'BEING ON TOP OF THE POPS was good,' says Tom Dixon about his appearance on the British television chart show with his band Funkapolitan. Before becoming the toast of the design world, Dixon was an art-school dropout with a passion for music and motorbikes.
Born in Tunisia in 1959 to a French/Latvian mother and an English father, Dixon was brought up in London from the age of four. After ditching art school he recorded an album with Funkapolitan. It was the 1980s and post-punk was in the ascendance along with the birth of the style press (i-D and The Face magazines). Dixon worked on promotional activities for nightclubs, leaving him free to do as he pleased during the day. He used the welding skills that he usually applied to his bike to experiment with design.
In 1983, the Creative Salvage collective was formed, reworking traditional materials into contemporary designs. It was then that early prototypes of the S chair were created. 'I was innocent and untainted by the design business, and completely free to make anything I wished,' Dixon says. 'The results were naive, often ugly, and certainly not designed, but it taught me how to make things and sell them.'
At a time when Britain offered little support for young designers, Dixon's silver lining came in the form of Italian furniture company Capellini. The S chair was launched, and Dixon's tenure with Capellini proved to be crucial to his future success. 'I got closer to the 'real' design world through my association with Italy in the late 80s and started to understand how a relationship between design and industry could work.' The S chair - with its frame of one continuous line of bent steel - was a hit and can be seen in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1989, Dixon turned to retail and opened a shop, Space. In 1994, he set up another company, Eurolounge, to manufacture a plastic lighting line, as well as products by other designers. Out of Eurolounge came the Jack light, which can now be seen in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Dixon has always been considered avant-garde, so his next move, in 1998, to work for the British high-street furniture retailer Habitat was controversial. 'I'm sceptical of what people expect of you, and for me it felt more radical and challenging to work inside a corporation than to continue being small scale.'