Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues

by Nick Hornby

  It is hard to be definitive about how Billingham pulls this off, but his insistence on giving Raymond and Elizabeth, his two leads, equal attention is certainly wise, because then these pictures become the portrait of a marriage as much as an analysis of social despair or urban alienation, and the artist is at pains to show that this marriage has its moments of calm domesticity and evidently peaceable companionship, as well as all the other stuff. Elizabeth sitting over a jigsaw (a brilliantly realized shot, this, with the jigsaw pieces, Elizabeth’s floral print dress and her tattoos coming together in an orchestrated riot of synthetic colour); Raymond and Elizabeth sitting watching TV on the sofa, a roast dinner on their laps, gravy down their fronts, the family pets in between them; even the spectacular shot of Ray hurling the cat violently through the air is a strangely matter-of-fact, life-goes-on moment. Given their context, these photos are rich and strange.

  But there is blood on the walls in this household, and Billingham shows it to us – quite literally, in the case of one photograph, which depicts a thin claret trickle apparently emerging from one of those cutesy mass-produced portraits of a mannequin that you used to be able to buy in Boots. There is more action here than one might expect to find in a selection of family snapshots: three of the pictures in Billingham’s ‘Sensation’ exhibits deal with violence or its immediate aftermath, and the changes of clothes alert you to the fact that this is not a sequence, but simply part of an ongoing domestic pattern. That Billingham was able to take the pictures at all is a clear indication that physical abuse is an organic part of the day; Raymond and Elizabeth would, presumably, have preferred their spats to take place away from their son’s lens, but in the end were unable to stop themselves.

  There is an inherent and perverse fascination, of course, in seeing grown people knock lumps off each other, and the fascination in this case is intensified by Elizabeth’s obviously immense physical power. In one picture the couple are resting after what must have been a particularly vehement disagreement. Elizabeth has a bloody nose. Ray’s scars are around his eye, and there is a sense that this match has ended in a score draw – Elizabeth even appears to be offering Raymond a paper hankie in a gesture of concern and reconciliation. In the rest, however, there is no doubt who the victor has been or will be. Perhaps the saddest photo of the lot is of an angry Elizabeth, fist raised, threatening her utterly defeated and understandably trepidatious partner: it is the closest Billingham comes to a direct articulation of despair if only because Raymond’s expression has, for once, not been neutralized by the blank mask of drink, and we can see him clearly. Even when he is out of his head and toppling head first towards the floor, there is no indication of feeling, and maybe, you can’t help reflecting, it’s better that way.

  ‘This book is about my close family,’ Billingham writes on the dust jacket of his book Ray’s a Laugh. ‘My father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic … My mother Elizabeth hardly drinks but she does smoke a lot. She likes pets and things that are decorative. My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11 but is now back with Ray and Liz again.’ There is a tone to these words that could be mistaken for blankness, just as the photographs could seem blank if one couldn’t be bothered to look at them hard enough, but actually this collection is much, much warmer than that: it is clearly about love. Richard Billingham, one would hazard, loves his parents, but they are not loveable, not in the most straightforward sense of the term. Hence the careful neutrality of tone, the refusal to allow his lens to become clouded with pity or anger or disgust: he knows that enough of his audience will feel those things anyway, and that actually the truth is a lot more complicated. The last picture in the ‘Sensation’ exhibition shows Raymond and Elizabeth cuddling on the bed, and it’s a kind of optimistic ending to an unsettling, extraordinary show – until you see Raymond’s eyes, focusing somewhere in the middle distance, and you wonder what he has seen.

  Humphrey Ocean

  Pub quiz question: find the link between Stiff Records – the anarchic label which provided an early home for Elvis Costello, the Damned and Ian Dury, among others – and Philip Larkin, our Greatest Living Poet probably even now. (Those of you feverishly trying to remember whether Rat Scabies ever had a gig as Larkin’s editor at Faber are barking up the wrong tree entirely, I’m afraid.) The answer is artist Humphrey Ocean, who, Stiff completists may remember, recorded a single for the label before going on to paint the unanswerable portrait of Larkin that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. ‘Whoops-a-Daisy’ (b/w ‘the umpteenth and some say definitive “Battle of Davey Crockett”’) was the last Ocean single, but there are other Ocean portraits – McCartney, Tony Benn – in the NPG’s collection.

