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Matt was born in Maidstone in 1978 and has little memory of anything, least of all pre-school years. He eventually attended Loose Primary School and, unusually, quite liked it, taking home economics with one other boy and the rest of the class being girls. He went on to secondary school; Oldborough Manor, a dirty shithole squeezed in the gap where the crap estates end and the nice ones begin, unfortunately, most of the kids seemed to come from the shit estates. Matt trampolined for school and district ("I smoked my first spliff on a trampoline thing!"), played some football, got into fights, worked on the school farm (until he 'accidentally' killed one of the rabbits; yeah we know Bremerkamp, "It slipped"!), became a prefect and embezzled the school tuck shop.
Passing most of his GCSE's, he got into drinking and hung out at the local sports centre trampolining and getting in fights. The home economics classes had obviously had some influence though, as he took an NVQ in hospitality and catering, passed, and went full time at a local restaurant as head chef. Meanwhile free time was taking on a more predictable pattern of piss ups, punch ups, psychedelic hard trance music, beach trips and getting arrested;
"About 15 of us went out to a nightclub, some guy headbutted me, everyone piled in and there was a huge fight, the manager and bouncers all jumped in as well, and eventually the police turned up and shut the club down, then arrested, handcuffed, and escorted us out of the building through a crowd of 5000 cheering clubbers."
Lumbered with a 2 year good behaviour bond, things suddenly went pear shaped when he was caught in posession of cannabis with friend Dom Watts; seeing the police coming Dom had thrown away some hash he had in his pocket, when asked what he had thrown the simultaneous reply was;
Matt; "A stick."
Dom; "A stone."
They both rolled up laughing and ended up in court, fortunately the prosecution witness didn't turn up and they escaped the government's evil clutches, hurrah! Drugs had been featuring ever more prominently in Matt's life, going hand in hand with music at acid parties in London (Tyson Street and Cloud 9). One night shortly before he was due to go travelling with Dom, he drank some acid punch and proceeded to go on a 14 hour trip;
"The place we were at was a shithole, people sitting around jacking up everywhere, it was [DJ] Sid Shanty's leaving party, I spent an hour standing next to him just saying 'I understand'. I was being sucked into the speakers, and broken bottles were coming out of the walls with liquid squirting out, everyone was soaking. I went outside and there was a fence with carcasses of some kind slung over it, and there was a war going on the other side of the fence; I suppose it might have been hell."
He flew out to Ibiza with Dom and spent 3 months sitting on beaches trying to work out what had happened. Inbetween sitting there was plenty of beer and partying, and one day they built a barbecue on the roof of the Manumission Hotel and smoked spliffs with Howard Marks and Happy Mondays. Eventually the money ran out, they got bored, and came home, Matt headed to more acid parties (this time without the LSD) to talk to other people about their experiences on the drug, still trying to figure out his own.
He decided to move in with Mannell who was sharing a 12 bedroom house with 5 other lads including Steve Piper, most of the 6 proceeded to completely abuse their employers, neighbours, and landlord for nearly a year of substance abuse, parties, and general fun; eventually the landlord caught up with them, found a marijuana plant growing in one of the spare rooms, and evicted everyone; Matt stayed in Maidstone and moved in with more friends to another house.
Lately he has gained a skipper certificate (his Dad is a keen sailor; Matt's 18th birthday present was a Laser yacht), and hopes to use it to combine work and travel in the future. He has spent the last year in Australia getting brown and fat, being a bum in a camper van, and fretting about spiders (he only just found out not all redbacks have red backs, having spent a whole year shooing away the "harmless" brown house spiders), he is currently back in the UK and back in whites as the head chef of a local restaurant where he is yet to sneak any of us a free meal.
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