The vegan author Jordi Casamitjana interviews the painter, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, ethical music entrepreneur and vegan poet Geoff Francis, who has spent over five decades fighting for the planet and Nonhuman Animals.

I am a man of the 60s.

I was born in 1964 in Catalonia, when it was still heavily oppressed under the regime of the Spanish fascist General Franco. Because of the 40 years of isolation that this dictatorship brought, we were left behind in any cultural and technological advancement that was taking place elsewhere. So, when you may think about what characterises the 60s as a decade, that may not be applicable to Catalonia (and Spain) because we were stuck in the past. However, when Franco died in 1975 and democracy was restored, the cultural doors opened, flooding our lives with everything we had missed.

I remember the excitement of that opening. We watched movies that had been banned, we read books that had been burned, and we heard music that had been silenced. Then is when we learnt, a decade later, about the “Swinging Sixties”, the youth-driven cultural and social revolution that transformed the UK with its epicentre in London. That was terribly exciting. The Beatles caught up with us, our hair was let to grow freely, and the clothes…well, you don’t want to know how extremely psychedelic my outfit during my first communion was! (a Catholic country, you see).

During this opening, all things that became my favourite were British. My favourite scientists (Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Desmond Morris), my favourite film directors (Stanley Kubrick, Peter Greenaway, Monty Python), my favourite musicians (the Beatles, Mike Oldfield, George Frideric Handel), and my favourite TV series dubbed into Catalan (EastEnders, I Claudius, Man About the House).

Without me realising it, British culture was seeping into my soul so much that, years later, I ended up becoming British myself when I emigrated to the UK over 30 years ago, and I felt totally at home in London. However, I wish I had experienced the Swinging Sixties when they were happening in London at that time, to see how they felt.

In one of those magical moments life sometimes offers you, I kind of half-experienced them yesterday. Not through watching a film or reading a book, but by chatting with a human who lived them. A Londoner who was at the heart of the music scene in the 60s and who, through his precise descriptions of situations, locations, and people, made me feel I was there. A man who has travelled all over the world, who has done many things, who has worn many hats, who has met many famous people, and who has never stopped finding new ways to send an important message to the world. A message of respect for nature and all its inhabitants, celebrating it in all its forms, but also of challenging those who are destroying the Earth and exploiting sentient beings. A man who could be described as a painter, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, and ethical music entrepreneur, but who described himself as a poet (which comes from the Ancient Greek word poiētḗs, which means “maker”) when I asked about his favourite label. I am talking about Geoff Francis, and if you read this article about what he told me, you will be travelling through over five decades of planetary and animal advocacy mixed with artistic expression. Buckle up, because it will be a very eventful journey.

Geoff’s Vegan Journey

I often interview people who have been vegan for a long time. I even wrote an article once titled “Vegan for Half a Century” in which I interviewed four people (Angie Wright, John Strettle, Ruth Hawe, and Russell Howard) who had been vegan for over 50 years. Had I written it a year later than when I did, I would have added Geoff. Yes, over five decades of rejecting meat, dairy, eggs, and other animal products is quite something, right? Here is his recollection of his vegan journey:

“I was born in London. I was born in the Whitechapel Hospital in 1950. So, that makes me a Cockney by birth. The first two years of my life we lived with my grandmother and grandfather in Bethnal Green. My father was a member of a sports club, which was, in fact, the biggest boys’ club in Great Britain that had been established in the early 1900s. It was called Eton Manor. It was started by Arthur Wellesley, who was, I believe, the grandson of the Duke of Wellington. At the time, that was significant for me and for my father. It was run by a guy called Charles Villers, who was the youngest son of the Earl of Jersey. He got together with a guy called Helbert Wagg. The Waggs were bankers, and they became Schroder Wagg, which is now an internationally famous company called Schroder’s.

Those two men apparently could move the markets worldwide, and what they did with their money — which is so different from bankers now — is that they actually put it to good causes. Eton Manor was one of those good causes.

