Seven Years with Banksy Read online

  He was never great for conversation. He didn’t do that, he didn’t reveal or divulge often but they say that only about 30 per cent of human communication is actually spoken or verbal. But people who talk too much have always bugged me; you’ve got to get your psychic awareness out, feel the other person. With Robin it was always just good to be around him. You felt like you were with an intelligent, deep animal but you wouldn’t think of crossing him. His razor blades were just too sharp. I got an idea of his background and there wasn’t a sniff of privilege about him. His wit and sensibility came from hard knocks, you could tell. He comes from nowhere and he could go right back there in a second and not be perturbed.

  In hindsight, I was very glad to have him in my life back then. He was a complete antidote to the superficial entities that inhabit New York in large numbers. I’m not going to say we were kindred spirits or anything like that but we didn’t stop hanging out. Our friendship was ongoing.

  He had an edge, as I mentioned, but he didn’t have any particular politics or dogma. He just saw things clearly. He wasn’t really influenced too much by anything but I could feel his keen sense of injustice and hypocrisy.

  I was starting to make plans to leave town and head off for South America. I’d been saving money and even had enough to buy a second-hand Harley Davidson and ship it back to England. My first idea had been to ride across to California to hook up with some good people I knew. However Johanna put paid to that idea as we were in love and she became my priority. Her stay was also coming to an end and I was determined to get over to Sweden as soon as my South American trip was over. Also I wasn’t getting on too well at the hotel with certain members of staff, one of which was working on getting me out of the place, saying that I was too rude, which still makes me laugh when I think of it.

  There was a buzz in the hotel office a couple of mornings running, more so than usual. The place was usually humming by around 10 a.m. Old Charlie Berg, the war-veteran, would be ordering his breakfast from the corner restaurant over the phone ‘and make the eggs over easy, dammit...’ while a fusty smell reeked off him, guests coming and going, money to collect, questions, complaints, and more questions. Robin would poke his head in, slightly bemused by the goings-on and to see me fencing off all the usual rigours of the job. ‘Hey, they call it work!’ I might say to an enquiring gaze.

  But this morning the buzz was: Damien Hirst was coming through town – and how the hell were we going to blag our way into the opening night? These were relatively early days for Hirst in New York and this was to be his breakthrough show. He is quite entertaining, but to be honest I couldn’t really take him that seriously. Nevertheless, I was into checking out the opening night. Whatever else he does Hirst has a skill in the art of extracting largesse out of corporations that have too much money to burn.

  What caught my curiosity was that Robin was genuinely excited at the prospect of seeing this enfant terrible’s collection. I hadn’t seen this kind of interest shown by him for any other established artist that I could think of; in fact we rarely even spoke of any contemporary art scene at all outside of graffiti. It was revealing because Robin was motivated enough to get in to the opening by hook or by crook and as the days passed you could tell he was anxious about the prospect of not being able to get in – it being invitation only (and none of us having invitations!).

  As things transpired I couldn’t go: it was a working night I hadn’t counted on. So I had to make do with him telling me about it later. The night of the opening Robin stopped by the office before leaving and he was almost glowing with expectancy and suppressed excitement. I was surprised because I hadn’t seen that reaction from him before. ‘Shit, he’s really into this bloke,’ I remember thinking, and as he left I wished him luck on getting in.

  The next day I was again surprised to hear how impressed he was by the show, and he described the atmosphere, the people who were there (like David Bowie) in glowing terms. He was so tuned into the whole thing. To be as good, in his own way, as Hirst, to be so well known, to have a certain type of person expressing interest in your art, this was a turn-on for Robin that I wouldn’t have envisaged up to that point. Now I see it clearly. In his mind already he had vague ideas of where he was going, where he wanted to be; he had his motivation click-clacking like a whirring machine in some part of him. ‘He wants to go places,’ I remember thinking. And with hindsight it is noteworthy that Mr Hirst, another West Country boy, could be said to have taken Robin under his wing a little.

  I went down to the show the following night, it was interesting, but it showed me more about Robin than anything else. I began to see that I was lucky to be spending some time with a genuine, talented, singular maverick that had a bright future ahead of him. This period in New York was a formative one, a beginning of sorts and an education of how to move on to the next step – there was a certain calculation on his part, but basically it was an organic process of growing, of branching out, of bearing fruit.

  I would have liked to have left the hotel before they fired me but all was not fluffy bunnies in the job. Something was up, I could smell it, so I decided to make a move. I think Robin felt I was going to be moving on and he started to be more forthright in conversation when we were together. He seemed to be forging ideas around me, sounding them out and maybe he was trying those ideas out on others too, but I was listening.

