Banksy Read online

  Right from the start of Banksy’s switch to stencils the humour, which was almost non-existent in his early freehand pieces, started to appear in his work. At Bristol harbour a sweet, but startling-looking girl appeared on the wall hugging a large bomb instead of a Barbie doll. He repeated the image in years to come, but the stencil work got cleaner and she got younger and grew a neatly plaited pigtail in place of her rather wild ponytail. The changes made the image even more arresting. He had two CCTV cameras grow legs and do battle like fighting cocks – the first of several pieces on the subject of surveillance – long before Ai Weiwei’s troubling CCTV camera, carved out of marble, drew critics’ praise when he was exhibited in London in 2011.

  Other pieces from that time include a tiger that escaped his bar-code cage by bending the bars and elderly bowlers, properly dressed for the occasion and concentrating just as hard as every bowls player does, but using bombs instead of bowls for their game. The melding of the familiar with the shockingly unfamiliar; the humour, the quality and craft of the work; the way that even now, when the original has long gone and they are no more than photographs, they simply stop you in amazement immediately you see them, marks out Banksy as brilliantly different from the beginning. Forget all the hype, all the argument about the name, the influences, the money, the fame, here was an original artist – and apart perhaps from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, who in the 1970s and 1980s both jumped from New York’s streets and subways into the galleries, he was making himself known on the streets in a way no other artist had done before him.

  Quite apart from his skill as an artist, Banksy had another skill: he could organise. Kato, a graffiti veteran equally at home with lettering or characters, recalled in an interview with Felix Braun the day when he was painting with the Dry Breadz Crew and Banksy ‘just turned up. He said he was into graf and wanted to paint with us. He was already doing stencils by then. He had a knack for putting them in the right places, and they always had just the right content. He invited us to do workshops and stuff and he always seemed to be able to blag good spots.’ When Kato and Banksy painted the side of a house in Bristol it was Banksy who knocked on the door and persuaded the house’s owner to give them permission.

  Inkie was another key contact and friend he made in those early days. Inkie moved up to London about the same time as Banksy, and carved out a very successful career for himself both as a graphic designer in the video games industry and as an artist in his own right. He now has a family to support and unless fuelled by alcohol he is no longer quite the wild outlaw he once was, but in the early Bristol days, one writer remembers, ‘When Inkie turned up at Barton Hill it was like the Pope coming to visit, the red carpet came out . . . he had a presence about him – and, of course, a reputation as a really good writer.’

  He might not have been pope, but he was still a very useful man to know and Banksy had no qualms about introducing himself. Inkie was painting – legally – the shutters of Rollermania, a Bristol skateboard shop, when Banksy came by. ‘He came up and introduced himself. I hadn’t really heard of him to be honest. He said he knew the guys from Glastonbury, he’d got an opportunity to paint there and he invited me to come along. We did the main dance stage along with Dicy, Feek and Eko.’ Their first piece there was a cartoon of Michael Eavis, who runs Glastonbury, on his tractor being chased by a herd of cows. After Glastonbury they started painting together quite regularly.

  ‘From the minute I met him he was always quite motivational. At that point I was a bit laid back about it. As far as I was concerned I had become one of the best in the world. I had done what I had set out to achieve. We’d had our fifteen minutes of fame and I never thought of it as a kind of career or anything, I just liked doing it. But he was taking things to another level. I lent him my credibility in the graffiti world, which he didn’t have at the time, and he used his organisational skills. It was a meeting of two halves really.’

  Nowhere were those skills better displayed than at the Walls on Fire graffiti festival which Banksy and Inkie put together in 1998, with the city’s agreement, using a line of hoardings stretching for 400 metres around building work at Bristol harbour as their canvas. Posters announced an event that sounded excitingly edgy: ‘WALLS ON FIRE! Britain’s top graffiti writers representing their skills in a massive paint battle over two days.’ All this to be accompanied by ‘raw hip hop and funk’.

  Banksy might have been the young upstart but the event would not have happened without him. Inkie gave him his network of contacts, but it was Banksy who did most of the work. Here was a completely unorganised activity – graffiti – being organised: someone had to negotiate with the city agency to allow it to happen legally, someone had to find sponsors willing to supply paint, someone had to get the DJs. Most difficult of all, someone had to decide which artists were going to be invited to paint, and of course the key question: how much space each artist was to be given and where that space was going to be, nice and obvious or tucked away at the end somewhere. And pretty much all of this was done by Banksy. A picture still exists of a line of young graffiti artists working away on the wall, each sticking happily to their own space. They look very meek and mild, far from the ‘BATTLE’ the poster had been promoting.

  Banksy’s own work for this festival was largely freehand – a group of the gloomiest-looking doctors you have ever seen gathered around an operating table. At either end the piece was ‘framed’ by television screens, each with a different Banksy stencil on it. The operating table itself was obscured by elaborate graffiti lettering that ran right across the piece, reading ASTEK (a fellow graffiti artist), and there was a dedication in one corner which read, ‘For Astek in the Scrubs’. The whole thing was Banksy with a foot in both camps. But no one complained. Unfortunately it rained most of the weekend but John Nation, whom Banksy tapped for sponsorship, says ‘It was the best event ever.’

