In the words of one of those promotional videos used to promote 6th form colleges—’MANCHESTER IS CHANGING’. Nowhere is this more evident than in the harsh molten core of the city centre.
Shops peddlin’ pet food and porn have been phased out in favour of chain bars cunningly disguised as independent establishments—whilst the humble phone-box, a proven shelter for the vagabond, is being eradicated in favour of open-air digital nodes.
Amidst all this, Empire Exchange remains—its outdoor speakers still blaring out forgotten classics of the hit parade straight into the ears of passing shoppers.
Reportedly opened in the Corn Exchange back in 1988 (and now located within acrid spitting distance from Piccadilly Gardens), this majestic cesspit of ephemera is a compacted car-boot sale of wondrous detritus—one last stronghold for damp books, broken cameras and chipped commemorative plates before they’re lugged to the landfill.
This place sometimes gets attention due to its old time charm, but it’s important to state that Empire Exchange isn’t just some tourist attraction window into ‘historic Manchester’—and it actually sells decent, interesting stuff that can’t be bought anywhere else. I can’t vouch for the quality of the aged smut it stocks in the shady hidden aisle beyond the far wall, but I’ve uncovered countless gems whilst poring through the plastic tubs of old music magazines in the shop’s main room—from xeroxed horror fanzines to plastic bags full of family photos.
It might be said that 99% of the stuff sold here is pretty useless (unless you enjoy reading mould-ridden copies of Q Magazine from the mid-2000s), but if you can be bothered to put the time into scouring through the rubbish, ye shall be rewarded (providing you enjoy reading mould-ridden copies of Speedway Star from the mid-70s).
I think some of the appeal of this place lies in the fact you’re never sure what you’ll find once you stroll down those stairs. I read somewhere that gambling is so addictive due to its random nature—and maybe searching through crates of old tat offers a similar bizarre buzz? Is the brain flooded with dopamine when you manage to score a copy of The Face in a box full of Dr Who mags? Quite possibly.
In the wide spectrum of possible addictions, hoarding old magazines doesn’t seem too bad.
On the subject of Manchester second-hand emporiums, respect must also be given to Paramount Books on the other side of town—a second-hand bookshop ironically owned by a man with two plastic hands. Long may these fine establishments remain and long may they reign.
Whilst coming up with a list of people who would be interesting to interview for issue 1 of Roman Candle, Bill Daniel was one of the first names that came to mind.
For starters, he’s the man behind the highly enjoyable documentary, Who is Bozo Texino? Pieced together over 16 years of serious trans-Am rail-riding, this loose masterpiece is a 16mm window into the relatively undocumented world of railroad monikers—proto-graffiti tags drawn on the side of freight-trains across America by bored rail-workers and the occasional hobo.
There’s no stiff intellectual talking heads sat in front of a book-shelf here… and instead you’re treated to a fast-moving view from the box-car door, as Bill traces the origins of one of the most frequent tags—a cig’ smokin’ chap with a figure-eight cowboy hat by the name of Bozo Texino.
And that’s just the tip of the high-contrast black-and-white iceberg. From his photos of the early 80s Texas punk scene to his images of San Francisco bike messengers, Bill had the foresight to point his Nikon at countless subterranean subjects, when they were still very much fringe subcultures. For some reason, he agreed to this fairly long-winded interrogation…
PART ONE: JUNE 2020
Where are you at now Bill?
I’m in the middle of a big life change. I’m moving out of my studio of seven years down here on the Gulf Coast of Texas. I tend to bounce back and forth between Texas, San Francisco and Portland, and I was recently thinking I was going to move to Upstate New York. I’ve got some rad friends up there doing all kind of cool projects and was planning on moving up there. But then Corona virus hit, and I was like, “I’m not going to be moving up there for a bunch of reasons.”
But I still had this plan to move out of my studio, so now it looks like I’m moving to this small town in rural Texas and getting involved in some projects there.
Has this big move put a point on your work as well to an extent? From what I’ve seen on the internet it looks like you’ve been whittling off a lot of darkroom prints lately.
Yeah definitely. The clock has been ticking for at least the last year or two so I’ve been sprinting to use the studio before it shuts down. It’s 1,500 square feet, and the whole place can be made light-tight so I print murals in this space… and it’s cheap, because I’m very far from Brooklyn and Los Angeles. It’s been great—being here has been like a production retreat—a sabbatical to just work.
But it’s also geographically a cool place because I’m close to the Gulf of Mexico—I’m 50 minutes from Galveston, and then 20 minutes from some beaches right on the bay, so everyday I sneak out after my post office run, and if it’s windy I’ll do a windsurfing session, and if not, I’ll go out on the paddle-board.
That sounds alright.
It’s cool. It’s near the ship channel, where ocean-going ships come across the bay, and then there’s fifteen miles of oil refineries in a row, and that’s basically my neighbourhood, so when I head out in the water, there’s also these ocean-going tankers, container ships and fuel barges chugging along, and one of the funnest things to do is go out in the channel, find a gap between ships you think you can make, and dart across to the other side of the channel—make some ship pilots nervous.
It’s cool just being out in the middle of the day. I’ll get a couple of miles off-shore and it’s this incredible sensation of almost being at sea, just standing on a board.
I suppose there’s not many opportunities for raw experiences like that.
Part of the attraction of moving down here was to be near here all this oil refining infrastructure—it’s a negative fascination. I guess a lot of people have a weird attraction to industrial infrastructure—it’s kind of an end-of-the-world backdrop. There are fires burning and they literally blow up all the time. It’s a weird, stimulating environment to look at, both as a playground and as a subject for my photography, so I moved down here to shoot this landscape close-up.
That’s a fairly strong theme with your photographs isn’t it? I read somewhere you’d been shooting industrial stuff since the 80s.
Yeah, in the early 80s I got totally into industrial music. Things like Hunting Lodge, SPK and Zoviet France. I’d put Zoviet France on the Walkman and then walk around with my Super 8 camera, and allow the song to compose the camera—physically react to the music with the camera on. We’d then gather up in this artist’s warehouse called 500X in downtown Dallas where there was a little core of us shooting Super 8 films and showing them together.
This one guy Roger Justice who had just moved back from New York. He’d lived the total life on the Lower East Side, and he turned us onto a bunch of crazy music and shooting film. He was kind of the Pied Piper of our experimental film club.
And that work led over and inspired my still photography. I started making these film strips—I’d expose the entire roll of film with these overlapping multiple exposures to create patterns, and then print the whole strip—representing a section of a film or a passage of time. Lots of time I thought of them as a score of music. The print would be almost like the aspect ratio of a composition—like experimental music notation.
It’d be sequential, rather than just a still.
Yeah, it had a sense of time to it. But I haven’t done specifically that since then. In a lot of my landscape photography, I’m thinking about using super-imposition and multiple images, maybe breaking the horizon or using multiple horizons to create abstraction. You know when you look at a piece of art, and you make a noise when you look at it? Or maybe bounce or tap your foot? I’m trying to get an image that imparts a physical feel.
Something more than just a straight-up documentary image?
Yeah, I feel that my work is halfway between documentary and experimentation. It’s a weird thing to aim for. The hybridity of experimental work and documentary work was really going on strong in San Francisco. San Francisco always had an experimental film background, coming from the Beats, and Bruce Bailey and Canyon Cinema, and then there was a tradition of great, socially-active documentary work there.
And when I got there in the late 80s and through the 90s, the film scene was just rich with this connectivity and hybridity, an ‘experimental documentary’ basically described what everybody was doing, in one way or another.
I watched that film, Sonic Outlaws, that you made with Craig Baldwin, and I suppose that’s a perfect example of the kind of thing you’re talking about. It’s a document of something, in that case those artists like Negativland, but then it’s got all this found footage in there.
Exactly. Craig Baldwin looms large in my story. He was the first person I met in San Francisco.
Was that ‘cos you were hunting down, or was it just by chance?
No, I didn’t know of him. I knew that Valencia Street was the cool street because I’d toured with The Big Boys in ’82 and we played a show there at Tool & Die between 20th and 21st Street, so the first day I was in San Francisco I borrowed a bike and rode down into the Mission, locked the bike up at Valencia and 16th and started walking up the street, looking at telephone poles.
This was the era of posters on every pole for every imaginable kind of event or cause or thing, and I saw a poster for Eyes of Hell Cinema. It had a schedule for the next couple of weeks, and it was the most incredible line-up of films that I’d seen—such an unlikely mix of experimental and exploitation films and art films. So I pulled the poster off, and marched up to the door, and it opens, and there’s Craig Baldwin with a Jolt Cola in each hand. A week later I was helping him make films.
I was Craig’s cinematographer, his editor, his co-producer. I got involved with his weekly cinema, Other Cinema, which was a Saturday night cinema which has been going for 37 years.
What was San Francisco like back then?
Those were the days of living in a city with cheap rent. So the neighbourhood was lousy with artists, of all kinds. There was so much different work being done… murals, graffiti, performance art, every kind of music, every kind of film—and it still had a bit of a small town feel to it, it wasn’t like New York, it was just this little neighbourhood. The level of stuff that was going on was just incredible.
And all the while you were working there with Craig, were you doing your own stuff too? Was that when you started making Who is Bozo Texino?
Bozo Texino really came out of learning film-making in that environment. I didn’t go to film school, I just learned by hanging out and being in the middle of all that, and I learned a lot about film-making, making art and how to approach making new forms of art, from Craig.
I worked on it for 16 years, and it started out as a little Super 8 film. I was making these little Super 8 documentaries—there was one on bike messengering, or maybe a three-minute portrait of a spare change guy doing a performance on the corner, and Bozo Texino was originally going to be one of these little Super 8 mini documentaries. But then it just grew and grew.
Its gestation was in this ecology of experimental film-making and documentaries—we lived in both worlds at the same time. So the film really was always this thing that didn’t have a specific form in mind.
At one point I was aspiring to be a documentary film-maker—like a real one who had stuff on PBS, so I was applying for humanities grants with visions of having the film going on a more mainstream channel, but the film really follows a path that’s closer to that core that I lived in at Artist’s Television Access. That was the name of the store-front and gallery at 992 Valencia Street.
You said the film took 16 years. Was there any point you thought it wasn’t going to happen?
Yeah, there were definitely periods where I thought it was never going to get finished. My friends were making fun of me, and certain ambitions I had started to fall away. At one point I really thought I’d use a lot of historical footage—working for Craig, he used a lot of found footage, so that was a natural impulse. I was going to have a chapter on the Wobblies, and a chapter on the expansion of the railroad in the West, but at some point all those ideas fell off. I thought, “The film has to be made out of what I gather on my trips.” And that was liberating.
You’d given yourself a limitation.
Just go with the core, drop all of the accessories and trust there’ll be a material integrity. I was in total abject fear for a lot of that time, just thinking there wasn’t enough material to make a film. I’d been shooting for so long, and the case that had all the film in it was huge, but by the time I’d transferred all the footage to digital to edit it, there wasn’t that much material. It was like a jigsaw puzzle where you only have a third of the pieces. And then you find out that you can compose with whatever parts you have.
I suppose it wasn’t like it had to be a certain length to fill a TV slot… or it had to be in colour for a specific channel to use.
Yeah. As I was editing it felt like I was making a found-footage film out of footage that I had shot. There was no shooting script. All the years working from Craig taught me to look at it and think, “Alright, what can you make out of this? What does this pile of stuff want to become?” I was working from the material up. One of Craig’s tenets is ‘available-ism’—here’s what’s available, we can’t go out and buy anything, we’re just going to use what we’ve got here.
Like making a meal out of what’s in your cupboards.
Fully. Completely. We can’t make a proper curry if we don’t have spice! But we’re not making a proper curry.
16 years is a fairly long time. How was it going through that footage to edit? There must have been stuff you’d forgotten you’d filmed.
The fact that it was a life project made it feel a little bit of a scrapbook of my life. With certain shots that were ruined for one way or another it was like, “I know why that shot is sideways, it’s because I dropped the camera and the viewfinder was bent. It’s full of this personal, interior history—all the things that happened in order for it to get made.
And then there was footage that I shot and audio that I recorded that, by the time I sat down to edit, I couldn’t find. I might still have them in the piles of stuff I’m standing around in now, and I sometimes think I might find them sometime and remaster the film.
I have this absurd idea that I want to make a 35mm negative and print of the film, because a core part of my obsession, and my project of being on earth for this period, is to make work in a long timescale. I’m interested in the ability for material to speak across generations. We can time travel—we can communicate with the past, and if we’re lucky, we can communicate with the future. If we make something that’s physically robust and retrievable, and interesting and resonant to the future, we can talk to people in the future, and tell them the stories that we’re telling each other now, because it’s on a DVD, or they can come to a show… but what about 150 years from now?
The way you get to 150 years from now is film… silver emulsion embedded on a base. Besides sculptures and stone tablets, that’s how you get media into the future. So a dream project is at some point to remaster all the material for Bozo Texino, recut it and make a 35mm negative to then make prints.
That sounds like quite a slog.
But here’s the question for you Sam—in doing that, should I reconstruct the film exactly how it is now, with the faults and the missing parts, or should I take the opportunity to put the lost shots in, and maybe fix a couple of things?
I don’t know. I sort of think that the finished article at the time it was released is the ‘finished thing’. It’s tough though—because you’ll always watch it thinking it’s missing things.
There’s a huge danger in killing the magic in something. The things that make something good are often beyond your intent or control. It’s like those early ZZ Top records they remastered—they completely cleaned them up too much. It was tragic.
Like ET?
Oh, I don’t know.
They remastered ET in the early 2000s and they gave him some bizarre CGI face.
Oh, awful.
It looked rubbish.
I’d definitely have to make sure I went in there in the right headspace, and not make the mistake of fixing it too much. The film never got mixed—it never went in for an audio mix as I had to finish at the studio I was working at. And I like it. It’s totally wrong. So I’d have to make sure I wouldn’t polish that insanely rough mix.
Going back a bit, where did you first notice those railroad monikers in the first place?
It was in ’83. It was at that same warehouse studio space me and my Super 8 friends were living at in Dallas. It was right next to a Santa Fe freight yard, and that’s where I saw the drawings. This is before aerosol moved onto the freight, or certainly down here at least. The only aerosol would be a band-tag—Led Zeppelin was popular. If you stood close, you’d see the monikers. They’re small and they’re not very flashy.
I wasn’t a graffiti artist, and there wasn’t any in Dallas, but I was reading about it in the magazines because it was really blowing up then with Keith Haring and all that stuff in New York. I ended up working in New York for a month, and I saw all the stuff in the streets, so I was turned onto graffiti. So when I saw the stuff on the trains, I was like, “What’s is this? This is graffiti, but what the fuck is it?”
Even at that point was it something you thought about documenting?
I started taking stills of it, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. I looked at it as something that was so sacred that I didn’t tell anybody about it. And that impulse went through the whole project. With the idea of making a film about it, I was like, “Am I going to snitch this out?” Am I going to really show the identity of buZ blurr?” What a terrible thing to do: kill this mystery. The film grappled with that—it was well aware of that and it realised that it needed to still hold the mystery.
It certainly doesn’t answer all the questions.
Yeah, hopefully it poses as many questions. But of course I want you to see who buZ blurr is, he’s brilliant. And Grandpa—I want you to meet him when he’s still alive.
I suppose you sat on it all long enough and made a finished film. It’s not like you just blew it up with some cheap, quick thing.
For sure. I think what the film was able to do, and I attribute this to being schooled as an artist by living in the Mission District in those years, was be a piece of folklore, about folklore. And it functions as folklore—most people have encountered it through an actual proximity… a friend gave them a copy, or they saw a poster in a record store and they went to a show that night.
Was that something you intended? You were driving around in a van, touring it like a band.
Because I was originally turned on by punk rock and touring bands, that was the light bulb idea. It was like, “Aha! This is how culture works.” Somebody gets in a van and brings it to you because you live in a place where there is none. They perform it, and you learn all the things they’re imparting. So I always knew that as soon as the film was done, I was getting in the van and touring it.
When did that punk rock thing hit for you then?
Around 1980 in Austin, which had a really fantastic scene. I grew up in the late rock ’n’ roll era, with Aerosmith and all that shit, and it was awful. I was into a lot of blues, and ‘hippy country’, like Jerry Jeff Walker, and so the first time punk bands started playing in Austin, it was a revelation.
The first show that I photographed was this all-girl band called The Foams. They weren’t musicians at all, they were pure performance—they’d read the ingredients of a bag of potato chips for a song. And then the second band was The Big Boys, and that was it. They were the beacon. I was like, “This speaks to me, these are my people.”
I can’t imagine many people were taking pictures in clubs back then. Was it a conscious thing to document these bands?
At first, I was just taking some photography classes. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was a business student. But quickly, within a couple of a months, I could see this punk thing was amazing, and my pictures were good.
Within that first year I was definitely operating with the idea that the future was going to want to know what this looked like. Like with Black Flag, I just thought, “I have to document this, because the people in the future would never believe what this is.” I had no idea that punk rock was going to become huge and Black Flag would become giant and enter the lexicon of everyone, but I felt like I was charged with the responsibility of capturing them for the purpose of the future.
So even in the very beginning of my photography work I was obsessed with the idea of archival value and historical utility.
Whether it was hardcore or skating or bike messengers… you documented those things quite early on when they were still very fringe scenes. What’s it like looking back at it all now?
As a photographer I’m not someone who shoots a lot. I’ve been shooting a long time, but I quit shooting bands in ’84, so it just stops there. There’s only 327 rolls of film of the punk stuff… so there’s not much. But yeah, in that batch I’m always finding things I’ve never noticed before – those hidden gems I missed.
Because I’ve been printing and looking at these photos for such a long time, in a sense, all the people in my photos… they’re still 21 years old.
So when Facebook first started happening, and I’d see pictures of these people, it was like, “Wow! You’ve aged 30 years!” In my mind they were still wearing that same funny eye make-up or that same ripped shirt. So there’s a weird fissure in reality. In my mind everyone is still there, sweaty, at a show with no air conditioning.
It’s strange how much these eras are talked about and dissected when in reality they were over so quickly. The early hardcore scene was only really for a few years, but so much came out of it.
Yeah, it was a blip. Small scale. Basically, it was just a bunch of friends. If you’re looking for a message, I think it should be to do shit with your friends. Make something happen, do what feels fun, and amplify it—leave the house! That’s what I always say, which is weird now we’re in this lockdown era. There’s all this talk now about how gathering will never be the same—but I don’t know. Once this thing blows over, I just hope people leave the house again.
One idea is that the virus will kill all these retail places, so we’re going to have entire malls and shopping centres that are closed, and every one of them will be a punk club. And when I say punk club I’m not really meaning ‘punk club’, I mean some form of community culture.
All of the things you’ve documented still go on now, but they maybe don’t have that early spark they did when you were first taking pictures or filming them. What has that spark now? What is the modern equivalent of punk?
I’ve known what it is for a while, and now it’s even more obvious… farming. Farming is the new punk rock, there’s no doubt about it.
Are you documenting that?
Photographically, it doesn’t yell at me, but I’ve been thinking about how I could make photography about farming which encapsulates it, or adds to it. Or maybe that’s the point? The new punk rock isn’t about image—it’s about making something that you eat.
One thing I’ve noticed about your photos is that they all fit together well. Was that an intentional thing?
Yep. About 15 years ago I started gravitating back to stills. I’d really went into video and filmmaking, but I missed the Nikon, so I purposely started shooting with the same camera, lens, flash, and film-stock as before—picking it up right where it was. By keeping all that consistent, you can see what changes or doesn’t change within the frame.
I was working in black and white exclusively for a bunch of reasons, and one is so that it all becomes one body of work. Some of it might be literal, and some of it might be way more abstract, but it’s all still nothing but the white of the paper, the black of the silver and whatever tones are in-between… and that’s it, that’s all we’ve got to work with.
It drums it down.
Yeah, and that has to do with that archive function. It’s information-based. They’re not necessarily pretty pictures, and if your house was full of black-and-white pictures, it might be pretty oppressive, but it’s about the index of the thing seen. It’s data. It’s simply what was gathered by a lens and resolved on a piece of film, and that’s it.
Digital technology is amazing, but all that extra apparatus doesn’t really add much more to the basic phenomenon of photography. And it becomes something which is very fragile and unstable—these digital files are bits of charged electrons which can be erased in a sun-spot, or become lost the next time you upgrade your operating system. Or you’ve got your photos on the cloud, your credit card gets stolen, you miss an payment on the cloud and all your photographs disappear…
It’s stressful to think about.
I am anti-cloud.
I don’t think people even own their photos anymore. It’s the same with music or films. No one has the hard copy anymore.
