Millie was partly inspired by three teenage girls who had passed through the drama club I was with at the time. I called them the Three Sisters and was fascinated by the continually shifting power relationships between them - two of them would forever be conspiring against the other one, and it would be a different combination every week. It was always my intention to write the strip around a trio of girls, and with the introduction of Gemma I completed my main cast.
In these early days Roger and I were attempting to ground the strip in the real Catford in South East London. I would take the train up to Catford every few months and breathe in the ambience (mainly diesel fumes and abandoned kebabs to be honest), while Roger got a friend to take some photographic reference material (nowadays we have Google Street View). This strip, set in Catford's open air shopping centre was the first fruit of those researches.
The cat is the nearest thing Catford has to a landmark. It marks the gap in the buildings that leads to the open courtyard/run down strip mall that is the Catford Centre. It has a small WHSmith in it. That's all I can remember about it - I'm sure it has all the usual inner city outlets, small grocery stores, hairdressers, building societies and the obligatory dodgy mobile phone shop that will 'crack' your phone for a fiver, no questions asked.
Pop culture references:
Soul II Soul - still going, still rather wonderful, still a strange mixture of roots music and corporatism.
The Beloved - very early 90s, but with one sublime album to their name: 'Happiness'. The Sun Rising was one of the most glorious chill-out singles of the rave era ever. I'd link to it on YouTube but EMI, with all the net acumen that has led to their bankruptcy, has blocked it.
Neighbours and Home and Away were competing Australian soap operas - they were hugely popular but nothing ever happened in them. Brookside was a British soap, based in Liverpool, which was its diametric opposite; murder, arson, religious cults, lesbianism, nothing was off limits.
Marks and Sparks and Top Shop are mainstream fashion shops. M&S are smugly middle class, famed for sensible underwear and prawn sandwiches, while Top Shop is a trendy women's shop for the teens and twenties.
Note the round advertising display bollard in the background of the last frame. Based on the Parisian model, these have started cropping up all over the world. Champs Elysee, Paris; Market Street, San Francisco; Catford Centre, Catford. Not quite right is it?
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