  While Walls on Fire meant a lot to the graffiti world, a piece that Banksy did several months later endeared him to a much wider community in Bristol. The Mild Mild West (it’s his title painted across the top) is a huge piece on the side of an abandoned building. A teddy bear manages to look quite cuddly despite the fact that he is about to throw the Molotov cocktail he is wielding at three riot policemen who are advancing on him. Eight years after it was painted, The Mild Mild West won a BBC online poll to find an Alternative Landmark for Bristol, getting more than double anyone else’s vote. And it is easy to see why. Some saw it as a reference to the St Paul’s racial riots of 1980 – the front line was just a couple of minutes away – others thought it more to do with the police tactics in breaking up the free party scene that was then thriving in Bristol. Whatever the influences, the message is clear: nice cuddly citizens represented by the teddy bear – he looks too nice to ever throw the Molotov cocktail – against heavy-handed police.

  If the madam running a brothel has a little black book where she keeps the details of her finest clients, then some graffiti writers often have their own rather larger black book where they keep the preparatory sketches they make before they do their work. Banksy has said he never used sketch books ‘in the way you imagine a “real” artist does’, rather he uses them ‘to note down great ideas of somebody else’s I’ve just had’. But he certainly did a preliminary sketch for The Mild Mild West, the major difference being that in this sketch the cuddly bear was holding a spliff as well as a Molotov cocktail. Whether Banksy would have got more or fewer votes if the spliff had stayed we will never know, but the image he actually painted is certainly sharper without it. The teddy bear is still there – just – and in the spring of 2011 must have been watching with some amusement as below him life imitated art, with rioters and police clashing violently in protests after a new Tesco store opened in the area.

  The Mild Mild West was one of the last pieces Banksy did before leaving Bristol for London and it is a good example of how his style was developing. Although this piece could easily be a stencil, it is actually fr
eehand but it shows him already light years away from the traditional graffiti that was being painted all around him. You don’t need any inside knowledge of the graffiti world to know exactly what is going on. The painting is instantly accessible and, like many of his pieces, shows a clever sense of timing in capturing an incident, a protest or in this case just a vague feeling of what people are thinking.

  What followed next – the history of the piece – illustrates Banksy’s extraordinary trajectory through the art world. First there was the excitement of actually doing the piece. It was painted over three days, with a friend holding the ladder up to the first floor site and keeping a look-out at the same time. Then a sort of anticlimax: nothing from the police, nothing from the anti-graffiti squad, no angry denouncements in the council chamber. Next, over the years, a growing fondness for the piece which became a part of the ongoing attempt to turn a rather tatty area into the sort of bohemian art district that every city covets. Then, as the area began to improve, and nine years after the piece was painted, an application by a property developer to redevelop the site around it into flats with a café on the ground floor covered in glass high enough to enclose the Banksy. So you could be sipping your cappuccino right underneath a Banksy.

  Four months after this plan was approved by the council, the piece was splattered in red paint by someone wielding a paintball gun. An outfit calling itself Appropriate Media announced on its website that they were the perpetrators. Calling the work an urban ‘masterpiss’ by ‘urban masterpisser, Banksy’, they declared: ‘Come on, you only care about it cos it’s a Banksy and he sells his lazy polemics to Hollywood movie stars for big bucks. Come on, you only care about it cos it makes you feel edgy and urban to tour round the inner city in your 4 x 4, taking in the tired coffee table subversion that graffiti has become. Graffiti artists are the copywriters for the capitalist created phenomenon of urban art. Graffiti artists are the performing spray-can monkeys for gentrification.’

  In response, one resident of the area who was interviewed by BBC Bristol amplified the confusion: ‘I’m shocked. I know that in some graffiti circles he [Banksy] is not actually seen in the best light. But to do something like that is extremely disrespectful. You wouldn’t do that anywhere, it’s against the rules.’ So somehow Banksy had become almost part of the establishment and others were the vandals breaking the rules.

  But he was not going to hang around to debate all this. Within a few months he was on his way to London. Not only Bristol but the world of ‘pure’ graffiti was being left behind in favour of a style which did not need to be decoded and was instantly understood and enjoyed, and where Banksy could make his own rules or lack of rules. In 2010 he told Time Out: ‘Traditional graffiti artists have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn’t become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else tell me what to do.’

  As for The Mild Mild West, when I last saw it the splatters of paint had been cleaned off by enthusiastic volunteers. The property market had not recovered enough for the flats to be built there. So, rather than being protected by the proposed glass-enclosed terrace, it still sits on the wall protected by one CCTV camera – the very security cameras which Banksy says today are ‘one of the worst things about modern Britain’.

