COPYRIGHT

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by The Friday Project in 2015

Copyright © Dan Richards 2015

Cover Layout Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover by Stanley Donwood

Dan Richards asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008105211

Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780008105228

Version: 2015-09-11

For Jo

Many are prepared to suffer for their art. Few are prepared to learn to draw.

– Simon Munnery

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

INTRODUCTION/LIMINAL SPACE

BILL DRUMMOND

RICHARD LAWRENCE

STANLEY DONWOOD

JENNY SAVILLE

DAVID NASH

MANIC STREET PREACHERS

DAME JUDI DENCH

CALLY CALLOMON

SHERYL GARRATT

VAUGHAN OLIVER

JANE BOWN

STEVE GULLICK

STEWART LEE

THE BUTCHER OF COMMON SENSE

ROBERT MACFARLANE

EPILOGUE

Footnotes

The Butcher of Common Sense Footnotes

Thanks

Bibliography

Discography

List of Illustrations

About the Author

Also by Dan Richards

About the Publisher

LIMINAL SPACE

In the summer of 2006 I moved to Norwich from my family home in Bristol to begin a Creative Writing MA at the Art School.

It was a year since I’d graduated from an English Literature and Philosophy BA at the University of East Anglia. I had spent the intervening months working in a bookshop staffed entirely by graduates sheltering from an indifferent world, presided over by a weirdly ageless Brylcreemed man who, when he wasn’t smoking on the roof – arcing his dog-ends languidly into the yard of the adjacent church – would lock himself in his attic office or materialise at your elbow to relate how his father nursed the captive Rudolf Hess.

The shop had a very limited selection of Art books and an even meaner smattering of Photography and Transport.* There was no demand, we were told, and it was this message that we passed on to any customer who enquired, taking great pleasure in directing them up to the ‘better stocked, less expensive shop’ at the top of the road (‘where we would much prefer to work’).

I had no idea what I was doing at the shop but day after day I’d be there, going through the motions of retail. I’d reached an impasse. It was relatively easy work and brought in a small wage, which I’d eke out during the week so I could catch a train to the South Coast to see my girlfriend at weekends. Sometimes I’d get to Brighton and she’d be happy to see me. Sometimes not. Sometimes she’d say, ‘I’m not sure how I feel about you being here … turning up like this …’ and I’d freeze there on the doorstep; tired and punctured, foolish – as if I’d spoilt the most simple of tasks: just turn up and don’t be shit.

Life in Barcelona-on-Sea unravelled as a mess of well-meant gestures and hissed upset. I was sure we had it in us to be happy but we weren’t; we really weren’t.

This went on for months.

I’d think about us all the week while stickering 3 for 2s or directing people up the road, but in my head she smiled more and shouted less.

In retrospect I’d been sleepwalking through many things. She left fairly suddenly. She had indeed been unhappy for a long time. I received a postcard quoting Virginia Woolf’s suicide note as an unequivocal gesture of severance.

That was it.

I moved up to Norwich earlier than planned and drank a lot of gin on my own in a conservatory.

Then I got a cat.

Then I got a night job washing dishes in a pub.

I’d return home in the small hours covered in sink dross, drink more gin and complain to the cat about love.

It became clear that I needed direction, to begin something new, or I’d go mad, fill my sink-drossed smock with bricks and throw myself into a pond.

I threw myself into the art school instead.

• • • • •

In the weeks before term started, I began working in the Student Union bar – a large timber-beamed hall above the canteen – a building which put me in mind of St Pancras Station, all mustard brickwork, corkscrew chimneys and gothic arches; an eccentric building which seemed to embody the idea of an art school.

Accessed up a spiral staircase in a turret tucked away, the bar had a welcoming, secret feel and it was always great to see freshers double-take on first discovery, as I had – caught out by the size of the space, drawn in by the warmth towards the silhouetted people clustered around long tables and stood at the bar while candle shadows flickered the roof joists high above.

Like a massive womb … with Jägermeister.

Hulking cast-iron radiators hugged the walls and creaked, their heat rippling the curtains. The hall was always warm, even on the dark mornings as I swept and served coffee to the few brave souls awake – or yet to go to sleep.

On quiet evenings, the staff would play Scrabble or perch at the bar and talk, and it was on one of these slow nights that Rob, the manager, and I hit upon the idea of an airship.

We were staring into space, I remember; talking about the bar.

At this point the bar was one of the few places in the school where students could exhibit their work, and the walls, ledges and large windowsills were crammed with sculptures and paintings. A huge canvas by Bill Drummond hung on one side of the hall which said GET YOUR HAIR CUT, one of a series of works the artist had lent to Rob to display in the bar. I think Rob and I were talking about this as we stared up into the eaves, discussing GET YOUR HAIR CUT, the student art on show, the roof – our conversation spinning off at intervals but always arcing back to large student work and the roof space.

That morning I had been exploring Norwich and discovered the brass plaques on the doors of City Hall which depict the history and trades of the town. One showed an engineer working with a propeller – a reference to the firm Boulton & Paul Ltd, a general manufacturing firm which built aircraft and airships among other things.*

Talking to the art school caretakers about the doors later that week I was told how Boulton & Paul Ltd had won the contract to construct the frame of the fateful R101 airship in the 1920s, then the largest aircraft ever built.* One old boy recalled being held aloft as the ship flew over Norwich on a test flight.

‘The whole city stopped to watch it circle and pass. Everyone was out in the streets.’*

Maybe R101 was circling and passing through my mind that night because the conversation about GET YOUR HAIR CUT, student work, and the roof came to rest on me, suggesting the construction of a large-scale airship above the bar. That would be brilliant, we agreed; and then went back to staring into space.

• • • • •

A week passed. I knew Rob had probably forgotten about our conversation and I still had every opportunity to forget it too and walk away, but the seed was sown and the space was there, waiting. I couldn’t look up any more without seeing the negative space of a large, ominous airship hanging there, goading me.

• • • • •

A month into the winter term I had drawn and researched to a point where I’d some idea of the airship’s size. I wanted the balloon to loom in a big room and as such it would have to be large. Six metres long, perhaps; over a metre in diameter. Also, it would have to be light so as to hang from the trusses without causing damage and, most importantly, look right. If weighty and over-engineered it would look wrong, I knew – it had to appear to float. Wood and paper, then – flexible, strong woods covered in paper like a kite.

However, it became clear that there wasn’t the space for me to build it in the art school workshops. I remember I sought out a technician and we paced the airship out; too big. Not that there seemed a surfeit of students making massive wooden things; not that there seemed much being made at all – the wood workshops seemed principally employed to make canvas stretchers and the main wood of choice appeared to be ‘ply’.

My rough notes about the ‘springing/laminate potential of beech and birch’ were met with polite concern. I was pointed towards the birch ply and chipboard.

‘That’s not really wood, though, is it?’ I asked the technician.

I think he took that rather hard.

I decided to let it lie.

Within a week it wasn’t the woodwork which concerned me as much as the people coming out of it to ask why I, a student on a two-year part-time writing MA, wanted to build things at all.

• • • • •

I am writing this introduction a couple of years after the events I’m describing and it’s strange to think now but my idea of an art school can’t really exist any more. The new fee system introduced after my time in Norwich has brought an end to the idea of studying with an open mind ‘just to see what happens’. I don’t think you can really do that if you’re paying £30,000.

The notion of value has shifted and the vocational is king once more. To pay out so much ‘just to see what happens’ seems decadent; the fees will surely cost out those unsure of what they want to become, or looking for an adventure.

Jarvis Cocker expressed the idea well:

‘As much as I wanted to study something, I went to Saint Martin’s because I just wanted to get out of Sheffield. I just looked at the colleges and it said, “This one is on Charing Cross Road”, so I thought, “Great, three years in Soho. Summat’s going to happen.” And it did.’*

To arrive in a space and be inspired to make art by its fabric and atmosphere – if I’d been asked what my ideal of an art school was before I arrived in Norwich, that would have been close … but maybe we’ve moved into a post-impulsive airship epoch.

Today, all government funding cut, I note the school has closed down my course and moved towards a more logical, verifiably employable roster of subjects – the abstruse hinterlands of Fine Art and Sculpture squeezed in favour of the more honest fare of Fashion, Graphic Design and Animation; a white sea of Macs sweeping all before it.

But let’s return to the winter of 2006 and the wood workshop where I’m not going to work and look around. There are tools here. The ones on show are old and battered. The better ones are locked away, we’re told, because otherwise they’d walk. Security is a problem and the technician cannot be everywhere at once, so the available kit walks and the rest is kept hidden.

Paranoia permeates the space and I feel bad for the technician, who’s doubtless doing his best but he’s under pressure and having to take on responsibilities beyond his original remit. In this context it’s reasonable to suppose that writers on part-time MAs talking about ambitious zeppelin projects would be given short shrift. He has to be there. He’s put upon. He’s busy. I bet he had people in there ‘talking’ all the time. Time wasters, charlatans, and opportunists – out to nick the shiny G-clamps, light-fingered magpies with asymmetric haircuts. Bastards to a man!

Now, it’s all very well writing this down with hindsight and retrospect and all the other tools available after the event – indulging in a bit of the third person to suggest a distance between now and then, the school and me, the technician and me – but it’s important to say that I didn’t help my cause.

I don’t like confrontation. Hate it. I felt plywood wasn’t the way to go and should have stood my ground, but it was much easier to smile along and nod and agree we should order a load of it and then run away; it was the hiding for the next two years which proved tricky, especially since the wood workshop stood at the entrance to one of the main buildings at the school and I knew I’d upset a man with a large collection of hammers.*

• • • • •

In early 2007 I travelled down to Henley-on-Thames to ask a pair of boat builders how best to construct an airship.

En route to London, the previous week, I’d spoken to my father at length about the project and he’d suggested that to question received wisdom, to experiment, fail and learn, was the point of a degree. Better to fail on your own terms than be led astray and compromise:

‘You know, you’ll spend ages building it out of the wrong stuff to please someone else, it’ll go wrong and you’ll end up smashing it up with an axe, or something …’ he pronounced near Heston Services, adding, ‘You’ve made your bed now anyway.’ *

• • • • •

Colin Henwood and Richard Way know about wood and their knowledge is deep. At our first meeting we sat in the shed at the heart of their yard and talked around the airship – unpacking each possible solution, weighing the ways it could be done. This took quite some time since it turned out I had many options – different woods, fixings, joints, glues; each with their own character and peculiarities.

Their enthusiasm for the project, my doodled sketches and the mooted materials spilled out along tangents and into stories about craft.

At that first meeting, Richard spoke of his work with wood and boats, his tools and concerns, with a love and mesmeric intensity that affected me deeply and has subsequently shaped this book. He put the idea in motion that people who love what they do, are immersed and consumed by their work, are wont to speak about it with an engaging and infectious generosity. There was no cynicism when he spoke, just a simple clarity of thought, of process and labour, and this was to set a pattern for many subsequent exchanges I was to have; in fact it’s largely due to Richard’s enthusiasm and lucidity that I went out and sought those exchanges at all. I’d taken along a rudimentary Dictaphone to record our chat – and it was to be a chat, a casual meeting for which I’d made no notes other than rough drawings and annotations in my journal. I suppose I imagined I’d be there an hour or two. But two hours turned into four, and lunch, and as dusk fell we three were still talking. I didn’t want it to end, it was such a pleasure. When I got home I transcribed the tape and happily listened to the day over again.* Below is a little of our conversation, beginning with Richard describing his daily routine:

‘I start at half past seven during the week and finish at six o’clock. I used to work much longer. My first experience of boat building was working at a time when there was much too much work and not enough people so we used to work through till ten o’clock at night or one o’clock in the morning and that went on month after month so I got very used to terribly long hours. You can’t do that when you get to my age, it just becomes too exhausting.’

What age were you when you started?

‘I was twenty-one. It was tiring but at that age you can do enormous amounts of work and still get up the following morning and do it again. Young people are always half out of control anyway, aren’t they? (Laughs)

I discovered shortly after I started that I much preferred using tools that had been used before. It wasn’t a conscious decision to begin with but … I can feel a lot through my hands. I’ve got a very delicate sense of feeling and just felt that new tools were very sharp, all their edges were very sharp, and I much preferred buying old tools that were quite worn but still very usable.

You always buy some things new because you want the full length of a long paring chisel, for example, but gradually I’ve swapped over all the ones I bought new for older ones I’ve found. It didn’t become an obsession, thankfully, but I decided that I liked knowing about tools, so I read a lot of books and I used to buy tools when job-lots came up at local auctions, and sometimes I’d get them from people I knew, so that meant I’d tools that reminded me of the man who owned them before. I’ll pick a tool up and think, “Ah, that’s Pat Wheeler’s – the old boy who lived in the village.” It brings a picture up in my mind which is rather fine and it’s nice to know that your tools have done other work, you know; generations of work.

At home in my workshop, I’ve tools that are centuries old – Georgian chisels, things like that, and they’re absolutely magnificent. I’ve got Georgian wooden planes, braces, and drills, extraordinary things …’

At this point Colin pointed ruefully to Richard’s toolbox – a blanket box on caster wheels – a hefty laden chest:

‘As you can see, Dicky hasn’t brought very many tools with him today …’

And as we laughed I became aware that the scope of my project was opening out, alive in the room, after so many months of being closed down. I was engaged with people who knew what they were doing. The spectral airship flew here too – more than that – buoyed by enthusiasm, it lived.

For the next few months, every chance I got, I travelled home to Bristol to build the ship of my imagination – 200 miles from the art school bar as the crow flew.

The body of an airship is a collection of variously sized hoops fixed together with cross braces – dirigibles generally have a keel like a boat, their skeleton frame distinguishing them from blimps, which are essentially bags that use gas pressure to maintain their shape.

To start with I set about making twenty hoops of various sizes – each as thin and strong as possible, each formed of three or four layers of beechwood. Beech has a fine grain which lends it a strength and flexibility suited for shaping and moulding – for this reason it is used a great deal in furniture making. I built up a laminate sandwich of wood/glue/wood/glue/wood around circular template formers, each a slightly different diameter – clamping each complaining lath length tight until it set, before adding the next.* My first efforts were fairly awful but gradually I learnt what I was doing and the hoops began to take a more uniform, circular shape.

Successful rings were laid out on the floor like ripples; pear-shaped failures were taken outside and burnt.

While laminates dried in their jigs, I moved on to the nose and tail. Again, this was trial and error and the thought that it was all going to fall apart or bow (and then fall apart) was never far from my mind; but I was fathoming the beech and coming to respect its toughness. Once layered up and glued into shape it was steadfast. The material didn’t lie. When I botched I couldn’t blame the beech, which often called my bluff; refusing to be undone – wood and glue having become a sturdy third thing – hoop or half-uncoiled mess.

Four tailplanes were measured and marked on board, sawn up, sanded and slotted together – aerofoil ribs fixed at regular intervals looking beaky and svelte.

The dust was flying from the bandsaw blade, sketched revisions and tea stains filled my notebooks, and solvents daubed my boiler suit and stunk out my hair. At the end of each day, on the train journey home, I’d peel PVA from my hands.

The nose cone went together fairly quickly with a similarly slot-oriented approach to the fins – the profile of the front dome built up in segments to form a pointy jelly mould, a hollow cupola built around the smallest of my beech hoops; a card skinned nib.

An assembly frame was made on which to build the kit of bits. Thin stringer laths were cut to fix across the hoops and form the rigid frame – skeleton cigar … late nights listening to the radio, sugary tea and pencil shavings – ticking off the parts lists until early summer, when I packed up the airship like a pasta tangram into a Volvo Estate.*

My MA, meanwhile, was going well. I was writing strictly relevant pieces for my course and moonlighting with zeppelins the rest of the time.* As the first year finished and the long summer break between the first and second year stretched ahead, I was setting out my kit in the union bar, ready for the build.

Up went the frame with its central jig. On went the hoops, held by spars. Everything was clamped and cable-tied at this point since nothing was straight or square.

This part of the project was time-lapse filmed for posterity and the early footage shows me deploying tape measure and spirit level with enthusiasm. Lying on my back beneath the fuselage, head scratching, wandering off, wandering back with tea and a pencil, losing and hunting for the pencil, making notes, fiddling with string; like Buster Keaton … that was week one.

Week two saw the keels* glued into place and the tail cone taking shape.

Week three was a bit of a write-off since I spent much of it undoing laths stuck into place under the influence of Guinness Export. The wrong place. Wonkily.