That’s how the enslavement is going to happen. I’m going to sound like a paranoid freak, but it is actually true that anything that you have access to that comes from an internet provider is provisional.
I read something about how one of the people involved with Spotify—some record company man maybe—had said that he wanted people to pay every-time they listened to a song, as opposed to pay for it once at first. I suppose me still listening to CDs that I paid five pounds for fifteen years ago doesn’t make them any money.
Hahaha—I think I remember a quote like that—about how they want us to keep buying it. And that’s how we go from being free men in the Jeffersonian sense to just serfs… renters and not owners.
I suppose you making your 35mm print of Bozo Texino is a fight against that.
For sure. The way into the future is with stable materials, and I want to communicate with the future.
And if you’ve distributed the DVD, people out there have it too.
Yeah, there are different ways into the future. One is the scattershot method—throw DNA as far as you can, and the other is to build a pyramid that’s too troublesome to take down.
There are those stories where these obscure albums from the 70s that no one listened to are given a second lease of life after someone finds an old dusty copy and gets it re-pressed.
Yeah… imagine. You fertilised 300 eggs, and 299 of them died as the turtles were trying to get to the water… but one turtle made it to the ocean and lived a long time with a great garage rock band inside of it.
I know you’ve got to go back to doing some work now, but before we wrap this up, I wanted to ask you about bike riding in the 70s. You were into jumping pedal bikes before BMX weren’t you? How did you get into that?
Like a lot of kids my age, seeing the opening sequence of On Any Sunday with those kids on the Stingrays, that was like the first time the punk band came to town. We hadn’t heard of BMX—that word had maybe been coined by then, but we hadn’t heard of it yet—I called it Pedal Cross.
That’s a better name for it.
I mistakenly thought motocross was short for ‘motor cross’, but it’s from ‘moto’… like a heat. My zine was Pedal Cross Racing News. All we had was the kids in the neighbourhood—me, my brother and a couple of kids we dragged away from the TV. We set up some cones that we stole from the telephone company and built some wooden ramps, and we made a rubber band starting line by breaking open a golf ball and using the long rubber band that was inside.
Were you taking pictures of this?
We never shot the races because they were all hands on deck, but yeah, me and my brother took pictures of each other jumping, doing wheelies and crashing on purpose.
You’ve been early on quite a few things then. It seems like a common theme for you.
But how am I going to be early on something now? I wake up and think, “What the fuck am I missing? Something must be going on.”
PART 2 – NOVEMBER 2020
Months later, I receive an email from Bill. He feels estranged from the art world, he has no interest in printing photos and he wants to make picnic tables based around an old design he’s spotted in the woods. I ring him up once again.
Alright Bill—what’s been going on since we last talked then?
I moved onto this farm with some back-to-the-land art hippies, then I moved onto this other farm with my girlfriend—and then I found out about this abandoned fabric mill which was built in the 1920s. My buddy is the owner, and he said, “yeah, you could live down there.” So I’m trying to see whether it’s liveable or not. It’s 26 acres—it’s huge.
I found a little office that has air conditioning and a heater that works, and I may or may not be able to find water, but there’s a spring coming out the ground—so I can dig a well and pump water into the building.
So where are you now? Are you still in the middle-of-nowhere in Texas?
There are some places that are really in the middle of nowhere in Texas, but I’m 25 minutes outside of San Antonio—which is the seventh biggest city in the United States. And then the place where the mill is, is about 15 minutes from the farm I’ve been staying at with my girlfriend, and it’s suburban sprawl.
It’s not Texas Chainsaw then?
No, but if you look at this mill, it looks like a horror movie—in fact they shot a zombie movie there a couple of years ago. It’s been a graffiti destination, and a vandalism destination—people came in and broke all the windows. So ironically, part of my job will be to secure the place and keep people from breaking in—I’m going to be preventing graffiti.
And where do the picnic tables come in?
Yeah—I’ve got this ambition—I want to make picnic tables, sell them and make money for a change, instead of making art where you don’t make money. I want to start making them in this abandoned factory. And that’s a good narrative for this property—this place used to be a mill and there were tens of thousands of jobs, and then this guy broke in, and started manufacturing stuff illegally.
Why picnic tables?
It really has to do with this individual design which I saw sitting in the woods at my friend’s place, and I just fell in love with it. I saw the picnic table, and it chimed—there’s no better word than that.
From the pictures you sent me, it’s not an everyday picnic table.
Just the look of it blew my mind. It was a very irrational, emotional, aesthetic reaction I had to seeing it; “Oh my god, what is it? Who made it?” No company would ever make something like it, because it’s too silly. But it’s incredibly utilitarian—it’s two inch pipe, made from 1/8 inch thick steel—you could park a truck on it.
You know, I think it might be like the god-damn Bozo Texino thing—the moment I saw that oval head and that figure-eight crown of the cowboy hat, I was obsessed—and it’s the same with this picnic table. I looked at it and thought, “Who made it, and why?”
I haven’t managed to find the person who made it yet, but I found out where they came from—they came from an old industrial laundry—and they were outside of the plant as the worker’s break table.
And it’s not a design that was churned out by some company?
That’s what I want to find out. Were they made by an outdoor furniture company? I don’t think so—they’re just too bonkers. There’s no reason they should be this big, and use material so much. I don’t think they were designed for profitability, I feel like they were designed with some sense of whimsy; “this will be easy and fun.” But I don’t know—why does somebody make something with unnecessary flair?
You see that with old houses sometimes—the builders had pride in their work and decided to add a bit of something extra beyond the job at hand.
I think there’s an element of pride, and authorship going on with this thing. It’s like a signature, or a moniker—it’s a graphic thing that’s completely unique.
But like graffiti or the rail monikers, do you have the right to copy it?
Legally, it’s up for grabs, but I do feel like I’m taking something that someone made, that really was a signature, but it’s an anonymous self-expression, a piece of metal vernacular. Maybe I’ll find the guy and he’ll go, “No, no, no—you can’t make those,” but I’m sure he’s long dead.
It’s like anonymous graffiti—it’s analogous to me to Bozo Texino—that basic design has been passed on for 100 years, nobody really owns it, people might do their own variation of it, but it’s not a trademark and nobody owns it. Even though it refers to authorship, it’s really not a piece of intellectual property, legally. It’s a complete continuation of Bozo Texino. It’s not art, but it’s totally inspired by an aesthetic impulse.
It’s functional—it’s useful.
Yeah, I could make a picture of Nick Cave, and some people might want it, but how useful is it? But a giant, sturdy table outside, where you can play cards, or have meals, or read—that’s useful. That’s making a contribution.
I suppose it’s like practical art—like the pottery makers in the 60s and 70s.
It is. I always thought I was too cool and sophisticated to make practical art… but here I am. I’ve always had the greatest admiration with craft and people who made things that were utilitarian, but none of my skills really lined up with that. My buddy in San Antonio is an amazing glass blower, and he does all kinds of glassware, and they’re really amazing, and he has a lot of fun making them—and he’s able to sell them at a good price, because they’re just so cool. And I’ve watched him and thought, “That looks like a great job.”
For me personally, I want to do something that has a greater degree of utility and service. Filmmaking now seems less interesting to me than bending and welding pipe.
It sounds like you’ve had a bit of an epiphany.
You come from punk, you make this film, you travel with the film as a touring artist—but then you’re at a dead end. What are you going to do with your life? Nothing means anything anymore. It’s a late mid-life crisis… a crisis of capitalism… a crisis of social purpose. What are you going to do with your life that means something? But then the story changes, with a chime—like that movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Do you remember?
Yeah—when he’s making the mountain in his living room?
That’s exactly it. Something in his mind made that line—he was obsessed with that line. And for me, that was Bozo Texino and also the line of the steel of these benches.
What do you think it is about these sweeping shapes then? Whether it’s the cowboy hat of a chalk character on the side of a freight train or the bend in a steel bench?
There’s just an energy to these circular shapes—they move your eye around. It’s like a skateboard ramp—anybody who’s a skater, their brains are printed with an obsessive compulsive disorder to scan the visual field to find a curved plain. These kind of curves, they have energy.
There’s something to ‘em. What next then Bill?
I’m still trying to figure out the mill. It’s like squatting, with permission. There’s no landlord who’ll fix the roof. I’ve got to patch all the holes that people are getting in through—because if I’m working in there, I can’t have people coming in and smashing my shit and stealing my tools. There are about 30 or 40 doors and windows that I’ve got to screw shut.
Sounds like a task.
It’s a crazy task, but the thing is—here’s a task that has a goal—to bend the pipes into those shapes, weld them together and screw some boards on top. It’s so pure.
I first came across Al Baker’s photography whilst looking through an old copy of a magazine called Flux I’d snaffled from Manchester’s world-famous second-hand wonderland, Empire Exchange.
Hidden in the magazine’s pages, between an interview with Mark E Smith and a review of a newly-released sci-fi film called The Matrix, were two black-and-white photos, snapped from the window of an ice-cream van, showing kids lined up for a bit of frozen respite from the summer heat. Reading the fairly minimal bit of text below, it turned out the photos were part of a series called ‘Ice Cream You Scream’.
I’d missed the exhibition by approximately 20 years, but thanks to the high-speed time-machine known as the internet, I managed to track him down. Here’s an interview about his fine photos, his time living in Hulme Crescents and the benefits of carrying cameras in a Kwik Save bag…
Classic ‘start of an interview’ question here, but when did you get into photography? Was there something in particular that set you off?
Like a lot of young people, I knew that I was creative but hadn’t quite found my place. I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a writer or in a band. I used to doodle, copy Picasso’s in biro, so off I went to art college and tried my hand at different things. All it really taught me was that I had neither the patience, technique or talent to become a painter. Photography seemed a much easier way to make images, a more instant result. Of course, the more you get into it you realise that whether you’re any good or not does rely upon patience, technique and talent after all.
Was ‘being a photographer’ something that people did in Manchester in the early 90s? Who did you look up to back then?
Not really. It was very rare to see another person wandering around with a camera back then. Even years later when I began photographing the club scene in Manchester no-one else seemed to be doing the same thing. Not at the night clubs I went to anyway.
Now it’s very different. These days you see people with cameras everywhere. Club nights almost always have a photographer. People are far more image-conscious due to social media. Today most people are busy documenting their own nights out with their phones. Look at footage from any major gig these days and half the room is filming it. Back in the 90s no-one seemed to care about documenting anything like that. You were very unlikely to see the photos that someone might be taking the next day or, in fact, ever. People often used to ask ‘What are you taking photos for?’ with genuine surprise or distain.
In terms of photographers whom I looked up to there are so many! There are great image masters like Cartier-Bresson or Elliott Erwitt. Photographers of war and social upheaval like Don McCullin and Phillip Jones-Griffiths. I liked Alexander Rodchenko and Andre Kertez, how they broke the conventions of their day with wit and invention.
I loved the dark and dirty images of Bill Brandt, and his inspiring nude studies too. I loved the city at night recorded by Brassai. Paris in the 1930s definitely seemed to be the place to be. Diane Arbus, Jane Bown and Shirley Baker. American street photographer Gary Winogrand was a huge influence on me, as was Nick Waplington’s book ‘Living Room’.
I was also quite lucky to be living in Manchester at that time. Daniel Meadows and Martin Parr had both attended Manchester Polytechnic. Denis Thorpe had worked for the Guardian in Manchester. I saw Kevin Cummins iconic Joy Division images, Ian Tilton documenting The Stone Roses. Both were regularly in among the inky pages of the NME.
I also saw an exhibition of Clement Cooper’s photographs of the Robin Hood pub in Moss Side, which was another big influence. I was also very lucky in that my very first photography tutor was Mark Warner, who produced very beautiful images, did a lot of work for Factory Records. He shot The Durutti Column’s (1989) Vini Reilly album sleeve. He was probably the first person who ever really encouraged me.
I really like that series of photos you took from inside an ice-cream van in the late 90s. What was the story behind that?
The initial idea for that project came from my friend Steve Hillman, who is an actor. At the time he was ‘between jobs’, which is an actor’s euphemism for being unemployed, so he was working an ice-cream round to help to pay the rent. I was at his flat one night, thinking aloud about where I might go next with my camera. I’d spent quite a long time following graffiti artists work around Hulme, and had my first exhibition based around that. But it only seemed to lead to offers of more work with graffiti artists, and I wanted to do something else.
I’d done a 2nd exhibition based around portraits of my friends in Hulme. I’d flirted with some one-day projects, like Belle Vue dog track, Speakers Corner in Hyde Park. Anyway, while I was talking, not really knowing what I was going to do next, Steve simply stated ‘You should come out on the ice-cream round with me. No-one ever comes to the van without a smile on their face.’ And it just struck me as a beautiful & simple idea. So, one day we just set off. 4 or 5 rolls of film and all the free ice-cream I could eat, which I discovered wasn’t very much!
What was the logistical side of those photos? Were they taken from the same van?
They were all shot on the same day, the same van, all around Salford. It was good fun, but actually very hard work. Trying to constantly find new angles, different framing and working on a hot August day in such a small confined space. By the end of the day I felt that I had enough strong images for my next exhibition. They were much jollier images than ones I’d made before. As a result, because it had more universal appeal, I got quite a lot of good publicity out of it, and Walls gave us hundreds of free Magnum ice-creams to give away on the opening night!
These days I could think of more than a few reasons why you probably shouldn’t drive around Salford photographing other people’s children without permission haha (in fact, I’m surprised that I wasn’t hung from the nearest lamppost!) but I was much younger and far more naive back then. Besides, that was something that I’d learned from living in Hulme. You don’t ask for permission. Someone will only say ‘No’. Just crack on and do it anyway.
You also documented the last years of the Hulme Crescents. A lot of people talk about that time and place in Manchester, even now—but what was the reality of it? What was a normal weekend there like?
It was quite unlike anywhere that I’d ever lived before. It looked like a fascist dystopian nightmare, only one peopled by Rastas and anarchists. Bleak concrete interconnecting walkways. No through roads whatsoever. A fortress feel to the place. The entire estate was earmarked for demolition before I arrived. Everyone else seemed to be busy moving out. But I was already spending a lot of time there, post-Hacienda, parties, friends, lost weekends.
There were lots of young people living there. Families had mainly moved out as the heating didn’t work properly, flats were cold & damp, often infested with cockroaches. There were traces of old Irish families, the Windrush generation, interwoven with punks and drop-outs.
There was a cultural & artistic flowering among the ruins. A Certain Ratio, Dub Sex, A Guy Called Gerald, Edward Barton, Ian Brown, Dave Haslam, Mick Hucknall, Lemn Sissay, all lived there at one time. It was the original home of Factory, where all the post-punk bands played. In turn that led to Factory Records, New Order, and the Hacienda. The PSV club later hosted raves and notorious Jungle nights. It was a good time to be young.
You lived there as well as shooting it. Do you think it’s important to be a part of the thing you’re photographing, rather than just an outsider with a camera?
I don’t know that it’s important to be a part of the thing you’re photographing, ‘embedded’ is what the war photographers call it, but you definitely capture different images. Certain things that might have been shocking to an outsider were commonplace, normal & every day to me. Boring even. On the other hand, I was much less likely to be robbed walking around. That meant I could take my camera places that other people couldn’t, or maybe shouldn’t!
I used to wear my camera beneath my coat so it couldn’t be seen, and I carried my film and lenses in a Kwik Save shopping bag so as not to attract unwanted attention. I got into the habit of handing that bag over the bar at the pubs I went in. I would collect it the next day if I could remember where I’d been the night before. Bless you, saintly barmaids of old Hulme.
If you look at my images of Hulme people they’re usually reacting to me and not the camera. Either that or they’re not reacting at all. They’re ignoring the fact that I’m taking a picture. That’s what gives them that ‘fly-on-the-wall’ feeling.
This is something that I put to greater effect later when I was photographing in night clubs, skulking stage side or hiding in a DJ booth. When DJs & MCs see you week in week out at the club doing the same thing they stop posing for the camera and just get used to you being there. You become part of the furniture. And when people stop being conscious of the camera, when they ignore that you’re even present, you can step in much closer. Put simply, you get better pictures. They’re much less performative and far more honest. It’s not often people can say they like it when they’re being ignored, but for photographers it’s a gift.
Do you think somewhere the Crescents could exist now, or was it just a case of the perfect accidental recipe for that kind of creative, DIY activity?
No, I don’t think anywhere like Hulme will ever happen again. I think the city council learned that lesson a long time ago. It was a dystopian utopia for us, but it grew out of failure. When I 1st went to university they warned us never to set foot there. I said, ‘But what if you live there already?’ and there was an embarrassed silence. They really hadn’t expected a poor boy from Hulme to be in the room. Now they own half of it and it’s all student Halls of Residence.
The city centre has been regenerated, redeveloped & gentrified. We can’t afford to live there anymore, and people like me are pushed out. Hulme was a failed social housing experiment, an eyesore & an embarrassment to the people who had commissioned it. People like me moved in & we made it our own. They’re never going to allow anything like that to happen again. Every quaint old fashioned pub that closes becomes a block of flats. The footprint is too valuable to property developers. One day all we will have will be faded photographs to bear witness to a very different way of living.
Was it through the Crescents that you started shooting graffiti?
When I first arrived in Hulme I’d just spent 3 years living with mates in a couple of houses elsewhere in the city. It suddenly struck me that that part of my life was over and I had very few photographs of that time. I’d been too busy learning photography, taking the kind of photos that every art student takes: Broken windows; abandoned buildings, and bits of burnt wood. I vowed I wouldn’t do that again. I began documenting the life that was around me.
I started with the architecture, as it was quite unlike any other place I’d ever seen. It had a desperate, faded beauty even then. The whole estate had been condemned for demolition before I arrived, but the city council had given up on the place long before that.
I started to notice graffiti pieces going up, seeing the same names repeated. It was obvious that there was a small group of writers trying out their styles on a large canvas for the 1st time. Wanting to claim this derelict space as their own Hall Of Fame. I started to document them as they sprang up. Then I noted that context was crucial, and so I began to include the soon-to-be-derelict buildings in the images also. The shapes & colours of the graffiti looked positively psychedelic beside the drab monochrome of the setting.
With your graffiti shots, you show a lot more than just the pieces. Was it an intentional thing to show the act behind it a bit?
Because it was Hulme and no-one cared, these guys weren’t working in the dead of night like most graffiti writers do in the train yards and what-have-you. They were working during the day, right out in the open. So, documenting their work, it wasn’t long before I ran into Kelzo. He really didn’t trust me at first, but I kept coming back. So, I got to know them. They started to let me know where they were going to be painting next.
In 1995 Kelzo organised the 1st SMEAR JAM event (named after a young aspiring writer who used to come down to Hulme to learn, and had died suddenly from a nut allergy). That was such good fun that another event arrived the following year, another & another. Graf writers came from London, Edinburgh, Leeds, Sheffield, and as far afield as Spain. The local community came out to support and, as usual, it turned into a party that lasted all weekend.
I got into the habit of taking 2 cameras. One loaded with B&W film to capture the event itself, and another with colour transparency to document the finished artwork.
Graffiti… hip-hop… kids getting ice cream… I suppose there’s a few different subjects there, but was there an underlying thing or theme you wanted to show with your photos? Maybe getting a bit philosophical, but they’re all quite free acts—is it about enjoying what’s there?
It was more about documenting the life I saw around me. Moving to Hulme was what led to me capturing graffiti, and graffiti led to hip-hop events. Once Hulme was demolished I moved my camera into the city centre and began photographing club nights. House and hip-hop turned into Drum’n’Bass, and then dubstep. Residents and warm-up acts have now become headliners in their own right. Manchester has always been a great city for music, and it kept me busy throughout the naughty Noughties. I’ve pretty much retired from all of that now. I’d had enough after over 15 years of it. I no longer feel compelled to document something as ephemeral as a club night anymore when half of the audience are doing it themselves anyway. Then coronavirus came & properly killed it all off. I don’t know what it’s going to be like now going forward, but it’ll be someone else’s turn to document whatever that is.
What do you think makes a good photograph?
You need to have a good eye. You need to notice & be aware of the world around you. You always see an image before you create one. You don’t require expensive equipment. Mine never was. And you don’t need to be trained. It’s one of those areas where you really can educate yourself. A certain amount of technique and technical understanding goes a long way but, again, you can pick those things up as you go along.
There are different kinds of photography, of course, but for me it was always about capturing a moment. The Decisive Moment, as Cartier-Bresson so eloquently put it. It’s something that the camera has over the canvas. For me the camera has always been a time machine. Like an evocative love song on the radio, it can transport you back immediately to a time & place long gone. It also acts as a witness for those people who were not there. Images tell stories. And we all like to hear and tell stories.