It was central to my life, very influential in a way that, you know, I wouldn’t necessarily expect it. But it was a boys’ club, described as being a club of elite athletes in all sorts of spheres. During the war, Charles Villers had gone to South Woodford and had bought part of what was called the Nightingale Estate, and on the part that he bought, he created many flats. We were lucky enough in 1952 to get one of those flats. Charles Villers was very interested in education and in allowing people who’d lived and were born in the East End to have new advantages. He built these flats, and as I say, we got one of them. He didn’t charge any rent to the boys. They just paid their rates. And the idea was that they could save up and move out into the local environment and then free up space for someone else, which is exactly what mum and dad did.

So, I grew up in a very intense sporting community with lots of aunts and uncles. There were people knocking for me to go down and play football when I was three years old. I became a very good sportsman, and I ran for London in the relay when I was 14.

The educational chances were really good, so in my peer group of individuals, most of them ended up at university, as did I. I did psychology at Bedford College in Regent’s Park, which again was another blessing. That’s where I started out, and it gave me all sorts of advantages. 

There were a couple of very interesting things when I was young, which fit into this. My mother went out to work at Schroder’s, as it happened, when I was about six or seven years old. So, I would come home and have to look and get myself something to eat. In those days, we had a pantry. Stuff was kept in a pantry, as we didn’t have fridges. I remember one night — I think this is an interesting philosophical thing for a young mind to be thinking — that I saw in the pantry an egg and a slice of bacon, and my thinking at the time, simplistic, childish thinking, was that the egg was a whole life, and the slice of bacon was only part of it. So, I ate the bacon. I was always concerned about relating to animals and the food one ate.

The other point was that my view of my parents — and remember we came from a poor background, and there was still rationing going just after the war — was that they were very loving people, decent people, compassionate people, and they wouldn’t do something with regard to one’s food that was going to involve any form of cruelty. So, I ate what they chose for me.

Later, when I was at school, you had to have school dinners, school lunches, and then we were given the opportunity — I think probably when I was about 15 — not to go for school dinners. I used to walk home from school, often with friends, and we would have a Welsh rarebit at my home, and then we’d walk back to school. So, it was sort of understood that I wasn’t eating a whole animal.

Often, when I travelled abroad — this would be about age 17 — I would avoid eating animals, but I would probably live on something like Greek yoghurt or something like that. 

Then, later, I fell in love with a Canadian girl. We’d met in 1966, when we’d both been visiting Moscow and Leningrad (but we hadn’t actually encountered each other at that point). We didn’t so much as hold hands, but we wrote to each other for three years, and it got us through those end stages of school. Mary came over in 1969, and we became lovers. It was very intense, and then she had to go back to Canada, and I, the lovelorn I, decided that I would follow her there at the following Christmas. There was a student travel service, STS, and you could buy a ticket there for $50 to get a 50-day bus pass on Greyhound buses. So, I went up to see her at the university; I saw her in Toronto, and then I decided I’d just travel in America, taking advantage of these tickets. 

When I was travelling, I was living at that stage on Hershey bars. Some of these stations that you’d come to in the middle of the night — because I was sleeping on the coaches as well — were pretty frightening, so I’d sort of dive out and dive back in with the Hershey bar. When you’re travelling like that, it’s like your brain, your thinking, is being matched by the speed of the journey. So, I decided, at the end of it, that I just had to be vegetarian. I came back to England, and I started to live with someone who wanted to be vegetarian too, and we explored all sorts of things. I was 19 at that point.

Then, I just started to come across people telling me about the dairy industry. It took a couple of years to go beyond vegetarian. You start to think, ‘Well, you know, cows are all right, you know, the calves are there, and it’s okay with the eggs because the chicks you see at Easter’, and all this sort of thing, and not questioning hard enough what was actually going on. But once I knew what was going on, that was a different story. Once you know it, you can’t unknow it, and you have to act accordingly. So, that’s when I became vegan; that was 1971, 55 years ago.

Now I’m 76, and looking back on life, I’ve done a lot. It’s all been orientated towards the planet and those we share it with, and trying to create respect in others for them, but then I just had to do it; I had to live it. I didn’t put the badge on me of ‘vegan’ then, because I’m a great follower of Marx, that is Groucho, who, as he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to join any group that would have me as a member.’  

