Holloway extract

I don't think this will be in the book but it was part of my notes and workings:

The thing that struck me that first morning, lying on my back,
half out of the green cocoon, staring through the mesh
of legion interlocking, interwoven twigs and stems,
was the way their patterns shone white
when I blinked or turned away.
A fretted photo-negative
weaving with the vessels
in my eye.
Burnt in.
Of a piece.

Louder Than War

A conversation with James Dean Bradfield; Faster Studios, Cardiff, 2011

[EXTRACT]

I was talking talking to Wire about the different approaches the band take to melodic pop music and being led by wanting to connect on the radio as opposed to The Holy Bible or Journal For Plague Lovers which take no prisoners. Does that make sense?

‘Yes, it does make sense. I suppose something like Archives Of Pain…’

You didn’t write that for the milkman to whistle.

‘No, but I still have the basic rule that if I go to bed after writing a tune I want to remember the tune in the morning without recording it. Another quote I read by Paul McCartney when I was young, he said ‘I could usually tell if something was good when, if I wrote something, I could remember it the next day.’ So, yeah, you might not be looking to get the A-list at Radio 1 with Archives Of Pain but you still want it to stick.
With Archives I felt there was a disjointed nature, something there which an audience might not expect because it was saying ‘Yeah, we are on the libertarian side of things and we come from a hotbed of what you might call traditional British socialism in the valleys etcetera but do not be mistaken, we’re not tokenistic and wet when it comes to retribution and justice.’’

Because the left goes right the way around.

‘Yes. There’s a great tradition of authoritarianism in leftist politics, you know, and it was just saying that most people, whether they come from a socialist background in the sense of our parents’ generation or not, want retribution when harm occurs against them. It’s not a right wing point of view… and I felt that our audience - if Richey were asked ‘What is this lyric about?’ - the audience would be slightly jarred by the answer.’

A defense of capital punishment.

‘It is, yes. In the right circumstance.
I think his argument was that people, the Tory Government, didn’t give a fuck about what happened to people within a community when their lives were marred by somebody who had no sense of community whatsoever. He said it was an isolated gesture, your justice, sometimes, when ordinary people’s lives were being absolutely destroyed by people who had no values - so I could sense that disconnect, perhaps, and straightaway when I was writing the tune I felt as if I was slightly walking out of time when I was writing it; I felt as if he was reaching for the outer margins of what people were expecting from us - so that hit me off my stride and therefore, I think, it affected the music (sings opening riff) it’s loaping towards some kind of truth and then, at the end, it unleashes it’s righteous fury. Now, if that sounds like ‘method tune writing’ or if that sounds stupidly pompous and suggests I’ve internalised something just for the sake of it, that’s how it made me feel at that point. But, then again, it’s strange, but I’ve been writing with the same lyricists all my life and they’ve made me feel a million different things. Same process, different feeling so any times.

I remember being given the lyrics to Motorcycle Emptiness and there was a period of gestation for that where it turned into a lot of different things; it was part of a song called Go, Buzz Baby, Go at the start - it had been around a long time and we were just too young to finish it, basically. When I finally came to write all the tune I just felt as if I were driving away from a generation that had failed in so many things.’

* * * * *

Looking back through my notes now I see I’ve written ‘a plurality of convictions; Hitchens-esque,’ and I think the comparison holds; the aspect of foreign correspondence, gimlet-eyed Left Wingers pouncing of the lazy minded, and bugger the party line, with a forthright defense of war, or Nixon, or Strictly Come Dancing.
Pity the poor saps, sloping into shot with a wonky grin for a handshake who find themselves blindsided - chewed-up and spat out with a bloody nose and sad kicked-puppy eyes.

Wire speaks of the 2001 Manics’ gig in Havana, Fidel ‘Louder than war’ Castro (1) in the audience, the apex of a plan doubtless hatched in a Blackwood bedroom. A writer, unnamed, ‘did a piece on us when we went to Cuba and it was so fucking drippy and liberal…’ he trails off, deflated.

