Banksy Read online

  On the other side of the street is a lone artist with about a dozen cans of paint at his feet. He is wearing goggles and full breathing apparatus to protect himself from the paint fumes, so he looks more like a welder than an artist. Pilot, as he calls himself, is originally from Poland and he speaks with such a slow, sincere English he makes the language sound almost sad. He has been here since ten in the morning, painting a piece which suits his name, planes exploding like darts out of everywhere. He is not using stencils, but it is not traditional graffiti, rather it is freehand graffiti without a letter in sight; he is using the spray can to paint what he wants without following any of the rules.

  ‘There’s still a load of work to do. I will finish in two or three hours.’

  ‘Will it last?’

  ‘No, it won’t last. The second I finish it I take the picture and I go away and someone will destroy it.’

  ‘That doesn’t worry you?’

  ‘No, I do it for the pleasure of painting.’

  And then he tries to explain the call of graffiti in an almost messianic way. ‘Kids will only aspire to what they can see. And that’s why you need to do your best work, so that kids can look and aspire to master the craft. Because it is a craft. It’s almost illogical to do graffiti. You can spend most of your life and money on it and what you have is a picture on the internet.

  ‘What I love about graffiti is there is a sense of belonging. Everyone seems to be coming from the same background. It feels like we are an entity. When I meet these amazing street artists my hat goes off to their work. But with street artists there’s no sense of “getting up”, it’s just one stencil, one sticker and two thousand pictures all over the internet. Graffiti artists would go in the dead of night and would do it for themselves and they would go to the most audacious spots for the love of painting. For the craft . . .’

  I went back to Leake Street the next day and was happy to see that everything was still there just as they had painted it. When I went back again two weeks later there was almost nothing of the original work to see and I remembered David, sounding this time a bit like a letter writer to the Daily Telegraph, as he told me, ‘We call them rats, they come out and they paint over everything and they’ve got no respect. That’s kids in society nowadays. It’s not just graffiti, it’s how kids are growing up.’ Pilot’s elaborate work had been completely ruined by tags and throw ups. But I know he would say it was worth it. Of the lads’ work the middle part had survived, with the crackled effect caused by the gloss still showing. The work they had done to the left and right had been completely obliterated. So too had our tag.

  Banksy was once asked to define graffiti and he made his definition as wide as he possibly could. ‘I love graffiti. I love the word. Some people get hung up over it, but I think they’re fighting a losing battle. Graffiti equals amazing to me . . . I make normal paintings if I have ideas that are too complex or offensive to go out on the street, but if I ever stopped being a graffiti writer I would be gutted. It would feel like being a basket weaver rather than being a proper artist.’

  But although he is known by the outside world for his ‘graffiti’, it was very early in his career that he decided there was more to life than tags and masterpieces. And many, although certainly not all, hardcore graffiti artists are not happy with him for it – to put it mildly. His work, they say, is too easy, too glib. In Crack and Shine the graffiti artist called 10Foot (later imprisoned for twenty-six months) says: ‘Banksy is a sell-out, a cross over and gets taken out because we hate street art and he’s got no integrity. Getting properly up or having a wicked style is less pseudo-intellectual but takes more time, determination and talent.’

  Banksy did attempt to reach this tough London crowd. Three years after he came to London he set up the Burner Prize – as opposed to the Turner Prize – for graffiti writers. He put up £1000 and even had a bronze statue made, rented out the basement of a club in west London and threw a party for about 100 people, all graffiti writers. There was a shortlist which included the ATG crew, Cos, Kist, the NT crew, Odea, Oker, Take, Tox and Zomby. The front-runner was Tox but in the end the prize was won by Zomby. Unlike the Turner Prize there was very little argument, for almost all the writers agreed that Zomby was the king of the London scene and anyway the press was not too interested in a row over who was the year’s greatest graffiti writer. There were two things missing from the award ceremony: Banksy and Zomby; but, sweetly, Zomby’s mother was there to collect his award. David Samuel was impressed. ‘I thought this Banksy dude, a stencil artist, bit of a writer from Bristol comes to London and does that with the money he’s earning, that’s amazing.’ But it did not do Banksy any lasting good in this tight community.

