Geoff Kayson paints a great picture of life in 1970s Leicester. A picture of a young man in Doc Martens, ripped jeans, the obligatory leather jacket and spiky red hair, kicking against the drab, downbeat system.
A picture of weekly trips to the dole office and weekends whiled away in the old boozers of the city's West End.
It is a colourful picture of a time slotted somewhere between the mediocrity of the post-war years and the conservatism that followed.
Casting his mind back, he said: "At the beginning of 1977 I was on the dole, and was kind of a punk.
"It was hard but fun; raw and exciting and I suppose, like a lot of people in the same situation, I was a little bit angry and pissed off.
"It was a hot summer that year and I had a flat in Hinckley Road and remember having to walk up the road every week to sign on and get my giro.
"What would annoy me was seeing these guys waltzing around with their shirts open and big gold medallions, all of them into disco music, flaunting everything they had.
"The best I could do was buy a tin of spam and a cabbage and a couple of potatoes – which I had to make last – and save enough for a pint on a Friday night in the Merry Monarch or the Black Horse.
"I was 24 and hadn't done any exams or anything.
"But I was a practical person and seeing these blokes wearing their gold medallions it suddenly occurred to me I could make a few bob selling cast lead pendants and badges for punks."
The punk jewellery – saying things like "solid, lead, worthless" – was the start of a homegrown British manufacturing success story that would go on to provide work for more than 50 craftspeople, designers and salespeople and see the business, Alchemy, supplying wholesalers all over the world.
Geoff, who learnt to make moulds and lead casts from making model soldiers, touted the early pieces to shops and around pubs and venues where punk bands were playing.
He sold them through ads in the long-gone Sounds music magazine – £2 each or three for a fiver – and the Back Street Heroes biker magazine, in an arrangement that stills runs today.
They went down a storm.
Geoff said: "This one chap ordered 100 at 50p each and I was handmaking them in my bed-sitting room and hiding all the kit from my landlord under the bed.
"I used to go to Piggotts Scrapyard in Western Boulevard to buy the lead."
As demand grew, Geoff called his brother Trevor in to help with the order and they're still working together today.
Back in 1978, Braunstone Gate was a busy thoroughfare with a couple of pubs among the shops and businesses and factories.
With that hustle and bustle and all those Leicester Polytechnic students nearby, it was perfect for Geoff's first shop – smack between the Rum Runner bar and Gadsby's art shop.
Geoff said: "I moved in above it with a mattress and a cooker and downstairs we sold whatever we could get hold of and whatever we could make, including model soldiers.
"We were the first shop in the Midlands to sell Dungeons and Dragons.
"We were making the jewellery in the back which was becoming more elaborate – instead of lead it became pewter."
By 1983, the company began making official badges for rock bands like Whitesnake, Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest for sale at festivals and concerts.
The orders kept coming. Then a buyer from France ordered 500 silver skull rings and the Alchemy range of fantasy jewellery was born.
Along the way, Geoff married Sandra Hibbert, manager of the Leicester Trader newspaper, who sadly died four years ago.
The team went to Monsters of Rock and around Europe and bike shows.
He said: "There was nobody else doing anything like this and we were mobbed.
"I had a Ford Cortina and the first time we went to Donington we came out with bags of money – £20,000 from a two-day concert."
They became the 'go-to' manufacturer for rock memorabilia.
By this time there were seven or eight staff and, even after expanding the workshops in Braunstone Gate, they soon ran out of space. So they relocated the workshop across the road, just around the corner from Kirby and West.
"We still had the shop," said Geoff. "There was a whole community there, with loads of little shops and everybody knew everybody else."
With the Bede Island regeneration plans, they were forced to move again, and 18 years ago settled into the former lemonade bottling plant they still have today between Audi and Asda in Narborough Road.
The business has continued to evolve with the music and style scene, making goth rings, rock 'n' roll pendants and the odd heavy metal belt buckle along with ornaments such as resin skulls, pewter tankards, flasks, goblets and elaborate walking canes.
Pretty much everything is created and cast in the Narborough Road workshops.
In 1984, the business took a new direction when Geoff and Trevor came up with their first flyers – illustrated with a skull holding a rose in its teeth, which became known as The Alchemist.
The Alchemist is now the symbol of the business, but just as significant was the move into stylised drawings of beautiful women draped around skeletons along with dragons, pentagrams and avenging angels.
Alchemy has a huge back catalogue of artwork, licensed out around the world and used on posters, T-shirts, playing cards and even guitar plectrums.
There are half a dozen artists at the business, and quite a few people out there sporting tattoos based on paintings conceived by Geoff and his team.
Around 30 to 40 companies use Alchemy's designs under licence while another revenue earner are the bespoke awards the company produces for the likes of Classic Rock, Tomb Raider – and even Bradford and Bingley.
A huge chunk of the multi-million pound turnover now comes from overseas, including via a distribution company in Fort Worth Texas.
Geoff said: "I'm out of the country six months of the year – we've just come back from Las Vegas, doing a licensing show there.
"We were talking to designers, gambling companies and even Zippo lighters – the artwork side of things is a big, separate business now.
"Earlier this year, I was on the same table as Ozzy Osbourne at the Classic Rock awards, and last year sat next to Lemmy.
"One of the first pieces of rock jewellery we did was for Motorhead – a big War-Pig badge with an exploding head, and a full, 3D War-Pig belt buckle. We're still doing rock jewellery now, and have just had an order from Tori Amos.
"Everything that is metal is made here – the Chinese just can't compete with us, because they can't do the quality or the short-run times.
"We can deliver merchandise for a tour in 10 days if we need to – we are the 'fire department' of the merchandising business.
"We were at Download this year and Sonisphere at Knebworth a few weekends ago."
Geoff loves the business and the people who have helped it become such a success.
"I can be myself and enjoy my lifestyle – I don't have to pretend to be something I'm not," he said.
"I get to meet people and travel quite a lot and we can express ourselves in quite an outrageous fashion creatively, and get away with it. I owe it all to my staff and my brother Trevor who has been my partner throughout.
"A lot of it I owe to my wife Sandra, who was managing director, who I lost four years ago to cancer. She was such an inspiration that I didn't know if I'd be able to carry on.
"But it was that inspiration that compelled us to continue, and even more than that this is her legacy."