TROOP & SPX FEATURE!

Which shoe had the air system?
The hikers, I guess. And there was a basketball shoe called The Air Support, er, yeah, the Air Support System. I think there’s a drawing of it. I designed that particular boot in the Golden Sands Hotel in Penang. We were having a bit of a jolly out there after a tour - I think we’d been to Hong Kong - and I sat in the hotel one day and drew that thing. As you’ve probably noticed, it’s not quite as finished as the others. And it was faxed from there to Korea for sampling.

It’s an amazing way of working that you’d just draw a sketch in the hotel after a few pints and guys in Korea would make a shoe. I can’t imagine that happening now.
We had some very good agents out there. Often they’d say, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ And I’d say, ‘Course you can.’ Sometimes they didn’t work, but a lot of the time they did. You’ve got to push these boundaries sometimes.

It’s great that you’ve actually kept a lot of the sketches because a lot of stuff has been lost. People didn’t anyone would be interested in it in the future.
Exactly. I did throw away an awful lot of samples. I’ve got hundreds of drawings here that were virtually destroyed by the flood at home. It was only a shallow flood, but because
I had all this stuff laying around on the floor in one particular room - and they’re all drawn with magic markers and pentel pens - the water got on them and they all just
blurred into nothing. There’s an awful lot that’s been lost.

You talk about it being only quite recent history but computers were quite a new thing then. I guess you could do word processing, but they weren’t powerful enough to do CAD drawing or anything. You were just doing the sketches by hand?
Yeah. See, I’ve done that all my life. I can do that till the cows come home. I can just sit down and draw and draw and draw, it’s so easy for me. What’s difficult is messing around with computers. I don’t do it anymore.