I said, 'I'm going to cycle from Sussex to Wales. That was very different to the essential green and rain and running around Northern Ireland. I left in '67 and moved to South Wales, near Swansea - a place called Skewn. I now think it's a work of Dadaist brilliance but my artistic career began and ended there with the horrified expression on my brother's face. They're these big chunky Plasticraft, blue-based things, one with a toenail and one with a tooth. I don't know what happened to my toenail but his was preserved in this box so I thought, I'll put these two, my tooth and his toenail, in cufflinks and give them to him as Christmas presents. A bench had fallen on his foot, and a similar bench had hit my foot several months before, and so we had matching smashed toes. I kept it and gave it to my brother as a cufflink from a Plasticraft set, along with a toenail. There was blood and stuff and a lot of yelling but it was actually quite a neat tooth, with a dunce's hat-shaped root coming out of the top of it. Running like an idiot and then falling over and smashing my whole front tooth. It was just the kids who lived on that street - Ashford Drive in Bangor. It was an immensely age-spread gang, from four to eleven or twelve.

Everything was being built then and they were constantly building bungalows, so we used to climb all over the roofs of them and pour water in all the cement mixers so it would all harden. I was going to primary school and drinking these third-pints of milk and the biscuits you'd get at break times and just drawing pictures of our house, Mum, Dad and stuff, and being in a gang and throwing mud balls at passing cars. There must have been underlying political stuff happening but I was totally oblivious to it. BP had a refinery in Belfast and we used to go down there and hammer away on the electric typewriters. We went to Northern Ireland and we were there until '67 and that was great.

My dad's going to take us and show us everything. There was a revolution once we left.I've got to go back to Aden. There's a great little scene of him, me and my mother, he keeps poking me in the eye and my mother keeps pulling his hand away.And my dad's in other bits with the moustache he had at the time. We've got a cinefilm of him running round playing football then poking me in the eye. His name is Mark: he's a couple of years older than me. So you had two people separately saying, 'I'm going to go to the fucking moon.' So then they met and got married and I was the second kid to come along. My mother went out later when she'd decided she was going to be a nurse in Aden.

Aden was a British colony at the time BP had a refinery there and they built a town, roads and a hospital. He ended up taking this post in Aden, which is a bit like saying, 'I'm going to the moon.' It's still miles away, but this was in the fifties. One of the first things he did was redesign the whole filing system so no-one knew where anything was except him, which I thought was a good move. He joined BP as a filing clerk, not really knowing what he wanted to do. He wrote essays on communism and stuff when he was sixteen. Dad was a fifties hippy with very short hair. EDDIE: I was born in February '62 in South Yemen.

Eddie gran bio