Vincent Forbes is a child of the sixties. Inspired by the Stones and by Tolkien and his fellow Inklings, Vincent started a band called The Screwtape Letters. They weren't bad, but were lost in the general Mersey Beat explosion, and they never did anything so heart-cringingly awful that they're dug up and mocked. (Unlike, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers).

The main reason they never did anything that awful? Vincent. Though he himself was but a lowly drummer, he was also the group's driving force and lyricist, smattering the lyrics with allegedly 'profound' allusions to Crowley's scribblings, Lewis' philosophies, Yeats' poetry, and so forth. And a certain amount of drug-fuelled imagery.

The Letters fell apart by 1970. Vincent found himself in a situation similar to Howard Marks - he was effectively his area's local dealer, and that tied him in to organised crime. Initially against his better judgement, Vincent became more and more tangled and embroiled in the situation.

In 1973, the Letters did a revival gig in a dank and archetypical pub. And something - possibly, Vincent figures, the acid he'd been experimenting with - opened the door to another dimension. And the demons came through; ghost writer demons. A whole band of ghost writers, who Vincent later found out had died of an OD just before their planned TV debut. So much for the Ed Sullivan Show.

That was Vincent's first exposure to the supernatural. He started asking around, and being in the nexus of the drug underground and the criminal underground, looking for the occult underground, it was perhaps inevitable that the first guy he found with a clue was Ray.

Raymond Hessell was one of the pioneering Narcotic Alchemists, and he and Vincent initially got on famously. Vincent, through the Golden Dawn, was at least vaguely familiar with most of the guff Hessell was using as the basis for his theories; Vincent learned swiftly.

Then Vincent hired on with the Kray twins and Raymond ended up on the other side of the tracks, and there was a knife fight over a particularly choice shipment of what you might call raw material, and Raymond was dead and it pretty much went downhill from there.

When the Kray's infrastructure started to schism, Vincent picked entirely the wrong side to follow, and ended up on the lam. He got away with it at first, running to Glasgow, but he finally made just the wrong mistake - one of the gangsters found their son, at University in Glasgow, had bought something that sounded very like Vincent's trademark Dr Finlay's Wakeup Pills.

Vincent was back in their sights, and ran back into England, where he eventually got made an interesting offer.

Seems Alex Abel's looking to expand his European interests. As William Thompson, Vincent's become part of that effort.