  Ocean is possibly unique: he’s a former member of an art school band who went on to become an artist. The art school band was Kilburn and the High Roads, whose lead singer was Ocean’s tutor, Ian Dury; they got together at the suggestion of the art school’s social secretary, who didn’t have a support act for Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets at the Christmas party. ‘So we did it, and we got our thirty quid,’ Ocean remembers. ‘And there was only one problem: we were too good. I mean, we weren’t that good, but we were good enough, so we couldn’t put it down, and it just sort of … rambled on.’ Almost immediately, though, just as the band had started gigging outside of Canterbury, Dury fired Ocean because he still had a year of his course left to do. ‘He was very moral and responsible in that way.’ In the summer of ’73, diploma in his pocket, Ocean was rehired, and spent the next couple of years touring with a band which, Ocean says wryly, ‘were so good we couldn’t be recorded. Ian was very ambitious, you know. He wanted to get on. He was frustrated that we weren’t the Temptations.’ The Kilburns played a distinctive and very English dance music – Chuck Berry and Alma Cogan covers, some free jazz and songs ‘about things like an insurrection in a stately home’, and in their own small way probably helped, along with Dr Feelgood and a couple of other bands, to clear the apparently impenetrable path from Genesis to the Sex Pistols. ‘We thought we’d become pop stars, make a lot of money, and then retire to cottages in the country to paint.’

  At the end of 1974 they supported the Who on their British tour, and even Ocean – gentle, thoughtful, unfailingly polite, Ampleforth-educated – could occasionally find himself flat on his back after one or two something-or-others too many. ‘One night on that tour, I came offstage and drank a bottle of Pernod, and when I came round it seemed to me as if the dressing-room walls were coming down. And I thought, as much as I was capable of thinking anything, that I wasn’t going to drink Pernod again. But of course the walls really were coming down. Keith Moon was next door knocking them down.’ He left the band that Christmas, scared that it would be easy to end up trundling round the pubs and clubs of Britain for the rest of a working life. ‘Ian used to say things like, “Hide his brushes,” but all that living on top of one another was driving me barmy.’ His Stiff single was a one-off: he was persuaded down to the studio by Dury, who wrote the words to ‘Whoops-a-Daisy’, and former Kilburn Russell Hardy. ‘And Chaz Jankel arranged it, and we split everything four ways. Stiff sold ten thousand copies and we each got a cheque for £12.56. I hope they had some jolly nice lunches.’

  I asked how he made a living between 1974 and 1982, when he won the Imperial Tobacco (now BP) Portrait Award, and there is a long pause. It’s so easy, one thinks, for struggling artists to spend whole decades doing nothing very much. ‘Gosh. Now that’s a good question.’ He thinks. ‘My granny left me three hundred pounds, and I made that last as long as I could.’ He thinks some more. ‘Ummm … Yes, and I taught for a day a week. I drove round all the art colleges in the south of England asking for a job … Ah, and I did a couple of album covers.’ The lost Ocean years are beginning to come back to him now. ‘There was a 10cc one and a McCartney one … Oh, and because of the McCartney cover, I was asked to go to America with Wings for a year and do an artist-on-tour thing.’ There are, one suspects, very few of us
who would have temporarily mislaid our time on the road with one of the biggest names in the history of popular music, and it says much for an anecdote-packed life that Ocean was able to do so.

  We talk about Larkin, whom Ocean was commissioned to paint by the National Portrait Gallery; he describes the time he spent with the great man as ‘the funniest month of my life’. ‘He’d bought this house in Hull with his royalties, and it was the most anonymous, least poetic house I’d ever seen in my life. He blamed it for everything – he never wrote a word there in ten years. We walked down the path and my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth while I tried to think of something to say about it. It was like the outside of an old people’s home. Eventually I came up with “1961?” And he said [and here Ocean takes on Larkin’s famously lugubrious tone], “No, 1959. But I know what you mean.”’ Larkin wanted to know all about McCartney, and they talked about jazz. ‘I liked Roland Kirk and he liked Pee Wee Russell, but we got on. He had these Tannoy speakers … Tannoys! The south London dub speakers of choice!’ Did he like the portrait? ‘I think he did, yes. He turned to Monica and said, “And in this house, too!”’ (‘We’ve fallen on our feet with that young man,’ Monica is quoted as saying in Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin.)