I didn’t speak to the Vegan Society, or get engaged with the Vegan Society when Kathleen Jannaway and her husband were running it. I basically was ploughing my own furrow, but on the way, I would come across other people who felt the same way and would perhaps give themselves a label of being vegan. That’s been my drive all the way through.

I ran a vegetarian restaurant a number of years later, but Tess, my girlfriend at that time, was talking to me recently, and she said, ‘Well, when you had the first shop, the first shop that wasn’t the first successful shop, but it was a shop, you wanted me to run a vegan restaurant there.’ So, that idea sat in my head for a number of years. I later ended up running a vegetarian restaurant on the top floor of another of my record shops, called Rosalie’s Good Eats Café. The initial idea was that it would be entirely vegan, but at the time — we’re talking 1976 — when Plamil soya milk curdled when we put it in the coffee, Rosie, my fiancé who was running it, said that we needed to use milk instead, and maybe have some Swiss cheese as well — because vegan cheeses weren’t available yet.

In 1988, I also founded Fruits of the Earth frozen vegan foods, the first range of completely vegan ready meals in the UK, sold through health food shops.”

Geoff’s Musical Entrepreneurship

For the younger generations, it’s very difficult to appreciate how important vinyl records were for the culture of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. For them, CDs and tape cassettes are already ancient, and although there is now a certain revival of the record’s allure, it remains a vintage, nostalgic collector’s item — especially because people no longer own record players. For me, growing up in Catalonia, they were crucial to keeping Catalan culture alive and to showing resistance to fascism. Catalan freedom singers risked their lives to produce subversive albums in the forbidden Catalan language that were shared as treasures among the youth, as a form of protest art that has stayed with me all my life.

In the London swinging days, records were crucial, and Geoff not only bought them and used them, but he sold them. In fact, he sold them in 13 different record shops he owned at different times in the city. As an offshoot of his first environmental campaign working with Friends of the Earth on the recycling issue, selling records was his first musical entrepreneurship project, but not the last. He also became a lyricist, organised concerts, ran what possibly was the first animal rights record label, and organised an anniversary edition of the famous Isle of Wight Music Festival. He explains how all this started. 

“I was working with Friends of the Earth, setting up their paper recycling campaign, and there was a chap called Ed Fairfax-Lucy, who was a very fine artist and a very fine human being, who was paying me £8 a week to run the whole thing. He wanted an office, so he got this place in Skinner Street, with a shop in front of it. As £8 was not that much, I said to Ed, ‘Is it okay if I put some records and books in there, and then I can augment my money a little bit as well?’ He said he was fine with that. He was renting it from the Greater London Council for £10 a week, and I borrowed £120 worth of second-hand records from a friend to start it. 

We then got a problem with the recycling. We were getting all the computer cards, which was the paper quality that everybody wanted, so with Friends of the Earth we’d gone up to Scotland, and we’d cut a deal with an independent Scottish mill there. We had a warehouse in Hackney, a very rough warehouse, where we kept the recycling paper, but when we came back found that local kids had set fire to all the paper. We’d been working on that for months and months obviously, but that was a blow.

The guy who had lent the 120 quid’s worth of second-hand records lived in Golborne Road just off the Portobello Road, and he was a follower of the Maharishi. He wanted to teach Transcendental Meditation, and he wanted the shop. He said, ‘Look, the shop I live above on Golburn Road is just used as a furniture store. Why don’t you see if you can come and rent that?’ So, I went and met the guy who owned it; he was sort of a touch of the Irish Mafia in the area, but it was lovely because it was those days when you could shake someone’s hand and that would be it. So, I shook his hand at £12 a week, and I moved all the stuff across. After a little while, I took on my friend Graham I was at university with, as a partner. The first successful shop we got, which we called All Change Records, was in Baker Street, the closest independent number to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. It became a very successful shop. 

