TROOP & SPX FEATURE!

No I haven’t...
Again, it was based in America. I did a whole load of stuff, but it didn’t really take off and I carried on working on Troop for the Dutch distributor, did a whole range of stuff, but slowly that brand was being trashed.

So it was still being run from Europe after all the troubles they had in America?
Oh yes. It was going very big here in England and all throughout Europe. Clive worked hand-in-hand on Troop with Herman Gazan in Holland.

You mentioned British Knights before. That’s another aesthetically-related brand. How did they fit in with what you guys were doing with SPX and Troop?
That was really the brand that gave Clive the inspiration to do SPX. The stuff was coming in from America - it was an American brand even though it was called British Knights - but that was really the inspiration for SPX. Clive was directly attacking that, really. And his brief to me, with the SPX logo, was to make it a British heraldic type of thing. It was a big influence, but I think we blew them out of the water.

Did the similarities in design cause any friction between SPX and Troop?
No, I think it was always Clive’s intention for Troop to remain very much a street brand and to try and take SPX forward into more serious areas: sports, the running boots, the hiking, to take that forward into more of a performance brand. Troop was trashed in the end - shame, really - but you still see it around in the weirdest of places. We came across a load in a bin outside a cheap shop in Spain for some ridiculous amount of money - the equivalent of six or seven pounds for a pair of shoes.