  At this point I could feel he was gaining in confidence and self-assurance. One afternoon he came into the office and started going on about his name. His first name is Robin, as he was saying, and he was thinking of changing his last name to Banks; that’s right, ‘Robin’ Banks’ (later abbreviated to the tag ‘Banksy’). He brought up the idea of this name-change at least three times on separate occasions and just ran it by me, looking for affirmation. The idea was that anything he did would be attributed to this moniker – Robin’ Banks – a deliberate pun. However, I knew the name was too long to use as a graffiti tag so thought he must have other ideas for his art and other projects in mind. Over time the pseudonym ‘Banksy’ just came into common parlance, despite his original intentions, and I can’t say I have ever heard anything he’s done credited to a ‘Mr Robin’ Banks’, but for those who wonder why he calls himself ‘Banksy’, now you have your answer. Eventually, after being at the hotel for a year or so I was out and back on the bike as a courier. I wasn’t fussed because I had never planned on staying in New York for too long. Even that town can get boring after a couple of years of living the life.

  As a result I didn’t see Robin as frequently but when we did hang out, most often at certain bars in the East Village, our talking increased a little in urgency. I began to ask him a few things about who he knew in Bristol. ‘Have you heard of The Pop Group, Mark Stewart and The Maffia?’ ‘No.’ These were critically acclaimed bands from Bristol that came out of the punk era. They had a serious political edge, preceding virtually all other acts internationally at that time. No, that was too early, it wasn’t his generation. He knew of Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead but it didn’t seem that he knew them personally in any way. I went on to talk about the ‘Dug-Out’ club in Bristol where everyone used to hang out back in the day and where the Wild Bunch, later to form Massive Attack among others, had their roots.

  He wasn’t really aware of that. Then we started talking politics: ‘Have you ever heard of these secret covert groups – the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Masons, these fuckers that try to control the world from behind closed doors?’ I asked. Robin said he wasn’t really up on these things. So I got into it a little to see how deep his knowledge might be, to see if I could inform him of some stuff. I thought he’d be interested about the backstage of our so-called democracy and the machinations of the faceless elites. This all came up as an extension of the conversation around Mark Stewart and The Maffia as this was that group’s prime territory. I didn’t want to berate, I just got some facts out in a sentence. Full stop. He looked at me from behind those
eyes in the darkness of the back wall of the bar and just kept on looking. He didn’t say nothing.

  On one of the last times we hung out together in New York, Robin recommended I listen to Mobb Deep, a rap crew from some projects up on the West Side. They were seriously lyrical and serially tough. It was unlike him to recommend anything. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I do listen to them – all the time.’ He looked at me straight and nodded. The conversation moved on. I didn’t ask why he thought they were worth listening to. They were the sound of New York, the sound of the oppressed and the dispossessed and the sound of intelligence rising against the odds. It stuck with me that he’d recommended them. He cared enough somehow to get me to tune into what he was digging and that felt good.

  A final moment between us intrigued and affected me. He just told me he really liked Johanna and thought, ‘She’s a really nice girl’. It was lovely to hear him say this – just a subtle comment, but it seemed like he’d been thinking about it, waiting for the right moment to say it. Coming from him and his singular honesty about all things it gave confirmation to my own feelings for her and it perhaps made me all the more determined to be with her again, and for that I’m still grateful.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WEST IS BEST

  I was gone, down Bolivia way and in the jungles of the Amazon for a while, flying over the Nazca lines in Peru and stopping off in Chile. I was interested to find out more about the jungle vine psychedelic Ayahuasca but all of that is another story. I was free in mind, body and spirit but I missed Johanna terribly. She was waiting for me in Stockholm. I also came to an odd realization. I had started a lot to see Robin in my dreams, he had penetrated my mind so subtly and he was really there night after night, strong, determined, psychic, delivering up endless antics. That guy sure is real, I thought, over morning coca-leaf tea. He’s super-fucking real.

  One dream of many: I’m in a darkened room with Robin and a paranoid feeling resounds. The light is low. There is a large book between us. He has created a complete dictionary, full of pictures and reams of text, to replace our conventional ones. This new dictionary transforms our language and perceptions, it’s intended to seep into our conscious minds. It’s aesthetic is revolutionary, to replace our common interpretations. I hold this book and flip through its pages in a fervour, the text flies off the pages, along with the images, floating transparently in the gloom around us. A fire burns in a grate, I can hear it crackling and feel its warmth. A desk holds the weight of this tome, a modern Book of Kells and its meanings absorb my mind’s eye.

