Suggs: my Saturday job

I worked in a butcher's on Chapel Market, near the Angel in London. I got the job through a friend of my mum's. I was a teenager at the time, about 16 or 17, but it was pretty obvious from the start that I wasn't apprentice material.

My job was to take all the metal trays to the backyard and clean them, which meant scraping the blood and fat off them and washing them with cold water. It wasn't very nice.

Then I got a new role, which meant I had to take all the horrible bits of a pig, including the ears, snout, bollocks and bumhole and feed them through the mincer to make something new and incredible that they called hamburgers. I'd do this under the cover of darkness and it was pretty horrible work. It's amazing what you find in a sausage. I could have chopped my finger off, wrapped it up in a sausage and you wouldn't know the difference.

I ended up staying there for a whole summer and working six days a week, earning about £11 a week – not a lot but it was 1975 or 1976.

One thing I learned about it is that, while butchery – like any kind of trade – is a very noble craft that people spend a long time learning and should be respected, I discovered that any kind of menial work wasn't for me. It was also very cold and involved carrying a lot of heavy stuff. But it did have some perks. These included taking pork chops home in your back pocket of an evening, and I also learned a bit about meat and the different cuts that I still remember to this day.

I also learned that I wanted to earn a bit more money. I realised this after I developed a Pavlovian response to the sound of coins chinking every time someone put money in the tips box, which was covered in gold-flocked wallpaper. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. It inspired me to take my music a bit more seriously because I was like a lot of teenagers who wanted to be in a band – I was only taking it half-seriously. But that glimpse of how hard menial work can be was enough to inspire me to try much harder with the music.

The staff were fun though, and we had a lot of laughs because it was a busy and bustling market, especially at the weekend and at Christmas. I was a cheeky chappie and a butcher's at Christmas is a busy place to be. It's especially good fun when the counter manager is on the sherry and all the staff are having a bit too. I think the butcher's is still there but I haven't been back that way for some time.

Suggs is the ambassador of the new Camden Town iPhone app. To download the app for free visit the iTunes store and search for "Camden".