A couple of years ago I was invited to talk at the University of Lancaster for a symposium on documentary photography, which is a tradition that I had always considered my photographs sat within. But oddly, as I gave my slide-show presentation, images that I have seen and shown many times before, and thought I knew very well, I suddenly saw in a brand-new light. I could see myself in every image. Almost like a self-portrait from which I was absent but my own shadow cast large. I realised that I haven’t been documenting anything other than my own life. 25 year old images suddenly had something new to say, something new to tell me.
Do you still take photos today? What kind of things are you into shooting these days?
I don’t really do a lot of photography these days. I teach and facilitate as part of my job now. I still do the odd event but night club photography is a much younger man’s game. I really don’t have the levels of commitment, energy or enthusiasm I once did. I feel like I’ve taken enough images. If I never took another photograph ever again, that’s OK. Maybe, perhaps, I’ll get into a different kind of image making in my twilight years … but for now I’m trying to reassess the images I made 25 years ago. People are far more interested in them now than they ever were at the time. Now they have become documents of a time and place which has gone. The graffiti and the walls that they were written on have disappeared. Many of those night clubs have closed. Time moves on. The images and the memories are all that is left.
Over all those years, how has the art of photography changed for you?
Back when I started taking photographs, where I lived in Hulme, the kind of music that I was into, the magic of a night club moment, there were very few people I knew of who were doing the same thing. Now I am aware of others who were. Almost everyone is their own photographer now. Mobile phones & social media have given a platform for anyone to make & share images of their individual lives, whether it be their friends & families, holidays, public events or more private & intimate moments. Anyone can document their own lives now, so I no longer feel that I have to. I do still love photography, it’s still my favourite form of art, but I don’t feel compelled to capture it all anymore.
I suppose I’ve pestered you with questions for a while now. Have you got any wise words to wind this up with?
If you want to become a photographer you must learn your craft. Keep doing it, and you will get better. But you must remember to always be honest. Make honest images. Listen to the voice of your own integrity. Don’t worry too much if no-one sees any value in what you do. If you’re any good people will eventually see it. It may take years, it did for me, but images of the ordinary & everyday will one day become historical, meaningful & extraordinary.
We live in a world today mediated by images, a Society of the Spectacle, but we still need photographers: People who have a good eye, an innate feel for the decisive moment; what to point the camera at and when to press the shutter. The images that you make today will be the memories of the future.
Pedestrian is a magazine about the humble art of walking. In this interview, I talked with the man with the plan, Alexander Wolfe, about his love for this much maligned form of transport, his recent expedition from New York to Philadelphia, and the art of conversation.
First off, you recently walked from New York City to Philadelphia over nine days. What made you want to do that?
The initial desire to walk to Philadelphia came out living in New York City during the pandemic. I was bound to my apartment for a few months with little to do but walk around my neighborhood. I’ve always had a habit of walking around the city, but the pandemic only made these walks longer and longer, which eventually led to a 23 mile journey from my apartment in Brooklyn, to the Bronx, and back.
Around that time I was reading The Roads to Sata by Alan Booth and started contemplating longer, multi-day walks. I needed a change of scenery and found the idea of traveling by foot and living out of a bag very appealing. I felt like I’d developed a process here in the city (go on a walk, take photos, write a newsletter about the walk, repeat) and needed to give myself a challenge. I wanted to lean further into this practice that I’ve been developing for the last three years.
I’d never considered my walks to be hikes, so it made sense that I’d keep it in an urban setting. Walking to Philadelphia seemed like a no-brainer. What most people don’t initially realize is that most of my time was spent walking through New Jersey. I liked the idea of walking in a place that is commonly misrepresented as the “armpit of America” and typically deemed unwalkable. New Jersey is actually a very underrated state. It might be the densest state population-wise, but it’s called the Garden State for a reason. Oh yeah, I’d never been to Philadelphia and just really wanted to visit.
How did the walk go? Quite often trips or excursions can be a fair bit different to how you first imagine them… how did the reality of the walk differ from how you thought it was going to be?
I was presented with a new challenge every day. Don’t get me wrong, the walk turned out better than I could have ever imagined, but you can never anticipate everything in advance. This was the first time I’d ever walked with a 25 pound bag on my back, let alone the first time I’d walked 9 days in a row. Originally I set out to average 17.75 miles per day, but thanks to my own curiosity, ended up waking 20 miles a day on average. I mapped the entire route a month or two before leaving, but would always deviate from the path in favor of exploring some neighborhood, road, or park that looked appealing. The first day alone ballooned into 27 miles because I got cocky and thought I didn’t need to use my map while walking in Manhattan. I learned my lesson and kept my eyes on the map for the rest of the trip.
Another thing I didn’t expect was the sensitivity one develops after walking 6-8 hours for days in a row. The smell of exhaust and gasoline becomes more potent. You realize how violently we’ve shaped the land to build huge highways and abysmal business parks. So much of our infrastructure is built in favor of the car, which makes being a pedestrian incredibly difficult at times. If the built environment didn’t present a challenge, it was always the weather, the gnarly blisters on my feet, or my gear malfunctioning. I quickly learned to accept these challenges. It was just another component of the walk.
A lot of times people go for ‘a walk’, they’re seeking out beauty spots or nice scenery—maybe in nature reserves or the countryside, but your walk was cutting through some fairly overlooked places… industrial estates and small towns. Do people miss out by not seeing the whole picture of somewhere? Is just driving through these places to get to the destination sort of cheating?
I wouldn’t consider driving to be cheating – it’s just another way we alienate ourselves from the world around us. When we drive, we experience the world at a speed that makes it nearly impossible to pay attention to the fine details. Our relationship to place is abstracted, especially thanks to the rise of GPS. We no longer have to have a physical relationship to these towns. We don’t even have to remember how to get to them. Driving around in a car reduces these places to nothing more than a label on a map or a convenient place to stop for gas.
It’s important to have relationships with the places surrounding you. The walk has given me an intimate experience with the space between New York City and Philadelphia. I know what it looks like, I know how it feels to be there. I can tell you where residents stop hanging New York Yankees flags in favor of Philadelphia Phillies flags. If I’m watching the Soprano’s and Tony references Metuchen, NJ then I know exactly what he’s talking about. I think to understand a place, such as New York City, it’s just as important to understand the places around it. There are generations of people who once called the Big Apple home, but decided to plant their roots in Jersey for one reason or another.
I suppose you could have read about some of these places on Wikipedia, but being there is a completely different thing. Is experiencing stuff first hand important?
It’s very important if you actually want to understand a place. It’s too easy to create our own narratives without ever visiting a place. I still tried to do my share of research before heading out. I have friends from North Jersey or the Philadelphia Metro and tried to take their opinions with a grain of salt. I spent some time reading about certain towns along the way on Wikipedia or scanned Reddit to get a vibe. I even previewed chunks of the walk on Google Street View to mentally prepare and know if it was actually safe to walk near some of these roads. I could have spent months preparing, but it never would actually replace walking in these small towns and cities. It’s so much different when you’re on the ground.
I suppose the main reason we’re talking is that you make a magazine based around the idea of walking. How long have you been making Pedestrian? What started it off?
I released the first issue of Pedestrian back in March of 2018. I was living in Ridgewood, Queens at the time and made friends with a guy named Curtis Merkel (I actually met him while out on a walk). He ran a moving business for a few decades and retired. At 84 years old he opened up a tiny little bookshop to keep himself busy. I’d visit him every weekend to check out his books and eventually we’d just get to talking. He’d lived in Ridgewood his entire life and loved to talk about the neighborhood’s history. Moving to NYC also introduced me to a thriving community of zine makers. I wanted to share these conversations I’d had with Curtis in print form, so I decided to start a magazine. I invited a few friends to contribute and the rest was history.
Since then, the identity of Pedestrian has become quite fluid. While it started as a magazine, I would now describe Pedestrian as my own practice. It’s a platform that allows me to collaborate with others, produce magazines, write newsletters, go on these long multi-day walks, and produce t-shirts. I have found this configuration gives me the most creative freedom.
A lot of your magazine is about meeting people and striking up conversations. Is this a lost art these days?
I don’t know if it’s a lost art per se, but there’s less incentive to reach out and talk with strangers these days. Thanks to the rise of social media it’s just getting easier and easier to stay within our own “bubbles.” Starting Pedestrian, in a way, was an excuse for me to speak with those I typically wouldn’t reach. It’s amazing how having a publication kind of takes the fear out of speaking with strangers. You can do anything when you have intention.
Although walking is something most people do, is it overlooked as an activity? It seems it’s mostly seen as an inconvenience, rather than a hobby in itself.
It depends where you live. In New York City, for example, walking is a part of the culture. The city is built in such a way that makes walking a viable means of transportation. And if you can’t walk to your destination, you’re likely walking to a subway or a bus. Where I’m from in Iowa, walking is very inconvenient. Everything is spaced out, which makes walking anywhere very difficult. It’s not that people don’t want to walk, it’s just the way we’ve built certain communities has made it very hard to enjoy. It makes people think walking is very inconvenient.
I’m here in Iowa until August and it’s been interesting to walk a place that is so reliant on cars. The other day I did a 13.5 walk around the city. There’s nothing here stopping you from walking (unless the heat gets you. Technically we’re in the middle of a drought. It’s been incredibly hot as of late), and there’s plenty of sidewalk. I think it’s mostly just a mindset people have to develop. It doesn’t matter how many miles you walk, it’s just about getting out there. Your mental health will thank you and you might even learn something new about your surroundings along the way.
Walking is maybe the antithesis to the internet, but Pedestrian also has a decent presence on the World Wide Web, and you regularly send newsletters and… er… partake in the digital world. How do you balance the real world with the matrix?
It’s a relationship I’m constantly reevaluating. I’m not a master of balancing the two yet, but I’m slowly building habits that will protect my time. I often daydream of abandoning social media altogether and picking up a flip phone. I obviously haven’t done that yet, so in the meantime, I’m investing a lot of time in my newsletter. Sending out a newsletter is a much more thoughtful, intimate, and slow experience…kind of like the way I approach my walks out in the world. I understand that the web is a tool and I’m not sure the Philly walk would have gotten the same amount of attention had I not had an Instagram account. It’s cliche, but everything in moderation, right? I try not to take it so seriously.
What next for Pedestrian?
The Philly walk was such a great success and I’d like to keep that momentum going. Later in September I have another big, big walk planned, but I have yet to announce the route. Look for an announcement sometime next month. This one will be a bit longer and involve 3 different cities. I can’t wait.
Once winter hits I’m going to buckle down and produce a proper book for the Philly walk that will include all my writing and photos I took along the journey. I’m already excited to share the finished product with the world. Stay tuned.
Final question, what are your walking shoes of choice? And what’s your soundtrack? Are earphones advised for long walks, or do you prefer the ambient sounds of the streets?
I’m a big fan of Hoka Clifton’s. I wore them throughout the entire Philly walk and have two pairs in my closet. At this point, Hoka should probably pay me for how much business I send their way. I’m always recommending them.
I prefer not to wear headphones and just listen to the ambient sounds of the street. More often than not, I find wearing headphones to be a bit distracting and it takes me out of the present moment. Although, I’ll admit I have been trying to introduce music into my walking once again, but few tracks make the cut. Lately Andrew Wasylyk’s Last Sunbeams of Childhood has been on repeat. There’s something about that track…
INTERVIEW ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ROMAN CANDLE ISSUE 1 – AVAILABLE HERE AND HERE.
No one ever admits it, but a lot of ‘photobooks’ are pretty dull. £40 for page-after-page of po-faced portraits? What a swizz. And how about those supposedly intellectual photos which just show the corner of a hedge or something… school textbooks were more fun.
One photobook which most certainly IS NOT DULL is a seldom-spoken-of gem called Vagabond by a chap from Tulsa named Gaylord Herron. Released back in 1975, this is a bizarre ride way beyond the far side, showing such amazing sights as a pair of overweight wrestlers, a proud man’s hat collection and a teacher sat by the roadside scoffing a slice of cake.
There’s paintings too. And words about Cain and Abel and Tulsa and trips to Japan and countless other things. The whole thing is a thick and hearty soup worthy of wading through, and repeat servings are advised.
Gaylord, or G.Oscar, as he’s sometimes known, now runs a bike shop which sells affordable vintage bikes. I called up the shop phone one morning to pester him about Vagabond and anything else I could think of…
I can’t say I know too much about your home city of Tulsa. What’s it like there?
Tulsa is kind of becoming more of a cosmopolitan city than before. There’s a family foundation called Kaiser, which covers the whole country, and they built a park here, which is the most incredible thing in the world. It’s a huge, huge park, which has won the award for the most outstanding park, worldwide. He hired people from Holland to design a lot of it.
Sounds nice. How big is Tulsa? What’s the population?
With the surrounding towns around it, it’d be a million I guess. It’s not that big.
What was it like growing up there? Was it the typical America you’d imagine from films and books in the 50s?
Well, it was more of that rural kind of feel. It was an oil town—it grew out of oil. I think it became an incorporated city in 1907, so it’s only just over a hundred years old. It was built on the curve of the Arkansas River at a place where Washington Irvine and those guys used to hang out. It’s a really historic area.
So that’s kind of the hook—the river—which has been developed and exploited in all kinds of ways over the years. But now it’s kind of taking on the feel of a larger city.
When I was a kid, we grew up near downtown, and we’d ride the bus into town, because we just didn’t have the money for all kinds of things that other people had. And I remember seeing the skyline in the distance on the bus, and thinking how neatly it was done—it was good math—perfect. Of course, that skyline has been decimated since then, it doesn’t have the architectural look or the charm that it once had.
But at the same time, there’s an area in midtown that’s about nine square miles of old growth trees that are there because of the watershed coming down from that curve in the river and making it very, very fertile. You British would call it a wood.
Yeah, or maybe a ‘copse’, although not many people use that word.
There’s a lot of European paintings of that kind of thing. They haven’t decimated it with pharmacies and parking lots, although I’m sure they’d love to. I’m taking photographs of the trees to call attention to it—I wanted to make people aware of what they have in Tulsa.
Do you think people take that kind of thing for granted a bit?
Yeah, they do. There’s this dappled light at the base of these trees, which filters down through the canopy and splashes across the ground, and that has a psychological draw for people. They get into that dappled light, and they don’t really realise it’s doing something to them, making them relaxed, making them feel protected—it’s neat. But when I first started taking pictures, I used to avoid dappled light. I didn’t want it, it was too chaotic and confusing. I liked solid blocks and shapes that were well defined. But at my age now, I love that dappled light—I look for it.
From what I gather, you started taking photos when you joined the army and went to Korea, but had you any interest in it at all before then?
Not a bit—I really hadn’t. I mean my sister and I would do goofy shots out in the front with a Hawkeye camera when I was a kid, but I didn’t do anything until I got to Korea.
You see what happens is you go in there and they say, “Let’s go to the village.” And they’ve all got cameras around their necks. So by about the third or fourth trip, I went and bought a camera. I remember it was a Petri, and then after that I got a Honeywell Pentax PX.
So I’d go out, and shoot these slides—but then one day I decided to try black and white—and one of the better pictures I’ve done was on that roll, at the very beginning. It was shot out of the bus window, going down the street. I shot these guys who were out on the street, these old timers who had been in the war and were reminiscing. It was just a neat shot.
And at some point someone said, “You know you can make a print off that?” So I went into the darkroom, and I get this picture. It’s a guy on a cart eating an apple. He’s a human truck, waiting for his next job. So I print this picture of him, and it was still wet, but I ran down to the club where my buddies were all drinking, and threw this print down on the table. And they went, “Ooh, look at that! That’s great!” They were all over it, and that was all needed. So I ran back to the darkroom and I was there ever since.
You just thought, ‘right—this is what I want to do’?
Yeah. Then I started messing around with cropping and all those other elements of art. I started really examining everything, until I got to the point where I was just excessive.
What sorts of things were you looking for back then? What were you trying to show?
Chronologically, it starts with me taking pictures of people farming along the Han River. Those kinds of things that were related to a kind of rural mind-set. But then I just expanded into all other kinds of things. What I realised then is that with a twist of this, or a twist of that, you could make a whole new world out of these images. I saw the potential for all the kinds of things you could do to change the feel of a print.
And now, later on, I’ve came to the conclusion that what I was looking for was perfect math. Everything is math—the frequencies in colour, lengths and distances, ratio and proportion—and if you frame it, and put it in a rectangle, then you’ve got the potential for perfect math. Or maybe something that’s perfect on one side, but not the other side. And all those kinds of unknowns.
The eye picks it up, sees it, then the mind says, “What’ve we got here, let’s put a rectangle on it—it’s perfect.” And then you shoot! Bang! Hit the shutter! And that’s what it is, isn’t it?
Your photographs aren’t maybe what I’d think of as being ‘mathematical’— they’re not straight, stiff architectural shots—they’re loose, and some parts are blurred, but I suppose maybe they’re mathematical in the real sense… rather than someone just lining their camera up 90 degrees to a subject.
Yeah, and I’m dealing with this now in another sense. My wife died about five or six months ago, and I’m still in that in-between land. We were married 50 years, and she was part of this bike shop with me for 22 years. And when she left, I started doing something really odd. I had some craft paper on a roll, and I brought it over to my bar. I taped it down, and I started darkening these frames which I wanted to put around these old sepia tone prints.
I wanted it to be this really, dark, dark brown. Almost black—but if you look at it next to a colour it’ll pick it up and amplify it—it really incentivises the silver to pop out at you. And it’s working a charm by the way.
So I’m doing this, and I splash some ink—well actually, it’s more of a stain like what you use on furniture. And on this craft paper I’m doing this very physical, violent Jackson Pollock kind of thing, and all of a sudden, these faces are coming up out of this paper. And I’m getting pictures of my wife, pictures of my kids and pictures of people I know, coming up out of this craft paper. And you talk about loose, this is as loose as I’ve ever been.
It’s that thing of the mind joining up the gaps?
You’re looking for math, your brain is looking at what you eyes are sending in, and it says, “Wait a minute, I recognise this.” But you didn’t do it on purpose.
And another thing when you talk about mathematics… I shoot a lot of photographs at a 15th of a second—even in the bible it says that’s the twinkling of an eye. So I shoot these drive-by photographs at 40 miles and hour and I realised in looking in these pictures that a lot of stuff comes and goes in that 15th of a second that we won’t see with our eyes. It real mysterious. It’s like a no man’s land of time— a warp of time.
I suppose if the eye processes 25 frames a second or whatever it is, what’s going on in the in-between time? There’s could be all sorts of stuff.
Yeah, that’s the point… there’s stuff in there. And I’m getting to the point now where I’m seeing faces everywhere, in all kind of objects. And I’m loving it. I’ll say that if you want to get over loss, and get through the pain, use art to do it. Make that your vehicle—and use your hands!
Art is a thing that is so hard to define, but I’m starting to think that it’s picking up impulses from the past, and fitting them into your current situation. And that’s why art doesn’t have to be anything in particular, there just has to be a connection. That’s what it has to be.
When you were in Korea in the early 60s, were you thinking of making art?
No, I can remember after a couple of weeks of doing those prints, I had a photo of some laundry hanging on some clothes-lines in a house in Seoul in the snow, and I made a print of this, and I turned it on its side 90 degrees, and all of a sudden it’s like an exotic seascape. It was all being done with this white linen laundry. And I thought this was unbelievable. You could twist it, turn it, dodge it, burn it, and you could make a whole different world.
And that began to fascinate me, that you had the control there. So I would crop and crop and crop until the math was perfect. And I trained myself to look for all the elements of math. And now, at my age, I’ve realised that that’s the name of the game—recognising and making available perfect math. And you can either see it, or you don’t. It’s a weird thing… I guess it’s a gift.
The subject or the narration takes a back seat—you’re showing the math that’s going to appeal to the eye or the brain of the person looking, and then they’ll investigate further. It’s the hook that gets people to look.
So you weren’t bothered about the subject?
That’s where it started—but looking back over my old prints, I’ve realised that everything I shot early on, I continued to investigate. I love architecture, I love portraits of people, and I love those Cartier-Bresson photos… the non-events… those photos where everyone is doing something, but they’re not related. I loved those. I was always real bold about putting the camera in people’s faces. I did a whole bunch of that. I didn’t ask, and I made a lot of people mad.
Did you get much grief for doing that that?
I didn’t have to fight them off, but I’d have to push them away.
What’s your argument against people being mad about that? Surely the photo was more to appreciate the person rather than condescend.
Right, exactly. Or actually, it wasn’t so much to appreciate… I took a lot of pictures that kind of exposed people and showed some of their idiosyncrasies. I liked to do that. I was always bold like that, especially when I was doing a story for the newspaper.