The nose was fixed in week four and the rest of the stringers followed. Because of the ship’s size, lath strips had to be seamed together at intervals with scarf joints, the two lengths cut with a taper and joined to form a continuous span. The scarfs were positioned at intervals so as not to create weak spots in the frame.

Week five, the tail fins went on; the central spars were cut and removed. The ship was carried off the stage and hung from its top keel for the first time, swinging slightly on its new jib. The team of bar staff who’d helped me lift and relocate it stood back.

‘Bit big, isn’t it?’ said Rob, looking warily up at the beams, and it was true; away from the stage and out in the room the airship did look massive.

‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured him, ‘I’ve done some maths and it only weighs as much as your legs.’

This seemed to settle him down.*

• • • • •

All the time I was building the airship, especially in those final weeks, I was distracted. A couple of years later, Stewart Lee nailed the feeling:

‘You often don’t realise that you’re working on something in your head until it’s formed – you might have had something that you thought you were doing for fun or was just interesting to you but suddenly you realise that it’s all adding up into the shape of an idea.’

Now built – out of my head and over there, causing Rob to fret about the beams – I saw the airship as a manifest preoccupation.

It wasn’t just an airship built on a whim; it was a reaction – an elephant in the room – everything the art school seemed to be turning away from;* a large, ambitious, crafted wooden piece of work which mirrored and celebrated the building around it, inspired by the ghosts of the city. I believed in the fabric of the bar and school and wished to celebrate that. The building was benign, inspiring and positive; it was the people at the top who concerned me.

Looking down the beech laths at the scarf joints, I felt the calm assurance of the materials and saw the influence of Richard and Colin in Henley-on-Thames and my father back in Bristol. The airship had put me in touch with them and articulated their knowledge better than words. The process was a language, lucid and succinct. It had an integrity.

I had faith in the wood and glue.

On 15 August 2007 I made the following note in my diary:

Today the bar paid for a set of ropes and pulleys and hired a scaffold tower.

I keep finding notes I’ve written about ‘People who know what they’re doing.’

I work here, in this room. The airship is site-specific.

The room is the space I respond to.

Does this happen to other people?*

• • • • •

The scaffolding tower was assembled one weekend shortly before the start of the new school year. From the top it was clear that the eaves were a lot higher than they seemed from the bar far below. Three of us scaled the gantry to hang ropes and thread the pulleys and shortly afterwards the airship was winched into the air for the first time accompanied by a blast of ‘When the Levee Breaks’.*

It was up.

From beneath, its lines merged and intercut the wood of the roof, putting me in mind of Orozco’s Mobile Matrix, a suspended whale skeleton,* and as the concentric graphite circles drawn on those bones radiated out, overlapped and distorted, so the beams moved through the cage of beechwood above our heads now. The few of us there in the moments after it was raised walked up and down below as the airship swam.

Later I sat on the stage at the back of the hall and looked at it for an hour or two, watching it settle in the ropes. It was up; unpapered and naked for now but that could be addressed over time.

But the important thing, as Rob pointed out, was that the stage was now freed up for the pool table because, say what you like about arty kids in an arty bar, they loved their pool: ‘You know, given the choice between an arty airship and pool …’

Luckily such a nightmarish choice was never forced upon them.

The new term started and I went back to my MA, papering the airship on Sunday mornings with tissue paper donated by Habitat.* I was helped in this task by Virginie Mermet, a brilliant French girl.*

We’d arrive early and open all the windows to ventilate the stale ale air before making tea and lowering the airship down. Tissue was cut into strips and applied with aircraft dope – a varnish that tautened and strengthened the paper as it dried while giving us headaches and mild hallucinations.

During these mornings we’d talk about ideas of artists and space and listen to Klaus Nomi.* Virginie was of the opinion that all artists create and respond to a space, be it site-specific sculpture like the airship or an environment attuned to making work. We spoke about photographs we’d seen of Francis Bacon’s studio and Roald Dahl’s shed, concepts of theatre and atmosphere; the idea that a resonance of creativity can remain in a building long after the people have gone and the function altered.

Kitchens, boat yards, studios, halls, sheds, rehearsal rooms, cellars, theatres, roofs, gardens, landscapes, vehicles – inspiring and facilitating artistry.

Some spaces must bear witness to a process while others stimulate it – become steeped in it. While some buildings evolve over decades into a perfect working environment, others are built for that purpose from scratch, others will be a compromise; some permanent, some fleeting, some known about and public, some private, even hidden.

That night as an experiment, I wrote a few pages about the broadcaster John Peel. Under the heading ATMOSPHERE, I recalled my second-year house at university; Thursday night, a large cold bedroom where the living room should have been. A desk, a set of shelves, a dicey gas fire, a bed, a wardrobe.

I’m sat at the desk in a thick jumper, illuminated by a balanced-arm lamp and the flicker of a radio set handed down from my mother – bought during the three-day weeks of the seventies because it could take batteries.

I’m listening to John Peel.

Thursday was not a pub night, Thursday was the night John broadcast his programme direct from his Stowmarket home, Peel Acres. Thursdays were sacrosanct. I remember taping Mono, The Black Keys and Four Tet sessions, listening with my finger hovering over the red button on the deck.

My diary of 13 May 2004 records that John played four session tracks by The Izzys and I enjoyed them very much. He opened the show with the greeting ‘Hello, brothers and sisters, and welcome to Peel Acres’ – very much the spirit behind those Thursdays; he was welcoming the audience into his home, where he sat playing tracks he thought we might like to hear – something new. Something by Jazzfinger or The Fall, say; the jet-wash of Part Chimp or The Izzys in session covering Richard and Linda Thompson.

Amazing to think how intimate it all felt – a man in his house in conversation with the world but broadcasting to you. A public service.

I remember the quiet of my room then, the crackle of the radio and the feeling of connectivity.

John Peel died in October 2004.*

In 2008 I wrote to his wife, Sheila Ravenscroft:

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

• • • • •

In his book Waterlog, Roger Deakin describes a seemingly impossible swan dive made by a market-worker in the 1920s from the copper turret of the Norwich art school, over Soane’s St George’s Street Bridge and into the River Wensum.

A friend lent me the book towards the end of my degree and I raced through it, drinking up the words on water, wild swimming and landscape. A few minutes after discovering the Norwich nosedive passage, I was stood on the same bridge, text in hand, eyes skyward, trying to join the dots – turret, bridge, river. Copper, sky, Wensum – but the orbit did not fit.

I went back to my work on the airship, disbelieving – imagining the lad Goodson arcing, plunging head first and arrow-like – aiming at the water, his eyes brim-full of bridge.

I returned at lunchtime but the bridge was no thinner than before.

Did Roger Deakin stand here too? I wondered. Did he weigh the thing up?

Waterlog and Deakin’s subsequent book, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, suggested a course beyond art school.

Writing in 2010, his friend Robert Macfarlane described him as

‘a film-maker, environmentalist and author who is most famous for his trilogy of books about nature: Waterlog, Wildwood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm. I say “nature”, but his work can perhaps best be understood as the convergence of three deeply English traditions of rural writing: that of dissent tending to civil disobedience (William Cobbett, Colin Ward), that of labour on the land (Thomas Bewick, John Stewart Collis), and that of the gentle countryman or the country gentleman, of writer as watcher and phrenologist (Gilbert White, Ronald Blythe).’*

I had a lot of questions, had gone off piste with my MA to fill gaps in my heuristic knowledge and in so doing become convinced that something was amiss and the answers lay elsewhere, in the heads and hands of people at work.

Roger Deakin walked out to meet the people who knew – who swam, worked wood, dwelt and engaged with the land. Meeting with people in the spaces where they worked and lived, he found communion and kinship. Perhaps I, in light of the Beechwood Airship, could do the same and find some resolution … because the postmodern doublethink of the art school seemed a very lonely thing – a vacuum occasioned to funnel and mould the kids in a system where talk of aesthetic judgement is muted and neutered, shrugged off as subjective.

Such a cheap trick! A spiteful closing down of the cosmos and, I couldn’t help but think now, having clashed against the axioms of the institution, that their dogma was self-serving and unfit to underpin a job of work in the world beyond their walls.

I knew of graduates turned out as graphic designers with almost no knowledge of its history – the roll-call: Brody, Beck, Oliver, Saville, Kare and Scher passing without a flicker – set up to be a caricature with no depth to their knowledge beyond a syllabus which ticked the school’s boxes – eggshell graduates who’d only been pressed top down.

But then, perhaps this does the tutors a disservice, perhaps it wasn’t their fault – maybe they were under pressure to deliver a certain sort of course – perhaps the onus should be on the student to broaden their knowledge. Shouldn’t a degree be all-consuming? The past and present insatiably mined out, the future dreamt, the vocation so pressing that each new contextual source is gorged? But I knew from my own encounters that students were being dissuaded from going too far away from their prescribed course remit. Peregrination was not encouraged, cross-course collaboration dissuaded – at an art school! Surely that was wrong or was I being unreasonable?

No. You need more. You need enough rope to either hang yourself or create something great. And sometimes you need to get out on the road and discover it, physically seek and experience it for yourself – whatever that is.

Take risks. Get your hands dirty.

Bill Drummond’s totemic GET YOUR HAIR CUT and the MAKE SOUP that replaced it seemed a good place to start.

Where did he work? I wondered.

The final weeks of art school found me serving rowdy intemperance to student types on weeknights while Sundays passed in quiet concentration, Virginie and I lying side by side on the floorboards of the SU bar: papering the airship, strung out on psychotropic varnish fumes, listening to Klaus Nomi.

BILL DRUMMOND (1953– ) is a Scottish artist, musician and writer who came to prominence in the 1980s with his band The KLF. He achieved notoriety after burning one million pounds in cash as part of his art project the K Foundation. He is the author of several books and is the founder of countless art, music and media projects as well as the writer of two solo albums.

BILL DRUMMOND

St Benedicts Street, Norwich

Summer 2007

I’m building my airship in the Student Union; a month to go before the autumn term and the hall is empty. It’s early and brilliant sunlight pours down from the cinquefoil windows above me, flooding the low stage where I work.

I enjoy being here out of hours. I have the run of the building from as early until as late as I like.

Most of the student art and canvases have been stored over the summer – to be hung up again once the bar reopens – so the white walls are bare except for one large red and yellow canvas which looms to my left as I look down the room: MAKE SOUP.*

I like MAKE SOUP. It greets me every morning with bright clarity and purpose. The framed text beneath it reads:

NOTICE

Take a map of the British Isles. Draw a straight line diagonally across the map so that it cuts through Belfast and Nottingham. If your home is on this line, contact soupline@penkilnburn.com Arrangements will be made for Bill Drummond to visit and make one vat of soup for you, your family, and your close friends.

I appreciate the simplicity and generosity behind this venture. I like soup, for one, but also I like the sense of quest, the bold colours, the aesthetic of the large stark letters − four and four, MAKE SOUP – the fact Bill will rock up and physically make you literal soup with his actual hands.

I look on Bill’s Penkiln Burn website and find that there are many more canvases of the same size and style − PREPARE TO DIE, SILENCE, DRAW A LINE, 40 BUNCHES OF DAFFODILS, STAY − each with an attendant story and aim.

I ponder what a BLOODY GREAT AIRSHIP canvas would look like; three words, one above the other. I sketch it in my notebook.

• • • • •

March 2009

Bill’s workshop is a grey unit with a roll-shutter front, solid and anonymous on a ring road industrial estate … outside Norwich.* As the shutter rises it reveals a stacked interior. I follow him into the space, stepping over piles of books and magazines, around walls of filing cabinets and heaped boxes into a clearing with a large canvas suspended upside down on a stretch of bare white wall − . White on red. Bill rummages in a cupboard and emerges with a handful of bungee leads, picks the canvas up and makes his way back out to the Land Rover, before climbing onto the substantial roof rack to secure it there. I ask what happens to his older, redundant signs; Bill says he paints over them.

Rather than the portentous figure I’d been expecting, Bill seems a quiet, thoughtful man – far more tolerant and humorous than I’d imagined. On the drive back into town I think over the disparity between the Bill with the reputation for dark shenanigans that I’d read about in preparation for this meeting and Bill the enthusiastic instigator of spontaneous choir The17 because it’s the latter who’s sat beside me now, imagining aloud waking up tomorrow to find all recorded music had disappeared.

• • • • •

Later that day − Norwich Arts Centre

A dark hall. Set up on a stage at one end is The17 canvas collected this morning. On the floor down the middle of the room runs a white line, bisecting the eighty or so chairs on which people are starting to sit, filing into the gloom from the light outside. Shuffling to a seat while their eyes adjust.

Between the seats and the stage is a table.

On the table sit a laptop and an Anglepoise lamp. The lamp is the only light in the room and the room − once a church − is large, with a high black vault and pillars that mark out the nave and frame the stage and table.

More chairs fill, more shuffling, low whispers.

Bill appears and walks to the front to a scattered applause and sits down to face the audience.

‘Hello,’ he says, ‘my name is Bill Drummond and you are The17.’

Thereafter the audience, myself included, are told the story of The17, how it grew from the sounds in Bill’s head as a child and his lifelong love of choral music; how Bill tried to fight the music, which welled while he drove his Land Rover, tried to ignore it, but how he found it swirled and coalesced with other ideas he was having about the way music in the twentieth century − recorded, manufactured, sold and now ubiquitous − had lost touch with time, place, event and performance … how he’d sought to write these feelings out in under a hundred words; how he got it down to ninety:

Bill sells us the idea of The17, seduces the room. He sits in his circle of lamplight before the red canvas and reads out ALL RECORDED MUSIC and his sonorous Scots tones reverberate around the building, then he moves to another score, IMAGINE, and begins to form us into a choir − no previous musical experience necessary − to create a new music. Year zero now.

I can’t tell you much of what happened next because it would spoil the inherent mystery and magic of The17 as a uniquely immersive happening, but it’s enough to say that the choir, led by Bill, made sounds that swelled and filled the space, more moving and beautiful than I had ever expected and when we filed out of the building, blinking in the light, we were all grinning and buoyant and wanted to do it again.

• • • • •

Later still that day − Rob’s front room*

There is only one chair in the room where we later convene to talk. Bill sits on it. I sit on the floor. At this angle he appears even taller than he is – which is very tall.

The room is full of Bill’s work. About ten framed posters lean or hang on the walls having migrated from the art school bar.*

As we entered we passed two large canvases, GET YOUR HAIR CUT and MAKE SOUP. Since I last saw them in the union bar I’ve read, watched and researched the Drummond canon, spoken to fans, friends and collaborators and come to appreciate the extent of Bill’s range … and it’s fair to say MAKE SOUP is not the work that defines him in the public consciousness. No. That’d be THE MONEY;* an event chronicled in a film titled The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid.

I begin by asking if being Bill Drummond is sometimes a hindrance to work like The17.

‘It is something that I think about. Not all the time but … and I’m not the only person this happens to, it happens to most people that have done certain things. It casts a long shadow. I can feel that stuff I’ve done in the past will cast a shadow over whatever I do from here on in and there are times when that can get to me and it has influenced, to an extent, the way that I work. I have evolved ways of working where my name might not be attached to something.

It just so happens that piece thing behind you there, 40 BUNCHES OF DAFFODILS, that very thing, I’ve been doing that for about nine years now − I did it last week in Southend − and it’s got nothing to do with me. I go out in the street, I’m just a man, I’ve got a box of daffodils and I hand them out. There is no explanation. I don’t go out there to explain what it’s about. I do it and some people say, “What’s this about? Is this some sort of promotional thing?” and I say, “No no, I just want to give out forty bunches of daffodils.”’

Do you like that anonymity?

‘Yes, I like that. When Penguin were going to be putting out a book of mine called Bad Wisdom, at that point I wanted to call myself “W.E. Drummond” in that tradition of writers having two initials and their surname − which goes back to a time when most businesses were like that, WH Smith or whatever − but Penguin weren’t having it.

Whereas, when I first started doing The17, the first place we did it in the UK was in Newcastle. I’d posters designed just saying “The17 − a choir, blah blah” and I thought, “Wow, this looks so good! Who wouldn’t want to come along to something called ‘The17’!?” Of course, tickets weren’t really selling and the guy said, “Look, Bill, we’re going to have to stick your name on this,” and I really didn’t want it to be but I realised that I had to. I do realise with The17, when I do it publicly here, I have to attach my name to it just to make it work. I still balance doing that with going into all sorts of places and doing The17 where they don’t know who I am. It doesn’t matter.’

