My Dad - 18th April 2013

My dad always seemed really tall to me. He's only about six foot so its not exactly unusual or freakish. As a young boy he seemed to tower over me and I always wanted to grow up to be as big as him. I'm not - whether due to genetics or my ridiculous idea that teenage smoking would get me more girlfriends (it didn't). Anyway, even though we are more or less the same height now (partly thanks to him getting older and shrinking slightly and me getting older and frequently wearing big Cat boots), he still seems like a tall man to me.

This is most probably a result of the impact he had on me as I grew up. One of my earliest memories is of him showing me how animation worked. Together we drew and cut out a few simple shapes (a bird and some other badly drawn animal, I seem to recall) and made a very short animation that consisted of the bird flying around and my finger popping into shot every few frames because I got too excited and/or impatient and prematurely clicked the shutter release on his small wind-up super 8 camera. This film still exists somewhere and is as underwhelming as it sounds... But it planted a seed in my head that I've still not shaken. These days I fiddle around with 3d animation software but the excitement I feel when I'm playing has not diminished. And I still harbour thoughts about doing some stuff with stop-motion one day...

The next thing I can clearly recall is listening to Tubular Bells and Rick Wakemen records in our tiny house in Stoke Poges (this was the 70's when only two albums where available). After discovering that just one man had played all these instruments, I asked my dad how this was achieved. My dad, never one to talk down to a child, told me about multitrack recording and demonstrated by covering up the erase head on an old cassette recorder and we recorded a load of old nonsense. Then we spooled the tape back and recorded some more nonsense. Hearing this layered sound of two nonsensical recordings played back was a hugely influential moment. I credit him completely with sparking my interest in music technology. Obviously this has been both a blessing and a curse in later life as I've struggled to make any money from what many people would just think of as a hobby and I've definitely lost a couple of girlfriends due to my slightly obsessive love for recording. But if ever I'm stressed or lost or struggling, I just turn my music kit on and make some funny noises. It's my therapy and I couldn't live without it.

As I got older, my dad would read to me and make up funny words and jokes and puns (something I now can't help but do with my own little boy) and this definitely piqued my interest in the power of language, reading and writing. I remember enjoying playing with his typewriter. I remember wanting to mess around with his Letraset. I remember writing silly short stories. I'd still like to do something interesting with writing but I just don't have the time.

At the start of the 1980's, my dads fascination with gadgets meant that we always had computers, cameras and musical instruments around the place. By now my parents had divorced so I only really got to play with these at weekends but it still clearly had an enormous impact on me. I would spend a lot of time fiddling around with a huge and basically useless PC. I would try and program his ZX80 to do anything at all - which it never did. I would play games on his spectrum. I would use the auto-chord feature on his keyboard to play “Feelings” by Morris Albert - a fact that still makes me cringe to this day...

Eventually I got my own gadgets and instruments and started off down the long and slightly weird road leading to where I am today.

Today I spend a lot of time working on computers with images, animations, words, music and games. My most successful jobs have been connected to this somehow. I'm usually at my happiest when faffing around with some device or other. I've got my studio with software and hardware that would have blown mine, Mike Oldfield’s and Rick Wakeman’s minds. I've got stills cameras and video cameras and projectors and all sorts of random gadgety crap in my house.

My dad is almost single-handedly responsible for filling my young brain with the passion to fiddle and create and mess about and play. And never grow up.

And he's 70 today and more active than I am - which is admittedly not that hard. And he still has that same fire and passion for his own creative stuff. He's turned into a rather good Tango dancer. Not one of those awful grinning ballroom idiots. The ones who dance from their soul, like a jazz musician using their entire bodies to communicate an emotion.

So for filling my head with ideas - not the least of which is to be decent to people and enjoy good chocolate - I'd like to say thank you. I just hope that I can inspire my son half as much as my dad inspired me.

Happy birthday dad.

P.S. in the interest of balance, it should also be noted that my dad is fairly hopeless at remembering things like birthdays. This is something I have also inherited which is why, up until a few days ago, I thought he was 69 on Friday rather than 70 on Thursday.