TROOP & SPX FEATURE!

What was the reaction with the kids from a fashion point of view?
Oh yeah. It always amazed me when I saw somebody wearing it. [laughs] We deliberately targeted the hip-hop thing. We did a lot of PR through hip-hop magazines. It just took off, we were doing competitions with schools in London. We ran a competition for kids to design trainers. We were very involved with the rap thing. At the trade shows we had this rap artist there: JC001, who was supposed to be the fastest rapper in the world at the time.

You also had boxers on the team, dudes like Lennox Lewis.
Yeah, that was a little bit later. Gary Mason, the British Heavyweight Champion at the time, was doing Troop for us. We got involved in a lot of sponsorship deals with
up-and-coming boxers and the like. I personally don’t think the boxing scene, even with Lennox Lewis, was such a big deal, really. I think the music thing, the rap
and hip-hop connection was much stronger in terms of promotion.

Yeah I agree. Looking at the photos of the team that Clive assembled to run SPX and Troop it just seems so incongruous to look at the team - you didn’t exactly look like a bunch of hip-hop gangsters. [laughs]
Well, the people who were buying the stuff were, I don’t know, ten to twenty years old I guess. All Clive’s guys were salesmen, really, that’s what they were. Clive had a very incisive mind into what was wanted in the marketplace. I’d been in advertising and design right from the late ‘50s through the mad ‘60s, so nothing surprised me. [laughs]

I guess, for that article, I was dressed up like them, really. [laughs] They were basically a bunch of salesmen. As I say, I’ve been an artist and a designer. So, really, my style would have been more casual than it was represented there. I was trying to be a businessman, I suppose.