We’d get too many records for one shop, and we’d go and get another one, and so on. We were dealing with a lot. We were buying review records from DJs, and people involved in the big way in music broadcasting. Our lives were much more interesting than just buying and selling records, and a lot of those people became very good friends. At the beginning we only had two shops: one on Baker Street, and then we had Lindair House in Tottenham Court Road. Then we took over another company that had two, one in Hanway Street, which was where David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album cover was shot, and another one down in Streatham. And it just snowballed, so at one stage I ended up with eight shops I was trying to run, plus altogether 13 shops we went through. There were times I couldn’t pay my mortgage to pay the guys, but anyway, that was when we took over a shop just off Baker Street, Marylebone Road. It was amazing. It was like two and a half thousand square feet on two floors, and it was £120 a week’s rent. On the top floor, I put in Rosalie’s Good Eats Café.

In 1978-79, Rosalie and I broke up, and it had a devastating effect on both of us. I met her in Baker Street one day, and we’d gone for an orange juice or something like that, and she said to me, ‘Close the restaurant; it’s not us.’ I said, ‘Okay, take it as a token of love, and I will do that’. I walked round the corner, and all the staff were on the pavement. The freezer had caught fire upstairs, and I thought that was a sign from the gods that it had to be done. So, we struggled a little bit, but not for long at all. When she went, I lost heart in everything, so we literally gave the shops away to the managers, and I walked away altogether.

I went travelling in Asia and Australasia, and my thinking was that I wanted to know what the situation was for animals and other forms of life throughout the world. Whether there was any remedy for this problem in terms of the way people lived their lives. The only place I found it was in Sri Lanka, in Theravada Buddhism there. In fact, I went back with the idea of taking the robes, but I caught hepatitis, and that was the end of that one. That was a very interesting journey; it had a purpose.

At one point I became a lyricist. I’d written odd bits of poetry and stuff, and I worked with the writer Carla Lane very closely. It comes by osmosis, this whole thing of how you play with language. I’d always had a facility, but I think under her influence it became a good bit more.

I’d set up and ran a thing called the Enough Project, which was after Gandhi’s ‘The world has enough for everyone’s need and not for greed,’ and it was at the time that there was the famine in Ethiopia, and they were bringing grain in from Ethiopia and feeding it to cattle and so on — it was around the Live Aid time as well. Around 1980, through the help of a very dear friend — who kept me going and gave me a job in his record company while I was recovering from the hepatitis — we did an album with Country Joe McDonald, the first animal rights album, and thereby, apparently, we became the first animal rights label (according to Chris Hines), called Animus.

It was Animus Badges that we started out with, so Meat Is Murder, I believe, is what we put into common parlance; before that, it used to be Meat Means Murder. Animus was Hilly Bevan, Anthony Lawrence, and myself. I met Hilly at a demo against whaling at the Café Royal. Hilly and Anthony had just started their own studio on Marshall Street, opposite where Cranks was, and basically through various ways, they became the designers of animal rights, particularly for BUAV. Margaret Manzoni is another legend in this story.  I had to be very professional in the record business, and they created that professionalism within the presentation of animal rights. I believe they were exceptionally influential.

So, we put the album out, we brought Joe McDonald over, and he played the Seal Rally in Trafalgar Square. Then, the next year I was approached to do the music, and I asked Ted Carroll, who was the guy who had been helping me, if he had any thoughts for this year. He said, ‘I’ve got Johnny Moped,’ one of the punk bands. So, we had a whole bunch of punks playing, one of whom was Captain Sensible. I asked the Captain if he would be interested in doing something for us, and he had an idea. I paid for the studio, he said yes, and we eventually became exceptionally good friends — and when I organised the Isle of Wight festival, he played that for me. We got to the studio, and he said, ‘Well, I’ve got the chorus, which is Wot! No Meat, but I haven’t got the verse.’ So, I sat down with his partner Rachel, and I just wrote the lyrics. It was very much along the lines of the arguments I’d been putting forward with the Enough Project. That we could change the way that people approach things by telling them things, making them aware, so that they would know and not unknow it. That was my introduction to writing lyrics. I did other things; I worked with a Dutch producer, who had number ones in Holland, and we did the lyrics of the Chimp Rap too.”

