Pimping my sax case #1

This post is a bit of a rambling story where I get to wallow in a bit of nostalgia. I was having a bit of a sort out when I discovered a stencil that I made many, many years ago...

In my slightly impoverished youth, in 1979 I think, I moved into a shared house in Caldecote Road in Coventry. One of the people I was sharing with was Mike Collins who was in a band called "Machine". They practiced in his bedroom.

At that time the band consisted of Mike (guitar, vocals), Julian Bell (keyboards), Nigel Mulvey (bass, vocals) and Silverton Hutchinson (drums). When I moved in, Mike had a Gibson Les Paul in bits in the living room and was painstakingly spraying the body black, and T-cutting the finish to a shine. The story was that he'd smashed a shop window to steal it and had to remove the distinctive black-and-white design.

My bedroom was the downstairs front room, so when they started gigging and coming back in the early hours with a van load of kit, I figured I'd better join them. So I became their roadie.

Mike had a Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinet that another band had made off with following a gig, and he'd followed them all the way to Llanelli to get it back. They had removed the rexine covering in an attempt to disguise it, so it was just plain chipboard. Following this experience, Mike was keen to have some kind of ID on the band's stuff.

So I made this stencil out of one of the plastic covers you used to get for LP records in those days. What amazes me is that I cut it out with a pen knife and a pair of nail scissors.

The typeface is my own design - I still think it looks pretty cool, in a retro kind of way. I think the rose was Silverton's idea - he felt it softened the starkness of the word "machine".

Anyway, following a number of iterations in membership, the band changed its name to "Hot Snacks" a few months later, so my stencil became obsolete.

So after about 35 years in a cardboard box, I've decided to resurrect it.

There are some scuffs and holes on the front pocket of my case where I think the original label had been removed. So I thought I'd stencil on to a patch and sew it over the top. First of all I used spray glue on the wrong side of the stencil to hold it in place. Then I used some matt white spray paint. There's a little bit of blurring around the edges, but not too much. I've left the bottom open and intend to put a bit of velcro there to make a sealable pocket. There's room enough for a paperback or a DVD case in there.

I'm pleased with the effect, it's a nice reminder of old times and the sax inside the case is also of course my "machine".