Part 1 - pictures of pain

It took me awhile to meet Nick, cos he was quite a reclusive character even back then, recalls Mark Farrelly, guitarist with Part One and a close friend of Peni during their formative years. He was especially close to Nick, sharing the same interest in macabre art and literature, and indeed their bands shared the same stage several times in the early Eighties. I’d seen Grant at the Anarchy Centre, but I never knew who he was; I hadn't spoken to him... but there was this other guy, a really good friend of mine, who used to call himself Scarecrow, and he was in a few Andy Martin (of The Apostles) - related bands... he's still around, he's done a lot of performance art over the last fifteen years or so. Anyway, he would put together these compilation tapes, and he was playing one of these one day and this song came on called Teenage Time Killer, and I was just fuckin’ blown away by it; it sounded so fucking peculiar... to say it was eccentric is quite an understatement, Scarecrow was sneering at it, saying that they were just a bunch of fucking sixth - formers', but I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And he pointed Grant out to me, and we ended up on the same train home that night, cos he was getting off at Watford and I was going back to Bletchley, which are both on the same line. Grant didn't drink, and I was really pissed, but we struck up a conversation, and because they lived relatively close to us, I eventually met Nick, and we really hit it off straight away, because we both had this very morbid outlook.

And I loved the artwork; it was fantastic, like nothing I’d ever seen before… and he discussed it with me all the time, because no one else was really that interested back then. I’d always been into drawing since I was a kid, but I’d more or less stopped, and then I met him, and he showed me this catalogue he got from Hayward Gallery in ’79 that was a big influence on his artwork, called Outsiders, and it was all what we know as Outsider Art now… you know, art from mental institutions, just fairly odd characters who had drawings in their pockets and stuff. And he showed me this thing and I could immediately see his energy, where he was coming from…cos he’d actually worked in a mental hospital, just outside Watford. He’d gone to Watford School of Art, and left because he couldn’t stand it, but he loved the very resonant world of Outsider Art. I think it had a big influence on his approach to music as well…

I actually introduced him to Lovecraft, and that was part of the reason why we fell out claims Mark Farrelly. ''Because I was getting more and more jealous of the Lovecraftian tomes he was finding... he acquired some lovely books that I didn't have in my own collection, and I didn't like it very much!

I didn't actually see Cacophony' until years later, but when I picked that it up, I couldn't believe it; every single Song seemed to have some Lovecraftian theme. But, oh, good luck to him, y'know? '

It was all just personal stuff why we went our separate ways; I wanted to get out of Milton Keynes, where I was still living with my parents... and Nicks with his folks, and wanted to make some kind of break, but didn't know what to do. After all the intensity of Part One and Peni, we were at a bit of a funny crossroads; it had all gone very quiet on the western front. I knew I didn't wanna do music any more, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do instead... so we both just decided to carry on doing gruesome illustrations, writing Lovecraftian horror stories, and then hopefully, by the time we were Sixty or seventy, someone would discover this great tome of work we'd created...! That was the plan anyway, and we were both labouring under a similar illusion, Nick had always been more of the recluse when I first met him, but by the end of the eighties, I was the recluse, and he was the one making connections with the big, scary outside world.

Mark Farrelly also figures quite prominently in the book The Primal Screamer, albeit under the pseudonym of Marco Farrelini, a character that Nick wickedly imagines as still suckling at his mother's breast when aged eighteen! But he did post me a little model of a coffin, and I’ve still got it. It was a little plasticine figure, in this incredible tiny coffin which he made with stick bandage... this little brown emaciated figure of plasticine, with his own hair an its head, it was about six inches long, an inch wide and he’d written my name and address on it in his spidery scrawl, the postage stamp was almost too big to go on it! But somehow it got to me safely.