It must have been the first half of 1981 when Dave Simmons exhibited 3 sets of prototype pads
“During 1981, the company (still Musicaid EP) exhibited at the British Music Show at Olympia in London. They weren’t members of AMII, (the manufacturer’s association), so were forced to exhibit nearby in what was known as the ‘over the road show’, in a slightly sleazy hotel. It took them a week to get just three hand-built kits ready for it. One was heart-shaped and sprayed in some sort of velvet, another was ‘bat-wing shaped’, with no straight sides, and aimed somewhat optimistically at heavy metal drummers, while the third was the now familiar hexagonal shape which has become their trade mark. (Unbeknown to the general public, neither the ‘bat-wing’ nor the heart-shaped kits actually worked!). All three set up in precisely the same way, like a traditional drum kit, with a vertically mounted bass drum with wide-spreading, tubular spurs. The proportions were purposely kept close to those of acoustic drums, the small pads measuring 11 inches across the flats, with the bassdrum roughly 22 inches. ...” (The Complete Simmons Drum Book)