Months later, when I mention this to Stanley Donwood, he laughs:

‘This is why I love Bill Drummond’s work; it’s a constant series of genuinely inspired and brilliant ideas that somehow always seem to go awry or sideways; a constant cycle of admitting he doesn’t know what he’s doing and is probably naive or an idiot; but so fired with it. I find that inspiring. You know, who wouldn’t want to go along to something called “The17” with a great red painted sign? I would.’

Do you think your media caricature as a money-burning pop star has hindered the message and impact of subsequent work?

‘I know what you’re saying. I don’t know. I think I live a pretty unsociable life so I don’t get into situations much where these conversations can happen. I’m usually so focused or wrapped up in what I’m doing at that moment … Even when I’m being interviewed by a journalist, they don’t seem to ask those questions or maybe they tip-toe around them but then, when they write up their piece … it’s there. Maybe the first third of the feature will be a potted history of Bill Drummond. They feel that, if they don’t put all that in, whoever is reading the piece won’t know who this person they’re writing about is and I don’t know if that’s because I’ve never particularly gone out to have a large profile as a personality, maybe they’ve got to give that history to say, “Look, this person has been working for quite a long time in some sort of way and there’s some sort of thread here that leads through to where he’s at now …” I don’t know.’

You’ve always pursued that thread with a strong work ethic; is that linked to your Scottishness?

‘It is that, it’s very much that; that’s the background I come from, that’s the attitude. I’ve never been drawn to decadence. I’ve never been drawn to that thing of “the wild artist”, it just doesn’t interest me. The work ethic is … it’s not work for work’s sake. I get wrapped up. I get driven. The big motivation is that “life is short”. I’ve got a lot of things I want to get done. I could die tonight, that’s always there; and I’m always excited by what I’m doing. Exploration. The next thing.’

Do you see a pattern or progression in your work?

‘Usually, I can look back on what I’ve done − or look into myself − and see a theme. It’s almost always like I’m gnawing at the same bone or scratching the same wound. The17 this afternoon and “Doctorin’ the Tardis” − in one sense they’re a million miles apart, in another sense they come from a very similar place.’*

• • • • •

You often relate your ideas and journeys in a very characteristic first-person style when you write – often in retrospect, often in the form of a diary or log.

‘Yes, although some of the time I cheat. Sometimes I write in the present tense although it’s been written after the event and I’m aware, in the sense that all writing is lying, that I’m telling a story so I’m leaving out a percentage of things in order to tie a thing together so that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and I will do that unconsciously. I don’t set out to do it but somehow I’ve learnt to do that. Sometimes I look back and think, “I’ve just learnt these tricks,” and sometimes I try to break free of that − I can see my own clichés.

I’d like to think I could write a proper book with one whole story, like a novelist does but I guess, for a successful novel and definitely a successful film, you have to have something that happens in the first ten minutes or the first X amount of pages in a novel that sets something up: Something has now happened that changes everything – you’ve got to get to the end for it to resolve itself, that’s what takes you through. That doesn’t really happen with my things.

You mentioned earlier that your writing is episodic, Dan. That’s what my stuff is and that’s what will stop it from ever crossing over commercially, I think. That’s the reason people can maybe get so far with one of my books and then go, “Okay, I get the picture,” you know? There’s no plot, it’s not going to go anywhere particularly.

‘When I was eighteen I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac − huge influence on me; that and Henry Miller is what got me wanting to write.

When they brought out the scroll of On the Road a couple of years ago I reread that and it was weird. I’m now, you know, quite a bit older than Jack Kerouac was when he died − he was young when he wrote it − and it’s only now that I realise “but there’s no story here, there’s nothing!” He could have cut that book off at any point, it has no conclusion.’

Has that influenced the way you see your role as a raconteur?

‘It was never a conscious thing; it wasn’t until me and Z, Mark Manning and I, went to New York to do Bad Wisdom* and we became like a double act, reading and telling the story, that I started learning how to actually talk to an audience. I knew I didn’t want to do it with a microphone. I knew I wanted to keep it as intimate as possible but I was aware that a craft was being learnt − it was an act to a certain extent but I knew that it also had to be for real. I know that, every time I go out and tell a story, like with The17 this afternoon, which I’ve told who knows how many times, I’ve got to somehow reach down into myself and make it real, in the same way as an actor has. Now, the last thing I ever wanted to be was an actor, but I know that’s what I’ve got to do and that has now become a big part, to use a cliché, of my practice as an artist; to get out there and tell stories and make it work, draw people in.

‘There’s another thing to this too. My dad was a minister in the Church of Scotland and in 1963 we did an exchange. He took over a church in a small town in North Carolina and the minister from that church worked at my dad’s church in Scotland. We went and lived in their house for three months and they came and lived in ours. Then, in 1993, we went back. It was just for a week or so but my dad was asked to give the sermon in the church there. Now, I grew up seeing my dad give sermons every week, as a kid, and I didn’t think about it, you know? “He’s just my dad.” When I was very young I’d be off into Sunday School by the time he got to the sermon … anyway, my dad was asked by the regular minister to come up and give the sermon, “We have Reverend Jack Drummond here …” and he got up out of the pew and started walking backwards down the aisle and started talking straight away. He got to the front and started going into it and I thought, “My dad’s got an act!” It had never crossed my mind (snaps fingers) and he was really good at it! He had them in the palm of his hand and the guy afterwards, the minister, said, “God, if I could roll my Rs like you, I’d be able to charge X amount more as a visiting preacher!” (Laughs) Which in this country, especially in Scotland, would never be said but that’s how Americans think, and I really learnt something from that. It’s not that I’m trying to imitate my father at all …’

But it’s in you.

‘It’s in me. And I realised I must have taken that in from a very early age − to get up and stand in front of an audience, no amplification, no band. You know, you’re not hiding behind the loud sounds of your guitar or the drums, or everything else, it’s not even that you’re hiding behind a tune. It’s just you and those people there and you’ve got to communicate something and leave something behind.’

You don’t think of yourself as a writer, though?

‘No. I’ve written books but I’m not a writer. I’ve made records but I’m not a musician. I can pick up a guitar or sit down at a keyboard and play some things but I don’t think of myself as a musician, never have done. I don’t think of myself as a writer, don’t think of myself as a painter … I went to art school by accident and I fell in love with painting. I was pretty good at painting too. That’s what I thought I was going to do and then, while I was there, I rebelled against the whole thing. Maybe I realised I wasn’t the genius I hoped I would be but I also thought, and this is going to sound arrogant, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life attempting to make things to sell to rich people.” You know, one-off things.

I was then beginning to read, as I said, Kerouac and Miller. I liked the idea that with writing you could buy the paperback, everybody could buy the paperback and it was the same everywhere; and the same with music − a seven-inch single. I wasn’t thinking of getting into pop music at that point but I thought − the example I gave myself at the time and remember writing about is that Andy Warhol’s seven-inch of “Penny Lane” by The Beatles is no better or worse than my version. I liked that democracy.

‘So, I walked out of art school, walked away from painting and thought, “Well, I’ll write. To do that, I’ll have to go and live life and do all sorts of jobs, go all over the place.” It’s not like I just wanted to sit down and write novels about relationships and all that kind of stuff. I wanted to get out there into the world and live a life but I realised after a while that I wasn’t really a writer. I don’t know at what point it dawned on me but I was actually doing everything with the head of somebody who’d gone through the British art school system circa early 1970s and that’s still the overriding thing. So the storytelling, doing the posters, coming up with a way of allowing myself to do the paintings all comes from that.’

You say ‘allowing myself to do the paintings’ and you do often seem to structure work around a dogma or set of rules − allowance and denial.

‘It’s not like I’m “into denial” like some sexual or perverse thing … It’s like when I was making three and a half minute pop records; there’s no point making them longer than three and a half minutes. The way that these things are communicated to people is via radio, initially, and radio stations don’t want to play anything longer than three and a half minutes. If it is, they start fading it or talking over it. Also, with a pop record, any record, any recorded music, you can only have it within so many megahertz − you can’t have really high sounds or really low sounds because it can’t exist on a piece of vinyl or an mp3.’

You see a beauty in restriction?

‘Yeah. Like, with oil paints – not that I use oil paints now – you know that this colour and that colour, they can’t mix chemically – so you’re always aware of it.

Doing the posters over the years, I always thought, “Trim it down. Trim it down.” Whereas they started off a lot wordier and there wasn’t much difference between the posters and the writing in the book.’

Are you happy with the term ‘artist’?

‘I’m never happy with that at heart, no, but anything else I try to come up with, it doesn’t work. There was a time when I thought, “No, I’m a poet, that’s what I am, just so happens I don’t use words …” and I tried to convince myself of that but I knew it was even more pretentious and would need even more explaining. There was a period when I was reading more poetry than I was looking at or thinking about art … I don’t know, saying you’re an artist has always had, maybe should have, that pretension. “Oh, you’re an artist are you? That what you think you are? You’re an artist now?” Pop record making was only (holds up thumb and index finger) that much of my life. There was a lot before and after that.’

The advent of The17 seemed to coincide with a shift in popular music away from the single voice to a more choral sound.

‘I think it’s a zeitgeist thing. I think I’m just part of a … this didn’t come into The17 book but I could have started from another point of view:

I buy an iPod. Theoretically, I can have every piece of music that I have ever wanted to listen to on there and I can listen to it when I want. So I get all these tracks and I start flicking through, this one, this one, this one − that’s just me though, jaded − but then I notice my thirteen-year-old doing the same thing, “flick, flick, flick, flick”, or she hears something on an advert, likes it, types it into Google, downloads it − whoosh, she has the band’s whole everything. She doesn’t know what decade they’re from, where they’re from but she’s got it all and maybe listens to it for a week and then it’s gone. Bang.

Next week it’s something else.

‘Something has vastly changed, really hugely changed. When I was a kid, to have an album cost you quite a bit of money. You invested in it. When you got it, if you didn’t like it, you accepted there were maybe only two tracks you liked but you worked at it and you ended up liking it, learnt to like it − that’s not going to happen now, it’s different and I’m not saying anything’s better or worse, it’s just changed. What’s happened since the whole downloading thing has kicked in big time is the live side − going to see the act live is far more important; last year with Leonard Cohen over here − whole generations said, “We’ve got to go and see Leonard Cohen.”

It doesn’t matter if they buy the album …’

It’s the event.

‘The event, yes. Look at the rise and rise of the amount of festivals. It may be a bubble that’s going to burst but it’s now about time, place and occasion – all of those things that I’m dealing with in a different way with The17 – that is what people are going for. It’s no longer contained within the recording.

Some people now, people more of your generation, fetishise vinyl and it’s young people who are buying into a want, a need for music to be more solid, the sleeves bigger …

So those are all reflections of that thing. Of course I hear Arcade Fire and Fleet Foxes and I love it but that’s just me, that’s because of my age and the way it reminds me of things from other times.

I didn’t bring it up this afternoon but I know, over the years, any time I’ve heard choral singing music my ears have gone out to it and that’ll be because I sang in choirs as a kid.’

Perhaps part of the magic of singing in church as a child is that you’re unaware of what you’re singing about.

‘It’s just the sounds, yes, and I’ve read recently how − I can’t remember the composer − he wanted less words, more long vowels and more harmonies because that’s what’s really being communicated. That’s what has the power in religious music. It’s not the words, it’s the sounds, it’s the voices.’

Are you finding that many members of The17 are being affected by the experience?

‘I don’t know. I don’t know enough people … I’ll go and do something like today but I don’t know what the long-term effect is. I’ve got no idea.’

• • • • •

Stoke Newington, London

March 2010

Bill is sitting on his roof − the roof where he writes, weather permitting.

It was here, surrounded by the ambient noise of outer London, that he wrote much of his book about The17*.

Earlier in the day, when I expressed concern that the portrait we’re here to take might look contrived, Bill patiently pointed out that, since he wasn’t in the habit of writing on his ledge with other people looming over him, it was contrived whether I liked it or not and we should probably just make the best of a contrived situation and not worry about it. So we do; Bill with his notebook and tea, Lucy and I teetering precariously above the guttering and the drop, trying to frame the shots.*

We speak about Lady Gaga. Bill loves Lady Gaga; loves her complete ease and ownership of pop. She has compromised nothing, he says, she has created a whole universe and now straddles it, unsurpassed.

Bill tells us that, for a few weeks last year, he and fellow ex-KLFer Jimmy Cauty were in agreement that the only thing which would tempt them back to pop music would be to work with Lady Gaga.

‘Jimmy said he was surprised she’s not telephoned us yet.’

• • • • •

After leaving Bill’s house, I’m struck by the thought that the way he records and narrates his work, however unreliably, may be a stratagem to buttress and bolster its shape – for himself as much as the layman. His world of mad doings only lines up in retrospect when viewed from the justified headlands of 17, How To Be An Artist and the other written records of his work. His books are accepted histories of a lifetime of tangential missions into the unknown and he takes such care to define the narrative path because he knows the chaotic abyss that lurks either side of his stated methodology.

Even the story that there’s no story – no meaning behind a decision – ‘Nothing to see here’, is a sleight of hand way of working.

He generates the story and embodies it, but sometimes his stories are not enough, the wilfulness of his acts too great to be constrained within the books, films, music and statements he makes in their wake – as with THE MONEY – and long shadows threaten to swallow him up … but he writes and talks his way out of it, making something new from the fallout; forms a new plan; invokes a new dialectic and moves on.

RICHARD LAWRENCE (1958– ) is a British letterpress printer based in Oxford.

He started printing at school in 1970 and bought his first press (a Heidelberg platen) in 1976. As well as commercial printing work, he teaches letterpress and linocut courses at the St Bride Foundation in London.

RICHARD LAWRENCE

Widcombe Studios, Bath

2008–2011

Returned home to Bristol from Norfolk, I found myself in a post-MA slump. Unsure of what to do next, I began working on a house renovation, returning life to a wreck, digging retrospective foundations where the Georgians hadn’t seen fit – claggy mud, army boots, two pairs of trousers, early dark starts, insipid rain … it wasn’t much like art school. ‘Well, at least I’m still working with my hands,’ I’d think, dubiously.

After a couple of months, around Christmas 2008, my father told me he’d met an interesting Bath-based letterpress printer who worked with a lot of old kit. I’d written nothing since talking to Bill (I’m not sure I’d even listened back to the tapes). Something about coming home had stumped me and I wasn’t sure where my idea for the book was headed. So I’d stopped. But something about the idea of talking to a printer brought thoughts of the brilliant time had in a Thames boat yard back to mind. I’d known very little about boat building but the craftsmanship and enthusiasm I’d discovered in Henley had inspired and re-energised the whole airship project – my MA too, perhaps – so I telephoned the printer, Richard Lawrence, and asked if I could talk to him about his work. He wasn’t keen, explaining it would likely be very disappointing and tedious for me since what he did was in no way arty, but we arranged to meet in any case after I’d explained that few things could be as disappointing as digging footings with a spade in the freezing cold.

Stood beside the River Avon, Richard’s workshop was a single-storey building with a pitched roof made of corrugated iron but held together with moss.

Mist from the river hung level with the gutters.

I remember the hefty padlock on the garage door was green and its long-term knocking had worn away a hollow in the wood behind it.

The first thing I saw once inside was a print of Fleet Street being consumed by fire and flood – one of a series of linocut visions by Stanley Donwood, an artist with whom Richard had worked for several years; the inky nous to the Donwood dash.*

At the time of my visit they’d recently finished work on a project called Six Inch Records and remnants of the printed sleeves and card inners were piled up on the printshop’s central bench.

Once sat with coffee, Richard explained the division of labour:

‘I do this because I love the machinery and am fascinated by the process of squashing ink onto paper. It’s nice if what you end up producing looks nice but that’s not actually why I do it. (Laughs) I mean, obviously it’s a lot more satisfying to produce something that looks good; and it really doesn’t take any more effort to produce something that looks good than something that looks bad.

Against which it’s very interesting dealing with Stanley. (He points up to a drying rack of prints) Those posters are very obviously made up of broken old wood type. If I had my printer’s hat on I’d go through and replace all the letters that are wonky and fiddle until it all printed solid and so on but that’s not what he wants, he wants it to look like that. That’s why it’s printed on brown paper. (Laughs) It’s rubbish!’

You’re the technician and Stanley’s the artist, then, but where’s the tipping point do you think? What is the difference?

‘In my case, the difference is that I do not have the artistic skill to produce an image that looks nice. So the tipping point between art and straight printing is probably the ability to produce a printing surface that is considered a piece of art. Recently I’ve fallen back on this theory: “I am someone who knows how to put ink on paper” … but it’s very interesting, this distinction between craft and art.

Printing is a design skill, a practical application of common sense.’

Editorial common sense.

