Seven Years with Banksy Page 2

  His artwork looked like fun but it wasn’t as serious or avant-garde as the usual stuff that got done in the rooms. Mind you, some of the rooms had been done out so heavily that it was depressing to go into them, and some had such explicit sexual references it made you wonder what sort of behaviour was demanded of you if you stayed there. One room was full of depictions of car crashes and flowers and that really got to my mum when she stayed in it. So Robin’s room was definitely staking out its own ground. It wasn’t traditional graffiti as some might expect. It was something else, like the Wacky Races with a macabre tone. I liked it but it didn’t particularly challenge you in any way and I wondered how the hotel became interested in him. It almost didn’t seem to fit the place.

  Ah well, just another visiting artist, I thought. I also figured he might not be around that long as the usual artist tenancy was a couple of months at most. Although he was British, there were no real gestures of friendship and as he was quite aloof, I just let it be.

  As time went by though, I would invite him into the office for a cup of tea and the English reticence thing started to melt a little and mutual acknowledgement became more regular. His room was coming along and he had started to occasionally bring around some people he was hanging out with. They looked like proper New Yorkers and lacked any pretentious airs that are sometimes common among creative people. Little parties began to take place in his room and when I was walking the halls in the evenings, the door was often open and I would pop in and have a beer, meet his associates and take in the advancing jungle world that was appearing on his walls.

  I think he was testy with me because I actually just worked there, ‘a member of the staff’, and we hadn’t crossed into a space of mutual trust that you need to let people in. The reality was I didn’t give a damn about how crazy it got in the hotel. I liked the madness and insanity of the place. And in contrast with the vomit-soaked rooms and firearms his vibe was quite chilled out and cosy, if a little standoffish.

  A young blonde girl attached to him showed up on the scene and you just had to look at her to see she was wild and spiky. She was on the punky-street side, and chased after him like a young puppy with her tailwagging. You could feel their energy before you saw them coming in off the street clutching bottles of American Sudsy beer wrapped in brown paper bags.

  Late one warm summery night I noticed she was in his room and there was a lot of high-pitch screeching going on that sounded like a heated argument. I hadn’t seen her come in with him, or on her own. The street door was locked, as it usually was at such an hour. I’m not sure if he saw me pass by on my rounds as his door was ajar, but he came down later and he seemed exasperated.

  ‘She climbed up through the fire escape,’ he said, ‘and came in through the window. I had no idea she was coming. She’s crazy; I can’t get rid of her!’ ‘Oh yeah?’ I said, and at that moment she came running down the stairs bouncing around like a toy doll. I’m not sure what she was on, maybe it was natural, but she became a fixture for a while and I was pleased to see them together.

  Robin moved out of the hotel and I didn’t see him for a while. Life went on in New York and I continued on my night shifts and pursued my fancies. One of whom came in the shape of an attractive young Swedish girl. I couldn’t help but notice a new energy in the hotel when four Swedish girls arrived. Their effervescence was infectious, they turned the heads of even the oldest residents, especially old Charlie Berg, a veteran of the Second World War who ate his breakfast in the office with me most mornings and who had Swedish heritage. He would mutter and mumble under his breath when they passed.

  They were studying at Parsons, a famous art and design college in Greenwich Village and were soon to move out to an apartment. When one of them left her architectural ruler at the hotel by accident, I took the chance to invite her to tea with me in the office one balmy afternoon. Soon we started going out so I had a new relationship to occupy my time. Her name was Johanna.

  Soon afterwards Robin showed up and said he had been staying down in South Brooklyn, a place known as Red Hook. I had been down that way a couple of times as I was eager to explore every nook and cranny of the city. There wasn’t much there to speak of; it was a heavy ghetto basically comprised of African-American-inhabited housing projects. The area was (and still is) hardcore but not famous like Bedford-Stuyvesant.

  I was astounded and thought, ‘What the fuck are you doing down there, man?’ Robin was staying with some people he knew and we got to talking about the place. He told me he had walked into the local fast-food joint late at night – a soul-food place – and had tried to spark up a conversation with the locals, as you might do in England. He was met with a less than welcoming response: the people there just all set their eyes on him with more than a hint of menace. A ‘Who the fuck is this white boy with a fucked-up accent? And what the fuck is the motherfucker doing here?’ vibe. I had felt the same thing many times while up in Harlem or the Bronx, so I knew what he was talking about. The truth is New York (and America) is a very segregated land and Britain feels different to that. Robin’s friendly attitude was his Britishness as much as just himself. His genuine openness as opposed to fear or more negative attitudes is probably what saved him from having his arse kicked around the block. ‘It ain’t like at home,’ he said, ‘like Paul’s or Easton.’ ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. I even had British Caribbean friends in Brooklyn in certain neighbourhoods who would say ‘watch yourself round here mate, it ain’t like England’. I was amazed and impressed that Robin was living down there and wondered what he was putting up on the walls and streets and what the Red Hook residents would have thought of his art. They probably dug it.