I did television news too. I would always have a microphone in your face… and I had a Nikon around my neck the whole time. I was banging shots and doing interviews. And some of my best work was taken during those investigations for television. I was banging shots whilst I was doing the work—unconsciously. If I saw something and it looked right… BOOM. As simple as that.
Sometimes I think you get an inkling or a hint of what is about to happen. I think that’s what Bresson and those guys did. They were always on the shutter, just before the moment. You had to be ready before the decisive moment. I used to kiss the back of the camera when I’d hold it up to my eye. And then I’d wait and I’d wait and then at some point I’d hit the shutter.
How did you get involved with the news stuff? Did you get into that straight after you got back from Korea?
As a matter of fact I did. The first job I had coming back, I worked as the night-wire editor of an evening paper in Tulsa. I would pull the copy from the AP wire and the UPI wire and Reuters and all that stuff, and put it on the desk of the guys coming in to write about that stuff in the morning. It was an evening paper, but I worked all night long. I had the whole newsroom to myself.
And then after that, I was cleaning swimming pools, and then let’s see… what else did I do? Around that time I built a dark-room at home and I printed a lot of the stuff I’d done in Korea, and put it all together when my father died. That was in ’64. I hadn’t been home very long, so I just packed it all into my ’57 Desoto with push-button controls, and drove 90 mph to New York with all my stuff.
There I worked for a photographer called Vincent Lisanti, he had gone to Brooks, which is a school in California where people go to learn how to use view cameras and super commercial photography. When I got back to Tulsa, I moved into this apartment, and next door was a photographer called Bob Hawks, he’s turns wooden bowls now—they’ve even got a bowl of his in the White House—that’s how good he is, but he’s one eye a photographer, and one eye a bowl carver.
I said, “I’ve just come back from New York and I wanted to see if you needed some help. I worked for Vincent Lisanti.” He said, “Vincent Lisanti? I know him. I went to Brooks with him.” So he gets on the phone to Lisanti and he said, “Oh, he’s great, give him a job,” so he did, and I started travelling around shooting the Sweet Adelines.
How long were you doing that for?
That was about a year, going all over the country. It was great. I’d do the quartet portraits and all that stuff, and then I’d go out and shoot my own pictures. I was just obsessed with shooting.
And then I got a scholarship to go to Tulsa University and photograph their year-book, so I did that—shooting the yearbook in exchange for tuition. And then I just quit and joined the newspaper again, and did television news.
And whilst you were doing this news stuff, you were taking your own photos?
Yeah, but eventually I stopped doing everything and anything apart from taking pictures. But it’s expensive, and where’s it going to go? You get these pictures, but what are you going to do with them? No-one is going to hang them on their wall. It’s not the kind of thing that people use to decorate.
So that’s when Vagabond came along, in 1975. I quit my job to do Vagabond, I went to New York and stayed in the Chelsea Hotel. I think we were in Eugene O’Neill’s old room. Dan Mayo and myself spent a year doing that book.
How was New York back then?
Oh, it was great. I’ll tell you when it was better though… when I went in the mid-60s. The skies were cobalt blue and there was beautiful weather, but then all of a sudden it became smog-ridden.
What was the process for making the book? There’s a lot going on in there.
Yeah, I was using the Cain and Abel story to depict an outcome that was predicted. I was using myself, and my friend Bill Rabon, as examples of the vagabond. And that became a way for me to talk about the dilemma we’re all in right now as modern humanoids.
What do you mean by that?
I think it’s one DNA versus another DNA. There’s maybe 12 DNAs on this planet, and they’re always at loggerheads with each other—that’s my idea anyway. And those DNAs go 6,000 years back to the Garden of Eden… or maybe they go back 60,000 years? They’re all over the lot.
I’d decided that my father had died sooner than he should of, because I had a talk with him a couple of weeks after I got back from Korea, and I started to point out some of his deficiencies—I chewed him out. And two days later, he died. And I always carried that with me, and I’m still carrying that with me. So I did this book for him. He was a vagabond, and I was a vagabond.
When you talk about the dilemma we’re in, what do you mean?
It’s politics, it’s art, it’s war. It’s the dilemma, the debacle. The best example is the chimp—the young males beat each other to death, but they’re almost exactly the same, when it comes down to DNA or whatever, as the bonobo, and they just kiss all day. That’s all they do, there’s no war, they just love all day long. It’s two different wings of the same animal. And that’s kind of what we are. We don’t have enough bonobo, we’ve got too much chimp. And chimps will tear your face off.
Do you think that’s changed at all, since the 70s when your book came out? Will it always be like this?
I don’t know about that. I don’t know about where you are, but around about ten years ago I started having a feeling that we were starting to become dull normals—we were being ‘dull normalised’. You could tell in the advertising and the culture and the thoughts and the way people entertained themselves that they were getting much more like dull norms—like children, just wanting to be occupied and entertained all the time.
Nobody wants to think of better ways to organise our various cultures around the world, and help people out. I think we were much more egalitarian back then. We’re really selfish and childlike now.
AT THIS POINT WE GO OFF ON A TANGENT ABOUT DNA AND ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS. THINGS ARE EVENTUALLY BROUGHT BACK AROUND WHEN GAYLORD SAYS…
…at the same-time, I think the photographers that are serious about photography are called to do that.
Your book wasn’t just photos, it had paintings and writing in there too—a definite departure from the ‘Aperture Monograph’ style of book. How did people react to it?
That book was really well reviewed. I even got a shout-out from Robert Frank.
Did you ever meet him?
Oh no, but I’d have loved to. He was an outstanding photographer. When I first saw The Americans, I loved it. He was going around, shooting in motel rooms, on highways and all kind of things. He was trying to get the atmosphere that goes with it… the dance that goes with it. Sometimes it’s dancing inside and you’ve got to grab it… you’re obligated to grab it.
Where did all that extra stuff in Vagabond come from? How did you go about laying it all out?
Do you know who was going to do it at first? The guy who did that book Somnambulist… who was that?
Ralph Gibson?
Yeah, Ralph Gibson was going to do the book—that was who Dan Mayo was negotiating with, but then finally I said, “Do you know what? I would love to do this myself.” And so I went with it, just starting to wait for ideas… and they came. It was about that simple. It took a year to do it.
And that was the same thing as the photographs… mathematics. When it feels right, the lines are right, the ratios are right, the distances are right, and then there’s texture and colour… when all of that seems to be in balance, like a Calder sculpture, then you nail it, and you get the page.
How did people lay out books back then?
I made a dummy of the pictures and the copy and everything, and then I took it to this guy Sidney Rappaport in New York, the guy who did all the Edward Weston and Ansel Adams books. He was a great printer. He used this triple-tone, it was a lithograph kind of a thing. It was beautiful.
How many did you get printed?
I think there was 10,000. I’ve got about 300 left. People reviewed it very well, which I loved, but it was such a small niche. I tried to promote it as much as I could, but I did a horrible job. I can sell bicycles and I can talk to people until they buy a bicycle, but I can’t sell photographs.
Was there ever plans to do another book? You carried on taking pictures, but as far as I know, Vagabond was your only book.
I’m at the point now where I’d like to relocate the negatives into a collection… a museum or a school or something so they could use it for education. But I haven’t done that yet, so I may at some point try to do a couple of books.
I’ve got thousands and thousands of images, and I’ve scanned in my prints, but until I know what I’m going to do with my negatives, I don’t know whether I’m going to need to print anything else or not. I need someone to sponsor me… it’s not easy.
If you’ve only scanned in your prints, I imagine you must have countless negatives you’ve never seen before. How many photos off a roll of film would you print?
Back in 69 to 71 when I was working at the newspaper I was banging so many shots on a roll that I’d want to print half the roll. It was one after another. I made them on an Ektamatic Processor, which is an interesting aside.
Kodak made this A/B solution roller, feeder and printer. You put your Ektamatic paper in, it goes through an activator, it goes through a stabiliser, and then it comes out, you squeegee it off and set it down and it air dries.
And I made gazillions of prints, just sitting on a stool with that roller printer, and now I’m looking at them, and they’re better now than ever. They were never fixed! Somehow Kodak figured out how to make the chemicals co-exist forever… or something. And these are 50/60 year old prints. They self tone down to sepia over time, as random sulphite molecules attach to them, but the silver is still pristine.
A lot of older photographer has a mystery to it. There’s maybe not as much information in the image, so your mind has to fill it in. Do you think that mystery has been lost a little bit nowadays?
It could be, and it could be that selfies have become ubiquitous and no one thinks about any other form of visual representation. People aren’t doing much because they’re always looking at their iPhone. They’re not getting anything done. It’s seems like as a culture, we’ve made preparation for an accomplishment into the goal. “I’ve got to get all this stuff together, get my money, get all the stuff I need, and then I’ll accomplish this goal.” All the time we’re preparing for everything, we never actually do anything… we’re just preparing.
I think people don’t investigate as much. In an old article, I said that taking a photo was like a stream of water running down a bubbling brook—you reach in and pull out a few drops that you can examine. That’s what a photograph does. It pulls a drop out of the stream so that you can examine it, or identify with it, or learn from it, or even be inspired by it. Or are made comfortable by it. And that’s the beauty of it.
Whose photographs did that for you?
I liked those guys who did the ‘decisive moment’ thing, where you capture it just right. You’d have to be on top of the shutter to get that—you’ve got to be ahead of it. If not, you don’t have it—you’ve just got another dull rectangle. But that’s okay, I think those are important too by the way… they’re just dull.
But I think that permeated my thinking all along. What I was going to say before is that when you shoot that roll of film you were talking about, well, you might have six images on there that you know are good, but then there might be one down at the end of the roll… and you’ll say, “This is it! That’s the shot!” It wasn’t those six—it was that one vagabond image that you saw. You print that puppy and you love it. That’s the one that stands out. You’re talking about various levels and grades of attraction, and math.
And then there’s content. I’ve always been mindful of content. That picture of that woman holding that girl on that street corner… her face and her body attitude… it makes me cry, every time I look at it, and I don’t know why. There’s just something about the arrangement that touches my soul.
Is that because it’s figurative? There’s always going to be more of an emotion connection to a photo of a person.
Yeah, but those trees… I’m having an emotional affair with the trees right now… but yeah, people come first.
Maybe going off on a tangent here, but I’ve noticed every time you’re mentioned, it’s often in the same sentence as Larry Clark. Is that a bit annoying?
Yeah, there was a review that a woman wrote which compared the two views of Tulsa, Clark and me, and she came out eventually to say that mine was positive, and his was negative.
I suppose his wasn’t really about Tulsa, even thought that’s what it was called.
Yeah, it was about that subculture, the methamphetamine. Whereas I wanted to be as universal as possible. When I was a kid, I’d think, “Wouldn’t it be neat if you could see everything in the world?” And maybe that’s what I’m trying to do—to photograph everything and see everything? But that’s the definition of omnipresent or something, and you can’t have that. But yeah, I thought that’d be neat.
I would just like to see everything, I don’t know why. I do know that it’s a visual thing. I think there’s a speed to your vision. Sometime you can look and get an immediate read from your brain. A lot of times your brain looks at it and says, “What the fuck is this? What are you doing?” But you get this fast, fast read, visually.
I suppose your book is a good example of that mix… of seeing everything. There’s all sorts in there.
It’s a cultural dragnet, over the whole thing. The overarching drag-net.
What do you think about photography now? Do you look at much contemporary stuff?
I wonder about the people who photograph now. They’ve got their iPhones, and they’ve also got their Nikons, and they’re banging shots… but I’m not seeing anything. It might be that they don’t know how to read the culture, or maybe they’re not interested in the things that I’m interested in, but there’s a lot of flamboyance now in art.
I don’t know how to explain it, but I always wanted to reduce it to the basic elements. But now there are all these different things to make it brighter, or make it shiny… we all like shiny things. But right now I’m drawing on this brown craft paper… and that’s what they wrap fish in!
What do you think has kept you going with photography and art and everything? A lot of people eventually slow down or stop, but you’re still at it.
One of the reviewers who wrote about Vagabond said, “I don’t think Herron’s going to write another book.” And he put that thought in my head… but I’m going to do another book—I’m not going to quit just because he said I would. But it was almost like that was my message and that was all I needed to do, and that was pretty much right.
But then I discovered something when Judy died, after that I didn’t go down and print old stuff, and I haven’t been taking pictures the way I normally do—I substituted it for drawing. But I can’t do that forever, so I guess from now on what I’ll do is collate what I’ve done, and try and make it accessible as a teaching tool. But I’m not having much luck with that. That’s why I’m selling bikes.
How did you get involved with that?
It was my son. He had a job in a bike shop, and he wanted to go skiing, so his boss said I could run his bike shop whilst he was skiing. And I just fell in love with it. And we’ve had this place for 22 years now. I grew up helping my father with his business, so I knew about mechanics early on. I made my own everything—whatever I needed, I built it. So this is a hangover from that. And I love the people who come in the bike shop. This is how I maintain my contact with people. But I’m not maintaining my art, and I think it’s because I was doing it for Judy. I couldn’t wait to show her a print. I was trying to impress her, and all along, through all those decades, she supported me—she kept me going. I’d print endlessly, with sepia tone, stinking up the kitchen… and I did it for her.
But now I’m re-organising, and rethinking all of it. And right now, I’m loving the idea of drawing on craft paper. And at the same time, I’m putting a little gallery upstage, showing some prints upstairs.
I might be wrong, but you seem like a fairly deep thinker; what do you think life is all about?
I think we’re here to reproduce, and to help what we produce. We’re here to survive and to thrive. I think we get tweaked up and down from time to time as well. I think it’s pretty simple really.
We’ve got so much energy flying around the planet at all times. There are all kinds of frequencies and wavelengths, and all kinds of lanes, and some people can pick up on a lane, and some people can’t. I keep thinking of Einstein, he’s drawing on a blackboard and doing all these calculations, and he’s in a lane that nobody knows about. But that stuff, the math, is there all the time, you just have to know how to grab it. And I guess taking pictures is maybe a practice of grabbing it. You’re grabbing the math and your brain is interpreting the math.
Were there photos you wished you grabbed? Some that got away?
Oh yeah, there are a bunch of those. But like I say, there’s always that one down the end of the roll that makes up for all the bad shots—all those dull rectangles. I love to look at it when it’s on those proof sheets, I can see the math real easily when it’s reduced down like that. In fact, it becomes bolder in terms of the contrast and the shape. When you’ve got one, you’ll see it, and it’s always that sleeper that you didn’t think of.
I don’t make wet-prints anymore, I do ink-jets. I really don’t like it, but I do it anyway. There’s something about looking into that silver. Silver is eternal, and it’s going to go thousands and thousands of years on that paper. It doesn’t diminish or dissolve or anything, it’s solid, and it stays solid. It’s a very mysterious thing, it’s hard to describe, there’s a luminance that reflects back to you.
Has the computer screen ruined that?
What did Marshall McLuhan say? “The medium is the message.” That’s what I think about all those pixels running around. It just looks like faux… faux life, faux everything. But when you look at silver, you’re looking at a solid piece of material that’s been around for hundreds of years. It’s completely different.
Yeah definitely. I think I’ve got to go fairly soon so I’ll try and wrap this up a bit. What have you got on this afternoon?
I’m actually going to go upstairs and work with photographs, and then do a little work for the bicycle shop. I’m G. Oscar Bicycles in the bike world, and then I’m Gaylord Oscar Herron in the art world. I can maintain both of them though… I can chew gum and walk at the same time.
Do you think it works well together?
Oh yeah, there isn’t anything that I don’t do anymore. I keep them all separate, but it’s all one flow. The whole thing is math.
It all comes back to maths doesn’t it?
The best example of math is this; you’ve got the guy playing baseball, he’s out in the left field, and he hears the ball hit the bat and his mind records the sound. And then he sees the ball leave the bat and coming up to his right, so immediately the eye sends that into the brain and the brain looks at it and says, “Okay, start this leg and this arm and move as fast as you can into the direction that the ball is going to go to, so that you can catch it”. Think about how many calculations that is. It’s all mathematics, it really is. And then he can catch the ball with his glove. And that’s the best example of how math determines everything we do. It’s all mathematics.
Roman Candle Issue 1 is finished. Issue 1 is 104 full-colour A5 pages, and features…
An interview with Derrick Bostrom from the almighty Meat Puppets about the early days of the band and the realities of touring America in the 80s (featuring some unreal old fliers from Derrick’s archive).
Some photos of the wonderful city of Berlin.
A particularly long phone call with the legendary (but criminally under-appreciated) photographer Gaylord Herron, whose 1975 book, Vagabond, might just be the finest photo-book ever made.
A quick article in praise of army surplus shops.
A hearty two-part conversation with Bill Daniel (the man behind the amazing Who is Bozo Texino documentary) about film-making, photo-taking and picnic tables.
And then some stuff about point-and-shoot cameras, old Toyotas and modern television.
It’s currently available via The Central Library and Rare Mags on the streets of Stockport. Challenger in America should be getting a few copies relatively soon too.
First printed in the late 60s, Foxfire is a pretty strange magazine which was made by a rotating cast of school-kids in rural Georgia (the American state, not the East-European country).
Mostly based around old-time life, it features some pretty interesting articles about tough living and bygone skillage.
I think it’s still being made now, but the newer issues don’t look anywhere near as good as the old ones. The printing limitations of the pre-computer age added to the charm of the issues from the 70s and 80s, and the covers looked mint… as you can see here.
Here’s a few choice cuts from Ricky Powell’s most excellent book, The Rickford Files. This guy joined the dots between countless characters and cultures, simultaneously stalking the streets and sneaking into high-society functions to capture everyone from DONDI to Liz Taylor.
And yep, that’s Gene Palmer, the street drummer from Taxi Driver, standing stoop-side with the highly-polished hair-line…
Night Music was a late-night music show that broadcasted towards the late 80s.
To be honest I’d never heard of it until recently, but a scour of Youtube reveals it featured performances with some of the most out-there cats who ever picked up an instrument (regardless of whether they bothered to learn how to play ‘em or not).
Sun Ra… The Residents… Bongwater… The Lounge Lizards… it’s potent stuff.
Imagine tuning into the box and stumbling across this wild noise with zero context—miss the intro and chances are you’d never find out what you’d seen until years later. It’d definitely send you on a path.
Most stuff you read about Peter Beard usually focusses on his famous mates and his fairly loose approach to life… but amongst all that he also made some unreal imagery. Combining black and white film with handwritten notes and a pint or two of blood daubed around the border, he managed to achieve the unthinkable and actually make wildlife photography interesting.
Here’s a few photos hoiked in from a book called Nam by photojournalist wildcard Tim Page. Tim was apparently the inspiration behind Dennis Hopper’s acid-addled camera-wielder in Apocalypse Now, and along with people like Michael Herr, Sean Flynn and John Steinbeck IV, documented the reality of the Vietnam War.
In 1969 he had his skull half-filled with epoxy resin after a chunk of his brain the size of an orange was blown out by a landmine. He later went on to shoot for rock magazines like Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone, and now lives in Australia.
In the early ‘70s there was no such thing as mountain biking. A few people had tried putting knobbly tires on bikes and heading off-piste (most notably a man named John Finley Scott and his ‘woodsie bike’ in the early fifties) but no one had taken any notice. That is until a rag-tag gang of cyclists took to the hills of Marin County, California, armed with nothing more than pre-WW2 Schwinn cruisers. Although their explorations took them all over, the track that became famous was a particularly steep downhill fire-road called Repack (due to the fact that after just one run down it your forty year old coaster brake would need to be repacked with grease).
One of the main characters at Repack was Charlie Kelly, who as well as riding foot-out and flat-out down the track, organised and promoted the first downhill mountain bike races. He later went on to start the first mountain bike company with his room-mate Gary Fisher (the aptly titled MountainBikes) and was the man responsible for the Fat Tyre Flyer, which until 1986 was the only magazine devoted to off-road cycling escapades. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I managed to wangle an interview with him a few years back… and here it is.
I have nothing to complain about. I still enjoy life and still ride bikes.
Can you explain what exactly Repack was, and how it all began?
Repack is a steep hill near Fairfax where most of our activities too place. When we decided to have a contest of downhill it was the perfect choice. Very steep and nearly 2 miles long, it was a severe test of bike and rider. A few of us went out there and held a race, thinking that we would do it once and settle all the bets forever. It didn’t work out that way. Everyone wants a shot at the title, so we held a lot more races.
Around the same time you were working as a roadie for the Sons of Champlin in San Francisco, what led you to racing old bikes down hills?
