Sorry sir, it's not a swimming pool at the moment, it's a gallery.
I made tea for Banksy when he was just a fellow paintscuffed human. People love that story. But knocking about for years with a bunch of graffers was a training course better than any I could pay for.
I’ve been watching trailers for the upcoming documentary ‘Secret Mall Apartment’, about the group of artist friends who spotted a hidden bit inside the new Providence Place mall and decided to build, and live in, an apartment there. The mall’s construction had ousted long-established residents by razing their neighbourhoods, including those inhabited by the artists.
From 2003 to 2007, when they were eventually caught, the artists filmed themselves in the secret apartment with cameras they bought at the mall's Radio Shack, concealed in emptied-out mint tins. An urban legend for years, this film is the first time the eight artists have been in each other’s company since their discovery. Their story of brazen, 'hidden in plain sight’ creative resistance is amazing and funny, and testament to the size of their balls - the girls’ too, of course; anyone who crawls through an aperture barely the width of their shoulders to get home has impressively proportioned cojones. There’s more, but better to just go and see it.
In the late nineties through the noughties we were – well, we were doing some naughty things. My old school mate Solo One, who I shall refer to by his tag only, was a graffiti artist from the first day I met him in school, scribbling away on a pad with bubble writing, characters and tag practice. He was an art dork like me but cool, because he hung about with the good-looking boys (one of whom went onto be a well-known music producer), told funny jokes and was into hip-hop and electro. I was too, but SECRETLY, because I didn’t want anyone to take the piss and that kind of music was right on the edges of what was, erm, mainstreamly acceptable for a 12-13 year old girl. He went to the after-school break dancing club, so I did too, and I even bought the right footwear with my pocket money. I was shit at it, despite me and my mate Dawn’s practise on a bit of lino (yes, really).
I stayed mates with Solo, later crossing paths again when he needed a hand running a pirate radio station from a flat right in the town centre (a town that, when visited. by the NME to write a feature on the pirates of the airwaves, was called ‘the armpit of the East Midlands’). This too was cool. Although an illustration graduate by then, and a part-time lecturer to boot, I had time to help because I was still very a much a creature of the night, so me and my newish boyfriend took up the challenge, DJing and fetching chips, making tea and friends for life, which continued through the station’s move to Birmingham’s abandoned tower blocks before going down in a blaze of creative differences (and busy lives) in 2003. While my boyfriend was crawling through spaces it should not have been possible to crawl through in the name of achieving a robust and far-flung transmission, Michael Townsend was building his secret mall lodgings in Providence.
At a time when I was still doing the occasional low-key advertising project, a whole load of editorial work and grafting my tentative way into publishing, Solo was being paid fat dollars to advertise for film studios and running campaigns for the likes of Adidas and Puma, all expenses paid. His energy was (and still is) remarkable. How was he doing this? Three things: visibility, humour, confidence.
Solo was known as The Sticker King, a label he came to hate (no pun intended). Without turning this into his biography - which’d be a great project one day - what he never did was wait for permission, or an invite. I entered competitions, wondered why I was never asked to be in the illustration shows, felt outside the cliques. Solo never asked — to be in cliques, or ‘collectives’, or apply to join a gallery or be in a show — because he was the show. He walked right in (often in a hi-vis), got up, went big (never home), battering the streets with joyful, funny artwork roaring with colour, crusting up the lampposts with paste-ups and freely available stickers stolen from a specific high street establishment, and with his graf chums, turned dull walls and buildings into mesmerising free art galleries. Like Michael and his Secret Mall Apartment friends, he lived wherever he could - not always in a house or a flat. He made his art wherever he was (in fact, he still does).
I watched in amused awe as I worked alongside him on projects. We decorated the Kung Fu club in Camden with on-the-spot paste-ups, helped design T shirts, pitched in with shows. I kept lookout disguised as ‘Unconnected Female Bystander’ while he and my partner threw down illegal street stickers of giant shoe laces in Amsterdam. We too stickered, slapping our own ones everywhere to promote the radio, our little distribution company, our T shirts, whatever we were doing. “Everywhere I look,” said a record shop employee, “I see your bloody stickers”. He meant it as a compliment. We knew we were doing it right when we finally got a letter from Westminster Council, from a youngish staffer who warned us in lightly coded language that we were probably going to get fined, and even though the internet’s great, we probably shouldn’t put a URL on the stickers.