  For this is a world which takes no prisoners, where feuds can run and run and where women hardly get a look in. Riikka Kuittinen, who curated a touring exhibition of street art for the V&A in 2010, explains: ‘It happens at night. It’s quite physical, dangerous. It’s mostly a boys’ thing. There’s also just the fact that women don’t want to walk by railway tracks at night.’ The feud or ‘war’ between Banksy and Robbo which stretched out for a year or so from the end of 2009 is an excellent example of the gulf between the world of hardcore graffiti and the world of Banksy. In the search for an arresting opening paragraph, newspapers ludicrously compared this spat to the rivalry between Picasso and Matisse, the feuds between Turner and Constable or Whistler and Ruskin, comparisons which – I hope – would make both Banksy and Robbo laugh.

  Serious graffiti, sliding down dark holes, sawing through the railings, fixing up ladders in the dark, is a young man’s game and Robbo, now in his forties, has a family to support. But he is a London graffiti artist from way back and is held in considerable awe as one of the ‘kings’ of the strangely hierarchical community of graffiti writers. In Crack and Shine the artist P.I.C. describes painting the tube trains with Robbo and Prime in Aldgate East on Christmas Day 1988. He gives a very good picture of how there is more to graffiti than just graffiti, there is the comradeship, the challenge and the fear.

  It was Robbo who racked the Rubber Duck ‘Stop That Leak’ spray paint that was going to be their ‘weapon of choice’; Robbo who did a recce of the station; Robbo who locked up a ladder near the spot ready for when they needed it; and Robbo who packed a little boom box in his rucksack to provide the music while they painted. After a day celebrating Christmas with their families (P.I.C. had dutifully listened to the Queen’s Speech with his parents and grandparents) they drove to Aldgate on Christmas night. One by one they climbed over a high wall from the street, down the ladder, now extended, that Robbo had retrieved and on to the train roof. From the roof they were swiftly down beside the tracks. The CCTV cameras were put out of action and then the train was all theirs. They chose a carriage each and went to work.

  ‘We were in there for just over four hours having our own special Christmas party. Robbo had supplied the sounds and pulled a bottle of Moet out of his bag, Prime had some ready rolled spliffs on the go and I had brought the turkey sandwiches. Perfect.’

  Three years before this Robbo had chosen a hard-to-get-at wall alongside Regent’s Canal in north London where he had spray painted ‘Robbo INC’ in huge bold letters. His work brightened up a dark space underneath a bridge, it looked good and it announced that Robbo was here to stay. And stay ‘Robbo INC’ did, for the next twenty-five years. In graffiti terms this was a landmark – there are very few pieces that survive twenty-five days, let alone twenty-five years. Certainly some squiggles had defaced it over that period, but essentially it remained ‘up’ until Banksy decided to have a go at the Regent’s Canal. He painted a total of four pieces, all entertaining and close enough to Camden Lock for the crowds to enjoy; but it was what he did to the Robbo piece that got him into trouble, not with the police but with Robbo.

  Banksy’s piece was, as usual, a clever bit of work. He obliterated more than half of Robbo’s original, painting it all a solid grey, and on this back
ground he stencilled a workman with a paintbrush and bucket; the workman was posed perfectly so he looked as though he was pasting up Robbo’s name, as if the work was nothing more than a few sheets of wallpaper.

  Norman Mailer said in his exotically overwritten essay on graffiti in New York, first published in 1974: ‘No one wrote over another name . . . for that would have smashed the harmony.’ But here was Banksy writing over Robbo, and unless you are deeply involved in this whole world it is difficult to imagine how strongly people felt about his intervention – any of Norman Mailer’s harmony that had ever existed was destroyed. The web was dominated by users attacking Banksy. ‘Complete and utter sacrilege by Banksy,’ was how one user described it. ‘Blasphemous in the extreme. How dare he paint over history? What on earth gives him the right?’ Revok, one of the West Coast’s most famous graffiti writers – the news soon travelled – wrote: ‘One of the “Golden rules” in graffiti is to respect your elders; foremost by not going over them . . . Particularly in the extremely rare scenario where something has lasted nearly three decades (the graffiti equivalent to a UFO sighting). I would assume Banksy would be aware of this rule, and respect it considering his roots lie in traditional graffiti . . . Apparently not.’