I was a cyclist at that time, a rarity in the circles I travelled in. I had been president of my bike club, Velo-Club Tamalpais, and Gary Fisher and I shared a house. We had some old bikes that we used as our “town bikes” instead of riding our Italian race bikes. There are a lot of dirt roads and trails near where we live, and eventually we took the bikes out on them. It was so much fun we took it up as a regular part of our activities. Some of the other members of the bike club had similar bikes, and so there were already a couple of dozen riders when we held our first race.
Alan Bonds, Benny Heinricks, Ross Parkerson, Jim Stern and Charlie Kelly striking a pose with their Schwinn Excelsiors. Note the custom Excelsior t-shirts printed by Alan Bonds
How many people turned up at the first race?
The record of that race is lost, although I have all the others. It was six or seven people.
How did you go about promoting the races?
It wasn’t difficult. As soon as some guys from a nearby town heard that we had held a race, they wanted to take part also. So we held another four days after the first one. I had a list of telephone numbers that I would call before a race. Eventually I had an artist make posters, but by then we had already been racing for a couple of years. The purpose of the poster was to create documentary evidence of who was doing this and when. I could see that it was getting pretty popular, so I wanted to make sure I got the credit for it. And I did.
Two flyers promoting the ‘Repack Downhill Ballooner’
How did find all those old Schwinns? Did you have to modify them or did you just ride them as you find them?
At first it was easy, because they were considered junk. The problem was that those old frames don’t last very long when they are ridden the way we used them. Every six months or so I would need another. They became much harder to find, and the price was climbing rapidly.
It wasn’t long before you and your friends were designing your own bikes, what improvements did you make?
The most basic improvement was to make it out of chrome-moly steel. The old bikes were made of cheap steel that was heavy and not nearly as strong as modern bike tubing. Cantilever brakes were not as effective in wet weather as the old drums, but they were much lighter. Most of the other components were the same as we used on converted clunkers.
Can you give us an idea of what an average run down Repack was like?
If you’re not terrified, you’re not going to win. You have to ride right up to the edge of control and not make any mistakes that cost you time. The course is not technically challenging compared to a modern course made for long-travel bikes, but to date no one has shattered the old records set on clunker bikes. I believe that the reason we were so fast on the low-tech equipment is that we had a lot of races and plenty of practice on the course.
I remember reading stories about people skidding under fire-road gates at around 40mph, is there any truth in this?
40 mph on a road bike feels pretty fast. The average speed for the record run is around 27 mph. Obviously the top speed is faster than the average speed, but 40 mph seems a little high.
Alan Bonds with a foot-out, denim-heavy slice of high-action
Joe Breeze, Tom Ritchey, Gary Fisher… a fair few fast characters raced at Repack. Now the dust has settled a bit, who was actually the fastest?
Gary holds the record, but Joe won nearly half the races. Otis Guy has the third fastest time by only a couple of seconds, and on the run where he set it, a dog ran in front of him and brought him almost to a complete stop. If not for that, I believe he would hold the record.
Did things ever get heated on the mountain or was it all just a bit of fun?
It was always fun, but there were five or six riders who were the top guys, and the only real competition was among them. Since we started the fastest riders last, when it got down to just those guys and me, the starter at the top of the hill, things got very very quiet. Each guy would be by himself, getting his “game face” on.
When you weren’t racing at Repack, where else were you riding around this time?
I was always a road rider, although my racing career was brief and unspectacular. Most of the clunker rides were not competitive, but just a group headed out on trails.
Fred Wolf on ‘Camera Corner’
If all the old pictures are anything to go by, plaid shirts, old jeans and boots seemed to be the uniform of choice, why was this?
It was the way most of us dressed anyway. I haven’t owned a necktie or a suit in a long time. If I got on the road bike, I changed into a jersey and shorts, but the whole idea of the clunker was that you just got on it.
You started the first mountain bike magazine, The Fat Tyre Flyer, in 1980. What led you to start a magazine?
It was an accident. We thought about forming a mountain bike club, so a few of us held a meeting. At the meeting my girlfriend (Denise Caramagno) and I volunteered to do the club newsletter. The club never had another meeting, but once we published the cheaply printed newsletter, people begged us to keep publishing it. So we did. Eventually I actually learned how to publish a magazine.
In an article you wrote in 1979 you said, “The sport that is going on here may never catch on with the American public.” Were you surprised when it did?
I’m still surprised. How could anyone have predicted that a goofy hobby that most people laughed at would take over the world?
Do you still ride mountain bikes now?
Sure do, and they are much nicer than the ones I started on. Gary Fisher has made sure that I ride quality equipment, currently a pair of Gary Fisher 29ers.
Nowadays you work as a piano mover. Can you divulge any tricks of the trade?
I figured most of it out by doing it. There are certain qualities that are vital, in addition to being reasonably strong. Size matters. A 200 pound guy can do more than a very strong 150 pound guy. (Unfortunately, size also matters in bike racing, but in the other direction, which explains my undistinguished bike racing career.)
My aptitude for “spatial relations” always tested very high. I can visualize three-dimensional concepts, but I’m pretty sure all piano movers are like that. Being smart is as important as being strong, and you need both qualities. No two situations are identical, but with years of experience you can usually find a comparison to something you did before, which shortens the process of deciding how to approach a job.
Anything else you’d like to say?
Buy my book, entitled “Fat Tire Flyer.” Maybe we’ll do an English version and spell it properly, “Fat Tyre Flyer.”
Whilst most humanoids struggle to master even one useful skill in life, John Lurie is one of those adept rapscallions who can seemingly turn their hand to pretty much anything — from acting to angling.
This knack has led to a fairly stacked C.V. which involves such notable achievements as forming a rule-flouting jazz band called The Lounge Lizards, appearing in films like Down by Law, Paris, Texas and Wild at Heart and showing his paintings in exhibitions all over the planet.
And if all that wasn’t enough, he’s also hosted his own fishing show, and, with the help of Dennis Hopper, once came particularly close to snagging the elusive giant squid.
Here’s what he had to say about fishing, New York in the ‘70s and the importance of humour in the world…
First question… your television programme Fishing with John is mint. How did that come about?
I was threatening to do it for a long time, but wasn’t really serious. I would go fishing with Willem and we would video tape it. I flew out one New Year’s Eve to play with Tom Waits and the next day we went and fished with Stephen Torton video taping it.
This woman, Debra Brown, saw the tapes, home movies actually, and brought them to a Japanese company that was looking to get involved in things in New York.
She came back to me and said they wanted to make a pilot. I believe my response was, “Are you kidding?”
When you watch a film or television program, you only see the end result. What was it like filming that thing? Were there any mad struggles?
If you see something good, you can just assume there were mad struggles. If you see something bad, you can assume that people were too lazy to take on the mad struggles.
If I am flicking through the channels looking for a movie, I can tell you in five seconds if a movie is going to be any good by the sound of the door closing or the light or the music or whatever.
Why do you think people love fishing so much?
First off, so we can go to these beautiful places and pretend to be doing something. We wouldn’t go if there were nothing to do. And there is that visceral thing. A big fish on the line is like that exhilarating sports thing, like hitting a baseball perfectly or shooting a basket and the net just goes swish.
And then there is that thing of the world of mystery, right next to the world we are living in. What is in there? We are only going to be aware of what is there with a hook and a nylon string.
So of course we have to drag this amazing creature out of the water and kill it because human beings are pretty much ridiculous. The last bit is not why we love fishing, it’s just an observation.
I’d say it’s a pretty sharp observation. Did you ever face anger from the fishing community due to the lack of more conventional fishing?
Yes.
Why isn’t more television like Fishing with John? I hear we’re supposedly in the age of ‘peak TV’ or whatever, but why is there so much boring stuff out there?
The great thing about this, and a big shout out to Kenji Okabe from Telecom Japan, was they left me alone. I am fairly certain that the reason Breaking Bad was so great was because they left Vince Gilligan alone.
With most projects there are all these people meddling with what you do, to ruin it. The Gatekeepers. It is almost like there is a conspiracy to maintain mediocrity.
Going back a bit now, am I right in saying you’re from Minneapolis originally. What were you into as a child?
At first, dinosaurs and archeology. Then reptiles, particularly snakes after we moved to New Orleans. I was going to open my own snake farm. Then I was pretty sure one day, I would play center field for the Yankees.
An attainable dream. You moved to New York in the late 70s, and not long after, you started The Lounge Lizards. It seems like New York at that time is glamourized a bit now, but what was it like for you? What food did you eat? Where did you go at night? What streets were good to walk down? What did it smell like?
I was trying to remember the food I ate back then and couldn’t remember. I was pretty broke most of the time. They used to serve hors d’oevres at gallery openings and cheese became a large part of my regular diet.
Almost every night, or maybe not even “almost” — more like every night — we went to the Mudd Club. More than what streets were “good” to walk down, I can tell you which streets were bad to go down. I lived on East Third St across from the Men’s Shelter, so my block smelled of rotting garbage and urine.
What are some bits that people don’t talk about from that time? What sucked about back then?
It went fairly quickly from people having more relentless fun than any period in human history to a fairly grim time, a year or two later. There was the beginning of AIDs. I had many friends who were dying or horrifyingly sick. People were getting strung out. There were many deaths. Car accidents. People fell out of windows.
Also, with the artistic promise that was there, the output is disappointing. I suppose the wildness led to a lack of discipline and the work wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been.
I might be wrong, but it seems like at that time people just did what they felt like doing… people made films, music or anything else, with no regard for budget. I suppose for example, you made a film called Men in Orbit in your apartment for $500. Where did this freedom come from?
The freedom came from a ferocious demand to have that freedom at any cost. But it is odd or sad, because the more talented of those people seem to have gone unknown and the people who are now household names are, mostly, the ones who played the game by the rules from the beginning.
Do you think people nowadays get too hung up on money? Or perhaps too hung up on success?
I think people nowadays for the most part are quite lost and afraid. So they do whatever they think they must do to have a successful career, even if it means that they are making shit — and it usually does mean they are making shit.
The Lounge Lizard’s album, Voice of Chunk is an amazing record. What sort of stuff were you listening to when you made that? And who is Bob the Bob?
The listening came from earlier in my life. Evan and I would devour everything. From Stravinsky to Monk to Little Walter to Coltrane to Tibetan music to Ellington to Dolphy to Pigmy music (you get the idea).
Later, when working on my own stuff, I stopped listening to pretty much everything. Though when I was in Morocco doing Last Temptation, I played a lot with Gnawa musicians that shifted me a bit. And around that time Evan discovered Piazzolla.
Bob the Bob is Kazu from Blonde Redhead. That is her mouth on the cover of the record. I still call her Bob.
You’re a prolific painter. Are there certain things that you notice recurring in your paintings?
I live on a small Caribbean island. There are flowers everywhere. I don’t like to think that they influence what I paint but they do. Fucking flowers.
A lot of people paint when they’re young, then stop. Why do you think that is? How come you didn’t stop?
The best paintings I have seen in the last 30 years or so are the ones taped to refrigerators. I don’t know why people stop painting or when they don’t stop, why the painting gets so stiff.
I am sure my mother, who painted herself and taught art in Liverpool where the Beatles went, but not at the same time, had something to do with me keeping a freedom in my work. To not be afraid of that childlike dream thing.
Though it has been suggested that it may be time for me to get in touch with my “inner adult.”
How do you know when a painting is finished?
I ask Nesrin. If she says it is finished, I know it isn’t.
You seem like a pretty funny guy. Do you think humour is sometimes underrated? Do people take stuff too seriously sometime?
I think humor is immensely important. I think humor can shift society’s consciousness in a better way than almost anything else. So from Shakespeare to Mark Twain to Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor and many more – these people shifted things for the better.
Do you know who was president when Mark Twain was at his peak? Benjamin Harrison. Who the fuck was Benjamin Harrison?
What are your thoughts on the internet? It seems like it’s a big thing these days.
I get so disappointed with people because I feel like social media could be an enormously positive thing for the world. And I certainly don’t mean to exclude humor, just I have heard enough fart jokes for one lifetime…
Something that bothers me quite a bit, is a star athlete gets hurt and then the response on places like twitter is close to joy. What kind of bitterness about your own life would make you behave like that?
You’ve just recently released a new Marvin Pontiac album after 17 years. This one is called The Asylum Tapes, and was reportedly made on a four track recorder in a mental institution. Back story aside, what made you want to make an album again?
I have Advanced Lyme, so I was unable to play anything for a long time. Actually because of what was happening to me neurologically, I couldn’t even hear music for the first few years — it was more like fingernails on a blackboard.
As I slowly got better, I was able to play guitar and harmonica again, though playing saxophone would seem to be done for me in this life.
But I am very proud of this album and hope people get a chance to hear it. I made it to cheer people up.
Are people still confused about who Marvin Pontiac is?
I suppose so. He is a character I created to make this music. I suppose that is bad marketing, but fuck it.
Would the album be different if it was a John Lurie album? Do you feel like you can get away with more stuff as Marvin Pontiac? Or maybe what I mean is, is it easier to say some things as Marvin Pontiac?
Yes, absolutely. Marvin gives me a certain freedom. I doubt I would put out a record where I sing about a bear saying, “Smell my sandwich.” But I’m happy that I get a chance to do that.
The lyrics are pretty straight up and direct. Do you sit and stew on songs and ideas for long, or do you just get it out?
Often they just come straight up. Like ‘My Bear To Cross’ I pretty much just came up with it live in the studio. Some took quite a while. And there are a couple where I never found the right lyrics to finish off a song and put them aside.
Okay, last question… do you think a lot of stuff is too over-thought and over-prepared? Does thinking sometimes get in the way?
Peter Saville doesn’t need much of an introduction. Not only was he the man responsible for what might be called the ‘visual language’ of Factory Records, designing record covers for the likes of Joy Division, New Order and A Certain Ratio, but he’s also produced powerful imagery for David Byrne, Suede, Pulp, George Michael and countless other icons of audio.
And, if all that wasn’t enough, he came up with that dynamic logo that’s on the side of those yellow trams that roll through Piccadilly Gardens every few minutes.
I called him up to talk about his work today, Manchester in the 70s and his idea of ‘the interzone’.
Are you busy at the moment, have you got a lot on?
Yes, even when I think I’m not busy, things just seem to come up. As you get older you tend to think things will change, but actually, they don’t change at all. Anyway, it’s better to have something to do than nothing, so I’m not going to complain.
What have you been up to lately?
The highest profile project over the last 12 months has been Calvin Klein — the redesign of the Calvin Klein identity for Raf Simons.
What does that involve then? What would you call that? Is it ‘branding’?
I try to avoid the term ‘branding’. It’s a useful word to understand the context of the work, but it’s not a process that I wish to perform. It’s a strange hybrid between design, advertising and PR. It’s almost entirely commercial, and therefore, it’s not something I want to be involved with.
So you’re not getting bogged down with the commercial stuff?
The capturing of markets and controlling of markets is not something that I wish to be associated with. My work, and any reputation I have, is based on giving something to people, not leading them to a market.
The Factory Records covers were not about making people buy the records. They didn’t even try to make people buy the record. They existed independently to the music, and therefore people’s relationships with them were quite different. The people who liked the covers or became interested in the covers saw them as possessions – they learnt through them, things they maybe didn’t know before.
Was that the intention of those covers? To show people the things you were into?
That was my intention. I was learning and so, I was sharing. The nature of Factory Records was that I had complete autonomy to do that. There was no marketing and no one was trying trying to sell records. Factory was a situation that allowed a group of individuals to do what they wanted to do. If other people liked it and supported it, then fine.
That was what Factory was about. And it was the same with The Haçienda. It wasn’t run as a business, trying to take money off the kids of Manchester, it was a gift to the kids of Manchester.
Something separate from money and business?
Yes, you did it because you could. But you’ll know very well that in the contemporary market place, there are very few companies who are doing things just because they can. They do things to make money. That’s business.
For a period of time in my career, I needed to engage with business. I was not an up-and-coming young designer, nor was I a ‘statesman’ of popular culture — it was an in-between period – in the ‘90s I needed to have a relationship with business.
Everyone’s got to eat.
Yes exactly, you’ve got to make a living. I had this uneasy relationship with different sectors, but I didn’t find a comfort zone for myself.
So at the end of the 90s, I stopped looking. I did a retrospective book and a show, and I closed the studio. I didn’t want to go into fashion marketing or branding or retail. I didn’t really want to do that. So I just had to be on my own. Since the early 2000s, I’ve operated independently.
I suppose you’re maybe in a comfortable position where you can pick and choose a bit, thanks to all the things you’ve done in the past.
I’m fortunate that just enough people engage me with work and commissions that I can address on my terms.
When Raf Simons phoned and asked me to look at the issue of the Calvin Klein identity – I was able to identify with his position. He is not Calvin Klein — Calvin Klein is Calvin Klein, and Raf is someone else. So I had to say to myself, “If I was in Raf’s position, what would I do?” So I changed the original Calvin Klein lettering from upper and lower case to upper case – it became capitals. It’s evolved from the subjective to the objective, but it still looks like Calvin Klein.
When you’re asked to intervene in aspects of cultural history, it’s quite an honour. You feel a sense of responsibility in responding to the challenge.
To respect what’s gone before?
Exactly. So in certain situations, I’m really happy to do that. But when someone is approaching me with something that has absolutely no virtue other than profit, because I don’t have a company to carry, I don’t have to do it.
When I first started to learn about art and design history, I was frustrated. Going right back to the ‘70s in Manchester, I would sit in the library at what was then Manchester Polytechnic, looking at the history of art and design, and simultaneously looking out of the window at Oxford Road, and feeling an enormous disconnect, and a sense of frustration. I was angry.
Because you were so far away from the things you were reading about?
Yes, because the everyday world wasn’t the way it could be.
What was it like back then?
It was terrible. When I was 20, in 1975, buses, cinemas, bus stops, railway stations, department stores, taxis, packaging, signs, logos… they were appalling. There wasn’t any awareness of contemporary design — of how design led thinking could make things better. That frustrated and upset me. And I felt very strongly then, as I do know, that our everyday world can be better.
Now what ‘better’ is, is a kind of variable. We saw a lot of ‘design’ begin to get rolled out in the 80s and 90s, but then it got rolled out to the point of ad infinitum, and lost its significance.
Things merely only looking good is not necessarily better, and an awful lot of art and design has been co-opted to camouflage the intent of things. And that’s not better. Using our cultural heritage, our civilisation, to sell mobile phone minutes or cheap holidays or gratuitous fashion — using it as merely packaging for the unnecessary — isn’t good.
And a lot of that started to happen. Business, as ever, takes a lead from the avant-garde, and begins to copy it, but without values. I try to do things well, and to improve the look of things that have values. But if it’s something with no values, it’s kind of wrong to wrap it up as something important.
There’s a lot of that these days… a lot of things look pretty slick, but beyond the fancy shell, there’s not much to them.
The one thing that has upset me over the last 20 years is the way that the canon of culture has been used in ways that we no longer trust. 30 years ago if you did something better, it meant it was better… someone was trying to make a better pair of jeans or a better car. But now, it’s just a look.
I suppose it’s hard to put effort and thought into something you’ve got no belief in.
Exactly. As you grow up and get to understand the world better, you question things. Some of the things I used to take for granted when I was 25 or 30 — I now look at in a completely different way. Once upon a time I might have thought it was nice to do the identity for something like a bank. But who wants to work for a bank now? They’ve shown themselves to be utterly disreputable.
So the understanding of the work and the world and the people who approach is constantly changing. You have to try to hold on to your own values. My reputation, the fact that some people have some admiration for me, is because my work meant something to them.
But if you suddenly starting doing some naff work for a bank, it’d discount all that.
Exactly. I became more concerned with my own identity than in just being prepared to work for people who’d pay me money. And I’m quite happy being me, trying as much as I can to be genuine about the things I do. It’s not easy. We have to earn a living, so it’s not all spiritual… we have to engage with reality.
Going back to what you were saying about looking after Oxford Road and feeling distanced and frustrated. Was that what spurred you on to do those first designs for Factory?
In 1978, the year I graduated from college, I wasn’t being asked to do anything for the infrastructure of the country. But someone did ask me to do a poster. There were things happening – the whole post-punk scene and the notion of independence in music. All of the venues that Manchester had for punk and new wave bands were being closed for one reason or another, and on behalf of the youth culture of the city, Tony Wilson took it upon himself to organise a venue.
Factory was nothing more than what is referred to these days as ‘a night’. It was Friday night every two weeks for two months, and that was it. I knew he was doing this, so I went to see him and said, “Can I do something.” And he said, “Do a poster.”
In doing that poster, I tried to put a better poster, a more intelligent and more beautiful poster, on the walls of Manchester than the ones that were already there. And that led to Factory records where I was given the freedom to express my will and my wish for how things should be,
It was an autonomous situation; it was not a proper company and everybody what they did in the way they wanted to do it. Nobody had any former experience, no one told anyone else how they should do what they were doing, we all performed autonomously. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.