  Five

  All Aboard for the Banksy Tour

  Some people go on a Jack the Ripper tour; I went on a Banksy tour. The day the contract arrived for this book I decided the first thing I needed was a total immersion tour around the streets of London where Banksy often paints, which are – conveniently – the streets where I live. Banksy must be the only living artist – and there cannot be many dead ones either – for whom you can buy a tour book giving you all the spots to find his work. The only problem is that despite regular updating, the book is always going to be out of date. You arrive and the wall is bare, painted over by council anti-graffiti teams, scrawled over by rival graffiti artists, or simply acquired by speculators.

  The book you need is Banksy Locations & Tours, self-published by ‘photographer, writer and street walker’ Martin Bull, with a very significant proportion of the profits – almost £30,000 at the last count – going to the Big Issue Foundation. There is now a bulkier updated edition which covers the whole of Britain, not just London. Ten years ago Banksy said he wanted to paint every wall in the Easton district of Bristol: ‘Next year they’ll be selling little maps of it with little red dots where my paintings are. That’s all I want.’ It took rather more than a year, but here in this new edition are the very red circles he dreamed of, dotted not only around Easton but also all over Bristol.

  With the lighter first edition in one hand, and a page of the London A to Z in the other, I was on my way. The first thing I discovered is that you can walk around London with your eyes wide open, yet tight shut. Quite apart from all the rubbish inflicted on us by kids with a spray can and an up-yours desire to leave their mark, there is a lot of very good graffiti staring you in the face if only you bother to look – and it isn’t all by Banksy.

  I had something of a head start. Months earlier, walking along the Essex Road in Islington, I had been stopped dead by a Banksy on the side of a chemist’s shop – three children pledging their allegiance to a Tesco flag that had been run up on an electricity cable which Banksy had very cleverly transformed into a flagpole. As I stood there looking a man passed me by and said: ‘A load of over-rated rubbish,’ but he just kept walking as though he had not said a word and gave me no chance to tell him how wrong I thought he was. I learned later that the canvas version was called Very Little Helps and in 2010 was sold at Sotheby’s by former supermodel Jerry Hall for £82,850. Towards the end of 2011 I passed the chemist’s shop again; someone had taken the time and trouble to remove the top layer of Perspex protection and obliterate Banksy’s painting with silver spray paint. I stood there mournfully with two other passers-by. Even though I had been told time and again how impermanent street art is supposed to be, it still seemed an utterly pathetic, destructive thing to do.

  On my tour the first graffiti I came across had nothing to do with Banksy. It was huge, painted on a wall the length of a cricket pitch in an abandoned depot formerly used by Initial Washroom Solutions. The depot must have been waiting to be turned into a block of flats but in the meantime it had become a playground for graffiti artists. There was the usual city rubbish, flattened water bottles, bike locks (where’s the bike?), McDonald’s bags, beer cans and a couple of buddleia, the one plant that thrives where everything else has long since given up the ghost. There was ample wall space to play with but there were locked gates to keep out all but the very determined – or those who, I was to discover much later, had negotiated a way in with the property developers.

  The wall running along the side of a disused loading platform had been painted in a series of huge, curving zebra stripes. Pasted up in the middle of all these stripes was a page from the A to Z, enlarged to a giant size, perfect in the detail and name of every street, except for the fact that it was the wrong shape for a page out of the A to Z. But by standing back a bit the whole thing came into focus; it was anything but haphazard. The page was shaped – perfectly – like a revolver and running through the middle was the Lower Clapton Road. On the platform below was scrawled in crude letters: ‘Murder Mile’. Googling Lower Clapton Road I came across an article in the Independent from January 2002: ‘Eight men shot dead in two years. Welcome to Britain’s Murder Mile.’

  On one side of this piece was the signature ‘Pure Evil’, written at a size that would eat up all but the very biggest canvas. Google delivered once more, telling me that Pure Evil was a graffiti artist with his own gallery. The gallery blurb said he left England for California after the poll tax riots and spent ten years there ‘ingesting weapons grade psychedelics’ before returning to London to pick up a spray can. Just this one piece had given me a very good lesson on how graffiti can jump from the wall to the web to the gallery. The next morning I sent
him an email:

  Hello,

  I was looking for a Banksy yesterday and just happened to stumble across your Murder Mile. I think it’s wonderful. Presumably some day soon the site will get turned into a block of flats but for the moment it is an original delight.

  Having discovered this morning you have a gallery maybe you make some sort of prints of your work. If you make one of Murder Mile I would like to buy one.

  From Murder Mile I started sniffing around with a new enthusiasm and within an hour or so I had spotted four good pieces of art within spraying distance of each other – and still I hadn’t found the Banksy. There was a ‘paste up’ of a woman wearing an elaborately patterned jacket which revealed a crudely stitched-up wound across her neck. Over her head was a sack as if she was awaiting her execution, except the sack was as elaborately patterned as the jacket. It was intricate and arresting, even though people had started to tear bits off the poster in passing.

  I admit that until I started this book I had no idea what a ‘paste up’ was. Happily a young graffiti artist took pity on me: a paste up is a piece of work, usually in poster form, that you prepare beforehand and then, usually using wheatpaste, you stick up on a wall – simple.