Chapter 20: Into The Unknown
When I left school, in the time-honoured tradition of many English musicians, I then went on to University as a means to get a grant (yes, believe it or not, the Government paid YOU in those days, giving you money each term) which I would use not to buy books, but to buy myself a Rickenbacker bass and a decent amplifier. To keep me busy in the times between learning to play the bass and my early gigs, I studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Brunel University. Fortunately I was very good at it, and left with a First Class Honours degree.
This study of early computers came in really handy when I unpacked my first Apple computer all those years ago. I couldn’t wait to connect to this new growing phenomena called the internet, fire up the search engines and guess what I searched for? Can you imagine what that felt like? All that time, my baby Frankenstein, my Sputnik, had been dead, demonised, buried without trace - or so I thought.
Because suddenly, there it was, living in the hearts of computers and fans all over the world. There were literally hundreds of Sputnik fan sites. I could read things about myself that even I'd forgotten. It may sound sentimental but I was honestly overwhelmed. Sputnik was alive in Cyberspace - Sputnik lived, was talked about, listened to, traded, debated. The signals from the record industry could not have been clearer: You Are Dead and we will never help you or believe in you again. EMI had even deleted the records by now, as if to wipe out my past completely, as if they were embarrassed for ever believing in the first place. Yet, despite the best efforts of the music industry, here it was.
