Some of the posters were used to promote gigs by bands such as Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and Soft Machine.

From the beginning they both understood what each other had to offer and, in sharing their talents, they were certain that they could produce a style that was both unique and exciting. English’s talent lay in his ability to balance an unrivalled attention to detail whilst creating the most fluid designs. Waymouth brought to the work a strong imagination bursting with romantic ideas and a facility for figurative drawing. Their very strong sense of colour was also important, given the cost limitations and the strictures of the silk-screen process. At a time when the prevailing fashion was for an indiscriminate use of rainbows and any clashing colour combination, they strived for maximum colour effect without sacrificing balance and harmony. To this end they introduced numerous innovations that have since become common practice. Expensive gold and silver inks had not been used much on street posters before but they made it a regular feature of their designs. English and Waymouth also pioneered the technique of grading one colour into another on a single separation. The effects were startling, bringing an explosive vitality to the fly posters on the London streets. Nothing like it had been seen before or since. Looking at a whole block of some twenty or thirty of a single Hapshash poster was a powerful visual shock. It was not long before people began to tear some of them down in order to decorate their own walls. It was eye candy to match any psychedelic experience.

In hindsight, they now realise that what they had done was to bridge a gap between Pop Art and tagged graffiti. The posters often contained subversive elements, including sexually explicit graphics, mystical symbols and dissenting messages. They regarded each poster, whatever it was promoting, not only as an aesthetically pleasing design but also as a pro-active concept. They got away with it because the posters were so charming to look at and the contents, including the words, required closer attention than people could give at first glance. Their immediate audience was the younger generation, sympathetic to the spirit of the times but they also wanted to brighten the lives of people going about their everyday business on the grey streets of London.

In 1967 English and Waymouth released an album, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat: Featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids.

Artist and Designer John Coulthart says : – ” This was a bitter blow coming at a time when I’ve been working on something inspired in part by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, the 1960s design duo comprised of Michael English and Nigel Waymouth. The two artists, together with associate Martin Sharp, are indelibly associated with the London psychedelic scene of the late Sixties. Whereas Sharp’s posters were often loose and dramatically bold explosions of shape and colour, the Hapshash posters were more carefully controlled in their curating of disparate elements borrowed from Art Nouveau—especially Mucha and Beardsely—comic strips, Op Art, Pop art and fantasy illustration. Their work perfectly complemented the very distinctive atmosphere of the capital’s psychedelic scene which, for a couple of hectic years, saw an explosion of new bands (or old bands in new guises) fervently engaged in a lysergic exploration of Victoriana, childhood memories and frequent silliness. UK psychedelia is generally more frivolous than its US equivalent which had the Vietnam War and civil disorder to deal with; English and Waymouth’s graphics captured the London mood.”