‘Exactly. It’s a very difficult dividing line and there’s an enormous amount of expediency in what I do which I don’t think people appreciate. That’s something that Stanley is very good about, actually – he’ll have a vague idea of what he wants but then quite happily bend it or, you might say, be inspired by what’s available. That’s the essence of all the typography that I do. I have an idea of what it would be nice to do and then I think, “Well, what have I actually got with which I could do it?”

‘Somewhere along the way I spent some time at Reading University doing a History of Printing, Design & Typography degree and one of the things that people there say – and it’s very much the way I feel, working with letterpress – is that letterpress is extremely good training for typography and design simply because of the number of things that you can’t easily do. You’re constrained in all sorts of ways and you’re made to work with what there is. It’s a very interesting exercise.

‘A few years ago I had the order of service to do for a funeral and there was a lot of copy in it, a lot of words, and I found I’d only enough of one typeface to typeset the whole thing. You’re then confronted with the problem of how to distinguish all the instructional headings for the congregation, delineate between hymns and pieces of text and, armed with one size of one typeface in roman and italic you can actually produce something that is extremely … I mean, “functional” makes it sound boring but you can produce something that works extremely well and looks good, having started with one option.

If I’d been doing it on a computer it would have been very easy to have as many sizes of type as I wanted and as many fonts but it would have been less thought out – that’s the other constraint with letterpress, if you’re typesetting a lot of material, doing it by hand, it takes a long time and you can’t, at the end of it, say, “Oh, I think it would look better if it was a half a point bigger,” and click a button. It doesn’t work like that. You have to decide before you start what you are doing. It inspires you to plan.’

• • • • •

There are three presses in the printshop proper. An Albion hand-press stands in a corner with an air of solid menace. Next to this a black and chrome press runs the length of the workshop wall – shrouded by a greenish tarp. ORIGINAL HEIDELBERG CYLINDER. 1958. Wheels, handles, dials and levers poke out at intervals, like Dalek punctuation.

To the right sits HEIDELBERG 1965, a smaller machine which Richard now starts and lets run. As the paper in the feed is fed up to the hinged ink jaw – the myriad movements are crisp and hypnotic – I realise the noise is taking me back to my childhood and the top-left-hand corner of Wales.

‘Pish ti’coo; Pish ti’coo; Pish ti’coo; Pish ti’coo …’

Ivor the Engine reincarnated as a press* and, indeed, all the presses here are substantial, locomotive-like apparatuses – sat still and quiet now but potentially very loud and powerful. Richard resembles a lion tamer sat in their midst.

‘The thing that puts a lot of people off owning one of these is the sheer size – it weighs almost exactly a ton.

Like all letterpress machines, you need an inky surface and a piece of paper and you squash one against the other. That’s it. That’s printing.

This press achieves that by running ink rollers over the surface, and the really clever bit of this machine is the feed mechanism which, rather ingeniously, can suck just one piece of paper up, deliver it to the gripper-arms which then rotate, carrying the paper.’

He hands me a newly printed sheet, the slight indentations of the pressed type just visible if I hold it up at an angle to the light.

‘Most of the trick to running this is knowing how to make it pick up one sheet and not two and not none. What you get good at, after a while, is looking at the pile and listening to the noises the press makes so that, if it does do something wrong, you can very quickly figure out why. You can adjust the number of suckers turned on, you can adjust both the height and strength of the blow that comes through the pile, you can adjust the angle of attack of the suckers, you can adjust how fast the pile is driven upwards and, depending on the thickness of the paper, what height it’s picked from. By adjusting one or all of those things, you can get it to pick up one sheet of anything you want – from very thin paper right up to beer-mat board. Have you ever made balsa wood aeroplanes? They’re done on these, that’s how you print and cut out the pieces for the kits – die cutting. (Rummages through a box file on a shelf by the sink) That’s a cutting die and that’s what it does.’

Richard puts a rectangular piece of wood on the bench. A maze of metal blades project up from it, surrounded by small, close-fitting blocks of foam.

‘The important bit is the shaped cutting rule – it’s quite sharp. If you imagine pushing the die into a piece of card, it would tend to stick in it, so the foam is there to push it apart again.’

Are fold-lines made in the same way but with blunt rules?

‘Yes, the folding rules are rounded on top and very slightly lower than the ones which cut. These are made in Bristol. If you ask people, “What’s printed the most?” the bulk would say newspapers or books when, in fact, it’s packaging material. Cereal packets win hands-down. The vast majority of printing around the world is for packaging and along with packaging comes boxes and for those you need die cutting.’*

Rooting through another box, Richard pulls out a block comprising two interlocking parts. A piece of paper or card placed between these matched male and female dies* will emerge embossed – the design pressed through the page. This is blind embossing, he explains, ‘blind’ because it is an inkless process, the pressure of the press moulding the material into a relief – the definition wrought by the light.

The examples of the practice that he proffers have a wonderfully tactile quality. Fingertips trace the contours of a set of Stanley’s bears – stamped into a furrowed map for a Six Inch Record outer, a linear Braille-scape.

I hadn’t considered printing presses being put to work ‘dry’ in this way. The technique seems so elegant. I ask how Richard cleans his type and presses down.

‘White spirit. You can use paraffin but it leaves a slightly oily residue behind.

One thing I run into which irritates the hell out of me is that the whole letterpress printing thing has been taken over by “creative” people, artists and such, some of whom have, what I consider to be, absurd ideas about safety. There are aspects of this which are clearly very unsafe – don’t stick your head in a moving press; don’t take a handful of lead type and eat it, all that sort of thing – but a lot of people, particularly Americans, are terrified of solvents … and you can get inks that, instead of being based on linseed oil, are based on soya oil; you can use cooking oil or soya oil to clean down the machinery afterwards, you can … but it leaves it in the most foul, sticky, gunky condition – if you know what you’re doing, washing a machine up with white spirit, you’ll perhaps use two fluid ounces.’

Can you tell me a bit about your inks?

‘Oh, they’re all boring old linseed oil based inks – you take linseed oil and boil it, then grind pigment into it. I don’t personally do that, there’s an ink making company in South Wales who treat me extremely nicely. I started using them some while ago. I asked them, “Could you possibly, maybe … ?” and they said, “Oh yes, not a problem,” and now they produce six different pots of bespoke colours for about £20 apiece which was about a third of what I’d expected to have to pay. I subsequently looked them up on the internet and they turn out to be Britain’s major ink producers – they’re the people who supply Fleet Street – so what they’re doing piddling around producing pots of obscure colours for me I’ve no idea; but I love them for it.’

Richard crosses over to a shelf, takes a lid off a tin and holds it out. Inside the ink resembles emerald engine grease – sickly, fat and viscous.

‘Here is a tin of green that I bought the other day.’

He up-ends it. Nothing happens.

‘I could probably leave it upside down for an hour before any came out; but some inks are thinner than others. White is a problem.’

He opens a tin of white and lays it sideways on the bench. An ominous bulge begins to form, like angry custard.

‘As you can see, it’s almost able to flow. White is a notoriously difficult colour to work with because white, as a pigment, is lousy and getting enough of it into stuff is very difficult. That’s why, if you ever see white type on black in a magazine it was almost certainly printed black onto white paper rather than the other way round.’

How is white ink made?

‘It’s usually titanium and other stuff – aluminium oxide sometimes, depending upon what you want. Most of the pigments are inorganic chemicals.’

Gone are the days of beetles for blue and suchlike?

‘Um, mostly. (Laughs)

I don’t know what some of the pigments are that they use. Having said that, I bought all these tins of ink for the same price and some had noticeably less in than others because the pigments involved were just that bit more expensive. To this day, a kilogram of blue will cost you more than a kilogram of yellow.’

• • • • •

At this point we pause for more coffee and a Penguin biscuit. Richard sits framed by a stacked tower of drawers that rise floor to skylight, each one partitioned into myriad cells – packed with an unseen type, filed away; dormant words.

Tall, bearded, an L.S. Lowry figure in jumper and gilet, he seems quietly amused by most things – I suppose he’s what people would call diffident, but actually I think it’s another facet of his economy – he’s not one for small talk, reserves judgement. There’s nothing superfluous about him – he’s lean. A spare man.

‘It’s actually quite rare to find someone who is interested. As you’ve probably worked out by now, I’m interested in the technicalities of it. That’s what I get excited about.

The images are great and it’s nice working with people like Stan but it’s the whole business of “How does it work?” that actually excites me.’

Do many people track you down because you work with Stanley?

‘No, thankfully not, somehow it hasn’t happened. He’s very fair about giving me billings on things that I have helped him with but no one seems interested in me, for which I’m eternally grateful. But then, I’ve been to one or two of his launch events and he seems to have a habit of wandering around, not actually telling people who he is.*

Having said fiercely that I’m not an artist, I’m actually a scientist by training. I spent the best part of twenty years working for a publisher in various editorial functions producing maths and science books. I like printing because I can understand how it works – if this bit doesn’t work it’s because that bit isn’t connected to the lever that makes it wiggle … and I can then do something about it. I’m very happy with this lot and if something goes wrong I can fix it.’

Where did you get your presses?

‘Well, the Albion in the corner came from an artist, a genuine artist, who made linocuts and worked at the art school at Banbury. He was getting on to retirement and needed to get rid of it so he advertised in the back of a magazine that I read and I bought it from him.’

Can it be taken apart?

‘It can to a certain extent, yes, but the main casting remains unfeasibly heavy and awkward to move; and while nobody knows what Gutenberg’s press looked like, it was probably very similar – except of course that his was made out of wood rather than metal.

While letterpress continued they were very useful, practical things – they made excellent proof-presses. So, rather than locking something up in a machine forme* and all that – particularly on very large printing machines, terribly tedious – you could ink these by hand and print a sheet or proof very quickly.

‘The 1965 platen came from a printer in Oxford who was closing down. He’d made it to the age of eighty-something and his second replacement knee didn’t really take to it so he decided it was time to retire. I’d got to know him and, when it came time for the machine movers to come and take this away, he suggested that I had a word with them. They were essentially taking it away to recondition it and sell it on – probably for die cutting and blind embossing and that sort of thing. I think I gave them about £400 for it and they took it out of his workshop and dropped it at my house a mile up the road. £400!’

What is it worth now?

‘£400!’ (Laughs)

Really?

(Still laughing) ‘There’s a limited market for them; a limited number of people who know how to use them.

This 1958 Heidelberg came from a private press in Marlborough. I’m very lucky to have got it. They used it very little but kept it in very good condition so it hasn’t done many miles.’

It looks in amazing shape.

‘The longevity of these machines is mind-boggling; if you look in the back of trade magazines you’ll see “Heidelberg, six colour – only 70 million impressions.” If you look after them, oil them and replace the odd bits that do wear out they just go on and on. The one I had before was from 1940-something and it was a little rattly but, if you treated it with a small amount of care it would work absolutely fine. The one I used at school was built in 1920-something – that was definitely on the wrong end of rattly but still worked quite well.’

I imagine Richard using the old school press. I wonder what he was like as a child. He seems to embody a stoic enjoyment; a half-amused smile of concentration on his face. The flat smell of ink on his hands.

‘It’s interesting to see the reaction of people who do come in here. I’ve had quite a few in who used to work in the printing trade and they say, “Ooh, wonderful! The smells of ink!” and so on, and some people get excited by all the curiously shaped lumps of machinery and some get excited about all the bits of woodcut and type and I sort of understand that but what excites me is that “It’s machinery! It works! I can do something with it!”

People get a bit put out, frightened even, when I don’t react in the right way; when I don’t get enthusiastic about the “incredible texture and quality” of something … but I’m a creature from a mechanical world, really. That’s what excites me.’

STANLEY DONWOOD (1967– ) is a British artist and writer, known for his work with the band Radiohead. Since 1994 he has produced all artwork for the group in collaboration with lead singer Thom Yorke. He has also written the short story collections Slowly Downward: A Collection of Miserable Stories (2005), Household Worms (2011) and Humor (2014).

STANLEY DONWOOD

Derelict dance hall, Bath

March 2009

The first time I met Stanley Donwood he was not in his element. Hosting the simultaneous launch and closure of his record label, Six Inch Records,* at a trendy London bar he stood apart from his guests; nipping outside for furtive roll-ups whenever possible, eschewing the venue’s lava-lamp paint scheme and 8’ egg-shaped isolation booth latrines.

When he had to interact and address the crowd to introduce a band he stood onstage uneasily. A pregnant cough. A pause; another cough before breaking into a run-up of ‘Um … er … OI!’

The night wasn’t his idea, I suspected.

He’s not a man for the spotlight, Stanley.

He’s much more likely to be the man taking apart the spotlight with a spanner … or a hammer.

He has the air of a man in a spot of difficulty; a man who’d much prefer to be elsewhere, perhaps.

He’s not even really called Stanley, you know; not even that’s right.

‘I’ve got a rubbish pseudonym. “Stanley Donwood”!? Rubbish.’

I approached him at the trendy launch and introduced myself. Yes, I’m the chap with the airships, we establish, and he’s the chap with the bowler hat and the pseudonym; no, it wasn’t his idea.*

• • • • •

Stanley Donwood, whoever he might be, is responsible for Radiohead’s* aesthetic, artwork and labyrinthine websites. Millions of people have his work in their homes, hundreds of thousands would recognise the pointy-toothed bears that have become something of a trademark. He has accidentally become very popular and his work is in demand. He is adept in many media, constantly evolving and adapting. He exhibits all around the world. He has won awards.*

He’s not sure how he feels about any of this, preferring to keep a low profile and not give interviews … for a long time people assumed he was an alias of Radiohead’s singer, Thom Yorke; but he isn’t.

‘That’d be nice, though. I’d have better hair.’

Stanley’s studio is an old dance hall. Where once it thrummed to the tunes of the day, it now echoes, abandoned and cavernous. The floorboards creak, the windows are cracked and icy, ivy grows through the frames. The only light in the place shines feebly – up a flight of wooden stairs that groan – a small office with a workshop beyond.

He beckons me in and shuts the door, apologising for the extreme cold.

‘All studios are cold. It’s the law.’

Is it always so cold?

‘Yes.’

And you always work here?

‘At the moment, yeah. I paint in a barn in Oxfordshire as well but that’s a bit more rudimentary than this, it’s … well, it’s a barn. There’s a wood burning stove so when that’s going it’s quite nice but most of the time it’s like being outdoors.’

Do you work with other people? I mean, will members of the band chip in?

‘Oh yeah! For instance, with In Rainbows* I’d have whatever stage the artwork had got to cycling on all the computers around the studio and the band would say, “Oh I like that one and I like that one.” So, over time, I could say, “Right, so that’s where it’s going.” We’d all talk about it and come into a sort of creative consensus about what was working well.

It was evolving as the music was evolving … and no record label! We were all working towards a deadline which became more concrete as time went on because we’d got things to manufacture, we had to book the factories to press the records and all that kind of thing, and all anonymously.

If the next thing works in that sort of way, that would be great. I’m sure it won’t because they’re never the same.

Hail to the Thief,* the one before, that was me in my barn with huge paintings around the walls, working on several at the same time, and the nice thing with that one was that I’d got this rubbish CD boom-box thing in there with me and the band would come into the barn in the evening – which is across the way from their recording studio – with the latest whatever-they’d-done on CD and play it and, because the barn’s all wood and vaguely insulated with plywood, it just sounded really cool! So they would come over to have a beer and listen to what they’d done. Outside, away from the brilliant speakers, to hear it more as it was going to be heard.’

• • • • •

Stanley has a record player in one corner of the room. While we talk he plays a selection of well-thumbed punk and post-punk records – Bauhaus, Magazine and Sex Pistols. Cold as it might be, the studio is a den, stuffed with collected ephemera; test prints and clippings on the wall, an old piano, a screen printing table at the back with tins of ink and paint stacked behind; a painty carpet and a painty sink. Above a wide window overlooking a courtyard is written:

FIRE EXIT

BASH SIDE BITS OUT WITH HAMMER PULL WINDOW OUT AND BE VERY FUCKING CAREFUL

Stanley puts the kettle on and I unpack some of the Radiohead records I’ve brought along as reference.

He returns with tea as I place the My Iron Lung EP* on the table.

‘Oh God! (Turning it over in his hands) I can’t remember this at all! This was the first thing though … we had all this footage Thom had shot on tour and we ran it through his telly and took photographs of it. I liked the men standing around for their meeting – they were Osaka businessmen, I think. Lots of legs, yes … we didn’t really know what we were doing.’ (Laughs)

You don’t generally do interviews, do you?

