Dave Ambrose, the A&R man we trusted, who had signed the Pistols, had now left EMI and we felt pretty rudderless. In fact, everyone who worked with us during that first heady year was now gone and in their place came a new, younger team who held the cheque book but not necessarily the same vision. Its always the same with record companies, people get fired or leave all the time and the new broom comes in and you get inherited by them but they also bring with them their own bands and their own visions of what is great. Still over time I was to become close friends with the new head of A&R Nick Gatfield.
Unlike the others in the band who had blown their advances on living large and first class travel, I took my advance and a bank loan to put down a deposit on a mews house, literally just around the corner from 392b Harrow Road. It wasn’t a great house, having been used for years as a car repair shop, it still looked like a squat inside and would remain so until I got more money some years later, but because the area was pretty scary, no one had a problem with the noise which was a huge plus. With EMI’s money we built our own small studio in the downstairs garage area and the SSS Experiment Camp was born. Our own place. We had new clever equipment and there was a pub just five doors away. Creativity and inspiration was just around the corner.