sang. I used to travel up to Harvey Nichols in London and buy Hard Candy nail varnish...I don't think my style is that outrageous but people beep their car horns at me or shout out of the window." Semple mentions his motivation growing up in a small town devoid of culture with just neighbouring extremes of entrepreneurs or rough neighbourhoods and his self-education over three years reading in Borders every morning. Semple took the persona of "Nancyboy" after his near death experience and produced over 3000 works of art between 1999 and 2003 that were sold via eBay each night at a set time creating an early online community and becoming one of the first artists to utilise the internet in their work. In 2002 he had his first major London solo exhibition at the A&D Gallery. It was called Stolen Language – the art of Nancyboy. It incorporated fragments and images that he identified with in popular culture and remixed into a personal narrative consisting of large paintings, screen prints, sculptures, T-shirts and panels. 10 final "nancyboys" were created in 2009 and auctioned once again via eBay with all proceeds donated to the UK charity Mind after his grandmother became diagnosed with schizophrenia. The Nancyboy Decade exhibition was organised by the original collectors who exhibited their early drawings and canvases commemorate to the 10 years. Debbie Harry bought her first Semple painting in 2004, he suggested the same price of $200 she had paid for her first Basquiat canvas in memory of this. Semple was commissioned to create a memorial with debris collected from the 2004 Momart warehouse fire. Semple packaged them in 8 plastic boxes under the title Burn Baby Burn. The boxes were then painted over and had slogans in pink lettering, including "RIP YBA", which referred to the Young British Artists, by whom much of the destroyed work had been created. Semple stated that amongst the debris collected there were fragments of Tracey Emin's artwork, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 ("the tent"). In 2005 Semple produced an exhibition of his works in an abandoned Docklands warehouse in East London, called Post Pop Paradise. Also that year he included a painting into the Saatchi Gallery which included the words "British Painting Still Rocks" as reaction to Charles Saatchi's comments that the YBA artists would be nothing more than a footnote in the history of art.