  In contrast the street artist Gaia defended Banksy for daring to confront the ‘unbending, intensely hierarchical and historically obsessed operations of graffiti’. He admired Banksy because ‘instead of succumbing to graffiti’s belligerence Banksy confronted and subverted its methods.’

  It was graffiti war, childish only to the outsider. What happened next is best told by Robbo. Although elusive, he is not quite as elusive as Banksy, and I finally caught up with him in a pub in north London. Shaven headed, six foot eight inches tall, overwhelmingly built, he looks as though he could drink the pub dry. Although at times he can be very funny, I sense that behind it all there is quite a hard history to him that I will never quite know. Thus we are talking about the football team we both support and it puzzles me that he does not go to the games any more. Eventually he admits he has been banned, although he does not go into the gory details.

  He met Banksy in the late 1990s when he was invited to a birthday party at the Dragon Bar off Old Street by Eine, who used to bomb up everywhere under another name until he turned respectable enough to have one of his pictures hanging in the White House. ‘Eine introduced me to a couple of guys who were with Banksy. I had been retired a couple of years and these guys were saying “It’s really an honour to meet you, a pleasure. You’re Robbo. You’re a legend.” And I’m saying “Yeah, I’ve heard of your name too.” I hadn’t but it’s good to be polite and stuff and I’ve always been courteous. Then I got introduced to Banksy. He was nothing at the time. And I said “Hello, I’ve seen your name about” – although I hadn’t – and he went “I ain’t seen your name anywhere.” I went “What?” And he said “I don’t know who you are.” And I thought what the fuck. So I went bang and give him a backhander. I said “You might not have heard of me, but you’ll never fucking forget me, will you?” Of course he had heard of me, but he was trying to play it cool. He was being disrespectful. He was a cocksure young toy really.’

  It may all sound a bit like Gunfight at the OK Corral transferred rather shakily to Shoreditch, but it does illustrate the feeling between the two camps. I asked Robbo if Banksy said anything in reply. ‘He got up off the ground, picked up his glasses and went off.’ I suggested that Robbo’s account might be slightly exaggerated; this was a mistake and I wondered for a moment if I was going to get cuffed too. ‘I’m not one of those who over-exaggerate. I play things down.’ It appears that many years later, as this story finally got out, Banksy took exception to it and felt the need to retaliate. Banksy completely rejects this story. He declined to be interviewed for a programme Channel 4 later made about the feud, but he did issue a statement saying: ‘Is this a joke? I have never been hit by Robbo in my life. I don’t know who he slapped but I hope they deserved it.’

  Again it emphasises the strange position Banksy finds himself in: on the one hand the artist who collectors compete for at Sotheby’s or Bonhams; film director; gallery artist and general all-round international star; and on the other still wanting to retain his links to vandalism on the streets. He told an interviewer in Los Angeles, ‘I’m not so interested in convincing people in the art world that what I do is “art”. I’m more bothered about convincing people in the graffiti community that what I do is really vandalism.’ It’s a difficult job.

  ‘How can I consider him a vandal when he don’t bomb or tag anywhere?’ asks Robbo. Among some graffiti writers the belief is that his main train piece, a chimp wearing an apron reading ‘Laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge’, which appeared on a District Line tube train in 2002, was actually painted by another artist who Banksy gave his stencils to rather than risk arrest himself. This has to be untrue, a libel on a vandal who, if this story were to be believed, is not as lawless as he makes out to be. Inkie for one is convinced it is untrue: ‘From my experience I would say he’s got some balls on him.’ But it does illustrate how some in the graffiti world regard him now.

  But whatever caused Banksy to pick on Robbo’s wall, he certainly started something. ‘It’s an old school graffiti war,’ said Robbo, ‘people don’t get it. They think I am bullying Banksy to get fame out of it. But I’m not. It’s like you go over one of my pieces and I’ll go over all your pieces.’