‘The reason I sometimes watch Fox News is because I get bogged down in liberalism, I really do… and I’ve spent half my life being a communist, in my head, if you know what I mean, yet there’s a part of me that just cannot take that much soft-hearted liberalism. It’s not that I agree with the other side, even. I just can’t take it.
I mean, Obama’s first month is power was a fucking disaster; his staff were being done for tax; he didn’t even sign the inauguration properly - imagine if Bush had done that! He would have been pilloried as a complete fuckwit who couldn’t even sign the inauguration. I can’t ignore shit like that.
For the last two years I have actually scarred myself thinking, you know, if me and Richey were saying now what we did in 1990 we’d be on Sky News every day! There must be a gigantic gap in the culture if we - me in particular - are still a voice…’ and he trails off again, but this time with a grin.

* * * * *

National Treasures: The Complete Singles was released in October 2011 and lodged straight in the top 10, spurred by a swarm of ecstatic reviews. The public clearly aren’t bored of either Manic Street Preachers or the tunes they’ve written in their 20 year career - many of which they still play live.

I ask James about the way the band approach their back catalogue:

You still play the key parts of the solo to Motorcycle Emptiness as they sound on Generation Terrorists; you still seem thrilled by that composed piece.

‘I think I’m more thrilled by the audiences reaction to it sometimes, to be honest, because I’ve played it so many times.’

Do you feel bound to keep it the same?

‘Um, I feel the need to put the signature motifs in and then I can drift off. I used to hate it when I’d been waiting to hear a song by a band live that I’d never heard live - say I’d go and see The Waterboys and want to hear something like Rags. Perfectly. I hated it when people reinterpreted the songs! I couldn’t fucking deal with it!’ (laughter)

[EXTRACT ENDS]

* * * * *

Footnote:

1 - In 2001, Manic Street Preachers played the Karl Marx Theater in Havana - the first time a western rock band had played Cuba.
Fidel Castro attended and met with the band in their dressing room before the concert. Wire warned him that the gig would be loud and Castro replied through a translator, ‘It cannot be louder than war, can it?’

Manic Street Preachers - section in progress

Manic Street Preachers, band of schizophrenic dichotomy; alienating and conscripting in equal measure. Influences worn proudly, self-acknowledged hypocrites, cultural magpies, damaged idealists, liberal hardliners, collaborative outcasts, global localists, cerebral reactionaries, pragmatic visionaries, self-defeating saboteurs.

Whilst the shaded areas of the Manics’ career Venn diagram are rendered in Technicolor the outer reaches are cold and desolate indeed.
A bitter-sweetness pervades - for every twist of fate, a self-inflicted injury.
Wire speaks of having ‘a Bill Drummond moment’ before the release of Journal For Plague Lovers, wanting to bury the tapes in the ground.
This is not the straight forward trajectory of a band focused solely on commercial success, their ambitions have always lain elsewhere.
Wire recalls the band working on a cover of Fight The Power by Public Enemy (1), the four teenage Manics in the front room of James’ Parents’ house:

‘We wanted to make a defining cover version and listening back to it its actually really minimal and interesting because there are no chords as such… this would have been 88/89.’

Globally defining, you sense; their sites having already been set beyond Blackwood, Wales, Europe, off any extant map towards legend - promising to sell 16 million copies of their debut album Generation Terrorists and then split up in an early interview, espousing a worldview which brook no distinction between high and low culture; unswerving in their quest to exist apart at the heart of the charts and public consciousness - slash and burn polemics married to indelible, grappling-iron melodies.

A quote by Antonio Gaudi (2), later deployed on the cover of single A Design For Life, crystalises the ideas behind the band’s evolution around the time of The Holy Bible and their first collaboration with Jenny Saville:

‘The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create... he discovers. Those who look to the laws of nature for support for their new works collaborate with the creator. Copiers do not collaborate. Because of this, originality consists in returning to the origin.’

* * * * *

Footnotes:

1 - Public Enemy are an American hip hop group who formed in New York in 1982.
The band have always sought to address the culture, politics, frustrations and concerns of the African American community in their music.
Early albums, Yo! Bum Rush The Show, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Fear Of A Black Planet are widely revered as mould-breaking classics.

In Fight The Power, rappers Chuck D. and Flavor Flav spell out the need to fight abuses of power by those in authority and express displeasure at the deification of John Wayne and Elvis as American heroes; not in their name, no sir.
The polemic is laid down over a musical bed of layered and looped samples, a sound pioneered by the band and production team The Bomb Squad.