  For the last year, Ocean has been artist-in-residence at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the fruits of his labours can be seen in an invigorating and entirely loveable exhibition entitled ‘How’s My Driving?’ The show is so called because the artist’s route to work has provided him with much of the material (significantly, no number is provided enabling us to register a complaint): a couple of south London’s most Larkinesque houses and office blocks have experienced the Ocean breeze, and the treatment has given them a charm that will make those who live on the dreary edges of a metropolis wonder why the heart doesn’t sing every time they walk to the newsagent’s.

  The show takes the form of a witty, bright conversation with Dulwich’s suprisingly classy permanent collection. There are sketches of paintings by Teniers and Brouwer, and an answer to Gainsborough’s portrait The Linley Sisters, with Ocean’s two extremely contemporary-looking daughters sitting in for the original models. And the Teniers, a winter scene, also inspired the four-painting sequence of buildings, one for each season. ‘We used to talk at art school about how you didn’t get it together as a painter until you were forty. It made us rather morose when we were nineteen. Well, I think I’ve got it together now I’m fifty. This show is my New Boots …’

  It’s a very helpful description, and not only because ‘How’s My Driving?’ has the feel of an album – a couple of cover versions, some light, quick, filler interludes (a series of drawings from Ocean’s ‘dot book’), and a central sequence, the four seasonal paintings, that the record company would want to release as singles. One also gets the feeling that Ian Dury would have loved this show, and his influence is palpable. This is hardly surprising – Dury was, after all, Ocean’s tutor – but it is not Dury the teacher one can feel, but Dury the exemplar of a certain sort of late-twentieth-century-art-school Englishness. The collection demonstrates a love for the past, but it isn’t afraid of the present either; it’s allusive and accessible, and it’s got soul and a sense of humour (which is not the same as saying it’s a one-line joke).

  ‘There are lots of other houses in the area I could have painted,’ Ocean says of Autumn, which depicts a twilit and defiantly suburban home. ‘But none of them were as funny as this one.’ And though it’s true that there is a mournful comedy in there, the picture tugs at the heart, too. Listen to Dury’s ‘There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards’, say, and you experience the same sort of thing: the song makes you laugh, but those solos are sweet.

  When I went to visit Ocean in his studio (he works at the bottom of someone else’s garden in Stockwell) I had just finished reading The Eclipse of Art, Julian Spalding’s elegant, persuasive and timely blast at all things Saatchi, and I tried to stir Ocean up into a frenzy of indignation, but it was utterly hopeless, of course: he has a nice life, his paintings are sought by collectors, and in any case he finds the current climate much more pleasant than the eighties, ‘when everything was so referential, and everyone was walking around with Gogol sticking out of their pockets. Not that there’s anything wrong with Gogol.’ But doesn’t it make him cross that Saatchi is unlikely to come stomping down the garden path into his studio? ‘Noooo,’ he says sweetly. ‘You’ve come instead.’ Yes, but … Oh, never mind. In any case, Ocean is perfectly content to let history sort it all out. ‘I mean, people don’t look at a Rembrandt and think, “Well, I don’t know what to make of that.” And they’re not interested just because he’s old, either. You look at a Rembrandt and your knees shake. That’s what it’s about.’

  London

  I have been doing a little literary sleuthing, and if my research is to be trusted, then I bring you big news: 2012 marks the two hundredth anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. It is probably too late to arrange a proper celebration – it would have been nice if the BBC had made a documentary or two, for example, and a ceremony somewhere grand might have shown the proper respect. Oh, well. Maybe we can push the boat out for his 250th.