Working directly in Animal Protection

I have worked in animal protection or veganism most of my adult life, never working in anything else since 1995. However, I have never run an animal protection organisation. Geoff did, and it was called Animaline. He explains:

“When I was running the Enough Project, I decided to publish a vegetarian celebrity cookbook. I sent out a message to people who I thought might be like-minded, with regard to the waste of the world’s resources, and I’d just moved to the Isle of Wight; I’d bought a building there — which was an old department store in an obscure position — and had that as the base for the Enough Project. We put these things out, and we got responses from Maureen Lipman, Brigitte Bardot, and others. Joanna Lumley was one of the first to come through. Anthony created a flyer for me, and I sent that out again to sympathetic celebrities, and it was amazing. I got this phone call from Carla Lane, the writer who had written several successful sitcoms, and then an hour later we were still talking. I then put the phone down, literally just put it down, and it rang again; I picked it up, and it was Spike Milligan. He said, ‘Well, I’ll do whatever you want.’  I had a number of people who were saying, ‘We’ll do whatever you want, and they went out for us and did radio interviews about the Enough Project.

Carla and I had many telephone conversations, and then they were doing an Animal Aid fair, and I asked her if she’d turn up and get some publicity for them. She turned up with her dog, a huge Irish wolfhound, and this beautiful woman walked in, and we got to be closer friends. Then is when her sitcom ‘Bread’ was happening, so I used to go to rehearsals and shows of Bread, and things like that with her, and we would talk at least once a day. Those talks went on for an hour or two, all about what we believed should happen for animals. And then, she said to me one day, ‘When I break America, I’ll start my own organisation.’ I just said, ‘Look, with your profile, we could do it now’. And that’s how Animaline started. She said, ‘Well, I’ve got two friends that have to be involved, and the first one was Rita Tushingham, and the second Linda McCartney.

I directed Animaline for four years. We just worked it as a campaigning organisation. Rita, Linda and Carla herself, all three of them, were just wonderful women, really wonderful, but I had the day-to-day to get passed across to me, to deal with all these people, telling you about the abuse of animals.

We worked on the very obvious animal campaigns. For instance, we went down to the Beaulieu horse sales because the horses and the ponies were going to a meat man. There was a particular meat man there who would buy them up and just sell them for dog food, or export them to France. And for that one, we had the front page of the Star, and they gave some money.  I was there to buy the horses and ponies, so I was bidding on them; we had people like Chrissie Hynde involved, buying the horses. We had the centre pages, and they had photographs of the meat man, and all sorts of things. That was the highest profile, but we were at it all the time. From the smallest thing to the largest campaign. Carla and Linda put out a single as well, which I had some involvement in making sure that it got distributed eventually.

But I have to say that the daily exposure to humanity’s inhumanity ground me right down; it really did, so I resigned after four years. After that, I focused more on art and writing.

The first book I published was in 89, and that was the Celebrity Vegetarian Cookbook, which Hilly designed beautifully. Janet Hunt, who was really the cookery writer and is a great fiction writer as well, had been a supporter of an animal sanctuary, a horse sanctuary called Red Wings, and she suggested that we sell all the copies of the books we had to them, for them to raise money. So, I went up. My mum had just died, and my dad and I were pretty much at a loose end, so we drove up to the sanctuary there, and got talking with Wendy Valentine, who had started it. I thought we’d maybe get 15-20 minutes with Wendy, but she took us off to have some lunch, and we got talking. She told me that she wanted to campaign for farm animals, and she told us all the plans for Hillside Animal Sanctuary. I went away; we’d left the books, obviously, and I believe they raised a lot of money on them, because there were thousands of them. I hadn’t been campaigning since Animaline, so that was maybe three years after or something like that. I rang up Wendy, and I said, ‘If you’d like, I’ll come, and I’d be willing to just do whatever I can to help you.’ So, that’s how that relationship began, and it’s still there. She just published something of mine about how animal farming is a disaster for the environment. She put it in an advert in the Metro, the Sunday Times, the Scottish Express and all sorts of things. So, for me, Wendy is the real deal. She keeps all this together, and she’s got 150 people working for her now. I used to go to the various events with Hillside leaflets and merchandise, basically introducing it to the animal rights movement, and I did work with her for four years. I stepped away for a while, but Wendy will ring me maybe two or three times a week to discuss things that are going on. Her sanctuary is probably the biggest in the world, with nearly 5000 animals there.”

