Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  Even someone like Acoris Andipa feels it. He talks about the Banksy camp: ‘They are who they are and they do business in the way that they do it and nobody can crack into that – or definitely somebody like myself can’t crack into that because I represent something that they want to be seen as not being involved in.’ So does that bother him? ‘On the professional front, no. On the personal front, kind of. Because I put my heart and my soul and my money into it. It would have been nice to get some sort of recognition, like “Look, we can’t do business with you, but thanks mate, you’ve helped along in your own way.” But I don’t think it’s ever going to happen.’

  When I travelled to Bristol planning to see Simon Cook, I had also made an appointment to meet a graffiti artist who used to paint with Banksy in days gone by. He had agreed to this interview on the strict understanding that we would not talk about Banksy’s identity. But soon after I arrived in Bristol I received a text: ‘Hi there Will. Pest Control have been in contact today and would rather I didn’t meet with you, so therefore, as this is the case I won’t be. If you can clear it with them and I hear from them – great. But until then I am sorry I cannot meet up.’ I learned later that he had received a call not only from Pest Control but also from Banksy himself. (The artist was so torn between his loyalty to his old friend via Pest Control and guilt about my wasted hours in Bristol that he kindly called again later that day and we did meet for a drink, but only on the understanding that we talked about anything other than Banksy – a surreal but enjoyable evening.)

  It can of course work the other way. Old mates who have fallen out with Banksy might grumble about him, but they never want to grass him up. But people who have come across him later in life are not necessarily so loyal. I had one proposal, offering ‘pretty much what every journalist/writer would like to know about Banksy and Exit’ and then asking how much money I would pay him for all these promised goodies. The answer was no money, and I never heard from him again.

  Bristol is a danger for Banksy; too many people there know him from the past. If he is waiting for a train back to London he tends to sit hiding behind a newspaper in the hope that no one spots him. Another danger is when someone comes up to him unexpectedly. Caspar Llewellyn Smith was at the Roundhouse in November 2006 listening to Daman Albarn’s new band, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, when Banksy emerged from nowhere and came over to start chatting with him. Llewellyn Smith says, ‘Here is a guy who doesn’t want people to know who he is, and I had a slight sense that it probably gets quite lonely sometimes. If he is in a room which is a big social setting and it’s a room where there are lots of people who seem to know each other it must be quite nice for him to have someone to talk to.’ That was fine, but there was a problem: coming back from the gents to rejoin Llewellyn Smith was another journalist, Ben Thompson. What was the protocol, what introductions was Llewellyn Smith going to make? ‘He said simply, “Oh, this is my friend Ben,” and Banksy replied, “Hi, I’m John.” Then he just sort of disappeared into the crowd. He had obviously had practice.’

  So what kind of man lurks behind this well-constructed moat?

  A man, one suspects, who enjoys what he is doing but who has trouble dealing with the fame, however anonymous it is, and the money that has come with it. After his triumphant show in Los Angeles in 2006 he said, ‘The attention weirded me out so much, I refused to sell anything new for two years.’ Yet he went to Los Angeles to do a big, big show to which he or his minders invited the likes of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, the star of the show itself being a live elephant which enraged animal lovers and amazed visitors. These were hardly the actions of a man who didn’t want anyone to know he was in town.

  A certain anger – jokey, but anger nevertheless – runs through both his early books and interviews. For instance, in Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, self-published in 2001 before he had gone more mainstream, he writes: ‘You could say that graffiti is ugly, selfish and that it’s just the action of people who want some pathetic kind of fame. But if that’s true it’s only because graffiti writers are just like everyone else in this fucking country.’ Is he condemning himself along with ‘everyone else’? In one of his first interviews he refers to the poll tax riots and says ‘I like to think there’s a side of me that wants to smash the system, f**k s**t up and drag the city to its knees as it screams my name.’

  But those were the early days. Now he is thirty-eight years old and married to someone he sometimes calls his ‘wall widow’, the time is long gone when, as he told one colleague, he had no bank account and used to keep his cash ‘under the bed’ or give it to a friend to put in the bank.