Were you ever questioned or disputed at all?
Not really no. Famously, ‘Blue Monday’ went straight from me to the printers. No one saw it.
Did you listen to the music when you were designing the covers?
If I could, but very often that wasn’t possible. But the covers weren’t about the music, they were about the moment. But then the bands were making music about the moment too.
There was always accidental parallels. I was into the aesthetics of computer systems that people were talking about a lot in the 70s and 80s. I didn’t have a computer – it wasn’t a part of everyday life, but people talked about them in the way that people talk about artificial intelligence now. You haven’t met a robot, but you know they’re coming.
So in the late 70s and 80s, computers were on my mind, and I was thinking about the visual side of it. And at the same time, New Order were looking at the significance of computers in making music. So what I did on the cover of Blue Monday had a parallel to what they did. In fact, the floppy disk was the common factor between the two. The first time I saw a floppy disk was the day Stephen Morris gave me one, and that became the basis for the cover.
It wasn’t about the music; it was about music as part of our culture. We were interested in the now. They expressed it musically, I expressed it visually.
The significant word to mention in any kind of understanding of me is the word ‘interzone’.
What do you mean by that? What is the ‘interzone’?
The interzone is the space between design, art, fashion, music, movies, photography, architecture, interior… it’s what people talk about now as convergence. And that was what interested me, even as a teenager. I was interested in the leading edge of mass culture, and how the new ideas would define themselves in different ways.
The feeling of the now is the feeling of the now. Musicians express it one way, film-makers express it another way and photographers express it in yet another way – but it’s all the same spirit. We know that now.
It’s all the same thing.
It’s all the same thing. That was my view 40 years ago in college, it’s just that I happened to want make art, which I saw as record covers, so I went to study graphic design. But what I found there was a closed mind-set — graphic people were into graphics, and weren’t very aware of what fashion or music was doing. This notion of the interzone wasn’t really appreciated.
I was never particularly interested in graphics or typography, I was interested in how two dimensional culture could capture the mood of the moment — the feeling of the now. So I studied graphics, but I spent more time in the fashion department than the graphics department.
If you just started pasting posters up yourself, but they weren’t linked with music or an event, they would just be a bit of paper on a wall. They might be interesting, but they wouldn’t be tied in with anything.
If you just make work that is not applied to any situation, then it’s art. These days art is quite a credible thing to do, but in the mid-70s in the North of England, you were more likely to become an astronaut then be an artist.
The only art that I saw was on record covers, so I wanted to do record covers. The record cover was the only place where you could see freeform visual thinking.
So Malcolm Garrett and I both wanted to do that. In a way we both wanted to be artists, but we didn’t know anything about art. So what was important to me was this broader feeling of the now.
As someone who is so into ‘the now’, what are your thoughts on the nostalgia that surrounds Factory? Why do you think people look back at that stuff so fondly?
I think there’s nostalgia about things that seem to have values. People are seeking authenticity and meaning. So things that have authenticity and meaning never die, because they’re more than just surface.
People still talk about Coco Chanel because she changed the way women could be in the world. She didn’t found Chanel to make money, she found Chanel to express herself and what she cared about.
Companies exploit these values — they continuously harvest them like GM crops, to the point that the market and the audience become tired of it. But they’ll carry on wringing it out until there’s nothing left. It’s desperate and it’s tedious to see the way the world operates.
In regards to the nostalgia thing, do you think people often take the wrong things from history? Instead of being inspired by the free way you lot worked at Factory, people just rip off your graphics.
Yes, unfortunately the mass market can be rather superficial. They get the look more than the attitude. But it’s a long process of familiarisation. We are living in an era of the dissemination of privilege, it is really only in the last 50 to 100 years that ordinary people have actually been allowed to share in privilege.
Do you think the internet has had an effect on that?
It’s one step forward, one step back. The internet allows for the unfettered distribution of a message, and at the same time it allows for confusion and fake news. The problem with the internet is trying to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not.
Almost everything that we invent which is a benefit to society just becomes a problem sooner or later. The motorcar was brilliant – now it’s a problem. That’s just life.
Where do you see things going?
I don’t know. I don’t care anymore. Next month I’m 62. It is other people’s responsibility now. I don’t have any children, but if I did, I would be very concerned. I’m passing the baton of the ones coming up.
What would you say to them as you pass the proverbial baton?
Do things you believe in. There’s a constant battle between good and bad, but as least if you do things you believe in, you’re trying to keep it on the right side of good.
It’s very difficult for every new generation, as they face a new set of challenges that the generation before didn’t even dream of. I thought I had a lot of people to compete with in the 80s, but now there is a 1000 times more. It’s really difficult.
It’s not even easy to find somewhere to live, or to find a job of any kind. The safety net that I sensed as a young person in the UK in the 70s – how the state would stop you from falling – is not there anymore. I think it’s increasingly difficult for every next generation.
As far as you can, try to do what you believe in, because then you hold on to yourself. I don’t really have much money – I don’t own my home, but I’m happy with what I’ve done. I might regret some mistakes I made, but I don’t regret the work I made.
Whilst the birth of modern-day club culture is much chatted about, very few people took the time to document it. Mark McNulty is a rare exception.
From the early days of warehouse raves to the age of the super-club, he candidly captured ‘going out’ at a level usually reserved for hard-hitting documentary photography.
Here’s an interview with him conducted on a Monday afternoon in the centre of Liverpool. I think it’s important to state here that club photography is only a small part of Mark’s repertoire — it’s just what we happened to talk about at the time.
Maybe an obvious first question, but when did you get into photography?
I don’t know if I’d taken pictures on someone else’s camera or something, but I just wanted a camera. And when I was 14, my mum and dad got me one. I think it was a Praktica — it was a really basic camera.
I can remember saying to my mum and dad that I wanted to be a photographer, but I can’t remember ever thinking too much about it as a career. When I had film, I’d take pictures. They were probably mostly rubbish.
But then there came a point where the stuff around me got more interesting. I started seeing bands and going to clubs. Before that I’d just take pictures of my nan.
A Guy Called Gerald – Liverpool
How did the club photography come about?
There was a club in Liverpool called The State, and that was the club I’d go to with my mates. We’d go on a Thursday night, and it was a penny to get in. They’d play things like The Smiths, but then they’d also play old 60s records and old Northern Soul records. It would play everything.
It was an old 1920s ballroom, with a tiled floor, and was actually the venue that Franky Goes to Hollywood played on their first appearance on The Tube. It was in that film Letter to Brezhnev too. And that club started playing a couple of those early house records.
Around that time, I’d started getting in with various musicians, and there was a man called Peter Coyle who was in a band called The Lotus Eaters. He put on night called 8 Orgasms where there’d be all kinds of mad shit.
There’d be arty bands, performance artists and a karaoke machine. And he brought in a DJ called John Maccready who’d play house records. And that was the first place that did dance music that I took pictures of.
8 Orgasms – Liverpool
At The State I’d take pictures of bands who were up on stage, but taking a camera out and photographing people dancing, before the rave scene, didn’t feel like the obvious thing to do.
When did things change?
I got asked by a Manchester magazine called Avant to go and photograph a club called Quadrant Park. It was in some sort of warehouse up in Bootle, and it was massive.
People had come from all over the North. I hated it, but I loved it. There was no dancefloor because the whole place was the dancefloor.
Quadrant Park – Liverpool
How did you go about taking pictures in there?
There was no benchmark, because I’d never really seen any pictures like that. That first night, I didn’t take a lot of photographs, I just got these mad crowd scenes of people with their hands in the air and people on speakers.
Before that, people were just going to nightclubs to cop-off — that old fashioned night club thing where the people would stand around the edges watching girls to move in on. But suddenly, everybody was dancing together and nobody was taking any notice of the oddball with the camera.
After that I started going to more and more clubs that started opening up in town.
When you’re going there were you going there to take pictures, or could you enjoy it like everyone else?
At first I was there to take pictures. I’m terrible at hearing in loud places as I can’t differentiate between sounds, so once I’d taken a few pictures in a club, that just made me want to do more. I can never talk to people in clubs because I can never hear them, so taking photographs was my way of dealing with being in places like that.
When I look back, I sometimes I haven’t got pictures of my favourite clubs. The ones I really enjoyed, I didn’t really take pictures at.
How did you get involved with the club magazines?
I just thought that what was going on around me was cool so I started to send in photographs to the magazines. These were the nationals like I-D, The Face, Mixmag and DJ Mag. They liked what I sent in from Liverpool, so they started to send me to places out of town and then further afield.
Suddenly everybody was dancing together and nobody was taking any notice of the oddball with the camera.
In 1992 I went off to Rimini to photograph a week of clubbing and, after getting a bit wobbly and running into a glass door, I came home with loads of boss photos (and a black eye), and they started to send me all over the place. So I did loads of trips to different places in the UK as well as documenting the scene in places like Ibiza, Tokyo, Detroit and Berlin.
Kaos – Leeds
How did ‘going out’ differ from city to city?
Well, the further north you go the madder it gets. That’s still a good general benchmark for going out around the country on a Saturday night, though I’d say regional differences are more subtle these days.
Glasgow and Newcastle were always insane, Leeds often felt better dressed than a lot of other northern cities and the spirit of the northern soul scene felt like it lived on in a club like Golden down in Stoke.
In Bristol the club scene was heavily influenced by the music the city was producing and that affected a lot of the clubs. I did actually spend a lot of time in Bristol clubs in the 90s and whilst clubs like the Thekla and some of the other smaller clubs really took influence from the music that was being produced, there were also the big house and rave clubs that every other city had.
Revolution – Bristol
There used to be a great night called Revolution at The Lakota which was a big name DJ house club with a great music policy and a well-dressed crowd who were up for it. But then once a month they’d run an all-nighter and loads of people used to come in from South Wales, and you really noticed the difference.
They didn’t get as many chances to party so they made the most of it and the whole thing just went up a level and suddenly Bristol didn’t seem so laid back as it usually was.
What were people wearing in the different cities? Were there regional outfits?
I think the main differences were in the different scenes within the bigger club scene. Everywhere had their full-on rave clubs which meant white gloves and glow sticks and then the cooler raves were more into the whole baggy look.
It was all about the practicalities of dancing for six hours, so things got looser with sportswear, or tighter with Lycra. Then as the club scene moved into the older clubs that had existed for years, some of them got a bit better dressed.
So in Manchester, somewhere like The Hacienda would be baggy, but somewhere like Most Excellent had a smarter crowd. So there were these clubs around the country opening that were maybe a bit more discerning than the initial raves — clubs like Back II Basics in Leeds, Smile in Liverpool and Venus in Nottingham. Smaller and a bit more perfectly formed if you like, but still very much big party places.
Rezerection – Edinburgh
You mentioned before about a mad night at a club called Rezerection in Edinburgh. What was going on there?
That place was insane. It was on the edge of Edinburgh in some sort of showground and it was a big fenced off marquee affair with no alcohol on site, and I’ve never seen such a deranged crowd in all my life.
It was mostly a young crowd — too young at times. It was all white gloves and whistles with random folk in fancy dress — like a fella dressed up in a wetsuit with an inflatable shark under his arm.
Rezerection – Edinburgh
Where else stood out?
Judgement Day in Newcastle, in a hard-core ravers kind of way, and likewise, Bowlers in Manchester or the Hard Dock in Liverpool — not for the feint hearted by any means.
But my favourite clubs were smaller, better dressed and with a better music policy. I’d say one that got it all right was Back II Basics up in Leeds, though I’d say my favourite club of all time, in the UK anyway, was Voodoo in Liverpool.
This was at the time of the super-clubs, when Liverpool had Cream, one of the most important clubs of all time. And whilst I loved how Cream was putting Liverpool back on the map, in popular culture terms anyway, there was nothing better than finishing a shoot at Cream and then heading around the corner to Voodoo.
Voodoo – Liverpool
It was as much of a family vibe as you could get out of a techno club, ran by an amazing couple called Sam and Claire with incredible residents, ace guests and an understanding management. It was the complete opposite to what was going on at the time with the emergence of clubs as brands. There’s nothing wrong with the big clubs, and it’s great to be lost in a big crowd with a camera, but I always preferred the smaller affairs.
How did you go about actually taking the photos? Were you tactical with how you shot the clubs?
It was all about finding the right place. Using the flash, you didn’t just want to photograph someone against a wall, because it didn’t look very interesting. You had to be in the middle to get all the flashing lights and everything.
The people at the edge are usually just standing around, so you had to get involved. If you just walk into somewhere with a camera bag, people are going to notice you, but if you’re somewhere for a while, you can be part of it.
Later on in the early 90s there was a point when things got very much about stopping people and asking to take their photograph, and asking them what clothes they had on. They had a thing in MixMag where they’d be some question of the month, and I thought that was shit – I didn’t like doing that. At the time, I wanted to document things, I wanted to be a fly on the wall – I didn’t want to stop people.
Yeah, as soon as you ask someone to pose, you lose that candid thing. What sort of cameras were you using?
Most of the time it was a 35mm Nikon with some pretty cheap lenses. We’d use these flashes called Vivitar 283s which had three zones you could set depending on the distance you wanted to shoot.
A bit later, I started taking photos on a twin-lens medium format cameras with slide film and an off-camera flash.
At the time it seemed easy, as it was all I knew, but I’ve been back to nightclubs in recent years, and I just think, how did I do this?
Herbal Tea Party – Manchester
How long would you be there? Would you take photos all night?
It gets to the point where it gets too messy.
Was that a conscious decision – to show people in a decent light?
I wanted to show it for how it was, which is why I got fed up with it when it became people posing and wanting their picture taken in nightclubs. I wanted it to be real. I wasn’t trying to make anyone look great – but they were great. And also, I didn’t want to make people look horrible.
I like that whole thing of people being stars for the night. What I didn’t like was that cult of the DJ. You’d start going to nights, and everybody would be facing the DJ, but earlier on, it never felt like that. People were dancing everywhere you looked — everybody was the star for the night.
Heavenly Social – Nottingham
Were there other photographers around back then?
In the mid-90s there was suddenly a lot, but before then, I don’t remember anyone else doing it in Liverpool. I mean places like Erics were documented by Francesco Mellina and you had Tom Wood, shooting his Looking for Love photographs at the Chelsea Reach, but not so much on the rave scene.
Everything is constantly documented now. The late 80s and early 90s are probably the last period of time before everything was documented.
Every now and again an old photographer will find their pictures from 40 years ago, and everyone will be like, “Wow, look at these old pictures!” But I don’t think that will happen in the future. There’s just so much imagery of everything.
G-Love – Liverpool
I wonder with the states that people get in now, what it’s like with phones. Do people get up the next day to loads of photos of them from the night before? I do think sometimes, if there was camera phones in the 90s, would people have been more reserved?
Haha, good point. When did you stop photographing clubs?
When I got bored. And I guess I got bored when people started stopping me to ask for a photo. When they started to become conscious of the fact that they could appear in Mixmag and be famous for five minutes and it became more about that than being caught in the moment.
Cream – Liverpool
I also got older and moved away from the scene and my own music interests changed, so I moved on and I photographed different scenes.
At the time you were going out a lot shooting photos, did you think people would look back on it, or were you just doing it?
I don’t think at the age of 20 you ever think that you’re documenting stuff from the future. Those times were pretty amazing, and everything was new. It was something which had never happened before. Now we can look back and say that.
Universe – Bath
What are your thoughts on the nostalgia that surrounds that era?
Good luck to them, but it’s not for me. It’s weird really as the whole dance thing has never stopped, so it’s odd that people are doing all this revival thing for something that’s never needed to be rediscovered, because it never really went away.
Quadrant Park – Liverpool
You’re still very busy with photography stuff now, what are you up to at the moment?
Photographing and filming with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, doing commercial work with all kinds of organisations and documenting arts festivals and music festivals in all kinds of places. So I’m still documenting music and the scenes around it, it’s just a little bit more polite and with better hours.
Sounds good. As someone who’s worked doing photography for a while now, have you got any wise words you’d like to add here?
Well, if it’s music photography we’re talking about, don’t hang about with shit bands. Although these days with digital cameras, I’d say just photograph absolutely everybody.
With film, I used to have to choose what bands to shoot. Looking back on the first musical festival I shot in Liverpool, I just photographed the bands I thought sounded alright. I photographed The La’s, but I didn’t bother with The Stone Roses or Pulp. But now, there’s no excuse.
Ralph Lauren has always been a master of appropriation — from hunting jackets to polo shirts, the great man’s finest designs are heavily indebted to the world of functional clobber. But what happens when the appropriator is… er… appropriated?
In the late 80s, at a time when Ralph’s American dream was aimed squarely at the minted elite, a crew of working-class kids from New York known as the Lo Lifes took to nabbing his most audacious creations from the racks as a way to stand out on the streets of Brooklyn.
And whilst most would look daft in head-to-toe Polo ski attire, this lot managed to pull it off, helping to take hip-hop style beyond fat laces and leather tracksuits.
Rack Lo was one of the original Lo Lifes, and is still heavily involved today, running his own brand dedicated to Polo-inspired paraphernalia, and helping to organise the various Lo Life gatherings that take place throughout the year.
I sent him a barrage of questions via trans-Atlantic e-mail, and thankfully, he replied…
Do you remember being into clothes as a kid?
Oh man, I remember well. As a kid, my brother was more into materialism and brand names, and I was satisfied with whatever my mother and father were able to provide for me, but as I got older things changed and I became very materialistic.
Growing up I remember wearing Lee jeans, Pro Keds and Converse. Back then it was more about your style as oppose to what brand you was wearing — people cherished the look more than the name.
Growing up in Brooklyn in the 80s, how important was it to wear the right stuff?
It was very important because what you wore told a story in itself — what you wore pretty much separated you from the others. For instance, if you didn’t have street respect or a reputation, there were some things you just couldn’t wear, and it would be very dangerous to do so.
So in Brooklyn before you wanted to get fly and fresh, you had to know how to fight and defend yourself. If you didn’t have a reputation for defending yourself, you became what we called ‘The Herb’, and people would take advantage of you anytime you were seen.
In Brooklyn getting fresh was a part of the street life for many of the street legends.
When did the Lo Life Crew start? When did it go from being a few people wearing Polo stuff, to a full crew?
It started in 1988. The crew got bigger and gained more members once I decided to unite both parties, Marcus Garvey Village and St Johns. Then some time later, the late, great Boostin Billy started a chapter in Philadelphia, and it started to pick up from there.
Why Polo? What was the appeal of this stuff?
Polo just stood out the most. For some reason we were just attracted to it. First, it had amazing color ways and wasn’t prevalent in the United States ghettos. Polo wasn’t designed for poor urban kids; it was made for the upper class, waspy and collegiate kids. So when we started wearing we took it to a whole different level.
The Lo Lifes made Polo popular in the ghetto. We took what Ralph Lauren designed and created new looks and styles based around our concept of ‘Lo Down’. Lo Down is a term used when a person is wearing Polo Ralph Lauren from head to toe.
I was going to ask you about that. Could someone ever go too far and wear too much Polo stuff?
Many of the times we dressed in what we called ‘layers’ — layers of nothing but the finest Ralph Lauren Polo on the market. From head to toe all of our clothing was Polo Ralph Lauren. This particular dress code shocked a lot of people, and even Ralph Lauren was amazed.
For us it was never about just having Polo, but more about how you wore and coordinated the Polo — that is what made you special.
Do you remember the first Polo item you got?
The first Polo item I remember shoplifting was the Anniversary Cross Flags Sweater in 1987. An OG named Mike-Lo (cousin of Friz-Lo) had taken us to Riverside Square Mall out in Bergen County, New Jersey. We had taken the sweaters from a major department named Saks Fifth Avenue.
What was New York like in the late 80s and early 90s? What was a normal day like back then?
New York was very violent and filled with a lot of criminals from all communities. At any time you could have lost your life for the pettiest things — people just didn’t see the value in life back in those times.
A normal day for me was doing crime, and by me engaging in criminal activities I was able to sustain who I was and my lavish lifestyle.
I suppose it’s probably pointless talking about the Lo Life Crew without talking about boosting or racking. Wearing all that bright gear, you lot were hardly inconspicuous – so what were your tactics for getting your hands on Polo gear?
Our first tactic was called ‘geeing’ or ‘city slicking’. Using this strategy was more of a calm approach. Even though we wore bright colors, we were still clever in the stores.
Then I coined the term ‘million man rush’ as I helped usher in our newest strategy called ‘steaming’. This is where we just entered the store with a mob of like 50 heads and would just snatch what we wanted and headed to the door. I would say the ‘Million Man Rush’ tactic was the more dangerous. And further that act brought you a heavier jail/prison sentence if you were apprehended.
