Me, Donnie Kerrigan, Hoss Gifford and Michael Falconer were in a company called Black Information Design (BlackID) from 1998, I think. And by the time it got to 2000, we were fed up with working there. All of us really fed up, bar Michael maybe. So we had a chat about maybe leaving. Hoss got the sack for stirring things up in Black, and he got the ball rolling on the admin stuff. Then me and Donnie went and resigned. And asked Michael to join us when we set things up.

We had one very small job in the pipeline, a job called Toilet Seats Online.

It was a company that did... aye, funny seats, and they wanted something a bit different. I can't remember what they paid us, or when, but it wasn't much. I think one of our first big jobs was finishing off the Zouk website, which we were working on in Black. Lynn designed it and I built it in Black: www.zoukclub.com I'm trying to remember what other work we got back then. Oh, the site's completely different now.

Aye, but not very well. It was kind of break even for the whole time. Up and down. We got in some games work from the BBC which was good for the portfolio but didn't pay well, then there was some work from a big company in America called Business Objects. They wanted online presentation after online presentation, and that paid well. HERE, YOU WORKED ON THAT, THEM. I forgot about that. We got them back in Flam Jam.

So Flam Jam was doing well enough to take on another 3 members of staff.

Aye, I was working mainly on the ideas and Flash stuff. The thing is, so was Donnie and Hoss mind you. We're all quite creative, but they had more mature heads on them, and I was quite irresponsible to begin with. So they handled the clients and stuff better than me cos I'm an idiot.

Hated it.

Naw, I couldn't stand it. I've never really enjoyed it. I don't enjoy work, haha. But there were a lot of times when I would have preferred to just sit there with a boss giving me a job to do and I could do what I do best: come up with ideas and make stuff.

Rather than working out how to pay the wages of seven people. Month after month after month. Donnie was right into the business side, though, as well as the creative side. That's why he's still doing so well.

Flam Jam came to an end for us when we couldn't work with Hoss anymore. That's it put nicely. I can only speak for myself when I say this, but I grew to hate him. Over the course of the time I worked with him, I discovered that he had told me lie after lie after lie. Just didn't know who the guy was, and felt totally bullshitted.

Personal side.

The business needed sorted out, we struggled here and there, and we maybe needed to make someone redundant. But that could have got sorted out, and like I said, we were break even, not a company in a shit load of debt. But I remember we all had a chat about the financial side of things once, and Hoss said that we should fire Steve Young (designer there) and perhaps Dave Lochhead as well (designer/developer). I asked him, well, why don't you get rid of that £400 a month car you're renting using company money and get the train to work instead? And he went in a huff.

Various things like that happened that became a bit intolerable. So we all had a chat about getting rid of him, but we were advised by our lawyer that it would become very messy and he would drag Flam Jam down with him. And we were advised to just leave and start up new. When we told Hoss that we would like him to leave, he said he wouldn't and that we were going through a silly phase, that's all. And that's when we gave him the letter saying we're off.

So when we broke the news to the employees, they didn't understand... As Steve Young said, "It's like a marriage that's going through a wee bit of trouble but rather than trying to work through it, you're just getting a divorce".

He didn't know that for the past year and a bit, I had been discovering that Hoss had been telling me an endless stream of lies. I couldn't just come out and say "That man there, that man that is actually called Alan, for fuck sake, is a pathological liar and I can't work with him anymore". I could get dragged into court or something. We just had to leave. The employees then came to the conclusion that we had fucked off cos Flam Jam was too much like hard work or something. That we had betrayed them. And I'm sure that was something to do with Hoss spinning them more bullshit. They didn't want to speak to us, and didn't want to hear our side of the story.

Aye, I remember you getting in touch when we started Chunk. I was in the living room in my Yorkhill flat at the time when you phoned.

So we left and that was that with Flam Jam, and a few months after that, they went bust, considerably more in the red than when we were there.

Me, Donnie and Michael. Aye, and we got in touch with some old clients to get ourselves started. And made the Snowball game to get some attention and get a mailing list on the go.

Well, for a start, we could all trust each other and we liked each other, so we knew that would be different. But I think we decided to try and keep ourselves small.

See if we could keep ourselves as close as possible to this small team and perhaps use freelancers for any extra work. If you've got 7 members of staff, you've got 7 mouths to feed. And as much as we were coping with that with Flam Jam, it was a struggle. Now we could feel sure that we've got all the talent we need to do all the work, and we could concentrate on just doing good work rather than getting a business developer in and getting into that whole side of things. At that point, we weren't into it, but that changed as time went on.