  He had always been involved in music – for a time in the early 1990s he had linked up with the self-described ‘losers, boozers, cruisers, chancers and dancers’ of Nottingham’s DiY free party collective. And it was through music that he gained the use of his first studio in London. Soon after he arrived in London he linked up with Mark Jones, founder of the independent Wall of Sound records – and then with Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, co-creator with Albarn of the cartoon ‘band’ Gorillaz. Jones allowed him to use a Wall of Sound studio on Acklam Road, west London, conveniently placed next to the tube tracks, and the arrangement was that instead of paying rent he would do the record label’s flyers. One of his most memorable images, a partially masked demonstrator who despite radiating pure aggression is about to hurl not a Molotov cocktail but a bunch of flowers, first evolved in these early days in London.

  The fashion designer Fee Doran, married to Mark Jones at the time, used the same studio. She remembers Banksy as ‘a really nice guy, a man who was certainly up for a laugh’. They would have a drink, have a smoke and then he would ‘go out and do some spraying’. She sometimes forgot how anonymous he wanted to be, a couple of times shouting ‘hello Banksy’, much to his dismay, when she saw him out on the street.

  His anonymity is helped by the fact, as one American who worked with him in Los Angeles puts it, that he’s ‘another skinny English bloke. The sort of guy who you see in thousands of pubs in England, just a regular guy.’ ‘Ordinary’ and, particularly, ‘unassuming’ are key words that crop up when anyone is describing Banksy. As another American who worked with him closely on his show in Los Angeles says, ‘I always say he looks like a plumber, you know the man who goes “Knock knock, I’m here to fix the drain.” He’s just an average kind of a bloke really.’ The sort of bloke who, as a colleague who worked with him in London puts it, ‘is the most nondescript person you could imagine. He smoked roll-ups and he was always pretty scruffy. He certainly didn’t strike me as ex public school, but you never know . . .’

  The double lives he leads – Sotheby’s vandal, famously anonymous, rich rebel – would be enough to make anyone a touch paranoid, and Banksy is no exception. Again he jokes about it – his film company is called Paranoid Pictures – but you feel it is not entirely in jest. In his second self-published book, Existencilism, he wrote: ‘Nobody ever listened to me and I used to think that was their fault. Eventually I got to realise maybe it was the fact that I was boring and paranoid that was the problem.’ A friend from Bristol days who still sees him occasionally says, ‘He’s paranoid and maybe he needs to be a bit, but he doesn’t need to be as paranoid as he is.’

  Certainly the circle around him appears to have got tighter and tighter, with old friends finding they no longer get through to him. In part this appears to be caused by the fact that he sometimes feels they are trying to profit from him, selling today for eye-watering sums pieces of art he gave them years ago – everyone wants a profitable bit of him.

  But one man’s paranoia is another man’s straightforward desire to control what goes on around him. One collector who knows him says, ‘It’s nothing more than being a bit of a control freak who likes to be the centre of events.’ Thus he was said to be angered when some of his prints were included in a 2010 exhibition of street art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. He was just one of twen
ty artists rather than the key artist, but more important he had no control of the event or how the gallery obtained their prints. While other artists were given time and, more importantly, space to strut their spray can, pictures on the web show his print looking so forlorn in the gallery that his anger was understandable.

  Everyone who has come across him says he wants to be involved. ‘He’s one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met,’ said Steve Lazarides, ‘he’s a perfectionist.’ If any artist brings a painting in to his gallery, Pictures on Walls, the staff will have to run it by him if they are thinking of taking it. He does not run the gallery – he has films to make, walls to paint, exhibitions to plan – but he certainly chooses the artists.

  Another source who works with him (it is extraordinary really that Banksy has got everyone into such a state they feel disloyal if they even whisper a compliment about him) says: ‘He is really involved in everything. I was always under the impression that the ideas were coming from him. He was a laugh, a lot of fun to work with and never anything but polite and friendly.’