‘Not loads, no. I prefer to do them over email really ’cos I feel rather inarticulate when I’m speaking – lots of “ers” and “ums” and “hmmms”. Whenever I’ve done it, talked to someone for an interview, I always feel like such a twat afterwards. I think, “Why did I say that? I should have said something else.”’

Bill Drummond told me he wasn’t happy being called an artist for a long time. Was that an issue for you?

‘I don’t mind saying I’m an artist now. I used to say I was “sort of an artist” but as you go on you meet people, grown-ups, adults, and they say, “What do you do?” and you can’t really get away with that so I just say, “I’m an artist” and it covers everything.

“Commercial Artist” I quite like. That’s what graphic designers used to be called; artists for hire. I don’t mind being for hire! (Laughs)

In a different world I’d be painting pub signs; doing something useful. I want to be, you know, a bit useful, because I’m a Jack-of-all-trades, master of absolutely none.

I’d love to be actually good at something, you know? Do one thing. That would be great!’

Richard Lawrence is very good at one thing.

‘Richard is, yes, and I think this is why I get on so well with him – because he says, “I’m a technician. I’m not an artist.”’

He does! Your relationship seems very complementary in that he’s the practical print mechanic, able to make your ideas about lino, text and printing happen pretty quickly.

‘He really can, yeah. I wouldn’t be able to work those bloody machines, they terrify me!

When I went to art college, the first people that I connected with were the technicians. There was a guy called Tony who was the print technician and we got on straight away; he was a real local boy from Devon and while all the tutors were talking about stuff from their sixties educations which had nothing to do with what I was about, he was someone who actually knew what he was doing and how to do it – that was much more interesting to me.’

Were you working as a ‘sort of artist’ before you began work with Radiohead?

‘Not “working”, no. I was officially a job seeker – £39.70 a week. That was alright for a while. I was a clandestine artist – not a spray-can artist, I didn’t have the means. I had a paint pot and a brush.’

Then you got the call.

‘Yeah, “Do you want to have a go at doing a record sleeve?” and I said, “Yeah!?” I didn’t know how to do it. I know how to do it now because I’ve done it lots of times. I’ve learnt on the job, as they say …’

I want to ask you about the bears; they’re your bears, they were on the Six Inch Record sleeves, but they’re Radiohead Bears to most people.*

‘I’ve been working with them for ages. I’ll use my stuff in their stuff. It’s hard to separate; I mean, it doesn’t separate – I do their artwork. Their artwork is my artwork.

The bears began when my eldest daughter was quite little, about one, one and a half – they wake up devilishly early in the morning and you’re in this weird state, it’s dark and there’s nothing to do but make a cup of tea. I used to draw stories and tell them at the same time. I was telling a story to do with toys, abandoned toys … it’s really bad when I think about it, luckily she couldn’t understand …’

Was it a bit dark?

‘It was a bit dark, yes – all the toys that are discarded by adults, sitting in this attic, got really fed up and so these cute teddy bears came down and ate the grown-ups … scary bears who’d started off nice and then became (bares teeth and howls) “Grawww!!!”

And that was it, it was just a drawing that was in a sketchbook and then I drew a load of them marching down a dark alley and then I started using them with Radiohead – the website first and then on a t-shirt and then it turned into all sorts of things.’

Around the time of Amnesiac* I remember you put out a very scribbly poster of bears flying through a city and people looking up concernedly …

‘That’s Thom’s drawing. He drew that; that was weird that one. At that time there was a lot of faxing back and forth “Phish, pheee, phew”; he’d send a fax, I’d draw on it and send it back, but that particular drawing of the flying bears, I’d done one at the same time – we did them on the same night, it was really weird – without telephoning or anything like that. We were both having some sort of mental flood or storm or something. I remember it intensely; drawing like mad with a biro, almost going through the paper with it. I think I scanned and faxed it to Thom and he scanned what he’d done and sent it back and they’d both been done at the same time and they were pretty much of the same level of biro intensity … that happens quite a lot with us, we work together a lot and do this thing of swapping where I’ll do something and then say, “You do something” and he’ll do something and say, “Now you do something”, so we’ll pass it backwards and forwards. We’ve painted large canvases where one person will do something until the point where you think, “I’m finished” and then the other person would go along and “Shhhhhhh” do something to it. We’ll basically fight over the ownership of the canvas until one or other of us owns it – which is a hard thing to do but, you know, you’ll get to a point where you think, “Right, that’s mine now, I’ve got it.” It’s like fencing but with a piece of artwork.

We’ve done it remotely with fax machines and lately with emailing.’

Do similar battles happen with the band musically, do you think?

‘I really don’t know. I hear them making music and some of the stuff for Kid A.* (Laughs) … I mean, Kid A is apparently quite dark but earlier versions of it were really dark – much more upsetting really … they got rid of some of the bits, some sections and sounds which were just too much but I … I’m a sloganeer, I’m into sorta like “BAM BAM BAM!!!” but they’re into a more musical art thing, something that will last and something that will work in different situations, so certain things they did, I said, “That’s brilliant! You’ve got to keep that!” but they decided, “No, it won’t work in time. It works now but it won’t work in a year’s time …”

I don’t have the same level of quality control because, I mean, with the way that I’ve worked with Radiohead and so on, there’s five of them and Nigel.’*

Six?

‘I would say 5 + 1 rather than 6.

With the artwork there is me and Thom, which is very different to 5 + 1. We’re 1 + 1, which, compared to 5 + 1 … what comes out of that is very different. I mean, obviously, we don’t go ahead with stuff if the other members of the band aren’t comfortable or happy with it.’

Has that ever happened?

‘No … although I’ve gone wrong a few times.

With In Rainbows I was going to do all this architectural stuff with the software that’s used to create optimum car parking spaces …’

The 2006 tour posters and merchandise were grey, I remember.

‘Yeah. “Any colour so long as it’s grey.” All the t-shirts were grey – it was possibly one of the most insulting things I could have done. Immediately afterwards we set up in Tottenham House, this decaying stately home near Marlborough, to work … and I’d been there for two days or something – had been obsessed by this book The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler* – was in this dreadful nihilistic state, preoccupied with car parks and all that sort of thing, thinking, “There. Bam. Right. This is how it’s going to be” … but they were playing the music and it was the most organic, spiritual, sexual, sensual, beautiful thing that I’d heard them do and I realised that what I was doing was completely wrong and that my head, my mind, my response, had gone awry.’

How did the In Rainbows artwork evolve then – the discbox and the ‘pay what you want’ aspect of the digital release?

‘They’d been thinking how to put the new record out. The idea of people paying what they wanted for it was a bit of a reaction to the way that people who like music are treated by the record industry – if you can imagine such a thing as this overarching authority: “The Music Industry”.

They treat people like, if not actual criminals, potential criminals. All this stuff – targeting people who download music for nothing, what happened to Napster.* It was a reaction to the way the industry assumes people are going to steal music and has created a legal and software mechanism to prevent that. So there was this idea, “Okay, let’s put the record on the internet and say you can pay what you want for it, pay what you think it’s worth – and some people won’t pay anything, some people will pay something,” which was a bit of a gamble, really. A huge gamble.

So the band and management said, “Okay, let’s do it for nothing,” and, to me, “Can you make us something that’s worth about forty quid?” and I thought, “That’s quite a fucking challenge!” (Laughs) “How can I make something that is essentially wrapping paper worth £40?” because, you know, I’d been doing this thing with EMI and they were principally releasing compact discs – horrible, clattery boxes which I hate and have, to my mind, really degraded what record packaging is.

When I was a kid growing up, I would buy records because I liked the sleeves and I would spend ages looking at the sleeves and poring over the sleeve-notes and the lyrics.’

You’d made unusual sleeves prior to the discbox, though: the Hail to the Thief foldout map and the Amnesiac book …

‘Yes, but they were always “Special Editions” and I had to really hassle the record company to do it. They really didn’t like doing it. The people that I dealt with first off were great but there would be people higher up who’d say, “Well, you know, can you reduce the number of pages?” It was always very hard to get it done.’

Without compromising the idea away.

‘Exactly. It was always a question of “How far can you push them?”

Kid A sounded to me like a message left on an answerphone that you received too late to do anything about, but Amnesiac was something else, it was something found when clearing a house, something in an attic, an old book in a drawer, a fragment – something left behind, the meaning of which had been lost.’

The Amnesiac book always struck me as fraught, as you say. Cross-hatching, layered detailing, out of focus, pixellated images – so much work in it, yet its meaning is a mystery; lost and unloved, like the toys in the attic.

‘I spent a long time in London working on it. Walking in London and reading books about London. I found this book called The House of Dr Dee by Peter Ackroyd* and he mentioned Piranesi,* who I’d never heard of, so I went out and found out a bit about Piranesi and I started copying Piranesi’s drawings with a biro because I wasn’t quite sure about copyright. Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Stuart Home … Michael Moorcock’s written some brilliant books about London. King of the City* is fantastic! (Begins turning the pages of the Amnesiac book) God, yes, and the bull …’

The Minotaur?

‘Mmm, Mithras, labyrinthine structures and the idea of a city being a maze or a prison – Piranesi’s imaginary prisons … I would get the train up to London for the day. I did it again and again, doing something that I’ve since found out Bill Drummond does, which is to write a name or a word across a city and then walk the letters … but I was trying to make a film as well and I did make a film in the end, to do with the bull. I think I went a bit mad, to be honest. I think I developed an obsession, looking back; but this idea of bulls … Smithfield Market and Smithfield Fair and its ancient past of bull running. I imagined that the cattle would be taken there, then they’d have this ritual thing where they would drive a bull down to the Thames and kill it and have some sort of horrible sacrifice thing; something to do with bridges and the little beaches you get on the Thames … and I made a film.

There was me – I wasn’t filming, I was directing – and there were three guys with cameras and an actor whose name I cannot remember … Graham? He was a proper actor and he was dressed as a City gent, you know – suit, overcoat, briefcase – and the idea was that he would come out of Farringdon tube station and walk through Smithfield and then down Giltspur Street – I’d mapped all this thing out and written a screenplay and everything!

He would be possessed by the spirit of the bull and become like the Minotaur almost, and descend into a type of madness. So we were filming him walking along, walking faster and faster and looking behind him and then, outside the Old Bailey, he stood against a wall, freaking out, and then start throwing his clothes off and chucking his briefcase!

‘We were filming all this on the hoof and because we just had little handy-cams people couldn’t tell that he was being filmed, you know?

We got down to the River Thames and the City of London Police came and stopped us. Apparently they’d been filming us with CCTV all the way down, filming us making a film – except they didn’t know we were making a film, they had no idea what was going on. Thankfully this was before all the terrorism stuff, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened. The police wanted to confiscate all the cameras and I had to say, “Right, no. You’re not confiscating anything, we’ve stopped,” and then we just filmed the last bit where the Minotaur gent walks into the Thames. Just about managed to get away with it.

Then the film got made but I lost it! (Laughs)

It’s one of those things. No one’s ever seen it.

I guess all that became R&D for the Amnesiac book. Funny how all that condenses down into such a little anecdote.’

• • • • •

I want to ask you about the thing underneath Kid A.

(I take the Kid A CD from my bag and begin to take apart the case)

‘Oh, the thing underneath!?’*

Yes, the hidden thing underneath!

‘That was the record after OK Computer, yes* – I hate jewel cases, as I’ve said, and I took one to bits and was looking at it and I realised there was this tiny gap and thought, “You could put something in there …”

They had to hand-pack them, apparently – it couldn’t be done by a machine. So I think that annoyed the record label … again.

That was really tough, that record; really tough for everyone. It was forced out, really.’

You took a lot of people with you, though, with Kid A and what followed.

‘Not a purposeful thing.’

What do you remember of that time?

‘The time? Um, I kind of … I don’t really remember it in the same way I remember childhood or something. I think it was over the course of about two years but In Rainbows was about two years and that was bliss compared to that.

I was not very happy, I don’t think.

OK Computer had been so successful, everything a band could want – number one record, good reviews, lots of sales, blahdy blah … I think they were worried about turning into U2 or something. You know, doing another OK Computer and turning into a huge, Simple Minds-esque stadium rock band – the weight of success hung extremely heavy.’

For you as well? Did you feel that?

‘Um, no. No, because I was even more anonymous then than I am now but … (thinks for a minute) I really can’t remember it too well – it was just fucking hard.

(Brightening) I’m very proud of it. In fact, it’s difficult to choose my favourite but I think, because it was such hard work, I think that was a really good one – and I really liked the music as well, that was when I really connected with them, musically, although that started with OK Computer.’

What was it about OK Computer?

‘I remember Thom screaming in an outhouse … they were recording out in this stately home, the first stately home of many, and he was screaming in a shed in the middle of nowhere with a mic and a line running all the way from that little shed, all the way into this impromptu recording studio; I thought, “That’s it.”’

Do you work with a sense of ‘I need to make an album cover’?

‘No, I don’t really. With all the albums I’ve done, the cover has been the very last thing – usually, almost a snap decision. The cover for Hail to the Thief was a big painting, a metre and a half square, and it was hanging up in the studio and it was not even going to be a part of the record artwork. It was the first one I did in that style and size and, because it hadn’t got words from the record on it, it was sort of outside of it all.

We were just sitting down and saying, “Which one should we put on the cover?”

“Why don’t we use that one?”

And suddenly it was obvious that it was the cover. The same with Kid A. The night before we had to decide I did loads and loads of printouts and stuck them round the kitchen with tape. There were loads of different titles as well. Loads of different titles. And we had them all up. Stuck onto all the cupboards in the kitchen. “Okay, there’s a cover in the kitchen somewhere, you’ve gotta find it.” (Laughs)

And luckily they chose that one and, I mean, this is my memory, but I think partly the title was because it looked so brilliant in that typeface – BD Plakatbau.

We had other titles with different typefaces.’

You seem to strive to avoid a recognisable style with your work.

‘Yes, I wouldn’t want to do the same thing twice anyway. I think that would be boring.

Someone like Vaughan Oliver, who did all the sleeves for 4AD* – Cocteau Twins, Pixies – and they were all different but they were all his, and I’ve always wanted to work in a way where you couldn’t tell it was the same person doing it.

I had a fantastic compliment with In Rainbows when someone said, “Oh, did you do that?” Which was great! It’s so totally unlike what I’ve done before; all abstract … and lovely in its way. Pretty. I became very interested in velocity – ink and velocity, paint and velocity and what happens when you throw or squirt pigment at a surface. I was squirting stuff out of needles and I found them quite frightening to use, needles, they’re very spiky … and this was a direct response to the music after that strict architectural drawing, and what happened was that I was working in this decaying stately home and I knocked over a candle and it poured a load of molten wax onto a piece of paper and I was really taken with this, and it was at the same time I was working with these needles so I began to work with these ideas of spurting and dripping and melting which seemed to fit very much, for me, with what the music was. I found that record an extremely sexual record, very sensual.’

They’d been threatening it for years.

‘Exactly. (Deadpan) It’s the long-awaited happy album.’

It was pretty chipper.

‘Yeah! Molten wax, squirting stuff out of needles, spattering …’

It’s all there, for goodness sake! It’s all there!

‘There it is!’ (Laughter)

So is the new thing always the most exciting thing?

‘Yes. To do the same thing you’ve done before … why would you do it again?

There’s no point in repeating yourself. I mean, in a way, what I’ve been doing recently with Hartmann the Anarchist* is repeating myself. I’ve done that, but I haven’t illustrated a book before and I love a bit of lino, I do. I love the physicality of carving it out, but I don’t want to do the same artwork I’ve done before … it’s easy to draw the same picture you’ve drawn before.

If I tried to draw an OK Computer-style picture now it would be really easy; and I could do it better than before, you know, “better” in inverted commas but … it’s horrible to look back on stuff. It gets easier after a while, when it becomes history.’

The recent past isn’t any good?

‘No. There’s a difference between memory and history, isn’t there – the difference between, “Oh yeah, I was just doing that a little while ago, I remember that … oh God!” and when it becomes history and you can look at it in a more even way. I can look back at most of my stuff when it’s got into its history phase and quite like it. It’s alright … but maybe that’s to do with working in this periodic way with capsules and projects because of the Radiohead thing. “Here’s the record – Phoosh!” It’s clearly delineated between one record and the next.’

Do you think you’d work like that if you didn’t work with the band?

‘No idea. I’ve been working with them since I was twenty … four? And I’m forty now … but, you know, I’ll still wake up at night and think, “I should be doing this” or “I should be doing that” or “What can I do to make that better?” I don’t like it. I’d rather not have that happen.

