There's more to life than books, you know

Louder Than War

2011-11-14T23:10:00.005Z

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

2011-11-05T19:33:00.007Z

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

2011-10-21T23:22:00.007+01:00

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

2011-09-26T22:43:00.008+01:00

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

2011-09-19T01:59:00.005+01:00

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

2011-09-07T18:01:00.007+01:00

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.

Bridget Riley / Jane Bown

2011-09-07T18:00:00.001+01:00

The Voice Project

2011-05-21T18:12:00.002+01:00

Whilst in Norwich this month to write and work around the festival, I offered to write something for my friend Jon Baker - a composer and choirmaster of The Voice Project - whose new site-specific work, composed in conjunction with Swiss musician Nik Bärtsch, sound engineer Jason Dixon and a libretto written by poets George Szirtes, Agi Lehoczky and Andrew McDonnell.
I chose to focus upon the process and collaborations which forged the work.
The piece below was published in the festival and concert programme.

The Proportions Of The Temple

Perhaps this begins in 1096 with the construction of Norwich Cathedral, the Caen lime stones shipped from France on waterways now long gone; or perhaps it began last year in the Sainsbury Centre, a lightning bolt moment over tea with Voice Project co-director Sian Croose, as composer Jonathan Baker explains, ‘The Voice Project worked with Arve Henriksen and Jan Bang at the cathedral last year and around September we thought ‘why don’t we make a piece that’s actually completely site-responsive to the cathedral?’ I’ve been coming to Norwich since I was a child, singing in the cathedral, and it’s always had an enormous effect on me; and it hit me in a flash - Norwich cathedral is part of the reason I’m in Norwich because I love that building so much. It’s such a special space and I wanted to make a piece about that.’

The Proportions Of The Temple is that piece, a layered, expansive and intricate work of intricate detail and impressive collaboration. The cathedral building sits at the centre of a web whilst an international group of writers, poets, musicians and technicians circle to explore and fathom the history, architecture and stories that weave around the building.

Swiss composer Nik Bärtsch: ‘I was interested in this project from the first moment it was presented to me because it’s such an enormous place and the idea was to create ceremony, an arts ceremony; to create something for the evening, with the building.
It doesn’t matter, actually, where you put it in terms of style because it makes sense in terms of the cathedral and I think when we were doing the process we became really close to the building and and it’s function.’

Exploring the space of the cathedral, the space the choir will fill on May 14th, three poets, Andrew McDonnell and Agnes Lehockzy and George Szirtes, were commissioned to write the libretto; surveying the structure of the place and the people within - archeology and architecture, iconography and meaning, psycho-geography and human history explored and intertwined.

Jonathan Baker: ‘Theres a piece that George Szirtes has written about two thirds through the poem, The Proportions Of The Temple, he comes up with these words:

Once I saw from the air
a tower rising below us.
The tower glowed in clear light of the sun.
The plane had places to go to. We flew on.

There’s just something really magical about those lines and ‘Once I saw from the air a tower rising below us’ I thought would really lend itself to some plainsong so I set that to plainsong with all the women and then the words are ‘I’d not seen such a tower anywhere’ and I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be fantastic to have the men singing that and the women just spiking into that and then ‘The tower glowed in clear light of the sun’… and then with ‘The plane had places to go to’ I just wanted to repeat it over and over again so you got a tight chord right at the top of people’s voices and then ‘We flew on.’ Release.’

Augmenting and enhancing this ensemble piece, sound engineer Jason Dixon works to bring out elements of the music in the fabric of the site. A keeper of the acoustics, he works independently of the ensemble, playing with the building:

‘You might hear a natural sort of tail from the choir but then have a thing that rises out of that - something that was there all along but now coming out of the building; so you’re hearing areas of the building speak to you.’

Nik Bärtsch: ‘You can do so many things with the room, the many poets, many musicians and the point at the end, our job, is to bring these artists together and make a piece that makes sense and, for me, it’s astonishing how that’s developed - so many things have come intuitively - but through work; you find out where, in the end, it has to go.’

Jonathan Baker: ‘It’s very interesting for the choir to be working with these composers but it’s very interesting for those composers to be working with these demands. We’re posing this challenge to them and that’s why we ask instrumentalists to do it because they will often then break out and do something that you wouldn’t expect. I’ve been immersed in choral music all my life but, with Nik, he’s able to do some things that… you know, he’s got skills which are quite magical.’

Jane Bown

2011-02-28T18:06:00.006Z

The earliest photographs of yours I’ve seen were taken on Dartmoor

‘That’s when I got my first camera, my Rolleiflex. A secondhand Rolleiflex, then I learnt about taking photographs because I could look through that little box and see things… so that’s what happened. I was at Guildford art school with a marvelous man, a Welshman, Ifor Thomas, he was absolutely marvelous for taking one on.’

I was interested to read that you didn’t like taking part in the discussions at Guildford

‘Dreadful. I was never a person of words. It was awful. I suppose there were twelve students and each week one would have to put their work up and the others would have to criticise it, and I couldn’t. I just could not.’

You couldn’t put your work up or you couldn’t talk about theirs?

‘I couldn’t talk about theirs. Couldn’t. You’re lucky to have a way with words but I never have. I don’t think I ever talked about photography much.’

At Guildford or just generally?

‘Just generally! (laughs)
I learnt to talk on the Observer when I used to go out with journalists and things but I was always a listener, I was never a talker. Some people are, aren’t they; I’ve got a lovely young son. He chats away, he talks all the time.’

Did you develop your own shots?

‘In the beginning. I loved it. Towards the end we were doing it in the darkroom at the Observer and things but at the very beginning I used to make my own darkroom, fill a bath with water and wash all the prints in the bath. As basic as that. Hang the films up to dry at night - there was no drying cupboard so they’d have to hang up and dry on their own - and I’d wake up in the middle of the night. I was very keen. I was one very keen photographer.’

That’s interesting. I’ve never heard you talk about that side of it - I imagine few people have asked

‘No. (laughs) The early days were lovely. At the end of the war I was in the Wrens and we were sent up to a school at the top of one of the hills around Bath and there was a road where these houses were and we were billeted in them and you could look down and see all the lights. I was sent these to be de-mobbed so we used to kid our time yapping. I didn’t know what I was going to do and we were given a sheet of paper one night of the different things you could do and I didn’t think I could do any of them and then I saw photography and I thought, ‘well that sounds nice.’ Never take a picture in my life. So I decided ‘well, I’ll do photography.’ Easier said than done. I couldn’t find anywhere in the country where you could learn to take photographs except Guildford and that was run by a fat chap called Ifor Thomas - an alcoholic welsh chap, super he was - and he said well he was full up but as he was ex-RNVR (Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve) and I was a Wren he would take me. So I fell into Guildford to learn how to take pictures.’

He took you through the nuts and bolts of it

‘Yes. He had a wife who was also marvelous; she was probably better at teaching but he just said ‘correct exposure, correct development and you can’t go wrong.’ He taught me that and I was very good at always knowing exactly what exposures to give with out a meter. Correct exposure and correct development.’

Was it he who showed you how to use the back of your hand to gauge light?

‘No, that was me. That was me but that’s very obvious really - I go to a window and depending upon the day I get window-light - there’s not much here today. I used to look at my hand, because I never used a meter. I’d just look at my hand to see what the light was doing on it and assume it was doing the same on my face. That's all I did. Nothing very clever… and of course, once you’re doing people by windows, it all falls into the same category after you’ve done half a dozen of them, you know.
Light doesn’t change that much. It’s brighter one day and darker another but I always handled that.’

(All images - Jane Bown)

Three Men

2010-12-14T15:35:00.011Z

A piece of writing from last month - scribble, fragments and notes:

Mellis Common

A photograph.

A winter field with a house beyond.
Bare trees frame the shot to the right, the leaves fallen into the straw grass and brush.
The house is persian orange with an earthenware roof with a twisted tower of chimneys .
White window frames. A black door. A hedge. A picket fenced bridge over a stream.

I crossed that bridge, unlatched a gate and knocked to no reply.

This is not Walnut Tree Farm.

It looks nothing like it.

Later, when I looked online, spun down from space to hover above the field and house just described, I saw we’d been walking on the wrong half of the common; the wrong side of the railway line - pottering amiss.
The dog enjoyed the day though, and it was a lovely day - Zoe and Bramble and I crisscrossing the autumnal paths; drawn to the sound of a chainsaw here, peering into the closed pub there, looking down at the ducks and up into trees and recalling the smell of childhood bonfires - the best to be had.

Roger Deakin was gone when we went hunting, mapless, for his house.
There was no fire or tea awaiting us. We were not late for an appointment with Roger - one of the three notable men entrenched in East Anglia whose work inspired this odyssey and whose paths I’m crossing, albeit latterly; seeking out the places which remain behind where tea was drunk, thoughts thought and written out, programmes made and records played.

The three: W.G. Sebald, Roger Deakin and John Peel.

