This is how Georgia March put it:

I've been asked to say something on behalf of the band Bloco Vomit. In these few minutes I want to tell you a bit about what Ian did in and for the band. He'd been playing with the Edinburgh Samba School for about two years and was just coming up to the end of his term of office as their convenor when, in 1995, with Gary, he came up with the idea to fuse samba and punk rock. We decided to form a band and he came up with the name "Bloco Vomit".

Many of you have seen Bloco Vomit. Not many of you know how hard Ian worked for the band. He got virtually all our gigs and organised all our tours. At first people didn't know what to make of us. We were too far off the wall. Venues were wary of what they thought was a punk band. We would have got nowhere had we limited ourselves to Edinburgh. He made it succeed by sheer dogged persistence. He bombarded every potential source of a review or a gig with CDs and publicity packs. Our second CD was called "Play this, you bastard" because he could not get John Peel to play our first CD. He did manage to get us a spot on ITV midday news though. He loved it. He loved all that Malcolm MacLaren stuff. Every time you spoke to him he would be bubbling over with ideas.

We made our first CD in 1997. Now that there are CD writers and minidiscs anybody can make a CD but a mere three years ago none of us had dreamed of it. Ian dreamed of it then went out and did it. Not satisfied with just selling CDs ourselves he invented a record company to distribute them. He came up with another tasteful name - X Creature Productions. We trotted off to recording studios and started talking about guide vocals, click tracks, over dubbing and "dropping in". As Ian used to say "Its not the sort of thing forty year old accountants are used to."

While having all these creative ideas he was still pretty scatty. He was always losing things. In Ireland, I think he had Dan with him, he lost so many of Dan's clothes he had buy some new ones. Once I found he wearing my jumper. It was the same style as his but a different colour. He was completely hopeless with money. None of that was important to him.

He excelled at networking with people. He got our CDs distributed in the States. He got involved with an scheme to bring British Unsigned Rock Bands together on the internet.. The current issue of the magazine "Folk Roots" has a two page article on us written by a Brazilian contact and we have a track on their compilation CD. If you do a web search using Alta Vista the name Bloco Vomit has 262 references.

In 1997 he got us a gig at the Drogheda Samba Festival and in Dublin. In 1998 he came up with the idea of doing a sponsored bike ride for charity and we took a tandem from Edinburgh to Oban. That year he organised a tour in Portugal and got us our first big gig in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow. We were the last band on before the headliner, Dudu Tucci who is the big cheese of European samba. We were terrified but we got that adrenalin rush that always happened to us in big gigs and which lifted our performance. The same thing happened in Cardiff and in Brighton just a few weeks ago and I understand it happened when the band played in the Recife Rock festival in Brasil in April. The band went on to play in Rio and Sao Paulo and appear on Brasilian television. Our biggest gig was in July at the Roskilde Rock Festival in Denmark when we walked out to face an audience of over 4000 people.

I'm not sure if he knew how much the rest of us got out of Bloco Vomit. We had travelled together so much under budget conditions that we were like a second family to each other. Being family we gave him a fairly hard time. For myself, my father had been a semi-professional saxophonist and had performed all his life. I had an unrequited love of performing but I thought I?d missed it because I was too old. I never dreamed I would sing in a rock band.

He was a good friend to me. I'd known him for 7 years and when I succeeded him as convenor of the samba school he gave me a lot of support. From then on we used to chat on email. I wasn't getting on very well with the people I worked with and that email was a lifeline. When my father went into care I was always asked to his house on Christmas Day. I know he was a good friend to other members of the band.

So, on behalf of the members of Bloco Vomit I'd like to say "Thanks for the memories, Ian".

There is a another nice summary of what Ian meant to the Edinburgh mucsic scene at http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/HeavensIan/IanHeavens.html

At Sao Paolo airport at the start of Bloco Vomit's famous Brazilian tour, which received nationwide press coverage

A studied moment in the advanced class of how to be half way through a drink while all others still wait to be served

Steamy days, steamy nights in Sao Paolo