Known as Dunsby or Lord Dunsby after the Blackpool tailors that friends and I used back in the eighties, Nat Dunsby’s was a tailor well accustomed to mod styles and tastes having started his trade before the last war ….. and tailored for the first en masse wave of Jamaican immigrants in the fifties, and the post war influx of Italians quickly learning the respective tastes of both helped him with the fussy bespoke abusers that were the mods of the sixties and had been tailoring for them and us along with a bizarre mix of itinerant Blackpool pier entertainers, comedians and magicians ever since …… always fun to be had rummaging through the velvet suits and broad checked jackets waiting to be collected by their ruddy faced, portly, besideburned owners.
Learned my trade from an early age, always had a need and a passion to draw and a keen eye for detail and observation, sailed through art at school on a diet of scooters, mods in parkas, targets, union flags and keyhole patterns, having first heard of mod in '79 at the tender age of 10 …. Took me two years to understand what a mod was or did, but having learned, I was hooked for life.
And so, on to Bolton Art College Great Moor Street (now town centre flats) where my passion for all things mod grew and my incarceration there flew past in a haze of seaside rallies and allnighters interspersed with the odd lecture, much to the cost of my tutor’s patience, 'does everything you draw have to involve the sixties or mod?'
'Well errr ….. mmmm yes, I suppose it does'. My hero Peter Blake did say 'draw and paint only what interests you', and so I did, and still do.
Then on to work, after the obligatory spell on the dole (a quaint eighties tradition) I started gainful employment at a glass engravers as engraver, illustrator, graphic designer, tea boy, manager, production overseer and chief sweeperuper. One of only three males in a factory of upwards of fifty women …. did have its advantages as well as it’s … ahem ….. disadvantages.
Subsidising my meagre income designing T-shirts for the then burgeoning Manchester scene, t-shirts sold like hotcakes and were the staple life’s blood of the traders at the then buzzing Affleck's Palace. Club posters, flyers, T’s, logos, bootleg tape and vinyl designs and even a t-shirt design for Tony Wilson’s infamous Hacienda Club followed ……
Sheffield was a city I’d known since the mid eighties and had long standing connections and friends there, so as a C change was needed to get me out of my self-engraved rut, I decided to move there in the mid nineties ….. yet more dole followed until I started sign writing, and painting murals for the pubs and clubs of South Yorkshire ….. this gave me the 'C' change I’d been needing and started with the help of the internet to pick up more and more work as an illustrator …. Still organising clubs and events for the mod scene, still drawing what interests me, but now have an ever growing list of interesting clients top skateboard teams and individual riders (flip of LA), VANS trainers for Geoff Rowley (skateboard rider) DVD covers, various LP/CD covers for Acid Jazz, Modus, Five Aces and Boogaloo Investigators to animation illustrations for 'stop soot' eco campaign (underground ads) all of which have helped keep me busy for the past 10+ years as a gainfully self employed illustrator.
Currently co-organise the POW WOW club in Sheffield which is one of (if not THE) busiest and most popular mod clubs in the UK …. If only there was any money in good will I’d be a wealthy man by now. Still getting my clothes tailored (though now not at old nat’s) and STILL drawing what interests me …….
Mr Steven Vaun Millington
Alias
Lord Dunsby & Hisknibs
