Sad to see Jeff Nuttall died the other day. Not that he was a friend or anything - in fact, the couple of times I met him, back in the 70s, I thought he was a bit of a boring old drunk (but then again, aren't most of us at times?)

I was a young and zealous smoker at the time, who didn't like people who drank (the older generation) as it seemed to be a stupid drug. It was only later that I discovered the drinking culture of the Mediterranean and realised it could be a civilised way to pass time together.

Still, he had been enormously influential in that cross-over from Beats to Hippies (who, I suspect, he despised). That CND generation were so serious and angry. It wasn't that my lot were any less suspicious of the world, just that our particular wave of people went for a bit of joyous irresponsible hedonism in the face of the ghastly, cowed, everyday world of the 50s and early 60s in the UK. It's all strategy and tactics. I am now just as angry and just as optimistic as I was back then.

The punks took it back to direct anger. Whatever.

Still, The People Show was kind of fun at times (boring and arty-farty at others) and my original clown teacher Emil Wolk was part of that.

Another one bites the dust - so I'll quote Michael Horowitz in The Guardian

"He died on a Sunday, leaving the Hen and Chicks pub in Abergavenny, where his trad band's lunchtime gig had been the highspot of his week for 10 years. At his soul's incarnation in Elysium it will surely come to pass, as Jeff once dreamed, that "Spifflicate water-buffalo drunk on rainbow fish will snore beside the oval father where he basks". For the rest of us, as long as "global politics" fester in lies and pea-brained Hollywooden mega-violence, it is bollocks to them, and long live Jeff Nuttall. "