I got to interview Gilbert when he was in London promoting the Fabulous Furry Freak brothers. This would have been the early 1990s when I worked at Forbidden Planet and wrote articles for Comics World.

He had been a hero of mine for a long time and I was nervous about the interview. He answered a lot of questions with simple yes & no answers and seemed reticent to open up at all. After the interview I listened through my tape and felt I had got very little material. However I tuned into a radio interview he was doing later that day and realised that he is simply a very taciturn person.

The interview turned out to be a success when it was written up as an article – and Gilbert gave me a very fine sketch of Fat Freddies cat that I still have in a frame at home.