I always feel envious of people who have a job and when they get home they don’t think about their job any more, but maybe that doesn’t exist. I always felt envious when I was cycling back from college, seeing people in their cars driving back to their homes on a housing estate somewhere – driving their car which looks the same as everyone else’s car, parking it in front of a house that looks like everyone else’s house but somehow they know it’s theirs … they’d park their car and they’d open the door and they’d close the door of their car, “Ker-chumph”, and open the door of their house, “Kru-ch-ch”, and in they’d go in and that would be it … but I’ve always sort of known that …’

Not for you?

‘Well, it’s not been possible for me to be able to hate my job! (Laughs) That’s the thing; people hate their jobs. I don’t hate my job, I quite like it. I hate it sometimes but it could be worse, oh yes!’

• • • • •

It’s late now and the dance hall beyond the office is dark. We take a break from talking for the tape and I go off to find the toilet. My Dictaphone records cars passing and the creaking of the building and Stanley pottering about with tea and wine. It records the moment he accidentally spills wine over my notebook and then, to compensate, closes it to leave a Tyrian butterfly over my notes. After a long procession of echoey footsteps I re-enter the room, unaware of the mishap. Stanley doesn’t mention the turn of events and I don’t discover it until I get home.

• • • • •

Old Bond Street, Bath

Saturday 12 March 2011

I bump into Stanley in a stationers and he invites me to the pub. He is working on something big, he says, biggest thing he’s ever done. The project’s tentacles spread worldwide … but he can’t tell me anything about it. It’s all set up and in place, though. Ready to go at the press of a button.

Yes, it’s to do with the band.

It’ll all kick off soon, yes.

He’ll explain more in a bit when he’s allowed.

We drink up and he cycles off.

Brick Lane, London

Monday 28 March 2011

So, The King of Limbs,* a Radiohead album, has been put out into the world digitally with a ‘newspaper album’ to follow, whatever that is. Very mysterious.

The artwork features colourful paintings of trees fronting dark woods beyond, strange multi-limbed creatures and lurking, vaguely glimpsed monsters.

I’m in Brick Lane, in a long queue of people that snakes back several hundred metres from a Rough Trade record shop.

Stanley has made a concomitant newspaper that is to be given away at noon today around the world, apparently. All the noons.

Information is somewhat scarce yet here we all are in the queue, and there’s a buzz; something’s up.

A strange website has appeared with directions to this place and a warning reminiscent of the fire escape instructions above Stanley’s studio window:

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

This newspaper IS NOT the newspaper that accompanies the Newspaper Album version of The King of Limbs.

This event WILL NOT be repeated. This event IS NOT a live performance by Radiohead.

I am here to experience the physical, tactile event of being given a newspaper and leafing through it to see what I can see … I imagine Stanley will be still cycling around Devon or somewhere and the last I heard the band were in LA so it’s a bit odd to turn the corner and find him and Thom Yorke dressed up as barrow boys in flat caps and braces, proffering copies of The Universal Sigh* newspaper.

‘Socialist Worker!’

‘Sooo-cialist Worker!?’

‘Socialist Worker, sir?’

• • • • •

Derelict dance hall, Bath

July 2011

The last time I saw you was just before the Socialist Worker debacle.

‘Oh yes … I was a bit scared because I didn’t know where it was happening. I got to Liverpool Street and then walked round and round the queue. I felt like a hyena circling a herd of wildebeest. It was a good day!

It was the most orderly and polite London mob I’ve ever experienced.

There was quite a lot of fuss and I was very pleased because we had this big meeting before we began with all the record company people who were to act like this big distribution network for the paper, and the publicity plan was to give out a newspaper in sixty-one cities around the world, simultaneously, for free, that mentioned neither the band nor the title of the album once. They took a little persuading but I think it worked. It got into every real newspaper. It was sufficiently stupid to even catch the eye of the Sun:

‘“Read all about it,” says Yorke, miserablist.

‘“Professional Gloom-monger Thom Yorke was today spotted in London’s Brick Lane handing out an incomprehensible art project …”

‘And then I went home and then I had a cup of tea and thought, “That was alright! I can begin to forget all about it.” Which I almost have.

It was fun though. We both wore flat caps and everything.’

Was The King of Limbs newspaper album designed around the same time as the Universal Sigh?

‘No, that was from the year before; September or something, and it went through lots of redesigns. Imagine setting up a newspaper and publishing the first issue, all that tweaking, changing … because there were going to be loads of sections and a little A5 magazine; lots of different sections, one black, white and red like an old-fashioned tabloid …’

We spoke about these things obliquely before, I suppose, down the pub.

‘Yeah, though it’s weird; when I was doing all the King of Limbs stuff it was all I was thinking about, but now it’s quite hard to recall … but I just thought it was really nice how the newspaper album turned out and the prints were quite rough, with mistakes and holes punched – so valueless, you know? So ephemeral. If you want to keep it nice you’ve got quite a job on your hands.’

Keeping it out of the sunshine … because it’s on the way out already.

‘Exactly. Self-destructing record packaging. I won’t get a Grammy for that one, I’ll tell you now. (Laughs) They won’t appreciate such irreverence, the Grammers.’

I see you’re cutting some wavy lino in the other room.

‘Yeah, meteors or fireballs, Vorticist waves; it’s taken a long time … it’s not just waves, you know! They’re the easy bit, they’re like a little treat for me after doing all the buildings. I did the downtown financial district and all these modernist blocks and they’re really boring to do, but the nicer stuff takes a long time so it’s a bit of a trade-off really.’

Is this for Atoms For Peace?*

‘Yes. I hope so. It is at the moment.’

A lot of your Radiohead work seems cloak and dagger. You’re wrapped up in these projects but can’t discuss them.

‘Yeah, I know, it is weird – very internal, all of us very locked in. I didn’t over-listen to this record either. I mean, I listened to it, obviously, I couldn’t avoid hearing it a lot, but I wanted to try and keep it as something I could enjoy later rather than being sick to death of it – because I usually get really enthusiastic and listen to it intensely, which is great for the year or so it takes to do the artwork but after that … no.

I’ve recently just about been able to listen to OK Computer. I really over-listened to that.’

How does that situation arise? Do you put it on?

‘In shops? It makes me slightly uncomfortable for some reason when I hear Radiohead music in shops. I don’t know why. I don’t know … because in my head it’s still quite a secretive thing and then you think, “Oh no! Everybody knows!”’

Where does this bunker mentality come from, do you think? I mean, other bands are able to embrace it.

‘I know! Able to “Live The Dream!” We’re congenitally unable to live the dream. That’s it. That’s what everybody wants to do, don’t they?

I don’t know what the secrecy thing is about really … perhaps it gets out of hand.’

It’s a bit late now, perhaps, on album number fifteen.

‘Is it!?’

Not really, no. (Laughter)

‘No, it’s about eight or something … I’m supposed to be getting the lino stuff finished because that’s supposed to be being exhibited around the time the Atoms For Peace record comes out.’

Can you tell me that? Surely that’s supposed to be shrouded in subterfuge.

‘I can’t live the dream!’

A while ago you mentioned painting a series of portraits in oil. What became of them?

‘They ended up being the trees for King of Limbs! I was going to paint naturalistic portraits of the band because I looked at Gerhard Richter’s paintings and they were really good and I thought, “I’ll do that,” but, of course, I’m not Gerhard Richter; I couldn’t do that. It was not possible. Where he managed to get all these great blurred effects in oil paint, mine turned into mud, it was awful; very depressing for about three months … and then I started painting trees in oils in Oxford … and it all came about because of the way cathedrals used to be all different colours inside. Apparently all the vaults and tracery used to be painted really bright colours before the Puritans came along and painted over them white. All Northern European ecclesiastical architecture is based on the forest – being in glades, being in a sacred grove – they would paint their cathedrals in the brightest colours they’d got, absolutely beautiful. Going into a cathedral would have been like entering into an illuminated manuscript forest and I just thought, if all the trees of the forest were all different colours, how beautiful it would be … and that’s how King of Limbs came to be.

There you are, a rare moment of articulacy! You should put it in a special box with red arrows pointing to it.’

JENNY SAVILLE, RA (1970– ) is a Cambridge-born artist. Her visceral oil paintings and drawings of the human body are often realised on a massive scale and have appeared in exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Art, Gagosian Galleries and Norton Museum of Art, Florida. Her work has featured on the covers of two albums by Manic Street Preachers – The Holy Bible (1994) and Journal for Plague Lovers (2009).

JENNY SAVILLE

Brewer Street, Oxford

26 January 2010

In light of Stanley’s eclecticism, I wrote to Gagosian, Jenny Saville’s gallery, and asked if I might have an audience with her since she seemed to represent the other end of the spectrum: a lone figure singularly preoccupied with painting flesh and the figure – solid, tangible, massive adipose studies of the body in oils.

The last I’d read, she was working in Sicily, so the approach was a bit of a punt since I wasn’t sure how I’d get out there even if she agreed to see me. However, it turned out Jenny had recently relocated to a studio in Oxford, so any thoughts of a Mediterranean adventure were quickly replaced with the more prosaic reality of a day return ticket because, to my surprise, she did agree to see me.

So one freezing Tuesday morning – satchel packed with a wine-stained notebook and a fickle Dictaphone – I caught a train.*

• • • • •

Jenny Saville’s studio is in a quiet shaded lane that belies its central city location. A two-storey building; grey-fronted and anonymous.

Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at Christ Church College, two minutes from here. My rabbit hole is rather unprepossessing – an ashen door with a burnt-out intercom. I clatter at the letterbox and wait, stamping my feet in the cold.

Descending footsteps. Jenny opens the door and I step in. To my left is a room of large, briefly glimpsed drawings and charcoal pieces.

A set of stairs before me. We go up and Jenny makes tea.

The first floor is spacious and open plan, lit by large windows and greenhouse-like skylights. The walls are white. In front of the walls are paintings.

At the top of the stairs is a three-metre-high work of a newborn baby, the umbilical cord snaking back to a splayed vagina and soapy legs. Along from this is a trolley stand stacked with books – magazines, newspaper paint swatches, photographs and journals. Notes, clippings and articles are stuck up on the walls while other torn-out pages are filed out on the floor – creative ‘compost’ as Francis Bacon dubbed it.*

Empty cigarette packets, turned to display pictures of cancer and disease – bad teeth, laryngeal tumours, black lungs – are lined up on a dado rail.

Below the packets is a radiator that bears a painterly impression of Jenny’s bottom – a Rorschach test pattern.

The studio, as well as being large, is freezing and Jenny explains she can only work for an hour or so before she starts to seize up. The radiator is where she warms herself and takes stock:

‘This is where I stand, as you can see. I find that a cigarette is a perfect space to stand or sit and analyse what you’re doing – the length of a cigarette.’

Opposite the radiator are several explorations of a single subject – a face with a mangled mouth; eyes closed, taut waxen skin lit from below, rising from a writhing, exploded mess. There are three versions of this piece, a large charcoal drawing, a mostly monochrome painted scheme – some patches of intense red and peach/pine – and an enormous black and white painting, streaked and leaking, the running paint visible below the surface layer.

None of the three is explicit about what is going on with the mouth, the wound is elusive and seemingly out of focus – a flayed moment of abstract expressionism – a de Kooning maw.

The finished piece, Witness, has recently left the studio for a London show in honour of J.G. Ballard. I’ve just missed it:

‘I think that show’s a brilliant thing to do because he was going to write my catalogue notes several times and I’ve got a lot of faxed letters from him – these great rejection letters from Ballard. (Laughs) Whenever I was asked who I’d like to write the catalogue I would always say, “Ballard. J.G. Ballard,” but first his partner was ill and then he was ill and then he wrote a fantastic summary of my work but didn’t want to write the catalogue – I’ve still got that. Everyone I’ve told about it has said, “Oh, you’ve got to publish it” – letters from Shepperton. I’ve got a really good interview with him that I taped off the radio. It’s from just after he wrote Cocaine Nights and he’s talking about the internet. Claire Walsh, his partner, was telling me how they used to watch a site where you can see the migration of swallows, a camera follows them. That was his favourite thing to watch.’*

We sit down on a pair of paint-specked chairs and I ask about the studio, how long she’s been here, and the differences between here and her previous workspace in Palermo, Sicily.

‘In Palermo I had the guts of animals outside my studio window; the stench was amazing in the summer. That has an effect on the way you think about making work. When I first walked in here there was blossom on the trees and it had an airy feeling. I haven’t wanted to overload it so far, it’s quite pure for me to have a space like this with only the work and a few things up – normally the floor is a cascade of books, but they’re all still in boxes so I’ve quite enjoyed having a clearer head. I’ve noticed that, when I have a lot of reference material around, I tend to work a certain way, so I’ve tried to switch that around a bit and see what happens.’

Did you ever find yourself trying to get reference material into the work because it’s around you?

‘Oh yeah, I collect a lot of bits of paint, like that thing there (points to a paint-smeared newspaper). I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of those, trying to get an effect of flesh – burnt flesh or when you slide one colour into another – they become like a word-coupling or a musician putting sounds together – it all eventually feeds in.

I used to go to the Hunterian Museum in London, part of the Royal College of Surgeons. I was a member of the Pathology Society there and they used to have a room for surgeons to practise new types of operations; so there was always a room which had corpses and I used to go in and wander around; and what I loved was that each head was wrapped in a plastic bag, a Sainsbury’s bag or a Tesco bag – obviously it depended upon what part of the body the surgeons were working on – the last time I was there they were working on something to do with the spine, but all the heads, bagged up. There was something so everyday about having a Sainsbury’s bag over your head at the end of your life.’

Jenny leads me to a table of paint tubs, each different, numbered and labelled.

‘I’ve mixed these for a new piece. Because I work on such a large scale and on quite a few things at the same time, I make a series of tones and spend days studying one colour and mixing a large amount of that, shifting it so that I’ve got a core tone that can be moved around.’

Have you got huge vats of paint somewhere?

‘Big tubs of white, yes, and I use kitchen knives, big old-fashioned things to mix with. I think the maximum I’ve ever made in a day is six or seven tones. That (points to paint on a glass-topped table) will be, for example, a side cheek and a panel of the neck, so I’ll mix up two tones to go near each other – one to move your eye right back and the other to pull you forward. It started as a way of painting more abstractly, but now I’ve got certain tones that I know are going to do a job in the painting. Once I’ve got those, they’ll shift and move around. The process came out of trying to keep something fluid in a larger scale.’

Do you see these paint tones as ‘movers’ rather than colours, then? You see them in the context of the actions they’ll perform, pushing and pulling the eye – a sculptural, kinetic thing?

‘I started doing it because I thought about it as a sort of human paste; making big pots of liquid flesh. It’s like composing – painting is like playing music, I think; so certain notes I’ve already keyed and I know that, if I shift it, say, “Plus cerulean blue to the left, plus cadmium red deep to the right,” I know that that’s going to move the tone in a certain way and I write that on the edge on the pot and I’ll keep it and I’ll get maybe six or seven pots and then I’ll do a session and I can be much freer with the actual painting because I know they’ll do the job.

If I want real space behind an ear, for example, I’ll work out exactly “more cold red, more ultramarine” so that tone behind the ear will literally shoot back and do what I need it to do.’

You’ve always drawn and painted bodies?

‘Always. I’ve always done that – anybody who would sit for me. My best friend at school was interested in French literature and she would come and read and I would do paintings and drawings and sculptures of her. Instead of revising at home, she would revise on my bed while I was doing drawings; the human figure has always been something I’ve been immediately drawn to.’

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

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

• • • • •

The first piece of Jenny Saville’s work I encountered was Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) that was used as the cover of Manic Street Preachers’ 1994 album The Holy Bible. I remember listening to it in the art rooms at school – scrutinising the cover triptych, liner notes and lyrics – a symbiotic body.

Jenny collaborated with the band again recently, the painting Stare fronting Journal for Plague Lovers, an album written around lyrics left behind by disappeared member Richey Edwards.*

‘The first time I did the Manics thing, I was living in Glasgow. I’d just done the show at the Saatchi Gallery and Richey Edwards called me up and we had a conversation about anorexia and I wasn’t initially keen on doing an album cover but then, after talking to him, I really wanted to do it because we had a lot of interests that were similar – about technology and the body, writers we liked – and he faxed me the lyrics to “4st 7lb” and I read that and said, “I’ll do it. Use the triptych, you can have it.”

I didn’t realise it was going to become this incredibly cult album. People still ask me to sign that album cover when I give talks about my work; there’s always someone, in America or wherever, who brings The Holy Bible album along.’