The Rings Of Saturn - W.G. Sebald

Sebald was unknown to me when I arrived to study in Norfolk. By the time I discovered the crisp flat scape of his prose he’d gone; perhaps we passed each other in the gray corridors of UEA - near missing, over-lapping but never converging.

Rings Of Saturn is best a found thing - a book of lost images or spidery notes in a wiry hand, a thing to be poured over and decoded - a map without a key or cross.
I found my copy in a blanket box whilst looking for something else.

Nothing else I have read captures the depth and loss of the broads; crawling into the landscape on a listless, wheezing train, walking out - the dot of the man getting smaller and smaller until he is swallowed by the landscape and only the voice remains.
Rothko and Ballard near Benacre Broad.

I read it in one sitting in a Norwich student kitchen, the book playing out until, suddenly, the end.
I blinked and peered about me to see where I was.

It was dark outside.

Tower Block

I remember the hospital buildings that once loomed here. When I watched Anton Corbijn's film Control I thought of those towers and now, as I walk up towards Newmarket Road, they still hang in my peripheries although long demolished.
If I close my eyes I can see their concrete bulk, burnt into my retinas, remember the hydraulic claws which pulled the blocks down; the still-curtained windows which streamed as they fell; the building’s interiors exposed - an exploded diagram of a 60s high rise healthcare dream - Sebald’s room amongst them:

'I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star. At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then that I began in my thoughts to write these pages. I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. Indeed, all that could be see of the world from my bed was a colourless patch of sky framed in the window.'

The Rings of Saturn,
W.G. Sebald

That image of Sebald looking down from his sanitarium spire cubicle which opens The Rings Of Saturn echoes so many Ballardian scenarios - a man waking up or sitting on a stark balcony, considering recent happenings - although its notable that the only dogs being eaten at the start of Sebald’s sometime narrative are the distant Sirius and the diffuse author himself.

Brutalism

Machines for living. Machines to cure now riddled with concrete cancers; crumbling renders revealing rusted crosshatched skeletons. Falling apart. Outlived but the remaining terraces they rose to supersede.

The grey corridors of UEA.
Logan’s Run.
Bunker cluster.
Concrete cube farms on spindle legs.
Gravel pit golf course.
Photofit ziggurats - cyanobacteria geometry.
The architecture of nowhere.
Higher education hinterland… with pubs.

Heidegger up in the SOC block. Interminable.
Intermission coffee and cigarettes in a boothed cafe.
Sky news on a monitor.
John Peel’s picture.
Thrown and out of context, I watch it - waiting for the headlines to roll around again - stomach sinking.
An accident perhaps.
Worse.

No more Heidegger for me.
I went to the library and cried.
Later I sat with my logic tutor Peter Green and discussed the sad state of affairs. He was brilliantly humane.

Thursday evenings

Bury Street.

My student house; my bedroom where the living room should be; a heavy curtain over the glass in the front door to stop the sodium leak of the light of the street.
Desk, shelves, dicey gas fire, bed and wardrobe.
I’m sat at my desk working - cup of tea steaming, thick jumper, cords and socks - illuminated by a red angle-poise and the flicker of a radio set that my mother bought during the 3 day weeks of the 70s because it could take batteries.
Its Thursday night and I’m listening to John Peel.

This was a scene repeated for much of my second year at university. Thursday was not a pub night, Thursday was the night John broadcast direct from Peel Acres; Thursdays were sacrosanct. I remember taping Mono, Black Keys and Four Tet sessions, listening with my finger hovering of the red button on the deck - I’ve probably still got them in a box somewhere.

From my diary of Thursday 6th May, 2004:

JP - ‘Something blistering from Newcastle’s Jazzfinger…’
In pencil next to it: Not very blistering as it turned out.

A week later I wrote approvingly that John had played four tracks by The Izzys and that I’d enjoyed them very much. The show opened with the greeting ‘Hello, brothers and sisters, and welcome to Peel Acres,’ and that was very much the spirit behind those Thursdays - he was welcoming the audience into his home where he sat before his decks playing tracks he thought we might like, or not - something new anyway. Something like Jazzfinger, of doubtful blister, the paint shredding jet-wash of Part Chimp - 'Crash The High Octave' 7" - or The Izzys in session covering Richard & Linda Thompson tracks.
Amazing to think how intimate it all felt - a man in his house in conversation with whoever happened to be tuning in - broadcasting to you. A public service.

I remember the quiet of my room then, the crackle of the radio and the feeling of connectivity. His sound space beaming into mine - from Stowmarket to the world.

Years later I wrote to Sheila Ravenscroft about those Thursdays:

'Perhaps the most interesting spaces grow up and around the person working within them. The more this project goes on, the more I think of John’s programmes from Peel Acres and recall the way the atmosphere of his studio seemed to percolate out into my room; the wonderful conversational way he had of speaking, how it created a space and set of associations that continue to inform what I am writing about now.'

(All images - Gerhard Richter)

Silent Running

2010-10-25T00:13:00.005+01:00

Hello,

I wanted to write an update about whats been going on of late with the book.

Last week Lucy and I visited Gavin Rothery, Concept Designer and VFX Supervisor on the film Moon (and various other secret projects that I can't talk about... mainly because he didn't tell me because they're secret... but I do know they involve 'lots of robots.' Brilliant.)

A lot of tea was drunk and jaffa cakes eaten, NASA photographs picked over and sci-fi books, films and models passed around... and talked about Star Wars a great deal.
It was great to talk to such a passionate and knowledgeable chap and he has a blog over at http://gavinrothery.posterous.com/ in which he details a lot of the work and process that went on before and during the filming of Moon.
The blog is well worth a read and look - lots of super cool pictures of all sorts and laconic northern monologues.
Also, if you've not seen Moon do look it out because its ace.
(The posters for it were pretty cool too. I remember seeing them plastered up and tube stations and wishing I could take one home but aware too that it would lose something in my bedroom, seeming all the more haunting and intriguing in the strange subterranean interzone of that place.

Later today I'm going to talk to Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers at Bristol's Colston Hall. He's someone whose work I hold very dear and who has, in various ways, introduced me to a lot of my favourite the artists and writers - Jenny Saville for one.
I think the way the Manics consume, repackage and disseminate both high and low culture is both important and unique - a model and spur to the somewhat holistic approach I've taken with my reconnoiter of work and workspace.

Before I go to sleep now, Gavin can have the last word on influence, the propagation of ideas and galaxies far far away :

'From my perspective I’m an artist and I love sci-fi, have done my whole life, so my heroes would be people like Ralph McQuarrie, Ron Cobb, Syd Mead - these kind of people, wonderful illustrators who’ve brought us all this amazing stuff.
You look at Star Wars, you look at Ralph McQuarrie. Read the script and then look at Ralph McQuarrie’s artwork and its like ‘holy shit, that's amazing.’ Before George met Ralph, he had the script and then he took the script to Ralph, Ralph did those paintings so he came out of it with this phenomenal portfolio - 15-20 pieces; cinema aspect plates, full colour paintings of key points in the film. In doing those paintings he visualised pretty much all of it; the droids, stormtroopers, Death Star, Darth Vader, Luke, Han, the Millennium Falcon, you know, every single thing which by itself is amazing, he did all of this in the course of doing those paintings so we get to the end of it and not only does Star Wars become this massive legendary film but the artistic input that Ralph had is so clear and so there.

(The portfolio can be seen here)

Its such a beautiful thing to have a portfolio like that, a chunk of imagery, but when we were doing Moon, you know, I’d been trying to make a science fiction film forever! Finally had the opportunity to it and I could do whatever I wanted with the art and it was like, ‘amazing! I don’t know if I’m ever going to have the opportunity to do this again so I better properly smash into it and make sure I get it right but because of the nature of what we were doing and the way we were under-resourced I was covering so many bases that most of my art on that job was functional rather than pretty so I didn’t come out of Moon with a nice 15-18 piece portfolio of all these really spot-on depictions that were then used as a template for the film.
There was no time to do any drawing or any painting so all my concept work was done in 3D because I needed to see exactly how it was going to be as we were going along. It was, ‘We’ll work out the space suit later... that's all we need for now.' '

Dan

Ben Johnson

2010-10-11T22:09:00.005+01:00

More exciting photo-taking opportunities next week but in the meantime here is a photo I took of the lovely Ben Johnson, when me and Dan went to his studio.

David Nash

2010-10-02T13:11:00.005+01:00

Jeff has posted a piece I wrote for him about David Nash over at Caught By The River.
Since that first meeting, last year, I've been back and taken some pictures of the man at work - 'frantically rushing across the country to get to David Nash before he disappears into solitude and introspection,' as a friend put it; it was rather hectic but the story of that fevered journey is for another time, perhaps.

David was skimming three pieces of greenheart with his saw. The wood, the densest there is - also called lignum vitae, guayacan and pockenholz - had been used as sea defenses somewhere on the south coast.

Last month I saw the finished work at the Annely Juda gallery in London. Two pieces hung on a wall, charred an intense dense black.
The small holes I had seen whilst David chain plained the tops, implacably bored in the sides of the wood by generations of sea creatures, were gone - the wood having been changed into something quite other by the fire.