  I spoke to him about some of the New York neighbourhoods I had experienced and we talked for the longest time so far, and when I look back, this is the point when things started to open up.

  From then on we started to hang out together. It wasn’t because we were English or that we had the common connection of Bristol. Far from it. It soon transpired that he was a Bristol City fan and I am a Bristol Rovers supporter so we were never going to bond over our local football teams. We were Englishmen in New York.

  The hotel had offered him the foyer to do out and he took them up on it and became a summer fixture in the place. This time around his work was still leery and on the comic edge but on a grander scale with scary beasts and monsters lining the walls as if they were residents of the establishment. It was good fun, sharp and had his unique humour running through it. I liked it but it didn’t seep into me too much, not like his later work. He was doing this thing and I was there doing my eighteen-hour shifts.

  One of our first excursions was to a nearby Irish bar to watch an English football international. It is always a laugh to congregate with English compatriots in a strange town with the common bond being the English national side. It’s an instant hit as you walk in. English energy, the looks, the clothes, the chants and singing, the beer-swilling, the nervous looks from the locals (even in New York). Through that Robin and I became more relaxed and I began to figure him out. He was still aloof and distanced but I got the feeling that despite his endeavours to not reveal himself, he was deep.

  This unfathomed depth is important because this was a formative period leading up to his prominence as the artist he is today. He was young, he was inspired by New York and although he had a lot of ‘suss’ and knowledge already, he was beginning to find his feet, sort out his own perception of things, and fine-hone that vision, for nobody else’s sake but his own. He was out there doing the deed in the dead of night in volatile, dangerous places, not in search of accolades but because he wanted to get his views out there. To capture people’s imagination was the only reward.

  The point is it’s all about thinking for yourself – because the powers that be try to think for you from cradle to grave. And that’s why Banksy is so good. He truly thinks for himself. And he doesn’t just think for himself, he puts it out there for all to see, to reject, to agree with,
be provoked by, enlightened by – all of that stuff.

  There was a Jewish mayor of New York back in the ’80s - Mayor Koch – who once said ‘If you’ve been here for six months but you’re moving faster, talking faster, then you’re a New Yorker.’ And I hold with that. The place can do something to you, animate you, make you more up on your feet, more up on your wits. Several people have asked me, ‘Why do they call New York the Big Apple?’ I’m not sure of its origins as a phrase but, to me, it means that everybody can take a bite. It’s big enough for all comers to savour its flavour. Just go ahead and take your bite and enjoy it. The City laid itself out in all its expectant glory – a myriad of spaces and places to check out, scenes to get involved in. And nobody minded too much about you. They just got on with their own thing and when you connected with like-minded people it was a double-plus good.

  I was seeing Johanna a lot and there were a ton of parties about, often in Williamsburg. Robin and I began to go out together some more. We’d walk some of the city streets and the spectacle of the town worked its magic. One afternoon we strolled down Broadway to a gallery around Soho, close to Canal Street. We had both heard of the artist previously but the name escapes me now. This was a street graffiti artist who had a formidable reputation and had now begun to show some big pieces on canvas in galleries. I can still see the work in my mind’s eye and we were both impressed and pleased to see the exhibition, to take in its visual manipulation.

  The canvasses were as big as your average door and the movement of form or letters burst out and rushed back into the art. The hues of blues and colour were so subtle and harmonious they reflected a mind-state that was one: tough and two: sublime. This was good. We spent some time in there while Robin said repeatedly ‘This just does something to my head.’

  He liked it a lot. He was hardly a stranger to graffiti and could easily do his own pieces but this was advanced and you got the sense that he knew he couldn’t compete with the standard, maybe ever. He did say later he didn’t think his graffiti pieces were that good, in the traditional sense. I also think that pointless pursuit of the conventions of the genre was too conformist an approach for him. He knew his limits and that is when he started thinking out of the box.

  He has famously said that he came to stencilling after he saw a stencilled number under a train carriage while concealing himself from pursuing law officers. Its simplicity and cleanliness appealed to him at the same time, being a direct and quick method that was not as time-consuming as when you put up a big piece. This meant he could hit and run with clinical precision many times over on one night. He found his own way and took full advantage. He started with one stencil only and then realized he could do huge pieces with many stencils placed together (like his ‘Mona Lisa with Bazooka’) to achieve maximum impact. In New York, however, I never saw him use or create a stencil. That was going to come later.

  We were out one day walking through Soho and I thought of popping by a marketplace where I had worked a little and had some trader-friends who were English and I introduced Robin to them. We all got on well and were having a laugh but soon Robin was tuning into this younger kid and they both clicked as they figured out quickly enough that they both wrote graffiti. Robin and this lad were rabbiting on nineteen to the dozen about all the local graffiti artists, the names of whom I’d never heard before. The knowledge was impressive and I was out of my depth in this context so I just listened and that’s when I realized Robin was way out there in his familiarity with this scene. They were almost like a couple of train-spotters. They spoke in reverent, excited tones of artists and places to find the best, newest pieces by the most invisible, law-defying street artists in New York.