Repeat (Stars And Stripes) on Generation Terrorists was produced by The Bomb Squad and the lyrical vitriol, social conscience and use of samples to bookend tracks has been a feature of Manics tunes throughout their career and often inspired journalists to pun on these apparent aberrations - ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us, Bach’ one such travesty.

2 - Antonio Gaudí (1853 - 1926) was a Spanish architect and designer.
Inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts & Crafts movements, Gaudí became a leading exponent of Catalan Modernism - taking a broad view of architecture as a multifunctional design, in which every element had to be harmoniously made and well-proportioned.
The landscape of his native Catalonia inspired many of the organic forms for which his work is known.

Writing in progress - Alec Cumming's chapter

Alec Cumming

STEW, Norwich

February 2010 - October 2011

Alec’s studio is in a large open plan building in the centre of Norwich - next to the river, across from the Cathedral spire which punctures the skyline like a limestone tack, beyond the high windows and their wire mesh glass.
We’ve been meeting to talk here for some years, often at night; the strip lights and sodium of the road furnishing the space with a charged stillness.
We sit amidst the oil paintings of the moment and a random mix of furniture - mostly rescued from skips, laminate edges peeling to reveal the flaky chipboard underneath.
There are makeshift shelves and trolleys stacked with books - a Kyffin (1) catalogue lies open on the floor.

Cigarette ends encircle us - stubbed out and up into precarious piles - stalagmites to mark the spots where Alec sits to smoke. Like Babel, if God’s judgement had been a plague of coughing rather than a multiplicity of tongues.

You couldn’t find an ashtray? I ask him as he settles into a scuffed chair, bald with use.

‘It’s a lot cleaner than it was,’ he protests. ‘There’s a bin bag around her somewhere.’

* * * * *

STEW is a utilitarian mix of reinforced concrete pillars and breeze block in about the right order and quantity to be structurally credible; an abandoned handbag factory, which even a hastily applied coat of gloss paint can’t disguise.
Next to Alec’s elbow is a makeshift water butt, half full. The drips which fall into it from a redundant light fitting echo around the space in the gloaming.

‘In the quiet you notice the sounds and shadows of the building and I think that feeds into the work. I’m aware of it changing in my peripheries.’

That mirrors the element of collage in a lot of your work perhaps; a layering.

‘The way things lie over each other, yes, and how that comes through... I like it when you build up the paint - a thin layer, then a thicker and then thicker again until you get this idea of strata, something going on underneath the surface.’

I remember, as child, and this is a bit of a tangent, seeing an oil painting of Bobby Charlton at the National Portrait Gallery. I recall that I thought the painter must had struggled with the end of one of his shoes because it was much more built up than the rest of the paint ; thick off the canvas. To a child, at a certain height, it was like a fungus growing out of the canvas. I’m sure you were meant to view it straight on, adults being higher and thinking of 66 and all that, not noticing the growth at the end of his trainer but I recall it made a big impression on me. That candle wax thick worked foot - it’s stuck with me; this strange thing bursting out. (2)

‘I think that’s very interesting because it changes the surface of the painting and the way the surface is read; it changes the idea of what a portrait of Bobby Charlton is…’

* * * * *

Alec Cumming’s work is abstract but has definite landscape qualities.
I see Sandra Blow’s influence when I look at it and I see the country of Norfolk in the flat plains and colour choices; the reed avenues of the Broads, the Rothko fields which stretch along the coast, prairie’-like but for windmill punctuation and the dune embankment which rise to check the sea. Whilst there is rarely a given perspective in his paintings or a recognisable cast of objects to locate and orientate the viewer, a feeling of looking on and in to something imbues work in a palpable, seductive way.

Alec stands up from his chair and begin to pull some recent canvases from a rack.
‘I’ve been working on these, which have a more definite idea of a space within the canvas, within the surface.’

Are these works about ideas of perspective or more to do with plains of colour?

‘Both, I’d say. There’s a concept of perspective but there’s also… I don’t want to say ‘foreground’ because that’s so tied into the idea of landscape but, you know, there is this idea of something in front and something behind which is different from what was going on around the time of previous chats we’ve had when it was more about surface and what was going on there. I don’t know whether this new work is going to go anywhere though.’

Some of your recent works look a little still life like.

