03/09/2026
Thanks to all who came to Naypalm’s send-off on Tuesday. It was a fitting tribute and an absolute measure of the rascal to see so, so many old faces. Below are the words that the wonderful Kate from The Old Chapel Etruria - Bespoke Funeral Venue so kindly read out for me (public speaking isn’t my forte).
Jill and Wayne asked me to provide a brief history of our time at the studio mentioning a few key moments in the chronology. I did make a start doing that but found that it kept reading like a bland Wikipedia article with no meaningful sense of my musical partner in crime, so I decided to see if a more personal approach would be better. Hopefully so… Here are some of my recollections of my time with Nay.
We’d met at - and then subsequently been joined at the hip since - the turn of the new millennium, launched headfirst as Big Cash Prizes bandmates into the eye of the intense Stoke music tornado that had raged fiercely between 2000 and 2006. Having emerged from that all-consuming experience completely dazed and confused, I went back to uni to conclude my studies that had been on hiatus and Mr International (which at the time was Nay’s high fallutin’ showbiz nom de plume) made good on his moniker and entered his globetrotting era. “I’m off to walk the earth for a bit, Stockin (his age-old nickname for me),” was how he put it as I recall.
Fast forwarding a couple of years I’ll pick up the story when he returned from his spell of living in Japan. He’d been back in the country less than a week and we immediately (and predictably) found ourselves discussing a new musical project over a few pints in Harry’s Bar. We decamped to the old BCP studio and within the week, Universal Thrift Club was born. We fell right back into step as though we’d been in the studio only the day before. Writing songs, messing round with equipment, saying stupid things in our made-up language. We’d no ideas of grandeur, we were just happy to be mucking around with music together again and seeing where the creative wind would blow us. Nay found it amusing at this time to set songwriting challenges where he’d turn up at the studio with ludicrous song titles and then see if we could reverse-engineer them into songs. This technique gave birth to the likes of “The Loneliness of a Low-Ranking Security Guard”, “Twenty Miles South of Shoeshine” and “Poker on the Beach with Bikini-Clad Beauties” amongst many others too numerous to list.
We only had limited access to the studio premises though - and it is because of this that I have Naypalm to thank for an idea that would change my life... “We HAVE TO build a studio, Stockin” he decreed one day. Not “why don’t we build a studio, Stockin?” ‘We HAVE TO”. He’d deployed the imperative immediately - serious business. Now I’d previously been involved in enough of his crazy schemes to know that it would be a funny thing to do if nothing else, so I was “all-in, balls-deep” to borrow directly from Naypalm’s wildly idiosyncratic lexicon. That was seventeen-years-ago and it’s still paying my bills to this day. Nice one, Naked.
So with some scrabbled savings and a couple of loans we built The Universal Thrift Club Studio in Longton. Our core ideology was to make recording accessible and affordable to young up-and-coming bands whilst offering musical and business guidance to them, using the experience we’d gleaned from our dalliances with the music industry a few years earlier. I’d like to think that this ethos has always remained in place and I’m still working with people who were amongst our first customers in 2010/2011. In fact, I’ll be amazed if quite a few of them aren’t here today, such was the regard in which Nay was held.
The following few years were among the happiest either of us spent. Arseing around in a studio all day with your old mucka, getting paid for doing your hobby. Immense! Although I did have to endure his perpetual chiding of my daily culinary choices. “Plain ham on bread, Stockin? Are you ever going to at least try some salad?” “You’re just scared of flavour Stockin, that’s your problem.“ “Stockin, you can’t just keep having a Wright’s pie every day for your dinner.”
There are too many musical memories to list individually, we honestly found enjoyment in everything that we worked on, whatever it was. I’ll just put this one wee anecdote out there as a flavour of what we got up to though. We’d taken to adding barely-audible tracks of ourselves saying daft things in the final mixes that we were sending out to bands. (His initial idea, who else?!). Not that anyone would ever know. You could barely hear them even if you knew they were there. But we just thought it was funny. One particular song contained a buried track of unrepeatable remarks about Arsène Wenger, the then-Arsenal manager and uber-mizzog Frenchman, at the time when his anti-Stoke City vendetta was at its height. Imagine our amusement then, when that particular song ended up gaining a bit of national traction, getting a few late-night spins on Radio X and BBC 6Music. Up yours, Arsène! Nay’s lips are now forever sealed and so shall mine remain.
Marriage and fatherhood bought about lifestyle change for him and it was with a heavy heart in around 2015 that he left the studio to concentrate on raising his beloved Nancy. He needed a job with more regular and guaranteed hours and had to park his music at the side of the road for a bit.
He was still a semi-regular at the studio, though and whenever I needed a bass player he’d be there. I’d fire up the searchlight fixed atop the studio, beam it towards Hartshill like the ghostly bat-sign over Gotham City and he’d arrive, Fender Precision aka The Red Rocket aka The Weapon of Mass Destruction in hand to lay down some block-rockin’, psychedelic-funkin’ “slippery fish” (yet another now-ubiquitous phrase from the dictionary of Smith).
I was really chuffed when he recently got back into music seriously, joining the band MFK with his erstwhile brother in funk Will Heaney on drums and long-time friends Nic Andrews and Matt Hicks on vox and guitars. The world had been deprived of his elastic and scampering grooves for too long - and to use the same modern parlance of the younger bands that I’m currently working with, they “absolutely slapped”. Of course they did. Naypalm was on the bassoon.
I was on production duties for this project and as such was in contact with Nay all the time about it. I thought back to our last conversation and found it to be quite apt. Nothing earth-shattering, we just discussed which recording bitrate would be best for him to use whilst laying down some bass parts on his little home studio setup before sending them over to me to splice into a new MFK song. Forever the two geeks! The call ended in agreement on 48khz, 24bit mono and “yes, Stoke do look like being a pile of crap again this season”
That recollection was one of the times that I’ve felt his loss most acutely. Amongst the tumult and roiling sea of emotions, which like everyone else I’ve been frantically thrashing in since hearing the news, I suddenly realised that I’ve got no one to discuss geeky bitrates with anymore. I’m sure a lot of people here will feel an equal sense of loss of their own particular connections with Nay. What a horrible, sickening feeling it is too. I’d always just assumed that we’d be well into our seventies drawing our pensions, still sat in the studio bickering about hi-hat patterns, extolling the virtues of optical vocal compressors, moaning about Stoke City Football Club whilst I sat and listened to him doing outrageous things on the bass guitar. Basically just mucking about writing music because that’s what initially bonded us and kept us so closely bonded for over a quarter of a century - and I’m certain would have kept us together for life were it not for the terrible tragedy that has turned mine and everyone else’s world completely upside down.
It absolutely feels to me as though in years to come that I’ll look back on Nay’s passing as being a definitive before and after point in my life. Like myself, he wasn’t very tall but the gaping void that his absence has created will be a billion times bigger than his diminutive physical presence. How can life ever be quite the same again? It can’t can it.
I’ll probably be somewhere in the vicinity of the bar later on and if anyone fancies discussing sample rates or valve amps or tube microphones or convolution reverbs, then hit me up. It won’t be quite the same, but old habits die hard. You get bonus points if you can comment incessantly on my plain and simple diet and even more if you can annoy the merry hell out of me by constantly suggesting that the end of Stoke City’s perils lies only in the reinstatement of Tony Pulis as manager. I imagine he’d find that hilarious wherever he’s peeking down from later.