  The problem Robbo faced in trying to get in his retaliation was that part of the reason his piece had lasted so long was that there was no towpath running alongside it. Originally he had reached this deserted side of the canal by getting through a fence, into a car park and thence down some steps, in full daylight on a Saturday afternoon. But that was before the canal had become a magnet for property developers and all the empty land had been built on. Today the only access is from the towpath on the other side of the water.

  So he chose five o’clock on Christmas morning as the best time to take his revenge. ‘Christmas has always been graffiti. You’d always go and do whole cars or whole trains on Christmas Day because it was the best day to do it. Everyone’s more worried about the Queen’s Speech and turkey and giving presents and stuff and they think even graffiti writers are going to have time off. And it ain’t like that.’

  He put on his expensive wet suit, which he uses for diving, and having put his paints and his track suit in a bag he flung it across to the other side. ‘I’m in this wet suit. I’m cold. I’ve got this air mattress blown up and I’m thinking, you must be mad. But I lay the mattress down in the water and dived on to it and skimmed over to the other side. That was all good. But the ledge on the other side was high. And I’m thinking, how do I get off this thing without falling in? That’s where my problem was. As I got up so the mattress went away and I was in the water.’ Out he got, put on the track suit to protect his expensive wet suit and soon he was painting away. ‘I’m doing my thing and I’m thinking this is good again and all of a sudden a bike goes by on the other side. And I thought, half past five in the morning, he must be a fucking nutter.’ It is hard to imagine what the cyclist felt.

  The piece took about twenty-five minutes and the whole time Robbo was thinking ‘Don’t get caught, you’ll be in a cell while the kids are opening their presents.’

  When I saw Robbo’s piece it looked just as clever as Banksy’s, even if the lines were not as perfect as Robbo would have liked. He had preserved Banksy’s stencilled decorator, but instead of putting up wallpaper the decorator was putting the finishing touches to a huge dub: KING ROBBO – outline in black, fill-in in silver. Beside it there was a sign off: ‘Team Robbo’. But to Robbo it was not as good as it could have been. ‘I’d come back after a long lay-off which happened from what life is like – you’ve got kids, you’ve got businesses, you’ve got priorities, graffiti was on the back burner. The paint and the cans and the nozzles are all different now and I was rusty as well. I got given a 600 ml high pres
sure can and I went over there thinking it was a normal can. I go pshhhhhhhh and fucking hell, like I’m trying to get a little thin line and it ain’t happening. It’s just so wide and style went out the window. I want to get out of there before I get nicked. It come out crisp though considering, but the can just blew me away. It was like a fire extinguisher going off.’

  For once even Banksy seemed to have a doubt or two, or at least thought he needed to explain himself and point out that the piece had already suffered heavy damage from other writers before he came along. ‘I didn’t paint over a “Robbo” piece. I painted over a piece that said “mrphfgdfrhdgf,”’ he told the Wall Street Journal. (He told Time Out he painted over a piece that said ‘nrkjfgrekuh’, but whatever the exact lettering there were a lot of scrawls on it.) ‘I find it surreal when graffiti writers get possessive over certain locations. I thought that having a casual attitude towards property ownership was an essential part of being a vandal.’ Robbo and other writers say that if you paint in a legal spot you expect to see it painted over almost as soon as you have taken a photograph of it, but if you do a work on the street, particularly if it is a big piece, where you have run the risk of getting arrested, then you don’t expect anyone to go over it – other than a council workman.

  Across London both Banksy and Robbo were strutting their stuff. Banksy added FUC to the front of KING, thus making FUCKING ROBBO, so Robbo had to ‘borrow’ a canoe from the nearby boating club, suitably named the Pirate Club, and paint out the FUC before the council decided they had to paint over the whole thing. Then he went round London with startling determination defacing any of the remaining Banksys he could find – ‘He started it, I’m going to finish it.’

  When Robbo was first interviewed after his spat with Banksy he said he was contemplating doing a show in a gallery. ‘I’ve done everything, everything for nothing,’ he said truthfully. For there is no financial reward for painting the side of a train or the bleak wall of a canal. ‘I don’t think anyone would knock me for making money out of it. But it’s never been my goal to make money out of something I love.’