  Perhaps one of the best descriptions of the sort of man Banksy is comes from Caspar Llewellyn Smith, who spent most of one day with him back in 2003 and, unlike others, dares to tell the tale. Having lined up Blur for the first cover of the Observer’s Music Monthly, it seemed like a good idea to ask Banksy to do the illustration for the shoot, since he had already created the artwork for their album Think Tank (this artwork sold later for £288,000). The plan was to take Banksy up to the Leeds Festival where Blur were playing and squeeze in the shoot there.

  ‘We met at the PR’s house in west London early in the morning. It was at the time when there wasn’t such myth around him. You sort of knew who he was because that was the idea to do it, but it wasn’t as if you felt intimidated by the idea that he was a mysterious figure or particularly in awe of it. He just seemed a straightforward bloke. Very like someone like Damon Albarn. Very very clever, but a bit of a geezer.’

  They piled into a minibus. Banksy’s plan was to stencil a television set being chucked out of a window in typical rock and roll bad boy style and he brought with him a couple of pre-cut stencils and a load of spray paint. Nevertheless they had to stop on their way through Leeds when Banksy realised he was missing a piece of kit and went into ‘somewhere like B&Q’ to find it. Eventually they arrived at ‘some strange back bit of the festival’ and went looking for a wall for Banksy to paint on.

  ‘We spent twenty minutes going around and we would say “What about this?” And he would be saying “It’s not big enough, it’s not this, it’s not that,” and getting slightly panicked because there wasn’t a suitable surface for him to work against. We knew that the band would only be available to us for half an hour and we had to get this thing done in that period, so in a light panic we then piled back into this minibus and drove off into the country side thinking, “We are just going to have to bloody find somewhere.”

  ‘We saw a farm, drove up the farm road, piled out, the farmer and his wife came out looking a bit bemused and we said, to paraphrase slightly, “Hello, we are north London media ponces. Can we have a look round your farm because we are trying to do a photo shoot with this band Blur who are about to headline the Leeds Festival.” They said, “Oh yeah, our daughter has just come back from uni and she’s at the festival and she’s a big fan. She loves them, so have a look round.” We looked around, Banksy found the side of a barn with all these tiny little ducklings in it and he said it would work fine. The band turned up and said hello and they were sort of larking around with him a bit. It was done fairly quickly. The farmer’s daughter turned up with her boyfriend. They were quite pleased because they got to meet the band. We left, I am not sure if we gave the farmer any money but he had this Banksy TV stencilled on to the side of his duck shed. He also had something on a gate which was Banksy testing one of his cans, shaking it up and spraying it on a stencil to see if it would work all right. [As we shall see, both these two pieces were later to find their way on to the art market, with very different results.] Then we went off to the festival and came back to London late.’

  Did he stress that everything had to be secret? ‘There was no sense of ducking and diving at all. No feeling of “Oh, I can’t be seen here.” When we were with the farmer there was no great secrecy around it. He just did it and buggered off. I don’t think we paid him for anything. There was no contract about you have got to keep your mouth shut. He was well known enough at the time that we definitely felt it was quite a cool thing to have got him. And we weren’t going to betray him.’

  How quickly did he work? ‘Oh, really quick. I remember him cutting some shapes when we got there before the band turned up. He had come with some stuff and I think he was just adjusting it or fixing it for size. And then it was very, very quick. Five minutes, if that. The thing that took time was the photographer, because photographers always take time.’

  Talking to Llewellyn Smith, the words he uses to describe Banksy include ‘approachable’, ‘funny’, ‘friendly’, ‘a nice guy’, ‘very sharp’; but the one phrase he used most frequently is ‘a bit of a geezer’. So does that mean if he came from London he would fit the stereotyped image of the norf London taxi driver? ‘No, not a taxi driver, not rough round the edges in that way, but the sort of slightly classless sort of person you find in the record industry a lot, although quite a bit smarter than that.

  ‘In the music industry, or the photography and fashion world, you meet a lot of terrible idiots and he certainly wasn’t that. He knew his music. He was quite self contained and he just got on with it. There was no hamming around, there was no bossing other people about. There were no great airs and graces. It wasn’t “Look at me, I’m the great artist and this is how you need to behave”.’