  That was another ‘click’ moment. He was up on stuff and knew details that I had no inkling of. This scene was his thing; he was becoming embedded in it. His artistic persona was getting more solid. He was the proverbial iceberg: you see a little above the water but underneath is the hidden mass. He didn’t show what was concealed and it’s pretty much the same to this day. He’s only going to talk through his art.

  We would quite often walk out from the hotel together after my shift was done. This was usually around 11 a.m. when the Manhattan mornings were often bright and felt full of endless possibilities. This particular morning, we were both riding skateboards and I suggested we move on downtown to the lower echelons of Soho to take in an exhibition showing the anarchist propaganda, art and posters from the Spanish Civil War. It was something I was interested in, having read various accounts of the anarchist International Brigades fighting the allied fascist forces of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler at the same time as the Soviet-backed communists. There were many westerners in the anarchist brigade, not least British and Americans who gave their all for the cause. I was mentioning these facts to Robin as we skated on down. He seemed interested but remained quite silent.

  It’s a complex and often overlooked part of history and I thought it would be enlightening.

  We got to the gallery relatively early, it had just opened and there was no one inside apart from the proprietor. As we strolled in he looked up, slightly disdainfully, as we propped our skateboards up against the gallery wall. This guy couldn’t have had his coffee yet because he immediately took off on a tirade about how ‘we shouldn’t have done that’. It was so out of proportion and snotty that I railed down on him. Pointing out how small-minded he was being – especially in contrast to the noble theme of the exhibition around us. It became a stand-off and I saw it through but Robin stayed quiet and hung back as it was clearly becoming embarrassing. Eventually and predictably the proprietor said, ‘get out of here before I call the cops’.

  It was a stupid event, but to me the gallery owner’s hysteria was beyond a joke. Robin wasn’t happy about this scene and I couldn’t really make him see it my way: that this man was childishly reactionary about a couple of skateboards when he was hosting a serious revolutionary art exhibition. To me the irony was obvious and absurd but it created a cold space between Robin and me and he took off soon after, leaving me feeling nonplussed by his reaction. But there you go; I wasn’t about to turn it into a big deal. To me he was just another snooty Soho gallery owner.

  While in the gallery, though, I had seen a notice that said there was to be a gathering of ex-combatants from the American branch of the International Brigades that night, including speeches from some of them, so despite the upset I resolved to return. This meeting meant something to me and an uptight fool wasn’t going to put me off.

  So that night I dressed differently, put on a ‘poor-boy cap’ and got myself down to the event. And it was truly worth it to see these brave men and women stand up and tell their stories: how the US military rejected them for their effort and even how, on their return to America, the unions would not let them be hired simply because of their political beliefs.

  They all stood at the end of the evening and sang ‘the Internationale’ and they were still strong and proud and righteous and it struck me hard in the heart. As I left, I passed the gallery owner once again and checked his gaze as he did a double take.

  I didn’t run into Robin again for several days and neither did I seek him out, but, of course, we were bound to see each other and I was determined to bring up this incident.

  The next time I saw him I was in the hotel office on a fine afternoon fixing up a shitake mushroom salad. He came in with Mike Tyler, the resident poet and writer who was staying in the hotel – and was forever stalling on his rent. Mike was one of the founders of the ‘Slam Poetry’ events in New York that later evolved into a worldwide scene. He was an interesting guy and also never had a dime. So I asked them in to eat and they were pleased to join me. I always made a little more food than necessary and often invited others to eat with me. It made for a pleasant intro to the night shift. And we got to talking.

  I already knew that Robin was naturally taciturn and since the gallery episode he had retreated a step back from our friendship. So, fuck it,
I just gave him a broadside and told him how I had gone down there again that same day to pay some respect to the old warriors. I told him about their clenched fist salute, how the establishment back in the States had blackballed them, ostracizing them and their families. He started to see things differently and silently acknowledged where I was coming from. I didn’t know if he had any politics. His art at this point did not reflect that but to me it was obvious he was smart, streetwise and a guttersnipe. And the truth is only known by guttersnipes. So I thought, ‘hey – we’re either going to connect or not’. So I laid it out and our relationship was better for it.

  Life in New York moved at its own rapid pace, and Robin and I continued to hang out. I took him over to Williamsburg one time for a brunch being prepared by a crowd of the artists that I lived with. I remember he was pretty quiet, as usual, but I could start to read him by then and I could tell he was intrigued. His style was to be quiet, to observe, to take it all in – and then he would come out with just one comment at the precise time to garner some attention. And that is what he did on this occasion, successfully pissing off half of my mates with deceptive ease. Usually his perceptive comments were so close to the target they got most people’s backs up within microseconds; others would laugh; others would be puzzled. But when he spoke all would listen. I’ve seen him do this ‘cat among the pigeons’ routine several times and it has this canny effect every time. He could smell bullshit a mile off and he could cut fiercely through the pretensions of a crowd. It was just quick, short and precise. And almost every time there was this humour – the same humour you see in his art, especially the stencils.