‘This is what I mean, there’s that going on.’

Where do you think that’s come from?

‘I think it’s to do with my surroundings. There’s been a build up in my studio - things have got to the stage now where there is a lot of ‘stuff’ around me. A depth of field has developed - and I don’t know whether that’s for the better or worse but it’s going somewhere at the minute and it seems to be happening quite naturally; slight figurative qualities are also emerging which I’m not sure I like but, you know…’

I remember you were aware of these elements when you were in your last studio, your sketch paintings were quite figurative - I have a small piece of yours that’s quite bird-like but that wasn’t coming through in your larger works at the time; you seemed to be getting it out of your system through smaller experimental works.

‘But now I am actually presenting this in a way that can be looked at seriously... but it’s true, I do still think there’s a figurative presence in there, some essence of figure…’

There’s movement.

‘Yes. There’s movement but it’s grounded in the still life.
I went to see a Roger Hilton show last year; a show of work from his last days when he was painting in his bed - I’m think of that now that you mention the still life qualities of some of this work.
He was painting what he could see from his bed downstairs, what he could see out of the window (fetches a book from a shelf). As you can see here, what he was doing has a very still life quality. There he is in his bed, painting in his book.’

What was he suffering from?

‘He had cirrhosis of the liver. You get the idea of these being painted from his point of view. There’s a lot more of the figure involved but that exhibition has had an impact on my recent work.’

* * * * *

We break to make more tea. The air is cold this February night and the woolen layers we’re wearing aren’t enough to keep out the nip. When Alec returns we hunch over our mugs, warming our faces in the steam.

Often, when I talk to people about their work in this context of process and space, they find themselves trying out ideas and theories aloud of why and how they are where they are and do what they do; such things having often crept up on them; they’re aware of it being so, whereas I’m interested in how it came to be.

I imagine you might not have had this conversation before so when you hear yourself say it, it’s for the first time, I tell Alec.
You might have thought it but now you’re actually saying it, dragging these ideas about your practice out of yourself whereas the rest of the time you’re actually doing it, so it’s new, this dialogue, it’s forming and formative. You’re trying it out - ‘Its about this… no it isn’t; it is about that it’s about this other thing too.’
Yours is abstract work and it’s in a constant state of flux - even if you nail it, it’ll change.
This is important, tough stuff.’

‘It’s that importance that you’re ever striving for but can’t elucidate.’

If you could elucidate it you’d be finished.

‘Yes, I could stop and get a job driving a bus or something.’ (laughs)

Done.

‘I think that’s very important; it’s got to be ongoing. It’s got to be something you’re ever-seeking. Part of me thinks I can’t stop and question it too much. I shouldn’t stop and take it all apart because I’ll spoil or lose something of the excitement; I’ve got to keep moving on.’

* * * * *

A while ago now, at the start of this project, I wrote to Will Self to ask if he’d talk to me about the way he wrote, assuring him this was not to be the usual prosaic, anodyne interview, his emailed response was both funny and telling:

‘No, no, you get me wrong: I'd rather give prosaic interviews - they aren't intrusive, they're facile and meaningless. If I could answer your enquiries I might well find myself creatively emasculated!’

* * * * *

It’s interesting that you said ‘made’ earlier in relation to your work rather than ‘painted.’ You make.

‘Definitely. I’m working. I’m making. I think, once you understand the idea and concept of what you want to do you can really start investigating the tools you use and work you produce and it totally becomes about the process. (Searches around his space for bits of kit) Whether I use this brush with this, what paper I’m going to paint on - starting something, going back to it, doing it again; understanding how you’ve done it and why; once you’re locked in to that investigation then you can really start making paintings.’

And enjoying what you’re doing.

‘And enjoying what you’re doing - you need to have a sincere amount of enjoyment out of it because it takes a lot of work and can be stressful.’

It’s involved.

‘Exactly, that’s what it’s all about; being here and doing it. I want to explore every avenue but I will, I think, for a long time yet, work with ideas of oil and exploring oils.
I’m learning my own language and I’m getting better at it. Doubtless I’ll always draw from certain artists but I’m beginning to speak more for myself.’

Alec bends to pick up the Kyffin book from the floor.

