IN APRIL 2006, I was given the opportunity to put more bread on our kitchen table when I was contacted by Paul Smith (from the Manchester-based Business in the Arts), who had recommended me to Susan Woodward OBE (another Huytonian done good) and Jane Lucas from ITV Granada in Manchester as someone who could help them fulfil their objective to create an arts residency that would celebrate ITV Granada's fiftieth year of broadcast.

The Beatles’ first-ever TV appearances took place in those hallowed studios and the Johnny Cash at San Quentin documentary was even a Granada production.

The work at ITV Granada ended up continuing for eighteen months! While working with the staff on artwork for the Quay Street studios, one of the many highlights was working with Denise Ambery on the logo for World in Action, a programme that had helped secure the release of the Birmingham Six.

During 2006, we also compiled and released two albums I feel are among the very best things Viper have ever done. I got the title Protest! from a Radio 1 programme presented by John Peel in the mid-1980s about protest music – when Radio 1 still did that kind of thing! It was this show that got us thinking about compiling an album of tracks all related to the great struggle people have endured to better themselves and the lives of others. With tracks ranging from 1928 through to the mid-1950s, the subject matter ranged from civil rights, the threat of the A-bomb, unemployment, prostitution and war, and we managed to get tracks as diverse and brilliant as Billie Holliday's ‘Strange Fruit’ through to Woody Guthrie's ‘1913 Massacre’. Actually, Steve Hardstaff's visionary cover montage of the waves of justice lapping at the base of a reconstituted Statue of Liberty is worth the price of admission alone.

Paul had the brainwave for our Song before the Song collection. The remit there was to dig out the early, unfamiliar versions of songs that would later achieve mass success when covered by later artists.