Back in the 90’s when I sometimes allowed myself to be distracted by music and occasionally jumped in to Transit vans to sit on filthy Marshall amps and head for places where music was made, back in the 90’s when I allowed myself to write pages (and pages) on the subject (actually I still do), that and somewhere along the line, put on a thousand or more gigs all of this fair city of London while somehow starting a record label called ORG where we put out something like a couple of hundred albums, singles, tapes and more (when I really should have been painting a lot more than I was). Somewhere back in the 90’s one of those releases on ORG was an album called Stupas by a band from Southend, a hardcore crossover band called Cynical Smile who I really hadn’t thought about much for quite a few years/ I still feel rather positive about most of the releases on ORG, (the less said about most of the artwork the better, in hindsight given the musical makers full artistic control in terms of the album covers was maybe a rather large mistake, in hindsight, if there was to be a record label it maybe should have been an artistic dictatorship). Back in the 90’s there was Cynical Smile and that one album they made was dug out last week. it still sounds rather alive, it still sounds refreshing, it was good to re-visit the band and that album in a visual kind of way this week – the painting came about after a conversation with Matt, one of the band members, I haven’t really spoken to any of them since we were all busy press records and putting on shows, actually he commissioned the piece, he asked me to paint some something that referenced that Cynical Smile album, I don’t mind the challenge of a commission when it feels right…