‘Kyffin’s a good guy. He’s one of the people I take with me. He’s landscape. Sandra Blow is abstraction but the thing I love about her work is the fact that there’s an essence of place on the canvas, not a memory of a place but a place in it’s own right. Making worlds.
William Scott, you know, there’s a lot of figure in his work but also a lot of space, not in a Rothko way but a lot of space, especially in his later stuff; ideas of figure. He’s a classic example of someone going through a lot of different stages in their life as they develop whilst always retaining a recognisable personality behind it. You can still look an any of Scott’s paintings and say ‘That’s William Scott’.’

These were people who excited you at the beginning?

‘People who made me feel something, you know? It takes a really good painting and a really good painter to do that, I think. It’s almost like having a favourite dish - going back to the same food - ‘I love that, the last time I had that it was amazing.’ You keep going back to try and get some of that again.
I’ve seen loads of Hilton’s paintings but I always see something new when I return to them.’

Is he a more recent discovery for you?

‘Yes, in the last couple of years.
Another original guy is Peter Lanyon, another who fired me up and got me feeling when I was 16 or so.’

Did you read up about how these people worked and where? Have you ever based your workspace and practice on any of theirs?

‘I’ve probably had five different studios in the last few years, some of which I’ve had for 6 months, some for years but they have always built up in the same way and it’s always the case that, when the studio starts to become grounded, the work starts to flow in much better ways.’

Understanding the space through the work.

‘Exactly and that has to build. I feel my space here in STEW has just got to that point. You’ve got to hone a space before you can work in it properly. I think that tends to be how I function. If it isn’t right you have to up sticks and leave.’

You’ve lined your nest with books and photographs.

‘That’s very true, you go out and gather - gather images, gather resources, gather tools and then come back and what you then do in your space is a response to those things you’ve gathered.’

* * * * *

Footnotes:

1 - Sir John "Kyffin" Williams, KBE, RA (1918 - 2006) was a Welsh landscape painter and one of the great figures of Welsh art in the 20th century.
His paintings, predominantly of the landscape and people of North Wales, were rendered in a uniquely bold palette-knife style which featured a large degree of abstraction, earthen tones and ridged paint surface - hewn and rugged as the landscape he depicted with such vital animation.

2 - Bobby Charlton by Peter Edwards. Oil on canvas, 1991.
84 in. x 62 in. (2136 mm x 1573 mm)
National Portrait Gallery, London

Holloway

Sat on a hill with a Lubitel,
framing a vee of sea;
foil moon arc ends looping round
the silver flat grained dusk.

Trunks grown pinguid round barbed wire.
Fanning beetle galleries
scored into a beaten tree.
Marbled staircase chute.

Leaf mold duvet.
Soft rain patters
through the woven beechwood mantle.
Three lights coming on.

Pilsdon Pen

Climbing up Pilsdon Pen, through the foil cloud line,
into the murk of a lichen toned world.
Layers of mist roll out from the still umbras
of clarity round us - three eyes in the fug.

So we walk out and pass into the billow.
Floating pall island - damp and diffuse.
I pad past a glum knot of cows, unacknowledged,
and on to the edge of the fern table brume.

But this bubble of sea smoke sits square on my chest,
and my mind is shod foggy whilst set in this scape;
and I find myself lost in a bronze castellation;
by a fume quoit looped over this whittled peg hill.

THE BEECHWOOD AIRSHIP INTERVIEWS - ARTISTS IN SPACE

THE BEECHWOOD AIRSHIP INTERVIEWS - ARTISTS IN SPACE explores artistic practice and environment and consists of both original text and images.

I have spent two and half years interviewing artists and craftsmen in their homes and workshops about their tools, inspirations, practice and environment - exploring where and how they work.

The book sprang from of a personal interest in creative practice and was focused by several experiences at art school (whilst building a 6 meter long beechwood airship) which drove me to seek out craftsmen who knew what they were doing and practiced what they knew.
Conversation with my father, a sculptor, and a group of inspirational boat builders in their Henley On Thames yard set me thinking about who else I’d like to ask about their work; a scribbled list of artists and craftsmen on the back of an envelope followed, whereupon I set about seeking them out…

The chapters consist of detailed conversations about the physical and thought processes of a series of leading and unique artists with supporting material from their peers, colleagues and friends.