More picture-nicking shindig!

2010-09-24T13:16:00.002+01:00

Ha!
More cheeky non-crediting pilfering scamps ahoy!

A) http://pitchfork.com/news/40032-take-cover-radiohead-artist-stanley-donwood/

B) http://flavorwire.com/114756/qa-with-stanley-donwood-the-sixth-member-of-radiohead

Honestly...

Lucy, sick 'em!

BUIRNT NORTON

2010-09-22T17:06:00.013+01:00

A piece written from my friend Elena Italia's exhibition at the STEW gallery later this month.

BUIRNT NORTON

i)

We were meant to meet at a cafe but the cafe is closed.
I sit on a step and watch the street. Comings and going, a mother with her children; two men carrying a bookcase to a van; moss between cobbles; cars parked at odd angles; bird fuss; shadows from the trees - whiffled by the breeze.
My companion stretches and mutters.

Waiting.

After a few minutes I retrace my steps - back up the passageway. A taxidermists - also closed. I peer into the dark shop and meet the glassy eyes of deer, fish, owls.
I look beyond these, looking for the ringer - a pair of eyes alert and sharp - a scare for the unwary.
Sitting on a stuffed horned head at the back, hunched like an old man at the back of a bus, huge. An owl. A fucking massive owl. Take your face off for shits and giggles, this one… if it could be bothered. It probably can’t though.
Our eyes meet.
We exchange wise nods.

Back on the step.

I take a postcard from my satchel. The picture on the card is of a meadow framed by trees. A Rothko scape. Black and white. A straight path of tramped grass.
‘A Line Made By Walking.’
I’m about to write on the card when a figure in orange overalls walks past; my attention diverted, my companion takes the postcard and eats it.

ii)

A road.

The stump baby chews ruefully.
The fish spits balefully and digs its tail into Elena’s guts.
Alec smokes a cigarette.
Sophie holds the camera to her eye.
These five walk past me and on. The fish in front, then Elena, the other three trailing after.

iii)

Earlier, sat on the step with Otik - me, wondering where Elena could be, the stump child picking at the cobbles with a twig - I pondered my situation. The two men having finished their furniture hefting look at us askance.
Otik glares back.
We look at each other.
Otik burps.

iv)

A pavement.

The fish doesn’t like the camera and refuses to make eye contact. It also appears to have taken against Alec and swears periodically in his general direction. Also, the smell. It smells bad.
Elena has entered a trance-like state and appears oblivious to the scene.
Sophie holds the camera to her eye.
These four walk past me and Otik and on. The fish in front, then Elena, the other pair trailing after.

v)

Jan phones me up, asking about Otik. I tell him all is well.
He says he won’t be long and thanks me for my time and tree sitting.
‘He can be a handful,’ he says.

I don’t mention the cat.

vi)

A field.

The fish hasn’t done or said anything for a while now. It lies prone and flaking.
It smells worse than before.
Elena walks sightlessly ahead, barefoot and silent.
Sophie has taken to holding the camera at chest height; her spatulate white finger ends white, filming as she walks.
Point and shoot.

The three walk past me, Alec, Otik and on.
The fish in front, then Elena, Sophie circling around.
Alec offers Otik and cigarette. He takes with a tendril twig and inspects it closely. Then eats it.

vii)

Like Cartaphilus, she walks through the world.
Like a condemned man suited in a Cuban cell.
Like a tree baby - brought to life by desperation;
Otik, an arbor, a still still place:

‘At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’

viii)

A wood.

The fish is falling apart and broken, fetid, gouged and rank.
The smell is quite evil.
A stain has spread around Elena’s midriff but its source is unclear. She walks with stiff resolve, staring ahead.
A thousand mile stare.
Silence.

The two walk past me, Alec, Otik, Sophie and on - deeper into the trees.
The fish in front, then Elena.
We watch them go until they are swallowed by the dark.
We wait for a bit; then we go home.

There is more information on Elena's website > http://elenaitalia.co.uk/upcoming_events.html

Poachers: please give us credit

2010-09-12T18:35:00.001+01:00

As soon as you post anything online multiplies off and proliferates.
Its impossible to put back in the box and you end up chasing shadows.
The pictures and words are put up on here in good faith and in the hope that people will enjoy them and but not nick 'em and appropriate them for and as their own.
Borrow but please credit the source or else we may email you in a tired and resigned way to ask you to do so... or just sigh when we discover said poaching and make a cup of tea.

Be nice and honest and honest and nice please.

One picture of Stanley seems particularly popular on the blogosphere/interweb at the moment - popping up all over the shop. Its a nice picture, yep... Lucy took it you know... sorry, of course you do.

Dan

Steve Gullick in film

2010-08-26T15:26:00.005+01:00

(Steve Gullick speaks to Dan in his study © Lucy Johnston)

In fear of sounding dramatic, its difficult to find the words to explain how inspiring I found it to talk to Steve Gullick, who has for a long time been a great inspiration to me. All I can say is that it was a real honour to talk to this man about his work, inspirations and concerns. Again, good tea was drunk and Dan very kindly let me speak very excitedly about things I love with someone whose work I deeply admire. It was genuinely a very positive afternoon and me and Dan came out of it talking excitedly, completely buzzing, having just met a very decent and extremely talented fellow.

Here are a few of the usual snapshots I take on my little LC-A.

The journey homeward...

Dan pondering:

Blurry me very excited by the prints Steve very kindly gave us within my grasp:

And here is a photo I took between Steve's house and the station...

This blog post can also be found here.

Steve Gullick

2010-08-21T10:49:00.009+01:00

A extract from a conversation in Steve Gullick's darkroom last month

Lucy - I struggle in terms of when to play the role of photographer, sometimes I feel that I’m invading - which I’ve just got to get over, I think

Steve - No, you’re good because you two are working together and you’re talking as well, which is good; its something I’ve always done. Its important. I think a lot of photographers don’t do what you do. Maybe its because of the type of writers that work with them that they don’t feel they’ve got the opportunity to get involved and ask questions because, you know, as a human being you’re interested. I was always chipping in…

I think, to get a good shot of someone, you’re relating to them or trying to. I hate having my photograph taken. I get so nervous, ridiculously physically ill at ease and I’ve had to photograph a lot of people - bands and stuff - who aren’t used having their photograph taken, and I’d hate for anyone to feel that I’m just rocking up and taking something from them whilst they’re not comfortable because I’d never want to make anyone feel uncomfortable or ill at ease, you know?

There are situations where you have to be like that though; when you’re given 5 minutes. I photographed Lou Reed a few years ago and I was introduced to him and he walked in the door and I was waiting and I went to shake his hand and he was like (mimes withdrawing hand up and away in a sickened and effete manner). I think he may have touched me slightly or something but then walked to the back of the office and then 20 minutes later I was summonsed to the back and I thought ‘well, he’s got a reputation anyway. This is obviously a game he plays to people.’ So I just started telling jokes and he couldn’t be arsed with the pretense then, you know, he just relaxed and took an interest in my cameras and stuff and I got a good set of pictures with him because he was into it then

Dan - Has photographing people who don’t like having their photograph taken become a speciality?

Yes.

Do you enjoy that?

Yeah. (wolfishly) It makes me feel special. (laughter) Yeah, because they don’t mind me being around. They’re usually the people I like anyway.

You’ve worked with Nick Cave quite a few times

Yeah. I work with Nick Cave ‘cos I’m quick.

He doesn’t like it does he.

No. I remember having a conversation with him about doing a photo session and him saying ‘you can have six minutes’ and I talked him up to ten and actually got twelve

Double!

Yeah.

Do you mind having your photograph taken?

Um, well, because I’m in this band I have to be in photos and I take ‘em - I hate it. Its tedious. It just bores me, its a really tedious thing. Its a really good position to be in as a photographer because I can now see how shit-boring it is. So its been good in that respect… there have been a couple of occasions when someone else has taken pictures and that's actually been fine…

When someone else has taken pictures, do you look at them and think ‘well, I’d have done something slightly different’

No, I never think anything like that.

You’re able to switch off?

Totally.

I suppose, if they’re not yours, then…

Yeah, I really don’t care. If it looks good it looks good. And that's an interesting perspective - doing the band thing and being photographed has been really enlightening for me as a photographer because, from the band perspective, I don’t care whether its shot on digital or film so… its made me question why I’m so…

You’ve realised you wouldn’t hire you.

I wouldn’t hire me. There's no question. I don’t like the kind of photographs I take… (laughter) Well, I do - I like the candid stuff I do but I wouldn’t want my band to look like that (holds up a print he’s picked off the side - a press shot in the traditional sense, all faces front) but I did take a shot of our band like that once because I knew it would get printed and after that I avoided taking pictures like that… but everyone still prints the first picture I took… so maybe I need to take another like that to get us back in print, do you know what I mean?

Yeah. I think so.

