. I was trying to think when I first encounter this particular fashion and I guess it was in the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, where we listened to some great American black blues players usually backed by four white British teenagers. They also hung out in St Ives in Cornwall where I tripped over Donovan in a shelter at the top of a cliff It was where piles of Folky, Bloozy rough sleepers used to spend the summer. The locals still call them beatniks in those days.

That's the end of the 1977 cartoon page which ended up rather surreal and it's interesting to note how many of Benyon's forecasts came true. I shall have to look through the rest of the drawings to see if there are any other looks into the future.

The latest scraps from the Punch cartoon spread which make a dig at 'old' rock, which doesn't seem to have gone away.

Some single gags from the '77 page. Benyon started off in the NME writing single gags and later on when he wrote one about a Kings Road, Urban Cowboy pointed out by one of the guys in a bar as 'th' Lone Groover' Ian Macdonald, who had become assistant editor agreed with Tony Tyler that it should become a strip. I Mac as he was known was the cleverest of  the NME hacks, followed closely by Tyler and they both had really good senses of humour and for a period the paper was a joy to read.

I don't believe all the golden age hype, it was chemistry with the right people, the time and the place all working together.In the early days there was still a feeling that everything was going in a positive direction, but it soon all fell apart, assisted by (w)reckless self abuse and a lot of people fell by the wayside who shouldn't have, but hey that's rock'n'roll !

I've posted the first two drawings out of sequence but as you can see it's all about being in 1976 and wondering about 1977. Sitting here looking at a really sharp blue sky bouncing off a really cold sea I am really having problems working out if any of these forecasts came true!

The drawings above are also from the NME.  They were from a full page look at what may happen in 1977 and an obvious Xmas filler when there wasn't much copy hanging about. Well, I can't remember exactly what was happening at the time but obviously the Church was cutting up about some profane artiste who was being controversial in the hope of making  money. Sharko, th'Groover's  manager makes an appearance amongst the clerics.

The second gag is about major bands getting older and it may be a dig about it being a good commercial decision to die and gain publicity to stimulate product movement. A&R men from Stiff Records signing acts in a graveyard, it makes me feel quite sentimental.

The bottom cartoon is taken from Th'Lone Groover Express and the drawing on top is from a large cartoons strip from 1977 which I think was from the NME. I'll post more of it later if.

Part of a really old late hippy strip. "Peas and Lurve'. I think Benyon always had a soft spot for hippies even though he moaned about them, but what indeed is wrong with peace, love and understanding. It was the zonked out dudes forever on a magical mystery tour without leaving their basement flats that he despaired of. I suppose there is nothing worse than seeing the light go out in someones eyes as they settle for an early death instead of achieving their potential.  For every Keith Richard who manages to survive decades of self abuse there are multitudes who slip off into the twilight zone after a single trip. Here endeth the lesson. As the Groover once said 'Life's a gift and it's bad Karma to return a gift'.....or something like that.

This drawing was taken from a notebook and follows a theme of financial gloom and sometimes we forget  the 70's, for  lot of people, was a bad time to be living in the UK. I remember going to LA in 1976 and they thought we were in need of food parcels and that was before the winter of discontent when unburied bodies were lying uncollected on the pavements. I can remember trying to write some copy under an oil lamp wearing gloves during the endless power strikes. They were bad days and you had a feeling that something radical had to happen to clear the mess up. We didn' t have the rest of the world to blame and we had to sort it out by ourselves. Historians in the next century may be able to explain what happened next, emotions run too high to get an objective answer from most people but when you go through this pile of cartoons recession and all the crap that goes with it is a repetitive theme. Dudes are shouting either 'No future!' or 'Loadsamoney'  with equal venom.  Too much too soon and too little too late. Sniffing glue to cocktails and back again all in a few years. It's like we're all on a big dipper wearing blindfolds and screaming into wind but none of us want the ride to stop. Now, if you excuse me I shall return to the bar on the shore were I spent this morning to watch the white horses and chaging weather.

Today I'm posting a section of a colour strip from Punch, just because the weather is grey and depressing, along with an illustration which may have come from the NME and illustrated an article about......your guess is as good as mine. Benyon drew quite a few illustrations for a number of magazines but not many were saved because of the difficulty of getting them back from the printers. I remember he used to collect Ray Lowry's cartoons and send them up to him or deliver them when he visited Manchester. Poor old Ray, another departed NME contributor.

I can't help thinking the journo in this strip looks a bit like an overstated Charles Sharr Murray did several decades ago.

A section from an early, rambling cartoon strip that may never have been published, at least I don't remember having seen it before and there are no 'mark ups' scrawled on the back or in the margins.
Searching through an archive is an exhausting business, it takes up so much time your mind keeps wandering. When I found myself with the drawings I thought it would be a good job to do during the winter, but so far we haven't had one. I can still walk on the beach without needing medical attention like the past two winters, although it was difficult to stand up last week.
I have realised, however, that cartoons were very important at tracing events and styles and it's sad how they've been dropped by newspapers and magazines. It's all to do with students being trained to use computer originated images and the advent of bloggs and tweeting and of course publishers and editors who no longer have ink  pumping through their bodies instead blood all combined with the remorseless persuit of blandness.

An early NME pre Grooveresque strip, including ye olden record player,dealing with creeping glam rock and upwardly mobile waxed hair

I've posted this drawing of Mike Oldfield which appeared in the NME and reflected the wealth he acquired from his huge album Tubular Bells which stayed in the charts for several centuries. He was thought to be a tree hugging hippy but has grown up to own homes scattered around the world and worth zillions. We can only hope the tax man pins him down one day. 

The Greg Lake story that I've never finished was the main reason that Benyon hung up his pen. He had an opportunity to write some Lyrics for Lake's first Solo Album after the break up of ELP which seemed a good idea because he was a fan of Gary Moore's guitar playing. Gary died a few years back but he was a fast, really fast, and Tommy Eyre, now also dead, was on piano. Tommy had started off playing in the Joe Cocker band and he liked a drink but according to Benyon was good guy along with the drummer Ted MacKenna  who had been in the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Of course Alex is also dead and but I hear Ted is hanging on and has a proper job. Anyway, Benyon's idea was to see how a 'Rock Star' like Greg operated at close quarters so he could record it all in a book. But it went horribly wrong because he felt he had been attracted to the darkside of the 'business' and the satirical edge he once had been blunted. It wasn't the reason why he left the NME which had been shrinking in  size and circulation under the guidance inadequate editors although the stories of the NME at its peak selling zillions of copies are greatly exaggerated the average sales were about 148, 000 a week but of course it did have a large readership with single copies being read by several people before being rolled into a giant spliff.

The fact is that when I worked with Benyon on 'Gaspo! How to make it as a Rock Star' it sold 30,000 copies but the spineless suits at IPC were terrified of it and refused to publish any more copies under the guidance of lawyers. Some revolution, eh kids!