I wrote to each of my interviewees explaining my interest in their work and asking for a meeting - in several cases I visited them multiple times; perhaps it is because of this unusual approach and my uneditorialised independence that such people as Dame Judi Dench, David Nash, Stanley Donwood and Jenny Saville - known for their reticence to grant interviews - agreed to speak with me.

I have written about three quarters of the book and have already met and spoken with such people as Jenny Saville in her Oxford studio, David Nash in his Blaenau Ffestiniog chapel and workshops, Dame Judi Dench at her home in Sussex, Robert Macfarlane in a Dorset holloway and Stanley Donwood - of the band Radiohead - in an abandoned dancehall in Bath; exploring the habitats of these different artists.

Some of the people I’ve met are rooted within a space and some are roving - ‘site specific or motion sensitive’ as Robert Macfarlane put it.
The peripatetic work of photographer Jane Bown and comedian Stewart Lee is obviously very different to that of the writer Alan Moore, who has always worked from his home in Northampton. Similarly Manic Street Preachers and David Nash, whilst working all around the world, have very fixed bases in Cardiff and Blaenau Ffestiniog respectively; yet there are constants and preoccupations with recur amongst many of the people I have met and it is remarkable how qualities and insights overlap and build into an interesting and coherent picture of artistic practice and space.

I have conducted over 100 interviews with artists and craftsmen during this project and have striven to be rigorous in my investigation. Many of the people I have met with, whilst highly skilled and knowledgeable in their specific fields, are unknown to the wider public however, such people as Richard Long, Antony Gormley, Bjork, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Thom Yorke and Will Self have walk on parts in the narrative of this project.

I have sought to retain the individual voice of each person I have met and set their words at the heart of each chapter. Whilst I am the guide and narrator in places, relating my journeys and experiences of each artist, once the situation has been set up for the reader, I have attempted to take a back seat and remove my ego from the frame as much as possible.

Central people whom I’ve met with and interviewed:

Alec Cumming - Painter
Bill Drummond - Artist/Writer
David Nash - Sculptor
Gavin Rothery - Film Maker
Jane Bown - Photographer
Jenny Saville - Painter
Dame Judi Dench - Actor
Manic Street Preachers - Musicians
Robert Macfarlane - Writer
Stanley Donwood - Artist
Steve Gullick - Photographer
Stewart Lee - Stand Up Comedian/Writer
Vaughan Oliver - Graphic Designer

Interviews in the pipeline:

Alan Moore - Writer
Bridget Riley - Painter

I have written a book that I would have liked to find and read whilst at art school; a book founded on the idea that interesting creative people are too often asked dull and repetitive questions about themselves by interviewers when, in fact, it is their work which speaks most succinctly of and for them. By starting from a foundation of art practice and process, the things which truly interest and drive them, I have drawn these people out with candid and revealing results.

Several of these people have offered to provide original artwork and photography for the book:

Stanley Donwood has offered to design the cover.
Vaughan Oliver, Jane Bown, Steve Gullick and others have agreed to allow reproduction of artwork and images from their archives.
Jenny Saville has offered me access to original photographs taken on her iPhone whilst painting.
Gavin Rothery, Alec Cumming and others have agreed to allow reproduction of their artwork.
My friend and collaborator Lucy Johnston has also photographed of many of the interviewees in their studios, in this the visual side of the project is uniquely well advanced.

Robert Macfarlane has written of the chapters he has read, ‘Completely lawless in terms of form. This is fearless and extremely interesting work.’

* * * * *

Biography:

Dan Richards is 28 and graduated from an art school writing MA in 2009 having spent much more time building wooden airships than his tutors might have liked.
He went to school on a hill overlooking Bath in Somerset and university at UEA in Norfolk which has no hills at all.
He is the Great Great Nephew of I.A. Richards - father of modern literary criticism - which Robert Macfarlane found exciting but generally meets with polite incomprehension.
The fact he was unaware of how difficult it should have been to contact and meet with world famous artists and performers meant that he went about the task with a naive energy that proved oddly successful.

He has written catalogues for Stanley Donwood and Alec Cumming, and articles for Caught By The River, The Times Educational Supplement and NME.
He has a three legged cat called Morrissey and a high maintenance bicycle called Carlos in lieu of a girlfriend.