So I can see why people need someone like me to photograph them but I understand that its not necessarily what the band want - but then I come at music from a relatively alternative perspective; see, the kind of bands I like can’t afford me (laughs)

Alan Moore

2010-08-02T22:38:00.005+01:00

I met Alan Moore in a maze of tunnels and arches beneath Waterloo station's throat on Saturday night. He was reading a piece he wrote for a collection of writings about disappeared and disappearing London compiled and edited by Iain Sinclair some time ago called London: City of Disappearances
I bought it when it came out and its sitting somewhere - a thick brick of a tome chock full of recollections, inventions and stories about the city, its strata of gone and going, lost and losing, racist sparrows n'all.
So, to recap, last Saturday in the dark dark city, I made my way over the dark dark Thames and onto a dark dark station approach, down the dark dark station approach to a door with darkness beyond. Through the darkness and down into dark dark tunnels, muffled music ahead - follow the dim light through the dark dark damp and past a velvet curtain into a bar - lampshades, tables and chairs, mirrors on the walls, 30's jazz... hmmm:

Yes, as the film at the top of the page explains, Alan read the piece called Unearthing whilst a live band called Crook & Flail backed him with hypnotic soundscapery. The audience sat in red velvet upholstered theatre chairs and it was wonderful and, well, dark.
I loved it.

Afterward the audience stumbled stunned back into the bar, unsure of what had just occurred but determined to celebrate it, whatever it was, by getting slaughtered.
I had a brief conversation to the man before the dancing began - he wrote his contact details down in my notebook and we discussed Stanley's appropriation of Shadowplay's swimming pools of blood in his artwork.

I must thank Ros for making all this malarkey possible.
Her's is the credit for buttonholing Mr. Moore and the blame for the red wine and dancing.

A trip to Northampton might be in order at some point.
Watch this space.

Dan

An update - notes made tonight

2010-07-25T23:43:00.008+01:00

Photography: Stanley - A shot up to/of the studio window from the courtyard - lit in the darkness? A figure looking out - the room and work visible behind him in the gloaming?

I remember sitting in Brighton Museum, listening to the Manics soundcheck behind a glass partition - making notes and writing a postcard to my brother.

Really excited about seeing Jenny Saville again and photographing the paintings go - if that is what happens… I remember that radiator below the dado rail - the corrugation rump impressions, the endgame carcinogen portraits.
A great document and object in itself, that scene.

As I type, I’m sat in front of the LP sleeve of JFPL, my laptop screen cutting the lower half of Stare so that I can only see from the girl’s left eyebrow up. I can see the naturalistic scaffolding of the right ear and the skin fleck in the fringe that cuts through one of the locks; the zones of tone on the forehead spotted and spattered in places. Looking at just this section of the work I see the dynamism of the artist, imagine her sweeping and swooping with her knives and brushes - the arch of errant halo hair, the smack of red pigment spots, the curve of the eyelid environs.
I move my screen back to reveal the rest of the face - the expression of shocked discovery or loss, blank confusion - revealing the delicate and brutal architecture of the right cheek and nose, the layered web of plains, the depth to the eyes - headlights coming the other way - studied classical anatomy shot through with the shards of meat mess, collaged and coagulate.
Experienced all together, in the flesh of her studio, the result was heady and mesmeric. The blue in the face is working so hard, every mark meant and manipulative.
Incisive.

Dettol and chewing gum.
Those teeth - like Picasso’s cat.
I think of Jonathan Yeo’s skin mag mash and am drawn back up the stairs up to the Hunterian Museum - walking towards the perturbingly familiar.
Lincoln's Inn Fields, hot outside; hubbub by the ice cream van.
Black sedans by the Soane Museum.

I remember presenting my face flush to the side of Jenny’s painting at the Gagosian Ballard show and seeing the physical plateaus, terraces and smears of the painted landscape built up atop the canvas.
I remembered this when I was walking around David Nash’s YSP show with my friend Ros, smelling and peering at the work, touching and climbing inside pieces - experiencing them with as many senses as possible.

Dan

Alec Cumming 23.05.09

2010-07-16T22:35:00.012+01:00

Going through some conversations from last year, I listened again to a talk I had with Alec in STEW. We sat in his workspace and spoke about process, the progression of his work since finishing art college and technical ability:

(Photograph taken by Laura Williams)

When you were working at art school, when you were studying, you were working and painting full time. What was it like when you stopped?

I think, when I left, I was swimming in murky water for a bit. I wasn’t painting anything as such but I had a show lined-up straight afterward pretty much so I had to make something... but I think it was a bit strange. There was a period when I couldn’t make paintings continuously every day, I was doing other things, it wasn’t so possible to get going and get on with things. In the same way that I don’t think I’ve made anything particularly... I haven’t made much over the last two years, not really. I’ve only just got going again. Everything you see here was done in the last 6 months.

Do you mean you didn’t paint much or you didn’t paint much that was any good? Because you didn’t stop painting, did you?

No, I didn’t stop painting but I could maybe pick out one or two pieces from the past two years that I could say ‘that's a good painting. I'm chuffed with that.’

How do you view the paintings though? Is this about getting technically better or just restarting the process?

Um, Its not about getting better. Its about continually exploring the ideas that I have. I don’t know necessarily that they’ll get better; they might do. I’d like to think they might (laughs). They need to get better.

They’re not exercises in form though, in that way...

No.

The journey isn’t about technical ability

No, its about exploring ideas - maybe not even that, just trying to get something across. I want people to enjoy my paintings, to get something from them. I get satisfaction from that.

Who is your audience? Do you paint for an audience?

Rich people? (laughs). I've got to eat... but I don’t really paint to anyone.
This is the weird thing, quite strange: I paint for myself but at the same time I want people to enjoy what I paint so there's never a compromise for the audience yet I want them to enjoy everything that I do... I don’t think about my audience when I paint. At all.

The show doesn’t really figure in your thinking when making work?

No, I don’t really think about it. Its important but its almost a case of putting yourself on show rather than showing people your paintings... you’ve got to have balls to do a show, I think; anybody who can do an exhibition does because people will come and look at your work and say stuff about it - whether it be good or bad - and in the end its your work; you’ll show it to people and everyone, unless they’re the most honest person in the world, will say ‘Well done, Alec’ or ‘Well done, Dan’ or whoever but, you know, they’ll only be a handful of people who’ll tell you they don’t like it or think its shit to your face. (pause)
That's why it takes a lot of balls because you’ve got to say ‘I am happy with this work. I believe in it. I stand behind it and think its good.’

Recently, working here in this communal environment, you get people asking about your work, questioning what you’re doing. I’ve had people say to me, ‘Alec, why don’t you just stop doing what you’re doing and try something drastically different?’ and I kinda look at them and say, ‘I can show you a painting from 5 years ago and I’ll show you what I’m doing now; it is quite drastically different,’ and they’ll say, ‘yes, but they’re still abstracted forms - why don’t you do different things?’

What, life-like figurative malarkey?

I don’t know... maybe they mean that but I think that's bullshit to be perfectly honest because I don’t... it infuriates me because its like, ‘can’t you see that the work that I’m doing...’
I feel that my work has developed so much in the last 5 years so why should I stop it developing? It hasn’t develop at a great rate of knots perhaps but... (changes tack) there's always this idea that you have to rush through things and do something one day and then another piece of work the next that's completely different and completely removed because its the best way to explore your ideas but I don’t think it is, to be honest. This idea of exploration, you know, I think that my work will be completely different in 10 years time but it will have taken that time and natural development rather than constantly putting things down and picking them up to get there, you know? Its almost like getting a guy to play a different musical instrument that he doesn’t normally play.

Which can be occasionally useful but as something, a device, to push and explore techniques you already possess, perhaps

Yes. I can’t do that all the time, I’d go mad! So... I guess maybe it is about getting technically good - but not for its own sake.

This all comes back to a consistency and work ethic, doesn't it?

Yeah, definitely. You know, consistency to me is more important than... no, I don’t mean that at all! (laughs)

Because it could be consistently bollocks

It could be consistently bollocks!

A repost from Lucy's blog of a meeting with Bill Drummond

2010-07-10T10:38:00.001+01:00

Saturday, 27 March 2010

I went to Bill Drummond's house on Friday morning to take some photos for Dan Richards' book (http://more-to-life-than-books.blogspot.com/). It was a beautiful day with the sun shining and Bill was extremely kind in indulging us in having a few photos taken in places where he works and collects his thoughts. We spoke of Lady Gaga, the british education system and his dislike for nostalgia. It was a true pleasure to meet him and I walked away excitedly talking to Dan, with a bundt cake Bill had given me under my arm. Bill was kind enough to put it in a shiny red cake tin from Texas for me to take home.

(All images © Lucy Johnston)

Poachers: please give us credit

2010-07-07T13:11:00.005+01:00

Erin O'Connor

2010-06-26T17:17:00.006+01:00

A few years ago I saw a film/documentary called This Model Life and remember being very interested in the collaborative aspect of Erin O'Connor's work with designers of haute couture, David Downton and others.

I think there may be a link to be drawn between what Bill Drummond said about his minister father - his energy, delivery and dynamism -, Judi Dench’s preparation for and embodiment of a character and the performitivity within Erin's work; this morning I wrote to her about that.

