My old mate Gavin Clive-Smith modelling my first ever job for The Sunday Times magazine. I was given carte blanche to shoot these giant match-sticks and I think they assumed they were going to get some sort of pseudo-surreal still-life, along the lines of the Benson & Hedges ad.s that were going down a storm at the time. But the above was inspired by the TV commercial of my childhood which assured us 'You're Never Alone With A Strand' which showed a lone figure walking along dark and empty streets and looking..., -well, lonely really, which I think had the opposite effect than was intended and put lots of potential punters off as cigarette smoking at the time was seen as a social activity, long before it became an anti-social one!

Years later I shot a cigarette advertising campaign for J. Walter Thompson, part of which involved the photography of their biggest collectors of coupons, who were unsurprisingly their biggest smokers. The art director and I flew to a tenement slum in The Gobals district of Glasgow to photograph these people in rooms with dark yellow ceilings from all the smoke.

Below is the follow-up in the series, giant light-bulb lights, -and Gav with hidden electric wires whipping up inside his Lee Coopers...