Geoff the Artist

In the second half of his life so far, Geoff has become a very prolific artist, using a plethora of media to send his message of peace and respect. He has used paintings, sculptures, photography, videos, novels, songs, and poems, and he is now writing a couple of musicals. I asked Geoff if it would be fair to say that when he resigned from Animaline, that’s when his artistic career began. He replied the following:

“Absolutely, because I had always wanted to be an artist, and my creative urges were crushed at my grammar school, where someone took me from top of the year, down to two years later being bottom of the year, 132 places down. It was a personality clash, but you know, when you start at 12 years old, you don’t expect it to have a clash — and of course, one’s respect for adults was high, more in those days than I think it is now. So, after Animaline, I just thought, ‘Well, if I don’t paint now, I’m not going to do it at all.’ 

I spent the first ten years painting the things that we’d been campaigning about; what was happening with animals in all sorts of ways (on my artistgeofffrancis.com website there are lots of the early works, which I believe are quite challenging indeed). I was still saying the things that I wanted to say, about what we were doing to the earth and the animals. There was stuff inside of me that I knew would be creative, but it had the opportunity to come out at that time. Then it led on to all sorts of things. A relationship with someone in Swanage, which is where I live now; an artist who had quite a reputation, who decided that she wanted to work with me, and we did some very, very interesting stuff. The work became much lighter, and it was lots of abstraction. We actually used each other’s bodies in creating images as well.

I went beyond painting to sculpture and also photography. Photography is always interesting. You’ll be aware that until the digital age came in, you were looking at gelatine that comes from animals used on the film. People ask, ‘’Why haven’t you got photographs from that period?’ Well, one didn’t take them because it relied on gelatine. There’s an interesting little story with Kathleen Jannaway, because the Vegan Society would only have drawings in their magazine. That was all well and good, but the whole magazine was photo-set, so it was using gelatine anyway…but bless her, you know that was their stance, and good for them.

In the early 2000s, I got myself a Mac to work on. I was doing an HND at Bournemouth Arts Institute, and obviously you get lots of creative ideas — with the sort of mind I’ve got anyway. You know I like making films; I like to tell stories in some way or the other. 

In 2006, I happened to have come into some money by selling the house that I had in Swanage, and I got together with a good friend and decided that we would do an online TV station called Bonobo TV. It was all about pulling stuff off YouTube and things like that, to promote the ideas that you and I share. It worked very nicely initially, until YouTube basically pulled the plug on a lot of stuff, and thousands of hours’ worth of work got dumped. At that point, we got together with a couple of friends, and I said, ‘Well, let’s turn it into a publishing company,’ which is where you see all of my books come through on there. I initially wanted to call it ‘Positive TV’, but someone had already used this name, and I thought, ‘Well, what’s the most positive animal on the planet?’ As far as I’m concerned, it’s the bonobo, because it’s our closest relative, and it’s female-led, so it ties in with all these sorts of things, even the idea behind Animaline that had three very powerful women involved there. I guess we all loved our mum too, and it’s that feminine thing; it’s such an important element that should be there, prominent in the world rather than the stuff that’s going on. In my opinion, it’s the caring; it’s the loving kindness that naturally comes with most females. 

I haven’t properly painted for about three years now. I’ve been concentrating in that time on music lyrics. I’m about getting the message out in the music, because I believe that is a place that touches people deeply, and I’d love to write a song that all the world knows the words to. That would be fantastic, especially if it carried a message that changed the way they thought about what they’re doing to animals and what they’re doing to the planet, and who’s doing it as well. I have a lot to do with exposing the people who are destroying the world for their own greed, and what I always try to get in is that enough is plenty, we have enough, we don’t need to go stealing from other creatures.