Whole episodes of This Model Life are available to watch here.

Dan

David Nash

2010-06-22T15:23:00.001+01:00

(All photographs - Kevin Parker)

Dame Judi Dench

2010-06-17T21:46:00.013+01:00

Hello,

I'm off up to Norwich in a couple of days to root about in the Roger Deakin archive at UEA but thought I'd post something of my conversation with Judi Dench.
The extract below is from fairly early on in the meeting and, whilst we're talking, Judi is cutting knots out the fur of her dog, Minnie, with my penknife scissors.

I know I need deadlines and pressure to work well; it can’t be open ended...

Lack of desperation is terrible. Lack of fright, lack of desperation. How do you get through that? I don’t know. Sometimes... I’ve thought about this quite a lot lately; I obviously have a kind of dread of setting anything in stone - you know how everything is so fluid. That's why I don’t really like seeing (my) films because, once you’ve done that, its in formaldehyde on a shelf. It’ll never change. You look at something and you think ‘why the hell did I make that choice?’ Thats whats so lovely about the theatre, you don’t ever set it in stone, its completely fluid all the time... and uncertain

Dangerous

It is dangerous and you’ll think ‘I’ll try this’ and it may not work, you know?

But there's tomorrow

There's always tomorrow! Tomorrow I might do it in a different way or, of course, the audience might signal something to you which you have a response to.

You have a Tannoy in your dressing room, I understand

I do, from the moment the audience start to come in. It is then... I'm in touch - just having a little link with somebody, you know. Its quite a tricky thing, not to have a Tannoy and just walk down and SUDDENLY be met with that... and you may come in in three quarters of an hour or you may come in in 4 minutes but, if you’ve not had any of that kind of feedback earlier, it seems to me that there's some of the story left out - your story for that evening - your actual process.
Yes, I have to do that.

And when you’re offstage...

Yes, well I might talk to somebody but, at the same time, always, I have to link in because the audience always makes it a different thing.

And how... I mean, when you’re onstage, you’re in character; how are you offstage?

When I played Lady Macbeth, people used to say, ‘do you carry that part home with you?’
Carry the part home with you? I mean, at Stratford I’d be playing Lady Macbeth in the afternoon and Beatrice in Much Ado at night so there's no question of carrying it over, no question at all - comes off with the costume.
... and then, what people don’t realise is that - you know in Biology at school, when you go in one day and there on one of those tin things on some tar would be a frog pinned out? That's just exactly as I always feel at the end of any play and therefore the moment somebody comes in through the door you know within 3 seconds what they thought of it, whatever they say or don’t say. You just know... because you’re that pinned-out frog.

Stanley Donwood

2010-06-10T18:17:00.004+01:00

(image © Lucy Johnston)

Things of late

2010-06-08T21:18:00.005+01:00

Hello,

I thought I should write something since a lot has happened of late and I've been travelling all over the shop to meet people and see things, research elements of this project in Limehouse, formaldehyde, woodland and Gatwick.
Several things were learnt about trains in the process:

i) Never buy a ticket on the Gatwick Express. When the Guard says 'yes, its alright, you can buy one onboard,' he means, 'Mwah ha! I'm going to take just under 20 of your pounds, you fool!'

ii) There is a train that leaves Cambridge and then takes a sharp left to Newmarket and Bury St. Edmunds. Do not get on this train in the mistaken belief that it is going to Norwich because it will steal a great chunk of your life and the ticket inspector will take great pleasure in telling you that you're a twit.

iii) It is best not to buy a ticket to Leeds on the day of travel. Not only will you have to feed a metal box an eye watering amount of tenners but the slot you're feeding them into will slowly twist itself into a leering grin, relishing your sterling exsanguination.
(The fact this hemorrhage is due to somebody else's inability to drive because of conjunctivitis does not help this one jot.)

(Trains are expensive would be the central point here, I guess - if you're in a hurry.)

A few Thursdays ago I met Dame Judi Dench for a talk about her work and then sped up to Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the opening of David Nash's retrospective show on Friday - I had a great talk to both and hope to post something of those meetings here at some point.
I returned home to Bath via London where I spent some time at the Huntarian Museum looking at lots of worryingly familiar specimens in bottles and cases and drawings made by the artist Henry Tonks during his time working as a doctor with Harold Gillies’ facial reconstruction team at Cambridge and then Sidcup between 1916 and 1917.

After this I went to see the Italian Renaissance drawing show at The British Museum, Alec Cumming's exhibition opening at Mason's Yard (which is round the back of Fortnum & Masons, I discovered) and then out to see Pixies play out at the Troxy... and it was a hot day, and I walked all over London carrying a carpet bag, and I didn't have a map so I had to ask friendly looking strangers the way (which proved quite difficult because nearly everyone looked hot and befuddled.)

So, yes, thats what I've been up to.
I'll write something about a Dorset holloway soon but that hasn't happened yet - people are still arguing about railway stations and dates! ... This is good >

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3667487/A-lost-wilderness.html

The beautiful world of Daleks and Donwood

2010-06-01T17:39:00.010+01:00

The journey...

The Man himself

(all images copyright Lucy Johnston)

Caught By The River

2010-05-10T16:00:00.004+01:00

I was up in Norwich for the opening of Roger Deakin's archive at the University of East Anglia.
Robert Macfarlane and several of Roger's friends read extracts from his published work and unearthed notebooks and spoke very well about his house, filing systems, annoyance with Aga engineers, swimming, goats and Citroëns in hedges.

I wish I'd recorded the stories and speeches of the evening since they were great, humane and very funny.

I had a good chat with Robert and he was good enough to introduce me to the good folk of Heavenly Records and the Caught By The River book and blog - Jeff, Robin and Andrew - and the wonderful David Cecil Holmes (brilliant illustration, shoes, hat and trousers). We all shared a cab down into the city where the River Three and me disembarked to look at an airship, drink ale and discuss malarkey.

Brilliant night!

More to follow - do look at the links below:

Links:

Robert writing in the Guardian

Environment section of the Guardian

BBC News

Eastern Daily Press

Notebook scans

2010-05-02T18:12:00.008+01:00

A conversation related to the third scan

Goings on

2010-04-30T14:52:00.004+01:00

Hello,

there hasn't been a post for a fortnight or so here but things have been going on.
Lucy has been working at the Lomography shop in London and photographing people in Sussex woods and there are a few new shots of Bill Drummond and other folk over at her flickr.

I've been working to write-up meetings and give the book some flow and shape - and working for my dad, travelling about and reading books by Luke Haines and John Niven and John Stewart Collis. Busy.

Tomorrow I'm revisiting Colin Henwood and Richard Way at a boatyard in Hambleden near Henley-On-Thames.
On May 7th I'll be in Norwich for the opening of Roger Deakin's archive at UEA.
On May 17th or thereabouts I'll be talking to Nicky Wire in Faster Studios, Cardiff about the work of Manic Street Preachers.
On May 28th I'll be at Yorkshire Sculpture Park for the opening of David Nash's retrospective show.
On June 4th I plan to be at Mason's Yard, London for Alec Cumming's opening at Alan Wheatley's gallery.

May is full of things.
By the end of June I hope to have finished the book.
Late June and early July will be about talking to publishers, I think.

Around and amongst all this I'll be hopefully meeting back up with Robert Macfarlane, Jenny Saville, Stanley & Richard, Esben & The Witch and others - I've no dates for any of that but it'll have to be done so more business to come.

Fun!

Dan

My 14 year old self finds this very exciting

2010-04-16T19:03:00.004+01:00

This was one of the first songs I ever learnt to play on the guitar. It was a pretty tricky place to start but I used to love picking songs apart and working out the chords and 'fiddly bits'.
Perhaps something about this process and interest in the workings of things stuck with me because I see it in the book - in fact, many of the people I'm speaking to made a visceral impression on my younger self. Maybe I'm exploring the impact they made as much as anything else; I haven't changed that much in a lot of ways - and Bernard Butler playing Animal Nitrate is still very cool!

Mirror and Kitchen

2010-04-15T22:50:00.005+01:00

I write here in the kitchen - the warmest part of the house.

The mirror used to hang in a barber's shop in Clifton. Generations of grammar school boys sat before it whilst being shorn. The foil is rusted and peeling in places - not that you can see much of the mirror for postcards and the like.
Today I wrote about Canaletto, voids, Hammersmith, flapjack and boats.

The wonderful Mr Vaughan Oliver

2010-04-15T00:26:00.004+01:00

Challenging hats and Monster Children

2010-04-12T19:50:00.003+01:00

Hello,

nothings been posted here for a little while but things have been shuffling along, rest assured.
Oh yes! I've been working to transcribe interview recordings and writing various other things. On Wednesday I'm being telephoned by Monster Children Magazine to talk about things - mostly about and on behalf of Stanley but the book will no doubt feature a lot too.

Lucy has been in Brighton talking to folk and paddling about in the summer surf - no doubt sporting more formidable garments; although that hat set the bar mighty high on that front.

Photographs of things to follow - Vaughan at home perhaps... I dunno, not my department.

