New York, New York

New York is in my blood. It has been since I was old enough to understand that it was a city in another country - at a time when TV was the only medium to experience it by. It fascinated me beyond anything else that forced American culture into our sheltered, southern world.

My first virginal memory of the place, was a scene in a TV show. Can't remember the name but it was typically ‘eighties’. It had a bright-lights-big-city backdrop and I can just about manage a memory of a thirty-something guy coming out of a tenement block, ostensibly to have a cigarette, but also to get out. He holds a rose, growing out of a pot near a front door, and you hear the sound of Sinatra’s ‘Moonlight Serenade’.

Sounds cheesy I know, but I that scene just created a paradigm in my mind, far beyond just the sights and sounds of one incident. It remained forever in me. I started crazily piecing together scenes from TV, bits of a puzzle, trying to get a flavour of the city. I imagined the lives of the working class to be the most intense. I could see the richness in their family and friendship bonds, in their conversations and their desires. Just the way they lived life, so passionate and energetic, so savoured, such furious liveliness, it stirred me. The sound of that life, its taste, its magnetism, it's a mystery that still holds me today: the belief that the inspiration of your true dreams never end.