I wish I’d kept it. Instead, here’s a page from the terribly serious textbook written about Solo’s criminal use of stickers, which I did keep.
(Side Note: here’s a grainy Solo One + INSA piece from around the time, who later went on to become an agency mate, both of us signed by NY-based BAreps. As I type, INSA’s mad gif-iti wagon is parked outside my house, because we’ve just fixed it for him. Funny how things work out.)
Then I found myself one day in 2005 waking up in a swimming pool — well, not IN a swimming pool, but in what used to be an office at the then-abandoned Brockwell Lido. Solo, Dane and I were working on a joint show there, Solo having erm, ‘lodged’ at the pool as a kind of caretaker. Noticing the large unused spaces, he’d made a studio and gallery of the place, just like he had with a shoe shop, bridges, streets and myriad empty buildings before it. He invited me to cover some walls with artwork in a show we called ‘Deep End’ (in the bit which I think is now the gym). It was early Spring, cold and difficult to work in, being used to a cosy office in the attic. But work we did, with Solo’s chum Banksy, then ‘just’ a fellow graffer, coming through to see how we were doing (that’s when we had the tea and chat. He’s a very, very nice lad).
I was very aware I was there purely because of my friendship with Solo and Dane - note the invite states ‘featuring’ Inkymole. But we didn’t wait to be asked, and we didn’t apply, and there was NO funding, of the crowd type or any other. We paid for everything ourselves, sometimes painfully, because no, none of us had backup cash, side jobs or rich parents/spouses/sponsors. As a result, no-one but us was curating what we did, so you could find politics, lewd jokes, silly characters, swearing and Tony Blair. Strictly and completely on our own terms.
And I slept in an abandoned office. You can start to see why I found the Secret Mall Apartment story so completely absorbing.
The show was covered by iconic graffiti mag Graphotism, itself an unbelievable score, and we went on to make a music video there for a band who were so loud the people in the tower blocks opposite complained. We shot and edited it ourselves - why wouldn’t we? - and my lack of editing experience was dealt with by a crash course on a hastily-purchased copy of Premiere. It turned out pretty good, but we’ve long lost the DVDs with the video on, probably still stuck in this:
A year later I had my first big solo show (no pun intended) at the slightly scruffy Truman Brewery in Brick Lane just before the money started rolling towards it, deploying everything I’d learned along the way. Urged on by my partner Leigh (my balls were small and quaking about the idea) I blagged my way into borrowing the whole of the site at no.152c Brick Lane in return for a donation to charity. I could paint the walls (I did), I could hang things (I did) and we could use every bit of the building (we did). To promote it we stickered, flyered, posted things; pounded the streets, left stuff in record shops and made a little website. We posted on forums, sent emails and made phone calls. We were enthusiastically sponsored by not only a beer company but wine, juice, tea and coffee companies. Solo manned the Fisher Price till at the merch stand. Social media did not yet exist, yet on opening night we had queues out the door and right round the corner.
I can’t imagine anything quite like that being possible now, not least because those kinds of spaces tend to be robustly gate-kept by corporate landlords, and those that aren’t are off-limits. There’s the rapid gentrification of old spaces, but the travel-sickness-inducing speed of social media growth that kicked off just a couple of years later also means that interesting, considered projects can today be utterly drowned out in a sea of voices yelling ever more noisily in a rapid-fire turnover of ‘content’ - or have a cost threshold too high to engage with. And if an endeavour can be monetised, you can bet it will be, which risks changing the motivation and energy in an idea.
Graffers are on the inside now, not laughing and painting on the outside. Good for them, they’re probably a lot warmer. Our friendship with Solo and assorted encounters with his bunch of fat-cap mates (Tizer, Dane, Kid Acne, INSA, Pulse, INKIE, Shucks, Philth, N4T4 and loads more, I don’t need to mention the B-word again) was, without knowing it, a magnificently unscripted course in how to get shit done. As Sage Francis says, “DIY or forever cry that someone else didn’t do it for you”.
But that show, and all the marvellous things it led to, is for another time; I have a (perfectly legal) sticker to design, and some wall-shaped energy to summon. I may have done the course, but I’m remembering it is NEVER time to stop applying the knowledge.