Yours ever,

Dan

22 pages front and back - too good to be used

2010-03-28T19:38:00.002+01:00

Three tunes:

Goodbye England (Covered In Snow) - Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can

Returning home from London after a successful day with Lucy - out through the knotted bridges and viaducts towards Clapham Junction - grainy chimneys and gasometers in the dusk. Red lights, trains overtaken and signals against somebody else. Listening to Laura Marling - a song found online which spurs me now to buy the lp on vinyl. Wonderful; words to conjour with, Robert Kirby-like orchestration - the sense of loss for a time you never knew.

Cry Baby Cry - The Beatles - The Beatles (White Album)

A scratchy record in The Bell on Walcot. A fire in the hearth. Wiffle tickets and a Gaudi biography. Jumpers, gloves and stories about tunneling beneath an art school to the gravity steam engine at the centre of the world.

Live With Me - Massive Attack - Collected

2AM - Standing on a grain barge moored off Shad Thames beside the Design Museum. Tower Bridge stands out blue through the steam of a coffee - I'm tired but not yet sleepy. I listen to the sweep of Massive Attack stood amid the shrubs and low mop trees of a deck-garden. Far away sirens. Everybody seems asleep. A police launch passes. I feel the wake hit the hull beneath me.

http://www.opensquares.org/detail/GardenBarge.html

Paper brains

2010-03-28T12:37:00.005+01:00

Hello,

I thought I'd write an update on things of late because Lucy and I have been up to some interesting stuff; roaming London and its environs to revisit and photograph the likes of Bill Drummond, Vaughan Oliver and Ben Johnson on/in their homes, studios and rooves.
We got a bit lost in Stoke Newingon, found a shop festooned with broken tail lamps, drank a lot of tea and coffee... Lucy sported challenging knitwear, I slept on a boat - we were busy.
Lucy has posted some LC-A+ photographs up - snazzy lomo sketch shots - more to follow of Bill and Vaughan I would imagine.

Lucy has posted some new shots and stories over at Ways Of Seeing - well worth a look.

Yesterday I spoke to Stanley for an hour or so whilst he cut up goat bankers in his studio and arranged dates for photography in April and rambles round Norfolk in May - jotting them in our respective notebooks - I'll attempt to scan some pages of my notebooks and post them here next week, the paper brains of this project.

Dan

Recent travels in the search of art and artisans

2010-03-25T21:44:00.013Z

Waiting for Drummond.

In the Studio with Ben Johnson

Slowly Downward

2010-03-07T19:32:00.005Z

Stanley Donwood has kindly linked this page from his own.
Perhaps you've turned up here from there ... hello; this is a blog which follows me/Dan as I talk to artists and technicians about artistic process and environment and then write about it.
I've spoken to Stanley and various other people - painters, printers, graphic designers, box-makers, writers, broadcasters, and musicians - and will update here with thoughts and news...
Lucy is part of this project too - she takes the photographs.

Do have a look and a read

Dan

Lost in Ballard

2010-03-02T21:51:00.008Z

Dan Richards, Kings Cross Station (11.02.10)

London/Some things of late

2010-03-01T00:41:00.005Z

Saturday

Elephant & Castle.
I was in London over the weekend. These things happen. Its nice to get out of the house and up to the capital once in a while and I had somethings to do such as synchronise with Lucy and see Ros (also on leave from home.)

I always find myself looking into London from without, vaguely disembodied - as if living in the/a third person. Slightly out of time.
Looking for familiar purchase, I called a few folk I knew dwelt of the various parishes and manors:

I spoke to my friend Izzy. She was very busy. (Yes, I’m aware this sounds like the opening to an Ian Dury number but bare with me...) With deadlines looming before a jaunt to Manchester there was no time to meet but she said she liked the blog and had considered writing one of her own but wasn’t sure there was an audience out there for her words.

I thought about this as I made my way down the 152 steps of Elephant & Castle tube station. An audience. Who is this blog for? I wondered as I descended.

Moorgate.
I walked up toward the Golden Lane Estate, under the brutalist gaze of the Barbican’s towers. I was still thinking about the idea of audience and purpose of posting writings about the process of making this book online - presupposing and assuming a readership somewhere but is it actually useful?

Tea with Lucy. Diaries aligned. Much tea drunk and cake consumed. 3 slack hours before I had to be elsewhere. What to do... Barbican?

Barbican.
I’d not been inside the Barbican before. I’d wandered through and across it, got lost out in its environs and backtracked down its endless walkways like everyone else but never ventured in to the warmth inside. A Ron Arad show? That rang some muffled bells. I went to see - a loose-end moocher.
I walked around the space age furniture downstairs, the hammer-pocked steel chairs upstairs; the thumbprint whirls and the rocking lava-lamp-innards-made-furniture-flesh. I liked it. It reminded me of space age comic books and tin-plate train sets. I wasn’t in a hurry so I walked around it twice - standing to watch all the film loops and take in the LED displays, the automata rockers with their bristle-brush arms, the rolling shelves, the pong pong ambiance, the works-in-progress glimpsed in cupboards.
Antony Gormley.
There.
Next to me.
Tall chap with the glasses and pointy shoes.
It is, you know... its London, this sort of thing happens. What to do... so I introduced myself and explained a little about the project, would he be prepared to talk to me? All that stuff. I don’t think I made too much of a tit of myself but you can never be sure.

‘Ron.’ he said, ‘now Ron would be a good person for your book.’

I could see this getting away from me - italicised ‘would’s are always a giveaway - I couldn’t insist he see me, he’s a busy man/institution, but then he proffered an email address ‘if I can, I will.’
Bang. Done.
Blimey.

‘You should talk to Ron, though. He’s down there playing table tennis.’

So I did.

Sunday/Monday

Home.
I have two new email addresses in my notebook. I had neither of them on Friday but now I do. Its all chance. Luck. Wandering around the Barbican with open eyes; being prepared to risk seeming a daft twerp in front of artistic people I admire.

I’m making it up as I go along.

Is there an audience or point to this blog? Perhaps - either it is a catalogue of happenstance and chance meetings, the diary of somebody blundering about in a vague attempt to talk to people for a vague book or, hopefully, its a record of what can be achieved with limited experience and resources but a great deal of enthusiasm and energy.

Its 00:33 now on Monday morning and know I’ve got to go and work for my father in a few hours - make some architectural models - so I’ll send off a few emails and then go to bed; push this project along a bit more.

Dan

By way of a distraction...

2010-02-25T17:57:00.005Z

Hello,

I'm sat in my Keynsham kitchen again transcribing conversations - this is the hardest and most tedious part of the venture but, since no machine has been invented to do it, it has to be done.
I really like meeting creative people and I like travelling about on my bike, feet and trains to the various parts of the country where those people live and work and I enjoy writing the bits in between the meetings that glue this project together and prevent it fragmenting into so many isolated happenings... but the head-phone totting listening back and writing out, typey typey - rubbish. Never mind.

Anyway, I thought I'd write something here that I could compose with good old-fashioned autonomy by way of a break.
Some things have been going on, organisational and logistical things that should push the book on a bit in the near future; I plan to meet a few new folk and revisit the rest with Lucy - who is working very hard day and night up in London - hopefully finishing by mid summer, at least thats the plan. I've got my hands full for now, anyway.

Today I tried to draw a few apparently disparate things together in Jenny Saville's chapter/section and write something for the brave folk at STEW in Norwich as I promised some time ago - a month!? Oh dear.
So far the latter involves the Dulux dog, Oscar Wilde, leather goods and the London, Chatham & Dover Railway... did I say disparate before? I may be some time yet.

Below is an extract from my meeting with Jenny Saville:

Were you always drawn to the viscosity and physicality of these materials too - the oils up here and the charcoal downstairs

Yes. I don’t mix much with my mediums. I use linseed oil and genuine turps in the paint and thats it. I know the strength of the paint I want and... language just develops and develops. I mean, you look at other artists - I look at a lot more abstract painting than figurative. I look at very old figurative painting by the Old Masters and I look at abstract work from the last century. Abstract Expressionism and especially De Kooning is probably the painting that I look at most because they feel incredibly modern, De Kooning paintings; but he had to be abstract to get to what he wanted to get to and I don’t want to be completely abstract. When he tries to paint figures later on they become quite hilarious and monstrous and cartoon-like and I don’t want to go to that level. I want to find a way, a space to keep - not a tight realism but something very precise and serious about the body. I want to do that but also keep the abstract qualities of paint so that I’ve got those two things constantly rubbing next to each other.

The close ups of your paintings in your Rizzoli book hark back in microcosm to the Abstract Expressionists in the way you move the paint about.

Yes, that's where the paint swatches come in - I couldn’t do it if I didn’t work out those tones. Its absolutely critical to the way that I work because you just couldn’t do it on the hop and have that, for example (using Atonement as the example) a tone like that, a tone for the side of a nose, I know that I can then add pure red and cerulean in a lump and put that underneath and rub that into it so the mix itself will make the third tone (this will make more sense when I go back and photograph the studio and work). So you don’t have to mix all those tones, you just have to have that as your key tone and that means you can fly a bit more with the paint - you can have this cerulean blue in itself, sparkles of that, as long as the major tone dominates; you’ll get the feeling of flesh much more than if you tried to mix up every single tone.