Later that year, I ask Nicky Wire of the Manics about working with Jenny:

‘She’s been so good to us, really. Amazing. I was really intimidated to meet her when she came to see us play Journal at the Roundhouse. You know, intimidated in a nice way but … I was so impressed with her and actually more intrigued and indebted afterwards.

I feel a correlation with her in the sense that, for me, she’s by far the greatest modern British artist but sometimes she’s not seen that way because she’s never been associated with Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst, even though they sprang up at the same time; she’s out on her own. There’s something inside her that’s like “Oh, fuck the rest of you.”’

I was in the Roundhouse for that Journal for Plague Lovers gig and recall Nicky dedicating a song to Jenny, who was in the crowd, with the words ‘She’s taken a lot of shit for this cover and I don’t know why’ – a nod to the hysterical reaction of several supermarkets to the Stare sleeve; removing it from shelves, covering it up or refusing to stock it altogether.

‘I didn’t know it was going to get the publicity that it got,’ she says when I ask her about it. ‘I was shocked by the supermarket scandal because it’s quite a straight painting really. I thought it was interesting the way people reacted – “There’s blood on the face!” Sorry, you’re made of eight pints of it, what’s so damaging about that?

In Italy the relationship with death is much closer. We’ve sanitised all those things. We don’t wash our parents’ bodies before burial here whereas in the south of Italy they still do that. I feel that’s the way the culture’s moved really, we haven’t learnt to deal with death. We’re all so paranoid about prolonging our lives for as long as possible … I think we’re going to have a lot of tubular humans.’

• • • • •

Standing among these paintings, it strikes me that Jenny’s work, like J.G. Ballard’s, is ultimately concerned with the interzone between life and death. The work on the walls crackles with this enquiry, the energy worked into them, bunched and potential beneath the viscous skin.

Close up, the paint is meted, cut and spread – the movements caught and frozen; plains of colour conjoining and colliding.

I point to the red swipe of an inside ear.

These moments of raw colour, there are scrapes of blue on the nose and cheek of Stare that seem to up the ante of reality and abstraction at one and the same time.

‘You can push the limits of it because you’ve got, say, this blue; the blue is there but I’ve pushed it, made it more extreme, but you can only go to a certain level of that and still keep a realism. You can go too far and have to come back – that’s what takes the time because … (digs out a three tone swatch) here we are, I know I can put that, that and that in any combination and those two will swing your eye over and the third will be a background – when I’m actually painting I can start to run things through that; they’re what give you the extra heightened reality.

The artists I like always can combine and move the nature of the medium they work in – be it paint, music or whatever. Radiohead are so good, they have such a good musical craft that they can push it so even something like the Shipping Forecast, they’re able to take that and move it. The people I like understand the nature of the material they work in and the nature of life; it’s the combination of putting those things together, melding and mixing, pulling it all in, that I respond to.

I used to have stacks of cookery books because I found photographs of cookery and food were really luscious. I collected a lot of things like that – fashion magazines because they always soup-up the body, they make the mouths more luscious, give the eyes more shadows – you can take elements of that, hyperbolic fashion shoots which twist reality a certain way and, if you’ve got the right eye, you can take all that and do something very interesting with it that’s not just superficial. It can be anything; the stain left by a dropped Coca-Cola on the floor – this human presence that’s been left on a pavement.’

You often have spatter and workings beneath your paintings – tea stains like scar tissue, paint running out of the frame.

‘A lot of that’s from Velázquez. I’ve got a picture somewhere where he shifted the edge so that most of this surface is literally raw, and Bacon did that too – raw canvas he then drew on top of. I like the idea that the material of the canvas itself becomes part of the image – you’re not just using the surface as something to cover up. You see the stain where I’ve painted this here? The oil that’s gone into the paint has gone into the paper. I’ve tried to replicate that in paintings so many times because I think it shows a sort of present. You see where the paint has slightly lifted off the paper there?’

You’re celebrating the process, then, embracing the canvas for what it is and the oily paint likewise.

‘I’m trying to get inside the mechanics of what paint is. I want paint to do something that only it can do. I know how to slide paint; how to put it on dry. I go through phases of wanting to use a lot of oil and slide the whole thing, really wet and then other times see the benefits of dragging dry paint over dry paint – the way it picks up the light slowly.’

The paint projecting to meet you.

‘An unkempt surface. We live in a time where a lot of things are hermetically sealed – I like it when I activate a surface and that surface is unique, it can’t be replicated in any way. I think that’s very human, that interest and need.

I was reading recently about Leonardo drawing a mother and child, how it took him two years to do it. Today, hardly any artist working, apart from Frank Auerbach probably, spends two years making a drawing. Our ability as humans to physically move faster hasn’t changed from Leonardo’s time; if you’ve got one stick of charcoal or Conté crayon or whatever, the ability to make a drawing hasn’t really shifted, so I think it’s interesting that art’s shifted according to the necessity for human speed – maybe that’s why the majority of art now isn’t made over a long period of time.’

Is your work exceptional in regard to the time you spend on it?

‘Yes, I think so. Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach – there are artists about who spend a lot of time on work. I don’t think there are a lot of people who’d choose to spend a lot of time on their own in a room, to be honest – not like this. I can spend three months mixing colours. Just mixing colours. Every day. And that’s before I’ve even got going. A lot of people don’t want to spend their days doing that.’

But you do.

‘I realised that I wanted to do this very young. I knew I would be labouring over making one piece and that what I wanted to do took a long time and I felt a kinship with people like Auerbach who goes to the studio every day, the same thing. It can seem very dogmatic but at the same time you have to stay in that painting space – if you want to make paintings you have to be in front of a painting by and large – unless you’re Jeff Koons and you get eighty people making them – if you want that one-on-one, Bacon-esque battle with the surface, you’ve got to stay inside a room … and you don’t really need a lot of other stuff around you; you need a bit of human contact so you don’t go mad, but actually it can be just a coffee with someone, a conversation on the telephone – enough contact so you’re linked but not so much that it consumes and distracts you. The Van Gogh letters at the RA recently were really interesting for that reason because Theo offered exactly the valve you need. Vincent just needed to get it out, to say, “I’m not completely isolated; I’m making this work and this is the progress,” and his brother would say, “Okay, great. Send me some drawings.” It was enough, a long piece of elastic so Vincent was out there but he wasn’t totally on his own.*

‘I used to get frustrated about painting, the fact that you’d make one painting and it’s just one and can only exist as that, whereas a lot of my friends were doing photography, what seemed a more versatile medium because it could exist in all different places, but now I feel completely different about that; I like that you make this singular object and it’s almost like a human performance – the trace of it. When you make a painting, every single bit of that process is in the document that’s left. It’s like speech almost, a collection of speech, so over the year of making a painting you’ve got a year of collected experience on the surface and that, for me, is an incredible document, and so to experience the work properly you have to see it in the flesh.

The Van Gogh show was incredible to see. The work that you’ve looked at in books a lot and think you know very well – some things are a bigger scale than you thought they were and the drawings are suddenly alive in the flesh.

‘The experience of having your body in front of the piece of work, I think that’s an entirely different thing from a reproduction, obviously.

If you stand in front of a great de Kooning you literally stand where he made that work. You can’t do that in another medium – you can’t do that with music. Even in writing, when you read a printed book, it transforms you and takes you somewhere else but you’re not actually in the creative moment, and I think painting is the closest you can get – apart perhaps from performance art – the closest to creation, if you like.’

• • • • •

How far do you look ahead and plan your future work?

‘Work comes out of work, I think. I’ve got certain aims as to where I want the work to go – this marriage between abstraction and realism, this space that oscillates between those two things. Certain artists couple that and make a dialogue between them. I’m not near it. I’m trying to get near it but I’ve learnt from doing paintings over the years that that’s a journey you have to accept. You can’t get there easily; you make jumps and then plateau a bit and then make another jump and then you’ve got to ride the plateau and when it starts to go, that’s when you’ve got to be brave and really push. Sometimes I’ll be in a painting session and I’ll completely trash the painting.’

Do you then try and get it back to where it was or work on with what you’ve got?

‘I work with what I’ve got. I know I’ve got to ride it – you’re in a game at that point and you’ve got to try and pull the strings because I try to make marks and each mark is like the way you play a note – you have to decide how you’re going to play it – but when you’re really on form or you’re really in it you don’t even think about the way you’re playing it, you just play. Sometimes you’re just awful and you say, “None of this works,” but then, often, you can turn a corner and, because it really doesn’t work, you’ll make a huge leap because, “Fuck it. I might as well try this and this.” You do two or three things and then suddenly you think, “There’s something in that.”

The mixing of the colours beforehand gives you the ability to get to that space.’

You’re grounded by that.

‘I know I’ve got a sort of safety net. If all else fails I can scrape it all down and just panel-in that tone and it will smooth that side of the neck, or whatever, but the best bits of my paintings usually come out of mistakes. A sort of desperation; it’s like driving and getting lost, not having a map and going another way and then, suddenly, you’ve got to the place you wanted to get to but you’ve gone by a different route.’

• • • • •

The ground floor of the studio consists of a single open room stretching from concertina doors at the front to multi-paned windows at the back. Jenny’s drawing studio takes up about a quarter of the floor space – a curtain of clear plastic sheet hangs down to divide this portion off and contain the warmth of two electric fan heaters which buzz and tick beside us now as we stand, surrounded on three sides by large charcoal drawings of mother and child. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci,* each cartoon is over-drawn to depict multiple scenes, like a triple-exposed film – the figures frozen in three acts. My eyes pick up and follow a line, a leg or a hand, and then recognise the rest of the drawing to which it belongs before skipping over to another detail or action. It’s quite disorientating and in these moments the babies seem to be multi-limbed and flailing … and I realise, standing there, how quickly I’ve taken for granted how mind-blowing Jenny’s work is because I’m describing it as disorientating and hypnotic when what I should be telling you is what it’s like to stand with an artist in the space where she creates work that I imagine would delight the pillars of the Renaissance. It’s shock and awe. It’s awesome and very moving … and I don’t want to jump ahead and spoil the end but I wasn’t able to revisit Jenny after this meeting and that aspect of this chapter – it being a unique four-hour encounter – means the details are rendered rich and vivid in my mind. We got a lot done, talked and walked around before the work, peered close where the paint became a livid landscape and smelt of sour gummy turps and stood back where the apparently disparate shards and pocks of paintings focused to form these remarkable wholes. We drank tea. We spoke about Duncan Jones’s film Moon, W.G. Sebald’s De Emigrés and I told Jenny about G.K. Chesterton’s essay ‘A Defence of Skeletons’* and then it was over and I was back out on the street and everything was prosaic by comparison for a long time afterwards, the focus and colour lost – as if I’d been drinking tea with a phoenix and now had to go back to rubbing two sticks together.

But I didn’t know that yet as we stood downstairs among the drawings.

‘I’ve used drawing a lot but never really wanted to exhibit them, whereas these are different. I’m trying to make something where you can read several things all at the same time and it’s really from looking at the internet. You don’t have one stream of information now – not one and then another – it’s many things that exist and are seen together. You’d never get that from these drawings but that’s where my thinking came from; you can see the workings of ideas.’

The draughtsmanship is brilliant. Are you self-taught or did you get a lot from art school in this respect?

‘I went to a very traditional art school. Life drawing every night from seven until nine. Thirty-six life drawings a term – whether you painted abstract, whatever you did. Obviously I liked it because I wanted to paint the figure.’

I’ve read that you teach, is that right? When did that start? Is it useful to you?

‘I used to teach a lot more. I used to teach at the Slade, UCL, but I really prefer the school of Eileen Guggenheim in New York – a graduate figurative school. Warhol bankrolled it quite a bit at the start. You can go and do a class on how to paint like Velázquez, you can do sculpting directly from the figure. It’s very traditional but you learn tangible skills. I do a workshop there that I was taught when I was at art school; a tutor showed me how to mix colour and he made me make a painting with squares – mixing a tone and putting it down so you make a space invader figure. Each square had to be a tone. It forces you to think behind a shoulder – “How do you make tone a piece of space? How do you decide what that tone is going to be?” There are no lines, just tone, and so I pass that on and they really struggle for about three days and then, after about the fifth day, they start to make progress because they’re then allowed to make half-squares, triangles, so you can do the edges of shoulders until, finally, you get something … I always say to them, “You’re not making art. This has nothing to do with art. This is an exercise in looking.”’

Articulation.

‘Yes! It’s about articulation. There’s not a lot of instruction in art schools now. People are quite ashamed of having skills, actually. I’ve always thought, “I want to show off as much as possible!” (Laughs) I don’t really see why I should be apologetic about that. I want to articulate. I think that, if you’re intent on doing something, then you need to be able to articulate how to do it and … you know, the amount of students I’ve had who’ve painted a broken hand or foot that they can’t articulate and have constructed a philosophy around that painting to justify it because they can’t do it. I think that’s part of the big problem with painting: there’s been a whole construct of “bad painting is good painting”. I find that annoying.’

Jenny trails off to a glum shrug. The fan heater clicks and whirs. The plastic sheet walls whisper and we stand there in silence for a moment.

Is most of your current work about pregnancy?

‘No. I’d like to mix it up a bit. I don’t really want to do a “Mother” thing. I’ve noticed from looking at art history that the notion of mother and child is very much a fantastical idea but it’s fucking visceral, giving birth; it’s unbelievable. You have a body coming out of your body. That is weird.’

I’ve always thought having a baby must be incredibly scary – this thing growing inside you, getting bigger – the amount of horror films based around that premise.

‘Alien.’

Eraserhead. Videodrome …

‘What struck me most about Miracles of Life, Ballard’s last book, was that he talks about this baby arriving that’s a new life yet looks like it’s been there for centuries – such an ancient, animalistic thing. That was quite a shock, I didn’t know how I’d feel but you are absolutely an animal in that moment … it was very close to painting and, it’s technical but I had a difficult birth; after my daughter was born a surgeon had to come and remove part of my stomach and all the placenta by hand – literally grabbing handfuls of placenta out of my body and putting it onto a table next to me. I was looking at that and, in that moment, I was in a Francis Bacon painting. I thought, “I am never going to make paintings in the same way again.” It was incredible – seeing the inside of your body being pulled out. I could feel the surgeon’s hand at the top of my ribcage – while his arm was inside me.’

James Herriot stuff.

‘Really like that, really profound; an incredibly intense moment. I’ve worked under medical light before, the feeling of medical light – so all the colours, the greens and the reds, are very intense, but at the same time I had just become a mother so I had just given birth to this little girl and I had all this going on at the same time. I saw painting everywhere.’

Did you feel detachment or absolute presence in the moment?

‘I think I shifted between those things constantly. I remember thinking, “Look at that, Jenny; you’ve got to take that in, you’ve got to hold and watch that, that’s amazing. Look at the colours in that!” At the same time my aunt’s holding my daughter and I was asking, “Is she alright? Is she okay?” You know, “That’s my daughter! Isn’t she beautiful!”

I have noticed in life that I’ve had times where I’ve had a conscious feeling of trying to hold a moment, visually, because I’ve known it was important; even at a very young age.

I remember riding on a merry-go-round and seeing another little girl who’d cut her legs open because she’d fallen off her horse and I was going round – sitting with my dad on one of those golden horses that go up and down – getting snippets, coming round again and getting another snippet.’

With a jolly pipe organ soundtrack.

‘Exactly. I remember thinking, “That’s really powerful,” because everyone was looking and then you couldn’t see. I wanted to get round and see again. That’s very much the kind of animal/human – wanting to see something but being worried at the same time or repulsed. I remember the scene so vividly. I was obviously tuned-in to that way of thinking even then because I knew that it was important, visually important to me, and I understood the mechanics of it and I must only have been four or five.’

I remember slamming my fingers in a car door when I was very young and my dad – in the way dads do – bought me a Crunchie chocolate bar to make it better. So now, every time I see a Crunchie I have that memory and a slight twinge, a feeling of pins and needles. I remember looking down at the dent in my fingers, squished right down … that moment before the pain hits. You get a split second of perfect clarity.

‘Yes, exactly, and I think that sometimes I paint with that in mind. That moment.’

• • • • •

Normally, of course, these are just the sort of conversations that might make you change seats, carriages or trains if it came unbidden from the lady next to you – unless she’d introduced herself as a surgeon or a butcher, say, and you’d kicked off with ‘So … evisceration and the films of Nicolas Roeg, eh?’

Yet I’m fascinated in Jenny’s company and engaged to an extent where any weirdness, macabre connotations or squeamishness could not be further from my mind.