Did you ever get caught?
Yes, I have been caught on many occasions. As a result I was locked up in juvenile detention and I was an inmate on the infamous ‘Riker’s Island’. But in my case I was still fortunate because I never spent time in prison — only in city jails for very short time periods. The longest I spent incarcerated was four months.
The whole thing of nabbing and wearing aspirational clothing wasn’t too different to what casuals were doing in England and the Paninaro were doing in Italy around a similar time. Were you aware of any of those subcultures?
No, I never heard of those, sounds interesting out in England though. Dope!
Why do you think people gravitate to this high-class functional stuff? A lot of people wear hunting jackets or skiing coats, but they’ll never go hunting or skiing.
That’s just how the ghetto operates. Although the clothes were made for those occasions and atmospheres we simply turned those wears into hood fashion artefacts. We never played by the rules, we made our own rules.
The Polo stuff at that time seemed to be particularly intense. Lots of bright colours and big logos — what were the main items you’d go for?
My favorite polo pieces are the Crest, the Yacht, the Anniversary Cross Flags and the Cookie.
Was there a competitive element to all this? Were you trying to one-up your friends by finding rarer stuff?
Yes, every day each Lo Life’s intension was to out-dress the next. The competition was high amongst individuals in the crew and we also competed against other crews as well. Some of the greatest show downs took place at Empire Skating Rink’.
What else were you lot wearing back then? What else was in the mix?
Besides Polo, I wore Guess, Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, Nautica, Gucci, Descente, Head, Prince, Sergio Tacchini and Coca-Cola. There was a lot of fresh brands we rocked.
Obviously the clothes were a big part of it, but what else was Lo Life about? What else was going on?
Everything that was a part of hip hop was happening. Remember this was 1988 the golden era of hip hop. But besides the clothes we did a lot of crime, partying and just running the streets. It was all about survival. So either you were a street kid or you played it safe and stayed out of trouble. But for us, we always found trouble, because most of the times we initiated it.
How has New York changed since the late 80s? Do you think you lot could get away with the same stuff if you were growing up now?
New York has definitely changed. The time I’m reflecting on is considered ‘The Old New York’. Nowadays, there are cameras everywhere. The city is filled with surveillance, so yes in the current times getting caught would be a realistic matter. Plus there are a lot more cops on the streets now. In the 1980s you had cops, but you also had crime fighters like ‘The Guardian Angels’ who also tried to prevent a lot of the madness from happening on the New York City streets. It worked sometimes, but for the most part, the criminals prevailed.
But I know for a fact, if the Lo Life’s were committing the same acts in the 1980s in the new millennium a lot of us would be in jail for decades and life on the back of the sentence. Because a lot of Lo-Life’s are three time losers meaning they already have three felony convictions. So a fourth one will keep them incarcerated for life. 2018 is not the time to being doing anything stupid.
What are your thoughts on streetwear today? Now that kids can just sit on a computer and buy whatever they want, is it still ‘street’?
No, it’s not street. I’m not into the new fashion and styles — I like gear that stands the test of time. Nowadays, a lot of the brands don’t have staying power. Polo has been here since 1967 and it’s still so relevant — it’s timeless and will never go out of style.
This staying power is what all of the other brands fight and struggle for. Will they last for the next 10 or 20 years? I see clothing brands come and go so often.
Have you ever heard what Ralph thinks of all this?
Yes, Ralph had no choice but to acknowledge our movement. I never cared about meeting Ralph or none of that. He was a non-factor in my life as far as my aspirations are concerned. I’m a realist.
The Lo-Lifes go hand in hand with Ralph. In the same way he created a brand, so did the Lo-Lifes. We have come a long way and we are still on the front lines doing it big.
What do you get up to these days? What’s an average day like for you now?
Nowadays, I’m all about business, traveling, family, being a great husband and father and truly helping other people realize and pursue their dreams. I view myself as the Creative Director and Visionary in all that I engage in. I have a lot of great things coming down the pipeline.
Sounds good. Any wise words you’d like to add?
Yes, check out my book Lo Life: An American Classic. It feels great to be a published author, and this is just my first book, I have plenty of stories to tell.
Thank You! 2L’s Up and SaLLute!
Lo Life: An American Classic is available now. Get it here. Interview originally published in 2018.
Shooting BMXers in the 70s and 80s, Windy Osborn’s up-close, high-zoot shots captured BMX with a dose of straight-up rawness rarely seen in ‘action-sports photography’. Here she discusses how she got started, her own attempts at riding and her time working with a young Spike Jonze.
First of all, how’s it going?
Great, thanks for asking. I’ve finally had a chance, this last year, to focus on converting the best of the classic shots of mine from back in the 80’s to digital, and uploading them to my website. I still have some stragglers, but the best of the best are now up and purchasable, for the serious collectors.
How did you get started taking BMX photos?
When we first began going to the BMX races in like 1973, my father would be the race starter and RL would race (Editor’s note: Windy’s brother and freestyle pioneer). My father lent me his Minolta SLR to take pictures, so I would have something to do for fun. Because my father was a photography enthusiast he had his own darkroom set up at home. He processed my first roll, shot at 13, and said that I had a good eye. I thought he was just being the encouraging father he was supposed to be. As we became active deeper in BMX, we came across a newspaper, Bicycle Motocross News, published by Elaine Holt. My father became a contributing writer/photographer, reporting on California BMX racing, and eventually I contributed my works and ended up being a staff photographer for the paper, first published at 14.
Your brother R.L. was one of the first people to really push ‘freestyle’ riding in the 80s. Did you ever ride yourself?
No, no, no — my only attempt behind the bars was way back in 73, when I entered a side-hack race with my trusty girlfriend, Theresa Grenke, as my monkey. This was at the Redondo Beach track, which was actually a great little local track, built on the side of a hill. So… nice downhill from the start, big jump and then into a berm — scared the s#@t out of me! And I realized at that point it was a lot safer behind the camera than the bars! Besides, being the photog’ had its advantages for being able to meet boys. Where I was shy normally, the camera was a handy tool in many ways.
You shot the cover of the first issue of BMX Action when you were sixteen, did you think anything of it at the time?
It was cool. I know my dad and I used to kinda compete for the cover, so there was always this friendly rivalry between us. He didn’t like that I could take such good pics with such ease. He said he had to work at it, whereas it was natural for me.
Even nowadays, BMX is fairly male-orientated; did you feel any sort of animosity being a girl taking photos at BMX competitions, or do you think it helped you get the shots?
There’s something very self-driving when you find yourself in a situation where the odds appear to be stacked against oneself, so I enjoyed being in the “what’s a girl doing that for?” situation. All I wanted to do was show them I could, and better than anyone else. More than anything, I was into shooting for the art and the opportunity to speak loudly and communicate my vision, of what I was experiencing. Men look at things very differently than a woman. The men who shot, looked at it as journalism and documenting, I looked at it as “OMG!!! Look at what these kids are doing!” I was so blown away and impressed; I wanted to make them bigger than life, through my vision.
Shot with a fish-eye lens and often with a lot of motion blur, your photos weren’t really like anyone else’s. What were you looking at for inspiration back then?
I wanted to show the insides of their heart and souls, I wanted people to be able to taste the excitement. That’s why I got so close, and closer and closer…and I found that when you crop in, you change the perspective of viewing to being more involved in the action, rather than standing back safely and viewing from a distance.
You took Spike Jonze under your wing when he was a teenager. What was it like working with him?
Comical. His advantage was hanging with the guys, as to where I didn’t necessarily fit in to hang with them… so I wanted to make my art and then get out of their way. Remember, I WAS shy at heart.
When was the last time you shot a BMX photo? Is it something you’d like to come back to?
‘89, I believe at the Oklahoma Grand Nationals… and YES! I’ve been wanting to get my hands on the 14-24 Nikon lens and then go up to Santa Cruz and shoot Wilkerson… we have a standing date. I’m anxious to find out how the digital camera works with my style of shooting. Digital is so awesome because of its instantaneousness and convenience, even though I use it old school style. I am looking forward to that moment…soon.
Without going too overboard, he takes the kind of pictures
that more idealistic types might call ‘timeless’.
From candid snaps of back-street brawlers to straight-up
portraits of the man on the street, his black and white photos have a certain classic
quality seldom seen in modern times – a long way from the brash and bratty
hyper-action of Instagram-friendly street photography.
Here’s an interview with him about his photos…
Starting at the top, how did you get into photography? What
made you want to start taking pictures?
My high
school had a photo class which I took. I was lucky enough to have a really good
teacher. I always shot Polaroids growing up, but this class inspired me to take
photography more seriously and consider it for a career.
Nowadays it’s a lot easier to get ‘into
stuff’, due to the internet and the endless information on there – but how did
you find out about photography and stuff back when you were starting out?
Mostly
indie book shops and libraries. I grew up very close to Manhattan, so I would
go into the city and spend days in vintage book shops discovering
photographers.
Is it almost too easy now?
Yes,
it’s crazy. While everything was much harder when you couldn’t just google, I
am happy I grew up in a more analogue time. I think my photos are better
because of it. Not to say there aren’t amazing younger photographers coming up
now, because there are.
Do you go out specifically to take photographs,
or are they just products of you already being out and about?
It’s a
bit of a mix. There are trips I take specifically to shoot, but then some of my
favorite photos were taken when I wasn’t expecting it. I
basically lurk around. Nothing specific, I just venture out and observe. Some
people probably think I’m a creepy dude checking them out, but that’s just me
finding my next photo.
Are there certain things you look for?
Yes,
definitely. The ordinary, everyday moments. Moments I think other people miss,
but there is so much beauty in the classic, mundane moments. Also, I’m big on
composition so everything needs to line up perfectly.
Are there things you try to avoid shooting
too?
Drugs.
Posers. Nothing to put down street photographers that shoot more of the raw
back alley content, it’s just not my thing.
You shoot a lot of people – and a lot of
actual portraits rather than just spy shots. What’s your techniques for getting
these type of shots?
Lurking.
Haha kidding, sort of. I must have a friendly face, or disposition, but people
seem safe around me, and inviting.
A lot of people out there are perfectly
content just shooting endless photos of the backs of peoples’ heads and spy
shots from miles away – do you think they should try a bit harder?
If you
can’t see a face, there must be something else about a photo that makes it
special, otherwise it’s a worthless picture. I would suggest editing your
content more and waiting for a better moment to capture that same pic. Or just
getting closer. So yes, put more effort into it
You live in Los Angeles now, but you spent a
long time in San Francisco. A lot of people talk about how San Francisco has
changed over the last 20 years due to the influx of tech companies – what are
your thoughts on it? Did you see a noticeable change?
Yes,
it’s completely different now. I left at the right time, right before the
shift, so I didn’t stick around to see the city lose some of its magic. I still
love San Francisco and it holds such a special place for me, but I’m happy I
made the transition when i did.
How does Los Angeles differ to San Francisco?
L.A.
gave me the chance to make a living shooting photos. There is much more
opportunity here. I worked at a photo lab in San Francisco, and I work behind
the camera now. Also, I drive a lot more now.
Does location influence the photos you take?
I’ve noticed that no matter where I go, my photos always look pretty much the
same.
I don’t
think so. In San Francisco, with it being such a small city geographically, I
found myself shooting the same content — it got stale. So L.A. was a blank
canvas for me. My photos look the same, just with different people and
backdrops.
Do you think going out and taking photos has
changed over the years? It seems like there’s a lot more people snooping around
with little cameras nowadays.
Yes,
definitely. There is such a larger community now, I think it must be the
digital aspect making it easier to shoot. I love it, there is much more of a
community.
Unlike a lot of so called ‘street
photography’ that’s around now, your photos have a very classic style. Is this
a conscious thing? I might be wrong, but to me they’re not tied to any
particular age or era like a lot of photos are.
Thank
you very much for that. Norman Rockwell’s paintings are definitely an
inspiration. As is the music of George Jones. I am drawn towards those
‘timeless’ moments.
Do you still mess with the dark-room?
I
actually don’t process at the volume or even near the volume I used to. I went
digital when I moved to L.A. for my commercial work, and started shooting more
digital street stuff. I’ll never give up film, but you cannot beat the
convenience and speed at which digital photography provides. The chemicals were
literally destroying my hands, and who knows what else. I had to take it easy,
as I’m still feeling the effects of the 15 years I processed film
professionally.
You used to work in a photo lab. What was that like?
Very fun and easy-going.
I learned more working in a lab than I did in four years of art school. You
basically get to learn directly from some of the best artists in the world,
seeing how they shoot. I
personally developed film for some of the world’s best photographers like Bruce
Weber, Sante D’orzino, Duane Michals and many more.
Have you got any tips for success under the
red bulb? What makes a good print?
I tend
to overexpose, which makes my film denser and gives it more detail. I also pull
most of my film a stop to build up my mid-tones and then pump the contrast
while printing.
I often think that with photography, the pool
of influence is relatively small – most people out there are into Robert Frank
and Walker Evans. Have you got any names for people to look into that they
might not have heard of? Who else deserves some recognition?
Danny
Lyons is famous, but I feel like he still isn’t as well-known as he should be.
Bill Owens and WeeGee of course. Working with Bruce Weber’s negatives over the
years, his photos were the most well-composed, perfect exposed pics I’ve ever
worked with. I am still blown away by that, nothing compares, he’s a technical
genius.
What sort of work do you do now with photography?
While I still shoot
street photos, professionally I’m actually a product photographer. Which is
kind of crazy seeing as some of my best work is of living people, but I also
love working with objects. They balance each other out.
Do you ever get burned out on taking pictures? What
with working as a commercial photographer, and then taking you own personal
shots – does it ever get a bit much?
No, never.
Professionally I shoot on average over 1,000 a day and it never gets old. I
sometimes can’t believe i found a way to make a healthy living shooting
photos.
What keeps you out there taking pictures?
Fear of missing the
shot.
Do you keep in touch with the people in your photos?
Or are there regular people who you bump into often on the street?
Funny enough, when
Hamburger Eyes’ SF Eyes came out recently, one of the guys I shot over 15 years
ago as a young punk emailed me. He asked if I would send him an autographed
photo. So crazy, and of course I sent it to him. I do wonder though what
everyone is up to now.
What are your thoughts on how people view photos these
days? Is there a perfect way to present a photo?
It’s definitely
different than what I grew up with, but as long as people are enjoying photos
it really doesn’t matter to me.
Following on from that, do you think Instagram
algorithms and the allure of the shock image can sometimes mean that a lot of
good photography is now ignored or under-appreciated?
It’s pretty gross to me that shock images
and a horrible picture of a boob or a pic of someone smoking weed for example,
will get someone a huge art show or recognition just because it’s hyped. I
don’t get it nor will I ever.
Vague question, but what makes a good photograph?
The subject.
Very true. Have you got any words of wisdom to end this with?
Don’t leave home
without your camera. I guess no one does now since we all have smart phones,
but if that’s what you use, then always have it handy as you’ll forever regret
the photo you didn’t take.
This is probably a pretty obvious statement to make, but there’s more to music than just the music. Things like melody and chords and all that are fairly important, but there are a thousand other factors that help turn a song, track or album into something more than just a bunch of sound waves smacking into your ear drums.
Record sleeves are one such factor — and not many have created quite as many stone cold classics as Brian Cannon.
As the man behind the infamous Microdot agency, Brian was responsible for looking after the visual side of both Oasis and The Verve, as well as designing covers for bands like Suede, Cast and Inspiral Carpets.
Here’s an interview with him about doing graffiti in Wigan, his trademark ‘in-camera’ style and the logistics of putting a Rolls Royce in a swimming pool…
Maybe an obvious first question – but how did you get into designing record covers? What were you into when you were growing up in Wigan.
I specifically set out to design record sleeves, because I was a fan of punk rock. I was 11 in 1977, when I first got into it all.
Do you remember the first time you saw ‘punk’?
I’m the eldest in my family, so I didn’t have the influence of an older brother – but I did have an older cousin called Tony who was 15 at the time — and when you’re 11, that’s a massive difference. I’d heard about this phenomenon from Tony, and then I saw the Buzzcocks on Top of the Pops — and to actually see it in the flesh — it blew me away.
Why do you think it had such an impact on so many people? Was it because it was so different.
Exactly, it was totally different. At that time, Top of the Pops was your barometer, and glam rock was pretty much all you had — things like Sweet and Mud — long hair, flares, platforms and mad outfits. But then all of a sudden you had these lads who looked like your mates, with short hair and tight pants, making this fast, aggressive music. And I loved it.
How did this lead into doing design?
Me and my mates thought, “We’ve got to get a band together.” So we met up at my mum’s house in Wigan, and I realised instantly that I couldn’t play guitar. I just couldn’t get my head around chords.
But I’d always been good at drawing. My dad was a fantastic illustrator, far better than me, but the opportunities for illustrators in Wigan in the 1940s were zero – so he worked as a coal miner and never did anything with it. But he was very much in favour of me doing drawing, and he always encouraged me.
And with punk, if you looked at the graphics and the visual identity, it felt like it was in reach. I think that was the point of it. Before punk, bands were like creatures from another planet — but with punk, the whole process was demystified – the man in the street could get involved. That was a massive inspiration to me.
So I married my love of the music with my talent for art, and thought that I’d become a sleeve designer instead.
It’s interesting how even in your early teens you knew exactly what you wanted to do.
I remember doing this art foundation course, and the tutor was going around, asking us what we wanted to do when we finished our education. He came to me and I said, “I want to design record sleeves.” But straight away he said, “No, no, no – you can’t be so specific, you need to get a job in graphics and learn your way.”
I was almost derided for it – because not only was I going to do record sleeves, but I was going to go freelance from the get go. I think anyone can do it these days, because you just get a laptop and then you’re a graphic designer all of a sudden. But back then, not only was there no social media and no internet, but the equipment required to do the job of a graphic designer, the forerunner to Photoshop, cost £300,000. It was this machine called Quantel Paintbox.
What was that?
It was a computer, about the size of your house, with less power than your mobile phone. It was way out of my reach — I could hardly afford a paper and pencil.
What did you do then?
This punk style was really stark, with high contrast black and white, degraded imagery, and it just so happened that if you photocopied an image over and over, it went like that. And that was handy, because all I could afford to use was a photocopier.
There was a little print shop at the bottom of Library Street in Wigan, and I’d be in there all day, with a scalpel and a tin of glue, putting these things together in the shop – and that’s how it all started.
How did your first sleeve come about? Was that the Ruthless Rap Assassins one?
Yeah — I did a graffiti mural on the side of a warehouse in 1984, and it was noticed by a guy called Greg Wilson, who was a very influential DJ at that time. He’d thought to himself, I’m going to see this New York style graffiti in London or Manchester or Birmingham at some point, but he couldn’t believe it that he’d seen it in Wigan. He sent word out on the street that he wanted to meet whoever had done it, and I was summoned to his house. We ended up becoming friends and I did this sleeve. And then off it went from there.
What happened next then?
I then met Richard Ashcroft at a party and got chatting, but then The Verve got signed and I didn’t see him for another two years. I ended up bumping into him in a petrol station at six o’ clock in the morning. He said, “Wow, you’re that sleeve guy. We’ve just been signed – do you want the gig?”
So I went to London to have a meeting with Virgin, who The Verve were signed to. Vigin obviously had some big London agency lined up to do this work for The Verve, so they were horrified when Richard Ashcroft said he wanted this unknown student he’d met at a party in Wigan to do the artwork. But they were cool enough to think, “Well, this is what the band wanted.” And then after the first single came about, they were like, “Sorry we doubted you.”
What else were you doing at that time?
On the back of doing the stuff for The Verve, Suede got in touch. And then I met Noel Gallagher. I used to have an office in Manchester on New Mount Street in the same building as the Inspiral Carpets office, and I got chatting to him in the lift about trainers.
What were they?
They were a pair of adidas Indoor Super. I took my mother to Rome for her 60th birthday, and I found these trainers in some tiny backstreet shop.
Wasn’t the Oasis logo based roughly on the adidas logo?
The original was kind of the adidas font – but we binned it, because with the adidas font, the ‘A’ is just like an ‘o’ with a line on the side, so it just looked like ‘oosis’.
I did the logo in ’93, and then their first album came out in ’94. After Oasis it went buck-wild… Ash, Cast, even Atomic Kitten… it was mental.
Was it hard to keep up with it all?
No, because if you think about it, even a busy band back then would only put out three singles and an album out per year – so even if you’ve got five bands a year, that’s only twenty jobs a year. Mind you, it was labour intensive as there was no Photoshop.
I was going to ask you about that. As a lot of your images were done without Photoshop, ‘in camera’, how did you go about getting them? Creating an image like the Oasis Be Here Now cover doesn’t look easy.