  We know already that Dickens is relevant to twenty-first-century London. We know because optimists are still Micawberish, interminable court cases are inevitably Jarndyce and Jarndyce, cheeky criminals (and even pop groups) are Artful Dodgers, dullard teachers are Gradgrinds, obsequious men are Uriah Heeps, bitter spinsters are Miss Havershams. No writer in history has created as many characters who have wandered out of the pages of novels and into our vocabulary, a tribute both to his incredible ability to identify and vivify types, and, more prosaically, to his sheer hard work: he is reckoned to have invented thirteen thousand characters, a figure that takes the breath away, so it’s perhaps not surprising that a few of them have lived on. And of course if he looked at London with his incredible X-ray eyes, he’d find that the skeleton of the place was pretty much identical. The City is full of the same privileged charlatans he described in Our Mutual Friend, Westminster is owned by Old Etonians. Junkies, drunks, prostitutes, chancers and the hard-working poor, the nurses and the teachers that he described with such wrenching sympathy, will always be with us. And anyway, so much of the city has survived more or less untouched. Many of us live in the houses that he would have passed on his legendarily long late-night walks. Five minutes from me, on the corner of St Paul’s Place and Northumberland Park in Islington, is Park Cottage, where Dickens’s mistress Nelly Ternan was living when he first met her. It’s not some heritage site, and there’s no plaque; it’s just somebody’s house. Dickens’s London is still our London.

  And yet … By the time you read this I will have reached the exact midpoint of my fifties. I’m not quite an old man yet – I’m not two hundred, at any rate – and sometimes I look around and I don’t recognize anything. The Canary Wharf skyline wasn’t there when I was in my thirties, for example; a small American city – Cleveland, say (does anyone know if Cleveland is still there?) – has apparently been transplanted in one piece and plonked down in East London. In my teens, the two places I loved most in the world were probably Highbury Stadium, home of Arsenal FC, and the Rainbow Theatre, where just about every seventies band I ever loved played at some point in the decade. I lived thirty miles outside London then, and I was such a hick that it took me longer than it should have done to work out that these two temples (both built in the first half of the 1930s) were less than five minutes’ walk from each other. As far as I was concerned, Arsenal played at Arsenal station, on the Piccadilly Line; the Who and the Faces and Costello and the Clash played on the Victoria Line, at Finsbury Park. Whatever; they’re both gone now.

  Or rather – and this is entirely typical of the complicated evolution of cities – they’re both still there, sort of, but they’re not themselves. The Rainbow is still apparently as achingly beautiful as it used to be, or as achingly beautiful as a converted cinema ca
n ever get, with its lovely fountained foyer and its starry lights twinkling away in its Moorish-themed ceiling; it’s now owned by some kind of Brazilian Pentecostal church, so even though I see it every couple of weeks, I haven’t been inside since some time in the late seventies. Highbury Stadium, or its fantastic art-deco East Stand, anyway, the stand I sat in between 1989 and 2006, has been converted into flats, and there is a paved garden where the pitch used to be. I have stood in one of the flats and squinted down at the garden, trying to see a goal from Henry or Ian Wright or Frank Stapleton; but it’s much easier to imagine Dickens walking through the door of Park Cottage than it is to recall the night I stood in the middle of 63,000 people at Highbury, the biggest Arsenal crowd of my lifetime. The Rainbow is a church, Highbury is an apartment building, Park Cottage is just somebody’s house. Dickens’s London is still our London; my London, meanwhile, is in the middle of becoming something else.

  Compendium Books, in Camden Town, where I discovered Raymond Carver and Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff: gone, years ago. Virgin Records – not the big megastore on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, but the disreputable hippy record shop above a shoe store in exactly the same place, a record shop that sold bootlegs and let drunks crash out in its listening booths: gone. Rock On in Camden, right next to the tube station, and one of the inspirations, if that’s not too overblown a word, for Championship Vinyl in my novel High Fidelity: gone. The Dr Martens shop right next door, where many Arsenal fans went for their footwear: gone. The Nashville, where one night I saw Dave Edmunds’s Rockpile play with the Asbury Jukes, on a stage so tiny that half the horn section was standing in the audience: gone. You only have to live on this planet for fifty years to realize that cities shed their skins with an ease unexpected only if you are daft enough – as all young people are, and as I certainly was – to believe that the world was invented for your benefit, and could therefore now stop changing.