The incredible intensity of the few hours I spend with her will remain with me and, looking back, there was a saturation about that morning – the colours and the images, the source texts and the photographs … yet, at the heart of it all was this quiet, contained lady in painty tracksuit bottoms, hair held back by an elastic band … ‘But she was so bloody normal,’ I’ll later recall, then, almost in the same breath, ‘She was one of the most brilliant, uncanny people I’ve met.’*

We break for tea and I ask about Jenny’s childhood, how she came to be here, when she discovered who and what she wanted to be, her formative years.

Did you spend a lot of time in your bedroom?

‘I would say so, yeah. I lived in lots of different houses and went to lots of different schools and so art became something that was a constant for me. I just always remember making paintings or building things and I read a lot about other artists. I visited Cézanne’s house when I was sixteen because I had an obsession with Cézanne and I knew pretty early on what it took to be an artist – reading about the life of Van Gogh when I was about twelve, things like that. My uncle was an art historian and he ran courses in Venice and Florence so I’d spend summers there and would join in all the art history courses. In the Frari in Venice, there’s an enormous Titian altarpiece of the assumption of the Virgin and I can remember sitting in front of that and saying, “One day I’m going to make paintings as big as that.” It wasn’t a joke. I was absolutely serious. I didn’t really know who Titian was but I learnt about him and Tintoretto and eventually I owned it through that knowledge. I knew that was going to be my life. I didn’t even consider that that wasn’t a thing that women had done. It wasn’t even on my radar. It was absolutely my life – there was my life: I was going to be in dialogue with these people who had done this stuff. I think the naivety of my desire helped me. That’s just what I did and my mother was a teacher – she was my teacher actually, when I was very little – so the classroom, when all the kids left, was mine; so she’d be doing whatever she did and I’d just be making things or drawing and that continued. It was my language from a very early age.’*

Your vocabulary to communicate with the world.

‘Absolutely. I mean, I admire writers greatly. I don’t find the precision in words that I do in paint. I find paint’s the way I can hold all the contradictions of life. I can’t begin to use words that way.’

Interesting then that a lot of your catalogue essays are very cerebral and penetrating in that way – John Gray, for example, one of the most acute and steely writers I know.

‘I love his writing. Straw Dogs in one of the best books written in the last twenty years because it’s incredibly precise; to be able to go through that amount of information … the relationship that he’s got with humans as animals is something that I’ve had in my work, that I’ve felt, since I was much younger. I give it to everybody, that book.*

‘I’m interested in fictional, constructed ideas of the self – ‘If I had this procedure, I’d be more myself’ – that’s just a myth, a mythical thing. You have this fictional idea of what you want to look like or could look like, need to look like, to be more wholly you. It’s an artificial construct and I found that very interesting when talking to patients in New York; they felt that they were inhabiting their body more by having this artifice … and that’s not a modern phenomenon but the idea that you can re-sculpt your flesh, I thought that thrilling.

I wasn’t making a moral judgement with the work, which a lot of people thought I was; I was fascinated with the need to do it and what the mechanisms of that were because I’ve often been interested in the space between things. I’d say the biggest thread that runs through my work is “the in-between”.

If it’s a transvestite or a transsexual, you’re in-between – a floating gender. You aren’t fixed – and that movable boundary I found an interesting place to operate. A free space.’

That’s the word, I suppose, operation. A surgical gaze.

‘Yes, I would say so, and I’ve painted quite a few things where you’re not quite sure whether the body is alive or dead. I’ve often tried to find images that have that – one eye left open or a face that’s completely mauled. When I paint it, I want it so you have to work to piece the head back together again, so you’ve got a moment of crisis, as a viewer.’

There are very few things more arresting or off-putting than to have your gaze met by something ‘other’ – familiar yet alien.

‘I suppose so, but by the time I’ve done them I’m so involved with them that I don’t see them with fresh eyes because I’ve done the journey … I think I’ve developed the withdrawal of personality, the opposite of what portraits have been aiming to do for centuries. I try to show the personality of whatever trauma or alteration is of the body.’

The crash site. The aftermath.

‘That’s it, I’m not trying to show the personality of the human being in the way of “the eyes being the gateway to the soul” – it’s not that.’

But I think you can have both together. I remember John Hurt talking about how he cried reading the script of The Elephant Man because of that feeling, the glint and purchase of recognition – the body, the man behind the trauma.

‘That’s the thing: when you get people that work well – even an artist like Velázquez, his Pope painting in Rome, he doesn’t illustrate. Velázquez isn’t like Caravaggio. Caravaggio, however great he is, for me, he’s a bit of an illustrator. Velázquez doesn’t illustrate. He builds in paint. He’s in that moment where it’s more real than real because he uses paint so well, and people like David Lynch do the same thing, I think. Something like The Elephant Man, it’s not you but it’s the hyperbolic you, but he has enough realism in it that it brings it to you; so it’s in you and out of you at the same time, and that’s quite thrilling because it unlocks sensations that you know you’ve got but don’t often have the facility in life to think about or experience.’

• • • • •

Jenny leads the way into the larger room beyond, pushing through the plastic sheets,* revealing a space dominated by multiple versions of the painting Stare. The faces gaze out, each with a dazed expression somewhere between “Have I left the gas on?” and “I’ve just cut off my thumb.” The expression lives in the moment of a child’s confusion – the split second between the fall and the tears, the crash and the blood.

I tell Jenny I’m amazed she’s able to redraw and repaint the same image over and over – each individual yet retaining an essence.

‘I know that mouth back to front now. Each one; but I’m quite pleased that I’m finishing them because I’ve painted this head an awful lot of times now.’

The textures here are really meaty.

‘They’re all going to be shown together. I became interested in video phones a few years ago and early MSN messaging; you’d see somebody break apart and pixellate, leave part of their flesh over there and you’d try with your eye to get the head to come back together again.’

Where did the source material for Stare come from?

‘It’s from a medical book that I had a long time ago. I use Photoshop a lot to shift the colours around so I did a blues and greens version and I did drawings of it – it had everything I needed. It had a mouth that I love, a landscape map-face, one ear that almost holds up the painting so you can shift the head.’

The ellipse of the shirt is great.

‘Exactly, it’s a good rocker at the bottom. So it’s got a lot of elements to it – the shadow of the nose – a lot of things where you can get good shapes going, so really it was an indulgence being able to concentrate on the paint, being allowed to make these landscape figures.’

When you’re preparing a show, do you arrive with some paintings or do people know what’s coming?

‘I don’t have a lot of people coming into the studio because I like to get the work the way I want it before I show it.

I have the link to the gallery, the person who looks after my work, and I talk to them regularly – a few times a week – but I’ve tended not to have somebody coming in to say, “I’d like to show that and I’d like to show that.” There’s nothing like that. They say, “Are you going to be ready in September?” and I always push it. I’ll say, “I don’t know, I’ll tell you in March.” And then, in March, I’ll say, “Can we go for Spring next year?” They’re used to me and I know that there is an elastic level that I can get to but, once I’ve made the commitment to that show date and said, “Okay, let’s do that,” they book the trucks and then I know I’ve got to get it done.’

I saw a film of trucks coming to take the panels of David Hockney’s Bigger Trees Near Warter at Tate Britain recently.

‘I’ve had guys have to have cups of tea in my kitchen because I’ve said, “I’m not ready, you’ll have to wait a bit.”’

Hours or days?

‘I get them to take the paintings piecemeal so, say it’s eight paintings, they’ll take three first and then they’ll come and get another two and then another two and it goes like that for about six weeks.’

Is that to get them out of the space or so you won’t fiddle with them?

‘So I can’t fiddle. I can’t juggle them all at the same time, but in one case the last truck was coming to pick up the last two and I only let them take one. I said, “The other one’s not done,” but the whole show was pivoted around that piece and I didn’t have a lot of work so it wasn’t as if you could leave anything out. The person at the gallery had to find a military airbase in Scotland to fly the last painting to New York.

I had a taxi outside my studio door and then I went, covered in paint, to Heathrow and got changed at the airport and the painting went to the airbase.’

Was it on a military flight?

‘It was a cargo flight that went out of a military base. It was the only flight that was going – the other ones had to go to Frankfurt first because they were too big to go in a regular cargo plane. I know what the biggest size you can get on a cargo plane is because I’ve pushed for the canvas stretcher to be as big as it could go … but I’m not so dramatic as that any more. I used to love the drama of that, you know (mad staring eyes), “I need more time! Arrrgh!”’

I’m an artist!

‘Exactly. “I’m not ready! You can’t have it!” The gallery person is freaking out because they’re going to get killed for not getting that painting on the truck, and they are also tied by “But we need to respect you because you’re an artist …” so you’ve got this bit of elastic where you’re pulling “Arrgh! I can spend another night on the nose …” Then you get to New York and everything arrives, or you get there and they’re still locked in customs and you’re going, “What the fuck!? Where the fuck are they!?” It tends to always work out in the end … but I don’t know if that’s really the best way to make art. It’s okay when you’re in your twenties and you’ve got tons of energy and don’t sleep for two weeks at a time but I think, once you get a bit older, it’s much better to let the work generate itself together. But I know of people who, I mean, Giacometti couldn’t let anything out of his studio – for years he wouldn’t let anything go.’

• • • • •

I think of Rothko exhibiting in his Bowery studio and then to the book Jenny published with Rizzoli whose pages were filled with images of her own workspace – glimpses of mirrors, ladders and platforms. Is Jenny still up and down scaffolds? I wonder.

‘I am but I haven’t worked on anything huge for a while. In Palermo I built a second floor on wheels. It had a palette table, the whole thing at different levels, but what I really want is to buy a studio and have a hole dug in the floor so I can let the painting down and up because I find that when I paint on a scaffolding I don’t paint as well because I can’t walk back to look. I like being on the ground. I want an inspection pit!

I’ve tried painting sideways but you get a slightly wonky head, so now I make the effort to go up and down a ladder. It’s a lot, though, up and down for every single mark.’

Do you have to think more in terms of landscapes when you’re painting sideways?

‘Yes, or an abstract painting. Thinking of space and the ways things work in space. I’ve tried multiple ways of working – collapsible scaffolding, second floors, ladders … ladders in the end are the things that I like but I don’t have the same desire to make enormous paintings. I’ll make paintings the scale of that wall, but it’s an enormous emotional job to make a painting on that scale, getting it to work. I suppose my equivalent of that is having seven or eight heads on the go at the same time, which is what I’ve got going on with these Stares. I’ll probably come back round to large work again but, you know, I’ve got two babies now so …’

You’re busy.

‘Yeah. To do that was pretty gruelling, physically. Maybe I’ll do another one in a couple of years but I like this current scale. It’s a good scale for me.’

It’s still relatively massive, you know! (Laughter)

‘I do get kinda shocked. I saw a painting I did called Hyphen – my sister and myself, heads, and I loved making that painting, I really flew. I was at the top of my game and had a great studio in London – I’d forgotten the paint was so thick, you know? I was trowelling it on. Everything is quite precise, I get the paint in the right place, but I don’t think I could make that painting now; not in the same way. I remember the studio had fantastic lino floor tiles from the sixties and I pulled them up, they were bendy. You could get the paint on and literally go like that with it (mimes smearing paint up and over with a lino squeegee) – sort of like plastering but it gave the same feeling as when a plastic surgeon pulls the flesh, so I was getting a tension and able to use the paint in a sculptural sense on the surface.

I’d ripped up all the floor tiles in that studio by the end.’

• • • • •

I heard on the radio the other day that Philip Glass was still driving a taxi at forty-one. You had your break quite early on – no time spent in the wilderness working up your practice. How has that shaped your development?

‘Well, it wasn’t the great easy ride that people sometimes imagine.

It’s seen that I’ve always had money but I was making shows in New York absolutely broke – eating an orange in five days, scraping out paint from old tubes – because everything I earned went on studio rent. You work for two and a half years on six pieces, and you’re not selling. The money just goes. It’s draining to work like that.

It’s nice to make a complete story “from Saatchi Gallery to Gagosian in New York” – a very singular ladder, but it’s not actually like that.

‘I made this very big painting called Fulcrum and that I nicknamed “The Bitch”. I couldn’t get it working. I spent more than eighteen months trying to get the figures together and the paint the way I wanted. It was a gruelling act of faith to keep at it because I should have probably trashed it but I’m a bit stubborn like that, I keep going but, yes, I suppose I don’t know what it’s like to have years in the wilderness, that’s for sure. I’ve been extremely lucky like that. I came out of art school and had a commission to make work for the Saatchi Gallery; that was the lottery ticket that I got.’

But you also had the pressure of being a high-profile and recognised artist from the very beginning. Lots of pressure. A very steep learning curve.

‘But when you’re young, I mean; I had no fear. As soon as Charles said, “Okay, do whatever you want with the space,” I just knew “I want this 21-foot triptych, I’m going to make it in three panels and it’s going to be like this.” My God! You know? Who else is going to buy that kind of scale of work? The dream that you’ve got of making such pieces; most people don’t have the finance to follow that through because they’ve got to do the nitty-gritty stuff of selling drawings or whatever, and I was extremely lucky in that sense: I wanted to make those big works and I could do it. And I did.

I was very quiet about it, though. I mean, I left art school with a lot of friends and a lot of people were getting really broke and having to get part-time jobs. Hardly anybody knew that I was going to show at the Saatchi Gallery, I didn’t tell anyone. I just worked in my studio for two years. Every day. Trying to get the work the way I wanted it, and then I was quite shocked by the level of press that was generated by the Saatchi Gallery. I left to go and work in America a few weeks later.’

Was that exposure one of the reasons for that?

‘I was very relieved to do that, yeah, because it’s never sat too well with me, being known. I don’t know how actors can live like that because their persona and their body is known, whereas I work very quietly in my studio. I was lucky that it happened when I was very young so that I could understand the mechanism of it and realise that, when you go back in the studio, it means jack shit. It doesn’t make you a better painter. The investment by other people – to show at different galleries, have exhibitions with amazing artists – that does help because it raises your game. I’ve just done a show with Picasso, Bacon and de Kooning in America and you’re there, accepted as part of this canon of art. That makes you … you lift yourself.’

I can see Jenny beginning to itch to get back to work, so I thank her for her time and am about to switch the tape off when I recall something else I wanted to cover related to her Rizzoli book, which featured shots of scrapbooks, lists and notes for her work. Is that an ongoing process? I ask.

In response, Jenny walks over to the back room, footsteps echoing around the space, and shows me an A4 sheet pinned to the wall: ‘Heads’, ‘Burns’, ‘Bodies’, ‘Babies’, ‘Blown Up Mouth’ …

‘I’ve had a third of those for about ten years. They’ll come up again or I’ll look through a scrapbook and find some other ones.

“Botched Suicide” – I like the tragedy of that.’

She gestures to a row of what look like crime scene shots of, well, botched suicides; although most of them look pretty successful to me. It’s hard to imagine people getting up and walking away with no intestines or only half their head. Dead people who got that way in violent hurry.

‘“Black Teeth” – I’ve had “Black Teeth” on there for years. “Albino” – I’ve got lots of albino photographs, I’ve just never got round to making the painting. “Patch Head” – patches of shadow on top of a head. I photograph lots of people all of the time and I’ve been doing these photographs recently of women in baths of water with shadows on the water. You know when you fly and you look down over the sea and you see the shadows of clouds on the sea? It’s got that sort of sense.

I have images that I collect and images that I create – where I get the model and I set it up and do a photographic session. I have that stream of my work and I have images that I just find. This is quite a barren studio for me at the moment. If you come here in two years it’ll probably be absolutely loaded with images.’

We’re stood by a back window now. Photographs of people in baths hang from a dado rail. I walk back to look again at the pictures of violent death but am intercepted by shots of burns victims and babies without legs.

‘I keep them in here because I don’t really want my children to see, so I keep them away. I’ve got a lot of images of babies like this. Depleted uranium. It’s having a huge effect on people who’ve been in Iraq. It’s on the outside of weapon shells and it affects the gene pool for generations; people who’ve been in Iraq, servicemen, have gone back to America and their wife or girlfriend who’s never even been to the area – it’s affected their child.’

I point to the violent deaths further on.

And these?

(Peering closer) These people have really gone for it, haven’t they?

‘She (pointing to a girl with half a head), that was from a love affair. I started to research what cultures had more suicides than others and discovered that suicides rise in countries where there are more high-rise properties built. Japan didn’t have a huge suicide rate until they built high-rise buildings and then a lot of death by high-rise occurred.

(Pointing to another)

That is someone whose stomach was driven over in Brazil.

(Man in a pool of scrambled egg entrails)

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