One my oldest friends, Steven Baker, found this in a box of stuff this week. I painted it for another friend, Cliff Purtell, back in 1988 I think, maybe later, I don’t really remember. He was going to Donnington (the rock festival) and wanted to show his appreciation of the band. I can’t quite remember how long it took but it was somewhere in the region of 2 weeks I think due to the fact that a lot of it was painted with modeling paints watered down, you know, the tiny pots you can buy to paint up Airfix kits and the like. We didn’t have money for proper paints and figured that these wouldn’t run if the weather was wet. We also only had an old tablecloth or bed sheet to paint it on as you can see from the not-quite-finished-yet bottom corner.

Anyway, I would troop round to Cliff’s place each morning (it was the summer holidays) and he would furnish me with tea and biscuits all day and blast out heavy metal. This was my introduction to thrash metal primarily although I think I bought a fair bit of LL Cool J, Beastie Boys and Public Enemy with me to even things out. Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth (obviously), Slayer, G.W.A.R. probably a lot more that didn’t stick too, all were played on repeat throughout the making of this banner, a tiny picture of which ended up in Kerrang the week after the festival. Cliff swore that, during their set, Dave Mustaine of Megadeth quipped, “You’ve got some fucking nice banners out there”.