I’m lucky that I can rhyme; I never used to rhyme in poetry, but when you’re singing, it’s easier to remember if it’s rhymed, and so I started to do this. Six years ago, via LinkedIn, I fell in with a guy called Darren Ginn, who is a world-class pianist and keyboardist. He’s based in Florida, but he has paid his dues from age 15 onwards, playing with all sorts of well-known people, and arranging their shows and stuff like that. We started out just by making films —to go with his music — and then more recently we’ve explored the idea of doing shows — musicals, really. 

There are two in the pipeline at the moment. One is called ‘Love Songs to the Mother,’ and we’ve tied up with the vegan restaurant Unity Diner. We’re going to be presenting there on Mondays, when we eventually get everything together. We’ve got three people who are going into the studio in a couple of weeks to record some of the songs individually. The idea is that we’ve always wanted this concept that whatever we do, wherever the show is, it should involve vegan food, so that’s the idea with Unity Diner. They’ll be doing fine food, we’ll be doing fine music, and with a message and images as well.

The second musical is called ‘Let’s Eat the Rich,’ and it has three themes as far as I’m concerned: the divinity within the feminine, the toxicity within males (like Musk and Trump, etc.), and an overall concern for what we’re doing to the planet. It involves two retired Greek goddesses and an eco-vampire who only eats the males who are destroying the world. It’s a musical with 39 songs in it.

I love collaboration; I love the idea of collaboration; I think that’s the only way we’re going to save the planet and stop people abusing animals. I’d like to produce work that inspires people to change.

I have made a jukebox within Bonobo TV, where you can see songs we have created with AI using my lyrics, but they can be used in any way whatsoever. I’d love to see that collaboration with musicians. At Bonobo, we’re totally open-minded with regard to creative things, but we work to a standard; that’s the thing, that’s what you’ve got to do. But I’d love to work with any professional or semi-professional, I don’t mind. I was talking to a lad the other day, and said, ‘Have a look at what we’ve got; if you want some of the lyrics, if the lyrics speak to you, for me the words are important, and if they speak to you, use them.’ If you go into the jukebox, you’ll see that. They’re there for you to listen to, and if they inspire you, please come to us. It’s like the stuff that’s in the fine dining show; that’s something I’ve worked up on using AI, and then Darren has taken it and completely changed it with his skills; and that’s what we would love to see happen.”

It’s amazing how much one person can fit in 55 years of veganism. How many variations can you fit into the same message of exposing abuse of our fellow animals and the planet, and celebrating nature and all its inhabitants, using all conceivable forms of expression and communication, old and new. Eyes, ears, smells, tastes, thoughts…Geoff has relentlessly been using all our senses to get his message inside people, and he keeps doing it with what looks like an unstoppable ethical drive that constantly creates. I wonder if that drive is the same drive that made him run for London when he was in the boys’ club. I wonder if his versatility comes from the never-stopping Swinging Sixties that were an explosion to the senses after the dull post-war years. I wonder if his ethical backbone was sculpted through the motion of his travels around the world and the inspiration from the many good people he encountered. I wonder if he got his moral consistency from Mahatma Gandhi or from Groucho Marx. 

Having lived in London for several decades, I was lucky to be able to visualise with clarity many of the stories he told me yesterday. Even if I did not know several of the people he mentioned, I imagined them easily. Even if I only know the streets as they look now, I could sense how they looked then. Even though I never lived through the Swinging Sixties when they happened, I could feel them yesterday when he spoke to me via Zoom in a very calm, measured voice, stripped of any Cockney accent but retaining a Cockney spirit that always speaks through a mesh of street and people’s names that I could already perceive when I watched EastEnders in the ’80s — even when it was dubbed into Catalan.

If I had been a man of the 50’s and lived in the East End of London, I think Geoff and I would have become friends. Imagine how much we would have accomplished if we had collaborated for over 50 years. 

It’s never too late to resonate with someone, and I guess this is why Geoff is a true poet who continues “making” things, because you never know which one will get to people.

I am looking forward to what he will make next.