The red of the ear there too (referencing Atonement, again)

Yeah, I mean, downstairs there are other examples I’ll be able to show you.

There are scrapes of blue on the nose and cheek of Stare that seem to be working very hard in the way you describe.

You can push the limits of it because you’ve got ... (finding something in a book) like this blue, the blue is there but I’ve pushed it, made it more extreme but you can only go to a certain level of that a still keep a realism that still feels very real. You can go too far and have to come back - that's probably what takes the time I would say because... (digs out a three tone swatch) here we are, I’ll mix up that, that and that and so when I’m working - because I know I can put that, that and that in any combination, that those two will swing your eye over and the third will be a background - when I’m actually painting I can start to run things through it and they’re what give you the extra reality.

A heightened reality

Yeah. The artists I like always can combine and move the nature of the medium that they work in - be it paint, music or whatever: Radiohead are so good, they have such a good musical craft that they can push it so, even something like the shipping forecast, they’re able to take that and move it. The people I like understand the nature of the material that they work in and the nature of life and its the combination of putting those things together, melding and mixing, pulling it all in that I respond to.
I used to have stacks of cookery books because I found photographs of cookery and food were really luscious and had a relationship to paint and so I collected a lot of things like that - fashion magazines because they always soup-up the body, they make the mouths more luscious, give the eyes more shadows, things like that. You can take elements of that, hyperbolic fashion magazines twisting and pushing reality in a certain sort of way and, if you’ve got the right eye, you can take all that and do something very interesting with it that's not just superficial. It can be anything; the stain left by a dropped Coca-cola on the floor - this human presence that's been left on a pavement.

Crash - Gagosian Gallery, Kings Cross, London - 11th February, 2010

2010-02-16T22:05:00.010Z

Caught the train down to London and let my mind wander out of the window. After transcribing Fay Ballard’s Front Row interview I walked into town and bought a duffel coat from a cash-strapped friend. He was so pleased that threw a russet scarf in free.

I spent most of the journey tuning in and out of the recollections of a man in his 80’s a little way down the carriage; a lawyer, I think. He and his family moved to britain in 1949. His father was an Italian officer who’d taken part in the last recorded cavalry charge - against Cossacks on the Russian Front in 1942, as it goes/went - the Italians winning the day since the half-starved Russians had no guns or ammunition, attempting to bayonet the horses as best they could in the charge before being roundly cut down and trampled.

I saw a fox curled up at the wood’s edge atop Bentwood bank, chin resting on its tail, watching the trains.

A friend telephones to tell me that Alexander McQueen has killed himself. Now a fashion designer himself, he worked with McQueen for a time as an estagiar; sourcing and stitching lamb foetuses into trills, shoes, boots and bags for weeks on end - ‘the softest fleece imaginable,’ he assured me at the time.

* * * * *

I am drawn to the image of the slaughter house now, the hung and suspended torsos - McQueen amongst them - dripping and creaking and steaming whilst the butchers and wholesalers walk between and beneath them. Screaming Bacons... but the whole scene is already writhing and changing and I am drawn back to a school trip to The Theatre Royal to see The Duchess of Malfi. At a key moment the auditorium is cleaved by a thunderclap and the shrouds fall to reveal a vision of an exsanguinated Antonio chained up high and swinging amidst a bovine knot.
Silence.
‘Bloody RSC,’ my teacher whispers in my ear, ‘they’ll have blown half the budget on that.’

* * * * *

I recently bought Vols. 1 and 2 of J.G. Ballard’s short stories and was very taken with the cover designs - reduced photo-negatives of high rise balconies and stairways - severe, modernist and just a bit H.R. Giger. As I cross up and through the Barbican’s warrens and walkways I recognise the spinal silhouettes of the covers to my left. ‘That makes sense,’ I ponder as I pass above rusty fountains, reminded of the concrete ziggurats splayed-out from UEA: Logan’s Run and Doctor Who, Mayan moon-bases in a Norfolk sand pit. Here, as there, the grass and creepers seek to overrun. Tendrils snake off balconies to search and sucker the pods around; utility yucca bust out - knotted green bedclothes beckoning escape.

I head geometric north-west to Golden Lane Estate and Lucy, and tea.

* * * * *

Sat in Fix Cafe I watch as with each customer through the door the window flexes and the interior reflections shift. Lucy arrives wearing glasses and I don’t recognise her immediately. Tea and coffee to go. Paper cups and Lucky Strikes, a walk beneath the dark towers in the city gloaming. The tube is glacial, all vacant eyes and free papers. Past Farringdon; my duffel coat won’t sit on my Man-From-Del Monte suit shoulders. I’m worried we might be late.

Up and out of Kings Cross, no problems with the barriers, no bins for cups. Britannia Street seems quiet and dark. I wonder if anybody inside is waiting with us. A tall black suited man opens the door for us. In.

* * * * *

At this point, perturbed and partially blinded by the arc-weld lighting, Dan falls over a piece of 747 undercarriage and is rendered unconscious. During the temporary Boeing coma he has a terrible dream and wanders through a set of empty galleries in the Overlook Hotel, avoiding the lifts but drawn in to the evisceration, cosmonaut rust spires, Turkish delight town planning, a Working Men’s Tardis, suspended crystal piston blocks, blood-chili headfucks, distended hoover hoses, neon bacon cyborgs, Will Self shin-kickings, motorway half-lives, Mushroom-cloud pebble dash, exploded tongues, meerkat bruises, Morse code light fittings, burning penguins and lobster penetrations.

* * * * *

I wake up with Lucy squeezing his outstretched, bloody hand - a nosebleed. We’re sat beneath the stairwell, between a cupboard and a crate of J&D Ballard’s Bang Wallop. A thin red line threads out into the foyer, tracing the track of where I must have been led/dragged? I don’t know.
Staring out from out hidey-hole I see the opening crowd. Around and between the legs of the security, I see mothers with the surprised-sugar death masks of women cut younger than their daughters; identical couples clenched and whispering, cold eyed. Claw-handed people with impossible shoes; high pitched laughter and perfect teeth.

‘I’m all lost in the supermarket,’ I whisper.

‘What?’

I avoid her eye and groggily try to stand and walk about the show but it’s all wrong. My confidence and mind are shot.
I half recognise everybody. I recognise nobody.
Everybody looks lovely. Everybody looks through me.
I think of my quixotic/stupid/Bambi/careworn suit and the distant dream of a pub.

‘I think I’d like to go’ I say to Lucy and we do.

* * * * *

Outside - a line of blacked-out Range Rovers, a sea of fur and smoke. I am unsure and shaky as to what just happened. Its Blue Velvet all over again. Run away.

At this point a dog appears in the street, too big to understand. A Baskervillian hellhound racing past us and away - tearing off and on, away to unsuspecting Vernon Rise. No lead, no owner, feral speed. Too much. We turn and stumble back to the station and to home. We leave the Gagosian crowds behind and fix ourselves on home. We don’t look back. Except... except to retrace a few steps and gaze at the speckled parking meter. Fresh blood. Covered in blood around the lock and pooling on the frosted pavement.
Steaming, smeared and sticky.

A thousandth thing, a final cut.

Splatter.

* * * * *

A final thing, 2 texts:

i)

Hope u enjoyed the show. I’m not too into openings so stayed very briefly. Will go back & look at the show next week. Good luck with work. xj

ii)

helo

the ballard thing sounds as if it was curated by the man himself, a construction of an art opening crowd, airkissed and dusted with wealth, marionettes twitching to a tune from beyond the grave

Pictures

Crash

2010-02-14T23:38:00.007Z

Hello,

I'm going to post something new in the next few days about a strange night Lucy and I had out in London recently. Its taken a bit of time to write because it was so weird but I'm getting there... in the mean time, here's a link to a piece Iain Sinclair wrote in yesterday's Guardian about J.G. Ballard (amongst other things) and here is another to a video and various other things relating to an exhibition in Holland by Mr. Stanley Donwood - for which I contributed some words.

Dan

Bristol/Bath snapshots...

2010-01-29T00:26:00.006Z

Out-takes and intakes: a few photographs were taken on a roll of black and white film to document the quieter side of the photographic process on the day Dan and I first ventured into our 'creative partnership'

Here is a little peek into our day...

John Parish (excerpt)

2010-01-23T18:39:00.005Z

John Parish

Carlisle House, Totterdown

16th November, 2009

Recording starts in John’s kitchen. We’re drinking lap-sang tea. I was slightly late arriving having written the wrong house number down - twice - and been running up and down the road for a few minutes questioning builders and the postman.
I’ve asked about John’s work with international musicians just before I turn the recorder on:

International, yeah; obviously I do work an awful lot with people from different countries - including my own band, you know.

You’ve got two, is that right? One 11 piece...