This is a very important point to make. Because it was all shot on film – we didn’t have the luxury of looking at the back of the camera and seeing what we’d got. We had no idea what we’d got until we got the photos back from the lab. Imagine putting a Rolls Royce in a swimming pool and realising the photos weren’t exposed correctly.
Before the shoot, there’d be a massive process of research and preparation, so when the day comes, nothing was left to chance.
Were you given free reign with all this?
Yeah, it was a beautiful situation. With both The Verve and Oasis, the record companies just let us get on with it. All they did was pay for the bills. And that was great, because we knew what we were doing.
A lot of the Oasis ones are particularly complicated. What was the hardest one to pull off?
Putting a Rolls Royce in a pool was pretty tough. Finding a pool that someone’s going to let you put a Rolls Royce into was the hardest part. And then we had to find a Rolls Royce that wasn’t worth £50,000 – because Oasis weren’t that rich. It was a scrap Rolls Royce, with no engine in it, but it still cost us £1,000 to hire it. And then we had to get a crane and dangle it in.
How many shots did you take of that one?
That one was ridiculous, because like I said, we didn’t have the luxury of seeing what we’d shot. For that shoot there was something like 30 odd rolls of film, with 36 exposures on each roll – so it was almost a thousand frames of something that’s really just a still life. That’s excessive.
We stayed there that night, and then we got the films processed in London. Then there was the wait, like an expectant father.
How did you work out which was the best one, when you had a thousand pretty much identical photos to look at?
It was like snow blindness. We’d start with the obvious non-starters, and whittle it down and down. It was a very laborious process of elimination, but we didn’t know any other way.
Do you think this real life, ‘in camera’ method of creating these really detailed images helped elevate them a bit?
By that point we could have easily Photoshopped it, but we just did things for real because it was our trademark, and I enjoyed doing things that way. We started doing it that way out of necessity, because we couldn’t afford computers – but even when we could afford them, we still did things the real way as we preferred it.
And it must have been more fun that sitting around staring at a computer.
Yeah – I loved it. Just to see a Rolls Royce in a swimming pool – it looked amazing.
What about the Definitely Maybe cover? Obviously now that’s talked about as being one of the best record covers of all time, but were people saying that when it was released?
No, they weren’t. It’s all very well saying things with the benefit of hindsight. It’s just been voted as one of the top 70 record sleeves of all time – and do you know what? I’m not going to rain on my own parade, because I think it’s a great sleeve — but had that been for a band you’d never heard of, it wouldn’t be in the top 70.
I suppose there’s a lot that’s tied in with that. The memories that come with it and everything else – it’s a full package. What was the story behind the Definitely Maybe cover?
It’s an anti-band shot. That was the idea. There’s a Beatles album called A Collection of Beatles Oldies (but Goldies!), and on the back there’s this shot of them in this dressing room in Japan. And I just loved the fly on the wall nature of it – none of them were looking at the camera. And whilst it looks nothing like Definitely Maybe, that’s where the inspiration came from.
That documentary style?
Precisely. The band are having their picture took, and they’re all watching the telly.
It’s designed to look candid, but what was the reality of it?
It was incredibly staged. It’s too perfect of a composition to just happen. We positioned everyone very carefully. Even the still on the television was specifically chosen – it’s the shot in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly where he’s got him by the face. It was paused on VHS. That’s how meticulous it was.
A lot of your sleeves are photography-based. Was there a particular reason for this?
My favourite record sleeves, with the exceptions of Never Mind the Bollocks, are photographically based. I just think it’s the best way of doing it. And that’s why, in the cases of both The Verve and Oasis, there’s very little intrusion with type or logos.
With The Verve, the logo would be in the shot, and with Oasis, the logo would be in the top corner. We’d spend ages coming up for the idea and staging the shoot, we didn’t want to ruin it by plastering a logo in front of it.
It seemed like there was definite styles for each band you worked with. Your covers for The Verve always had real text in the photo. Was that a faff to do that? Setting the letters on fire on the Storm in Heaven cover looked tough.
Yes, it was. I had the letters made by a steel fabricator in Oldham, and covered them with this cladding that street jugglers use when they’re juggling fire, and then poured paraffin onto it. The only downside was that the letters gave off loads of smoke – and because we were in a cave, it just wouldn’t clear. We were having to wait about half an hour in-between each shot for the smoke to clear.
Where did the idea for that one come from?
I’d never seen letters set on fire and photographed before, but I just thought it’d look good. I do a lot of lecturing at colleges, and I always say, much to the chagrin of the lecturers, that you don’t have to explain everything away. Some things you just do because they look good – there’s no further explanation required.
Very true. Maybe a tough question, especially considering what you’ve just said… but what makes a good record cover?
What makes a good record? You just know, don’t you? There can be a thousand reasons why one might be bad, but I can’t think of one reason why one will be good. There’s no formula to it. It’s down to the individual too – it’s all opinion.
What do you think the purpose of a record cover is? Is it marketing, or is it art?
I don’t think it’s a marketing tool — I’d regard it as a bonus for the fans. I don’t think it sells records. I’ve bought the odd record because of the sleeve, but then again, I’m a sleeve designer.
Were the covers always influenced by the music – or sometimes did you just have an idea you wanted to use on something?
No — that never happened. We were quite vehement about that. Every sleeve was like a bespoke suit, cut for that particular piece of music.
From what I’ve read, you weren’t just some guy in an office sending off designs to the bands – you were involved with the bands a lot more, going on tours and things like that.
I was of the opinion that the more I got my head around what the band were into and how they thought, the better the visuals could be… and hanging around with a rock and roll band is good fun. I toured American with both Oasis and The Verve, but it was mad, because I was the only person on the tour-bus who had nothing to do.
What was it like being around those bands when they suddenly became massive?
It was all a bit weird really. Anybody will tell you this – the best bit of any band is that bit when they just start taking off. The best bits are when it’s still pretty innocent.
Did you have a few people working for you by that point?
Yeah – but it was never massive. At Microdot’s peak, there was five or six of us. In the late 90s we started branching out into all sorts of mad stuff. We were running night-clubs, we were publishing magazines, we were managing bands… at one point there was talk of importing Volkswagen Beetles from Mexico.
A brilliant idea.
I’d gone to Mexico on holiday, and I kept seeing these old Beetles. They were still making them there, and we’d worked out that if we shipped them back to England, and even if we turned them right hand drive, we could still make £2,000 on every one we sold. If we sold 500 of them, we’d make a million quid.
We were all set to go, but Volkswagen head office in Germany had told the Mexicans they couldn’t sell us the cars, as they reckoned it’d harm the Golf market in the UK.
But it would have been mint.
I know. So we then tried the Brazilians as they were making them there too – and this was so Microdot it was untrue. On the street in Shoreditch where we had our studio, there was a little café called Franco’s that was run by a Portuguese family. Now they don’t speak Spanish in Brazil – they speak Portuguese, so I went in to Franco’s one day and I said I’d give the man who worked behind the counter a tenner if he’d come to the office, and speak down the phone to Volkswagen HQ in Sao Paulo. He did it, but it still didn’t happen.
What do you mean by things being, “so Microdot.” Was there a certain attitude there?
Absolutely. The reason why it was like that was because I didn’t have any experience of working in an agency. I had no idea how things should be done — we were just making things up as we were going along.
It was bonkers. When we moved to London, we had enough money from Alan McGee to buy this computer, and to set up a studio in Shoreditch. But in this mad rush to move to London, I’d forgotten that we needed somewhere to live, so me and Matt, the lad who worked with me, had to live in the studio. There was one room, and a toilet, and we lived in there for four months. We had a couch that you could take the cushions off, and we’d take it in turns every night – one of us sleeping on the couch, one of us sleeping on the cushions on the floor.
And we could party hard, because we knew that the only person we had to answer to the following day had been out with us previous night – there was no way Noel Gallagher was going to ring us at nine in the morning, because we’d just left him at seven in the morning. There’d be occasions when a client would turn up, and there’d be somebody asleep on the floor in the studio.
Nowadays you do all sorts of stuff – and amongst various design bits, you’ve been photographing northern soul nights. How did this come about?
That was a massive project for me. It started in 2012, when the renaissance was under way. A friend of mine from Wigan said that I should go along to this club run by these kids who were into northern soul.
I was very aware that when you take photographs of people dancing in dark rooms, they just look like statues at a wedding, but I wanted to get some soul or some atmosphere into the shot, so I thought I’ll use an off-camera flash.
I went to this club-night with my mate John, who was going to be my lighting guy, holding my flash in his hand, at a 45 degree angle to me. But when we get there, his phone rings — his wife was pregnant and her car had got a puncture — so that was my lighting gone. So I just put the light on the stage or on the floor, and worked around that, and the results I got were astonishing, purely by accident – I got these massive long shadows, cast from behind.
I suppose that comes from the same place as your record covers – you’re a fan.
Absolutely. Growing up in Wigan in the 1970s made it kind of inevitable to be a northern soul fan.
Alright, I think I’ve pretty much ran out of questions now. Have you got any wise words or anything to finish this off?
This interview was first published in 2014. R.I.P. Tony Pikes.
You may know Tony Pikes as the moustachioed bartender in the video for Wham’s 1983 smash hit, Club Tropicana. But not only is he a great dancer with a penchant for neckerchiefs, he’s also the founder of Ibiza’s real life Club Tropicana, Pike’s Hotel. Famously the location for Freddy Mercury’s 41st birthday blow-out, this place has long been associated with decadence, hedonism and downright sleazy behaviour. By some bizarre turn of events I found myself sat with Tony. It would have been rude not to ask him a few questions.
Here’s the context — we’re sat next to his purple tennis court, it’s two in the afternoon and Tony, who has just celebrated his 80th birthday, is still up from the night before. He has a habit of deviating from the questions I ask him and going off on long-winded tangents, but seeing as he’s been up all night, I suppose I could hardly expect concise answers. I start by asking what brought him to Ibiza…
What makes you go anywhere in life? Fate — complete fate. I don’t believe in God, I believe in destiny, that’s two different things. I’ve always chased the rainbow. I’m not stupid. I work hard and I play hard. I learnt at a very early age that you can’t play hard if you don’t work hard. I started without a penny, I had an inferiority complex, I couldn’t speak to people, I was nervous because of my childhood. I was bullied by my older brother. I’ve moved on from there.
Now I meet with the best people in the world. It’s just worked out very well. These are people from all stretches of life. I sit up there every morning and have breakfast and I see a new customer coming in like a bantam cockerel with his chest out.
“Are you Tony Pikes? What’s all the hype about, it’s a fucking farmhouse,” he’ll say.
“Can you ask me that question in 24 hours?” I’ll say.
22 hours lately he’ll come up to me and say, “Tony, forgive me, I didn’t realise. I thought I was a really important man and now I realise I’m just part of the team.” And that’s what I want, for everybody to be equal.
The sign at the bottom of the road that lead’s to Pike’s Hotel
You were exiled from Australia, you worked selling yachts and you had been shipwrecked in the Caribbean. Then you landed up here. What was your plan? Did you always want to open a hotel?
No, not at all — it was destiny. I had a house in the Côte d’Azur that was apparently owned by Napoléon’s sister. It was a picturesque little house. I held a dinner party and one of the guests stood up with a fork and started scratching away at all the plaster. I said, “What the fuck are you doing?”
He said, “Tony, when these houses were built they were constructed with timber. I’m sure there will be timber underneath this thing. So he carried on, and there was a beam. He said if you strip all of this off it will be beautiful.
I took his advice and the next day I brought builders in and they stripped it all off so it was all beams. So I oiled them with linseed and they were beautiful. I stayed there for three years. Then things went wrong so I moved on.
A friend of mine had moved to a place I’d never heard of called Ibiza and when he came back, he said, “Mate, you must go to Ibiza.”
What year’s this?
I came here on the first of June 1978, so this must have been in ’76. If anyone had said that to me I wouldn’t believe it, but we used to hold parties together in Bangkok. So when he said to me to come here, I believed him. I came over here in March for ten days and there was nobody here because it was winter time. But I had a feeling for it. So I came back in June.
Now Spanish people are fairly short. I’m not really a big man, but in Japan I am. When I’m there I wear a kimono, but I have to have one made for me as I’m too tall. And so when I looked over the side of the boat there was a guy standing head and shoulders above the rest. It was a mate of mine from Sydney called Pete Middleton. He was a typical Australian, always swearing. I had a Méhari (editors note: a Méhari is a small off-road Citroën) at the time and Pete, who was very athletic, leapt over the windscreen and landed in the seat next to me.
“Come on Pikey I’ll show you the island, I’ve been here for a week, I’ll get a Sheila for you,” he said.
I said, “Look Pete, all I want is a bed. I was at a party for 48 hours in Antibes, I’ve had a day’s drive to Barcelona in this Méhari that won’t go over 60kmh with so much wind-force that I’m going backwards. I’ve been to Majorca and now I’m here five days without sleeping. I’ve got to have some sleep. I’m a human; I’m not a machine.
He said, “You’re bloody senile, you used to be good fun Pikey, how old are you now?
“I’m nearly fifty,” I said.
“Nearly fifty? You’re a fucking child, what’s your problem?”
I said, “Mate, I just told you I’m shot. I’m a mere mortal, I need rest.” Then all of a sudden this Seat Panda drives past with a woman in. I honked the horn, but this was no a klaxon — it was a wounded cat with no guts. I got behind her but I couldn’t overtake her as it was a narrow road with one lane, just like it is now. So I got two wheels on the soft shoulder, which is very dangerous, and I’m going by and I look up and she’s a nice, pretty girl. I eventually managed to get in front of her but she smashed in to me.
“What’s the problem?” she said.
“There’s no problem, what are you doing for dinner tonight?” I said.
“Is that all?” she said.
“What do you mean is that all? I’m going to change your life.” And I did — I changed her life. We started this place together. We bought an apartment that was being built in the island’s first high rise, but when we came back there were just mounds of gravel and sand and nothing had been done. It was blacklisted by the authorities. It was all unsafe. The builder had put gas pipes, water pipes and electricity all in the same conduit. It was disastrous.
So we had a coffee, feeling a bit miserable and then walked up the road, just past an estate agent’s window. And in that window was a five hundred year old finca in San Antonio. I said, “That’ll be fresh air sweetheart, let’s go there.”
So we came here and it just had a feel about it, I don’t know what, but we both felt something. We got a bottle of wine, put a rope on the neck and swung it down. We got pissed too as it was hot. She said, “Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could forget husbands and wives and divorces and stay here together.
I said, “Why can’t we?”
“Well, you haven’t got any money.”
I said, “Don’t mind that, if I want to do something I put my mind to it then I’ll do it.”
So I got this idea of not making a hotel, but a house. And it just started from there.
How long was it until word got out?
From the word go. I sold boats from a marina in France to Peter Sellers, Roger Moore and Shirley Bassey, so I was used to those sort of people. I’ve always been a yachtsman and a businessman. I didn’t have a childhood and I had a tough life, but I started to get the feeling for a good life. I thought if I work hard I can get it, and I have — I’ve got a world-wide reputation. It’s been a long, long road and it hasn’t been easy. People say I’m lucky, but I’m not lucky, I’m fortunate and I’ve worked my arse off.
A washed-up speedboat found a few metres from Pike’s Hotel
You said you were very introverted when you were young, what changed you?
I felt success. The island is kind. If you work hard you can make it. This is the countryside, there’s no water, no electricity, no road and no facilities but I had this vision that one day I’d make it like it is now. This took me twenty years. But I wasn’t in a hurry because when you’re young, then you don’t feel you’re ever going to get old. But you do get old.
How old are you now?
I’m 80.
You look well for 80.
I feel very well. My doctor said I’m a walking medical miracle. He said, “I know you take a lot of blow up the nose and copious quantities of alcohol but I’d trade my internal organs for yours tomorrow — you should be dead.
I’m doing everything I shouldn’t do but I’m 80 and I feel great. I’ve been married five times and I’m engaged to my sixth wife. We were going to get married last year on the 35th anniversary of the hotel, but she rang me up from Vienna and said, “Tony why did you lie to me?”
She said, “I’ve been speaking to two friends of yours and they said she couldn’t marry me because I was already married.”
I said, “Oh bullshit, what would they know about it?”
So I phoned my wife in Dubai and said, “Are we still married?”
“Baby, you know we are. We went to get divorced, we got everything ready for it but when we got to the bank you didn’t have any money and I wanted two and a half million euros.”
I said, “You’re worth every penny.” I was with her for 14 years — she was a good wife. So I sold the hotel to get the money, which is a shame. But now they’re saying they want me to say. I’ve got a room for life here.
After all these years is there any night here that particularly stands out?
There are a lot of them. I guess Freddie Mercury’s party. He called me into his room one day that used to be called Julio’s room. He said, “Why’s it called Julio’s room?”
I said, “It’s named after Julio Iglesias, the international singer.”
“What about me?” he said. “Where’s the Freddie room?”
I said, “You keep singing and one day maybe you’ll get your room.” I was being facetious but I had a great rapport with him.
His birthday was the biggest private party on the island. But all the parties have been good. This life is different. I live in utopia.
What about the days when you need to go to the supermarket or sort your bills out?
No, I don’t do that. That’s mundane stuff. I live life to the full every day. It’s what keeps me young.
Have you got any regrets in life?
Nope, no regrets.
Being an 80 years old man living in utopia, what would your advice be to someone slightly younger?
In my opinion the only way you can make it is to work your arse off. I started without a penny and no education but I know how to work. When I started this place with my girlfriend we used to go down to San Antonio early in the morning, pick up all the derelicts sleeping on the beach and I’d line them up like Lee Marvin in the Dirty Dozen and say, “Listen, you’ve got the job. I’ll pay you 150 pesetas an hour and if you do your work you’ve got the job. Work half as much as me and I’ll pay you.”
Most of them by noon were finished. They’d all gone across the fields. It was very, very difficult to get the place built. And then you’ve got planning coming up and asking you if we’ve got permission and they’d try and shut you down.
I’ve been put in prison here. I was put in a pit. You go down there and the police are four stories above you with rifles and you’re in a dirt pit looking up. Now one guy there spoke English. He said, “Tony, you’re a nice man. They’re going to lock the stalls later on so you make sure you get one by yourself or you’ll get raped all night long and there’s nothing you can do about it ‘cause the guys don’t listen.”
Now the Spanish law is that you can’t do more than 72 hours inside without a charge so I thought all I had to do was 72 hours then I’d be out, but this blond headed guy said he’d been there a month.
“But what about the law?” I said.
“There is no law,” he said. “The law is those coppers up there with the rifles and they can do as they wish.”
Custom bedsheets featuring Tony and his mates
Was there a lot of this sort of thing when you first started? Was there a feeling of animosity from the locals for starting this place?
I never walked around being big headed, but I gradually became very well known. It’s a good business but it’s never made any profit as I wasn’t in it for money — I was in it for lifestyle.
I got the greatest compliment ever one day when I walked in to the restaurant one day and Julio Iglesias was having lunch and he said, “Tony, I envy you.”
I said, “Mate, you’ve got a 41 million dollar airport and I’ve got a fucking bicycle. How come you envy me?”
“I’m not talking about riches, I’m talking about lifestyle.”
I walked out of the bar with tears in my eyes. Here was the nicest man in show business saying that he envied me. I’d made it. I’d done it.
Do you reckon you’ve cracked life?
Most people don’t have the tenacity to keep going. It doesn’t come easy. I’ve achieved a lifestyle second to none. I’ve got Julio saying he envies me. Ron Rice, the founder of Hawaiian Tropic is a multi-millionaire with two 747s and he says he envies me. I’m doing something right.
Why do you think you’re still here?
I love life and I love women. I should have been a lesbian. I don’t want it to end. I want to live a few more years.
What’s going on tonight then?
I don’t know. I never plan. If you make plans they all come unstuck. I just go along with the flow.
Howard Marks is knocking around here at the moment making a book with you. You said they were going to make a film too. What’s that going to be about?
They’ve already made a film about me. But it didn’t get finished. I was going to be played by that good looking man from Hollywood. What’s he called?
I don’t know… Robert Redford likes to think he’s good looking.
No, before him — a very good looking man. I had dinner with him once. Anyway, they had him talking to this blonde, who was an actress. And the camera was moving around — camera work is always important. She’s talking to him and the camera goes down his body to his fly. You see a hand go across and open the fly. The camera goes to her face and she goes, “WOW.” You don’t have to say anything — that says it all. And then I die. But it was nicely done, it wasn’t morbid.
And with that sleazy-yet-poignant image, I leave Tony Pikes sat on the edge of a sun lounger as he finally submits to the power of sleep.
Roman Candle Magazine 