  Seven

  The Artist and Organiser

  At the beginning of May 2008, forty stencil artists from around the world were put on alert. They were not told exactly what was going to happen but they were told to be in London for the week. Those coming from abroad had their air tickets paid for.

  When they had all arrived in the city, they were summoned to a hotel where they were let into the secret. Banksy had rented Leake Street, the street under Waterloo’s railway tracks which he described correctly as ‘a dark, forgotten filth pit’, and they had all been invited to paint there. Pure Evil was one of the artists invited to the hotel. ‘It was pretty exciting. I saw artists that I knew from Poland, artists from Italy, everywhere, everyone had been brought in. I came back to the gallery, grabbed all my stencils and went straight down there and spent the next three days there. The first night I was there it was just great because Faile was doing some pieces, 3D from Massive Attack was doing a piece, Banksy was painting. There wasn’t really anyone else around there on the first night. I think everyone was in London and having a look around before they got down to work the next day. What was quite cool on that night was there wasn’t any of the weirdness about secret identities, everyone was getting on with it and just doing their thing. It was like a little group of people that he knew. So the identity wasn’t really an issue.’

  There were plywood barriers and security guards to make sure that they had time to paint before the public were allowed to enter. Various props were brought in, including an ice cream van which has adorned more than one of Banksy’s big exhibitions, and an assortment of wrecked cars were delivered by trailer. Someone even produced an unfortunate tree, growing CCTV cameras rather than leaves. The event was christened the Cans Festival and advertised as a ‘stencil art street battle’ – much like Walls on Fire – attempting to link it to graffiti battles of the past; but it was hardly a scene of conflict. The walls were all painted clean ready for the artists and they had all been allocated their spaces. Even their meals were laid on for them. The police could not touch them. In fact the biggest problem was probably the fumes from the spray paint they were all using in the enclosed space of the tunnel. Inkie said later, ‘P
aint fumes had always messed with my head. The worst time recently was Cans Festival Two down in that tunnel – I vomited!’

  Entrance was free and the art was not for sale. The programme theoretically cost £3, though at some point it was being given out free. Thirty thousand people queued to get in during the three days over the May bank holiday. Once the show had opened, artists who came along with their own stencil could put that up too; there was even a blank piece of wall reserved for them. All the important figures in the street art scene were there, and each of them received a ‘thank you’ piece of art from Banksy – a laser print of a cowgirl riding a bucking spray can, each with a small dedication from Banksy which might make the prints difficult to sell if their recipients ever wanted to. Three weeks later Tate Modern opened its own exhibition of work by urban street artists. It was a major, major step for the Tate but it didn’t quite have the down and dirty edge of Leake Street.

  At the end of the summer Banksy staged a second show at Leake Street, curated like the first by his friend Tristan Manco, author of several books on graffiti. But this time it was the turn of the ‘old school’ graffiti writers. It might have had the slight whiff of a consolation prize, for as one old school writer says, ‘They saw we were pissed off about not being included in the first show – we wanted a go.’ Nevertheless it was a pretty cool consolation prize.

  Again about forty artists were invited. There was no hotel briefing, but Leake Street had been completely cleaned up for them and a new array of wrecked cars deposited, ready to be painted over. For the first time in these graffiti writers’ lives they were protected by security guards rather than being hunted down by them. David Samuel, who was one of the participants, says: ‘We spent the weekend there with breakfast, lunch and dinner being served out of the arches. Like full gourmet meals. You’d go in in the morning and breakfast was there, all the chefs were there with all their catering thing. Lunch was called, everyone puts their paint down and goes in the arches for lunch. I thought, what a dude, man.’ Banksy was neither painting nor watching over this show as he had the first time, so it did not have quite the same frisson. Nevertheless it was a second impressive show, and Banksy somehow retained use of the tunnel, so writers have been painting there legally ever since. The two Leake Street shows gave graffiti writers of all persuasions their biggest ever showcase in London, and together with the Tate exhibition helped raise street art to an entirely different level of recognition.