Well I had the eleven piece band, that doesn’t really exist anymore (checks himself) well, they do all exist as people (laughs). My current band has a Sicilian musician, Marta Collica, on keyboards and a woman from the north of Italy, Giorgia Poli, from near Brescia - she plays bass. The drummer, Jean Marc Butty, is from near Hennessy in France, between Hennessy and Geneva. Yeah, I feel really comfortable working with - obviously I’ve done a lot of productions for bands abroad and the bulk of the film music I’ve done has been for foreign directors (thinks) in fact... all of it. I’ve never worked with a British director. I think you can actually trace my interest in working with people, my interest in other places, from when I was really quite young growing up in Yeovil. Yeovil was a very non-cosmopolitan place in the 70s when I was growing up; I think there was one black family in the town and there were no subcultures. It was a white, industrial small town and for some reason my best friend at school, the person I ended up relating to most of all and got on with best and the only person I’m still in contact with from that time, was Italian and his mother didn’t really speak any English. I used to go round and hang out there a lot when I was a kid, it was my first experience of food as something vaguely pleasurable as opposed to something you did before you went out to play football. And then, when I was 16 or 17, this American girl came on some kind of exchange to our school and we ended up going out together - again, I was obviously and immediately interested in the fact she was from somewhere else, I was curious to know about other places. I guess it felt like a ticket for me out of there although that was subconscious, I didn’t think of it on that level then at all. I only thought later that it was funny how the people I’d had the closest relationships with had been from somewhere else - partly escape, partly curiosity; not knowing how things worked elsewhere, being interested in the mundanities of other lives and other places.
Like most British people, I’m really terrible at learning foreign languages; I’ve struggled a bit with French and Italian at different times...

I think you have to move there so life becomes so difficult without it that it seeps into you

Yes, I think thats the only way but, even then, its almost impossible - unless you’re going to somewhere really obscure - to find anywhere where people are worse at speaking English than you are at speaking their language. (Laughs) I’ve found that a great hold up but, yeah, I’m just very comfortable with working and being with people from other places and have done right throughout my life.

[Odd place, Yeovil. Turn a corner and find yourself in a 50s time-warp. I remember a story about Geoff Capes hefting sacks of plaster up and down the stairwells in the concrete box of the arts college... can’t find any reference to it anywhere though. Lets pretend its true. Here be giants.]

Is escapism is a theme in what you do?

Its difficult to talk about your work - I think that's why a lot of people don’t like talking about their work very much because, unless you are deliberately approaching it from an intellectual bent then you tend not to notice how you do a lot of things. Sometimes you can look back in retrospect and pick them apart and understand why you made those decisions but at the time... I mean, I work pretty much 100% instinctively as do most of the people I probably work with - they don’t know why they made that choice; they made it and then you could look back and say ‘Oh, well, it was probably because I was listening to these things or I’d been reading that and it had filtered in.’ For me, I see my work as a filtering of all the many influences that I’m subject to now and have been subject to throughout my life - things that I listened to as a fan growing up, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with an awful lot of very great musicians and writers and all of them have had an influence on me to some degree; some greater than others and some more obviously than others but everybody I’ve worked, even obscure student bands when I was teaching at performing arts college, those young kids would have an effect on me because some kid would pick up a guitar and play something in a way I would never have considered. These things find there way out sometimes, later... there's very little conscious effort on my part. I don’t sit down and think ‘Okay, today I’m going to use these strands of influence and see if I can make something original and unique.’ I’ll be sitting around waiting for something and I’ll pick up a guitar and play for 10 minutes and maybe something will come out of it, maybe it won’t. You have amazing days and you have average days. Most days are average but sometime I’ll pick up and guitar and play for 15 minutes and 4 songs will come out of it and I don’t know why it happens on that day, it doesn’t happen often but sometimes it seems to work.

Do you have a strong work ethic to the job - do you view it as a job?

I like to refer to it as a job because it makes me feel as though I’m doing something worthwhile (laughs) but I have to say it doesn’t feel, you know... I think it took enough years before I was successful that when I did start to make a living from it I was able to appreciate that that was a fortunate position to be in and, although sometimes you have quite frustrating days, I haven’t ever lost sight of the fact that I make my living from really ding what I always wanted to do and doing what I still want to do and sometimes you come up with things that are incredibly exciting and I think that I’m very fortunate to be in that position.

Do you set yourself times or targets for your work?

I can do that. I’m not brilliant at it. Funnily enough I think having children helped in some way because they’re such an immense drain on your time that you’re forced into being very focused in the time that's your own. Its easier now my kids are at school but when they were pre-school it was extremely difficult to work at home, there’d be very short periods when I could. Michelle and I would make pacts with each other:

‘Okay, you take the kids out for 2 hours so I can work.’
‘Okay but when I come back, you’ve got to take them out for 2 hours.’
(laughs)

I had to think, ‘I’ve got 2 hours, I need to do some work,’ and I could be very focused then whereas before that - and now I can already feel myself slipping back into it as I have more time - I certain deadlines to be imposed upon me. It is possible for me to impose them upon myself, ‘by Friday I have to have a new piece of music written and largely recorded,’ but I find it much easier if I’m writing a film score, say, that has to be done by a specific date; then I’ll get up and I’ll work. I’m not one of those people who gets up every day, sends the kids off to school, sits down and works. I’m very easily distracted.

Nick Cave office hours

Yeah, some people do that, I know, and I admire that. Polly can be like that, Polly’s very much a writer in that way but thats not the way I am. Having said that, I’ve never missed a deadline for anything whether its been self-imposed or not. If I need to do something then I’ll do it.

The Bell - 'Like trousers, like brain'

2010-01-20T16:21:00.000Z

Like day, like brain; today was foggy and dreich.
Would you believe I sat alone in the wrong hostelry for 45 minutes before realising my mistake? Of course you would. Its the sort of thing that happens when the brain idles in neutral, the body seeking the path of least resistance - warmth is warmth and tea is tea. Sit down and ponder, let the world swirl around you like the milk in the brew and the rain in the street - a 45 minute 'Where was I?' Three quarters of an hour of 'Hmmm?'
The Bell, The New Inn, The Green Tree - just names, signifiers of where elsewhere is afoot - a world away until, with a juddering thunk, thought crunches back. 'Oh shit.'

So I dashed into the street at looked up at the sign - a horse, not a bell - and then started across town to the right pub. And the rain fell and the cars hissed and the light seemed to be draining out of the day like colour from a face after a shock.

Late.
I apologise and sit down then get up again and go over to the bar.
Otter? Otter. Half a pint of Otter. Okay.

Stanley Donwood has an exhibition coming up in Holland. He and an actor - shortly to be painted red - are sat at a corner table (next to the billiards table) discussing the particulars of the latter's performance. I've written something for the catalogue - a large tome of some 160 pages - and sit listening to the conversation they draw me in and I introduce myself to Mr. Jerrom (the actor) and explain a little about the book and how I came meet Stanley and why I'm so late and out of breath:

i) MA, Airships, Process, Letters, Running around.
ii) Richard Lawrence, Aircraft wreckage, Sketch, Stanley Kubrick, Dancehall
iii) 'Like day, like brain,' fog, horses/bells, Running around.

Mr. Jerrom smiles.
I imagine him painted red.
Stanley drinks some of his Otter.
I wonder how I can get over to Heerlen for next Friday.

Odd Wednesday.

Link to Stanley's exhibition

Beginnings

2010-01-18T18:45:00.000Z

Last January I began traveling around the country interviewing artists and craftsmen about their work in their places of work - printers in printworks and cellars, artists in abandoned dancehalls, raconteurs in lockup garages, sculptors in chapels, writers in their spare rooms, graphic designers in the pub, musicians in their kitchens and studio bunkers... I spent a great weekend with a pair of Thames boat builders on their river and a chaotic time roaming around quarries in the middle of the night looking for bears.

As the writing and conversations went on it became clear that the most interesting spaces had grown up around the person working within them - like a habitat or den - and it has been both fascinating and sad to visit places where the inhabitant has moved or died but the environment remains: John Peel’s studio being the most unique example.

John Peel's programmes - particularly the Thursday night programmes broadcast live from Peel Acres in the year or two before his death - were a staunch and valued constant in during my university days in Norwich - the time when Lucy and I first met. I remember the way the atmosphere of the studio seemed to percolate into my rooms, the wonderful conversational way he had of speaking and how it created a space and set of associations that I still carry with me.

So, John Peel, wood and paper airships - they're another fulcrum - and plane wrecks in the Black Mountains, Studs Terkel, Roger Deakin, WG Sebald, JG Ballard... tea and toast and a childlike interest and enthusiasm.

I'm a year into the process now and Lucy has just come on board as a partner to photograph and document as I revisit some of the people I met in 2009 and meet some new for the first time - the pictures she takes forming a key part of the eventual publication, a record and portrait of the practitioner, work and workspace.

We'll both post updates on our travels and progress here.

Dan

Lucy & Dan are making a book...

2010-01-18T14:16:00.000Z

Hello,

this is a blog about making a book.
Lucy will post photographs and Dan will write things.

More soon.