We weren't into what some companies are into, which is "Let's plan to expand to 20 members of staff within 2 years". We thought we'd keep it simple. But as more and more work came in, it wasn't an option anymore, and that's when we got in Steve Walsh as a designer. Before that, though, we got Scottish Courage as a client. And we were busy getting through all their work, busy enough to not think about a big expansion. That was one wee problem we had in the early days, we, as bosses, were too busy actually doing the Flash work to manage the business. We could manage the work we had on, but we couldn't just relax and plan for the future or think bigger cos we were too busy making websites.

Aye, definitely. Just getting my head down into the work. Making stuff up. I'm quite single minded, or short-sighted, like that. Just one thing at a time and not really thinking about the future. It would be Donnie who would have the business ideas, or the business sense to realise we can't go on that way.

Aye, definitely, personally. Me and Donnie have got the same sense of humour, we laugh at the same things and slag off the same things as well. I'm able to come up with lots of ideas pretty quickly, and build things pretty quickly. Donnie's creative, but he's also able to pick up new programming stuff quicker than me.

The Snowball game is a good example of the teamwork. We all came up with the rough idea for the game. Donnie made the 3D code and the 3D graphics, that I couldn't do, and I came up with all the patter and voices.

I didn't really decide to work on my own full time, it was more a decision to go travelling and do something new. To stop work completely for a year. Things were going well in Chunk, and it was eventually down to just me and Donnie. Michael had left because there wasn't any database work left for him, and Steve left to join Rockstar North. So me and Donnie were just battering through all this work. A duo.

But when I stopped drinking (June 2004), I got quite bored of things. And Lynn wanted to go travelling. So I told Donnie that I'd be leaving for good and we went travelling. And when I came back, it was time to get some work.

Before I went travelling, I made up a Limmy.com DVD with all my videos in it, and I managed to sell 150, which paid for my round the world ticket. That maybe gave me the idea about making money, or taking things more seriously at least. When I was travelling, I knew that I wouldn't be going back to Chunk and I didn't fancy working for anyone. And I wanted to see if I could do the comedy thing full time, or take it more seriously at least. So I wrote the outline for 6 part comedy animation, and came up with the idea for the podcast. World of Glasgow www.limmy.com/podcasts/worldofglasgow And decided that when I got back, I'd make it and try and attract attention and see if it got me on the telly and made me rich and famous somehow.

Aye, it was in the top 10 of the UK iTunes chart, and that's quite an easy thing for newspapers to understand. That's what I was aiming for. Some kind of success that was easy to grasp.

Grasp the idea of. Aye, and "genius" of course.

Black and white in a paper, I said to Lynn "There it is there in black and white".

It didn't annoy me, but I did think "That's not true... that's not true either... that's half right", and that was after me speaking with the person.

I've got all that stuff in a wee pile in a box. To look back on. I'm already at the point I'm looking back at it. Haha.

It was funny to see the papers saying things like "YouTube comic" cos they don't quite know how to say that it's not YouTube, it's actually the guy's own website.

Trying to explain the thing in simple terms to non technical people.

I was asked to do last year's Glasgow Comedy Festival. After the success of the podcast. And I said okay, even though I had never done any live stuff. So between being asked (October 2006) and doing the show (March 2007), I did a few live spots to get experience of doing stand up. And it was fucking terrifying to begin with. But the GCF show sold out very quickly, and it went well. No problems. Then I was asked why I don't do the Fringe as well. So I did that.

I was backstage, ready to come on for one of my shows at the Fringe, and the bouncer guy told me that there were three lassies with tickets to my show, but they were absolutely steaming. 4pm. And did I want to let them in. I said aye. The guy asked me if I was sure. I said no, not now that you've asked. But I let them in anyway. And the spent a lot of the show sitting down the front, a few feet away from me, saying mad things. Being a bit loud. Answering rhetorical questions, etc. In a small room of 40 people. And it ended with them kind of fucking up the punchline of my last sketch by saying something like "Geeza bon bon" Or "Limmy's the bomb bomb" I don't know. I was told by people who were at the show that they were eckied. They were pure gurning and they were crying and cuddling each other before coming in and after leaving. So a trio of e-head lassies at my show. That was a highlight. And the last show, of course, was good. After a month.

It was quite relaxing. Doing fuck all all month, bar doing this one hour a day. Same show. Same patter.

Ehhhhhhhh... things like madness. Seeing things that don't make sense, things that don't add up. Horrible situations as well, the threat of violence, etc. Generally unpleasant things. Confusion.

Ideally, I get my own fucking telly show, fucking now. But I don't think that's going to happen for a while. I'd like to just win the lottery or fuck off to Australia and get a simple job doing nothing and do my comedy stuff as a hobby.

Aye, work with Donnie Kerrigan.

and just remember that none of it matters. That's what I try to tell myself. NONE OF IT MATTERS, IT'LL ALL BE OKAY.