  Yet, we are being pursued by shadows. Dark forces are approaching while the wind whistles up. We move off, this way and that, I’m swiftly following him. We both board a small aircraft which Robin knows how to fly and we glide up and out, north, above the West Country, over Cotswold valleys, with villages of honey-stone and ancient steeples. The people peacefully sleep in their beds. ‘Ah, my beloved valleys,’ I murmur. It’s darkening and the landscape looms up at us, the hills rise to meet our aircraft as we fly low, Robin’s presence cocooned safely in the cockpit. Alighting next to an ancient Saxon church lying deep in the fold of hills we step out into a dust of frost that lies all about us. Stars glint in a moonless heaven, pulsing from above. We carry the book into the sacred building, uplifting a central flagstone near the altar and place the book in its hiding place for now, it being wrapped in patterned azure silk. I feel old England protecting its own.

  I had been back in Europe for a time, stopping in England before spending several months in Stockholm with Johanna. The New York period was over and I had a longing to be in England as it was some years since I’d been there for any length of time. So I left Scandinavia to re-establish myself in Bristol and be closer to my family and to reacquaint myself with friends up and down the country.

  It was a little odd to be back in Bristol, so much had happened there in the past, but I hooked up with some old faces and got some work in nightclubs doing doors and had a few daytime gigs around and about. I sorted out a nice place to live up in Kingsdown, looking over the city and Johanna flew in regularly to keep me company.

  It so happened that I ended up in the Bristol Royal Infirmary in the summertime for a spell after swimming in the River Avon near Bath. Every chance I got I was out into the countryside on the Harley I had shipped over from the US and we had been out for a dip when I must have swallowed some water polluted with rat piss and I succumbed to Weil’s Disease and was laid up in hospital recovering.

  The day I finally felt better Johanna was visiting and she was anxious to get me out of the hospital. It was a glorious summer’s day, and it just happened to be the weekend of the Ashton Court Festival. Ashton Court Festival had been a free festival since the hippy days and took place annually up in the grounds of an old stately manor on the south side of the River Avon. I had been going there for years – it was a guaranteed good time, with a lot of great music being performed. Half of the city would be up there, so you were bound to run into friend and foe alike.

  Johanna and I held hands and made a beeline for the place. It was quite a walk and when we got there I remember being sick and heaving up the hospital breakfast. Nevertheless, we continued into the main stage and got caught up in the infectious buzz of happy people and good music. I was pretty pale according to Johanna so I didn’t think of heading for the beer tent, although a refreshing cider would have gone down well, perhaps.

  The sun was blazing, the music blaring, we were just milling about and I was crowd-spotting, recognizing faces and saying hello to some. Then I saw Robin standing on his own, the crowd moving around him. He was sort of looking at the ground, motionless. It was slightly odd to catch sight of him again in such a different environment to New York. I was really pleased to see him and I tugged Johanna’s sleeve and said, ‘Look, there’s Robin!’ ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘let’s go and say hello.’ We were twenty or thirty yards away and we moved towards him through the crowd. I actually stopped to observe him a little more closely as we approached. He was still just looking at the ground, occasionally glancing about. I was imagining some great reunion. I had been wondering about him, but seeing him, I began to get slightly nervous. Something was amiss. ‘He looks kind of fucked-up, somehow,’ I said to Johanna. ‘Let’s go up and say hi anyway.’

  So we did. ‘Hey, Robin, how’re you doing?’ I said as we approached him. He looked up as he was rolling a cigarette: ‘Fucking hell!’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. I took a good long look at him. I could smell the cider. I figured he’d been on the apple juice pretty heavily. We said a few words but he was non-committal and swaying ever so slightly. I was beaming at him; I was so happy to see him again after all these months but he didn’t seem to give much of a damn about seeing me. So, I said: ‘How is it, being back in Bristol?’ And he replied: ‘The only thing wrong with this town is you and your fucking family.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and Johanna stepped back a little. I wasn’t in the mood for this and could see he’d been on the scrumpy so gave him a wide berth. If you’ve been brought up in the West Country you would know very well what it’s like to be trashed on rough cider, or ‘scrumpy’, and it can turn you pretty psycho – especially in the hot sun.

  But his comment was out of order, deliberately so. It was a challenge: Stand up to me or fuck off. I wasn’t about to creep off anywhere so I looked at him with some sympathy for his state and said: ‘What the fuck are you on about? You’ve never even met my family.’ I continued looking at him and he looked up at me. I said, ‘It’s only three o’clock and you’re fucking trashed.’ ‘Yeah?’ he said; ‘Fucking right,’ I replied. Something happened then: that invisible click and we were right as rain again.

  I asked Johanna to give me a moment alone with him and she moved off, quite puzzled by this ‘English’ episode, and we started to talk. He was arseholed on the rough cider.

  When I look back at it now this exchange tells me two thi
ngs. It was classic Banksy ‘fuck off’ humour – like, if you can’t get beyond my razor blades, then fuck off. And secondly it was a classic risible West Country welcome. And that was it, we were back in cider country and you may as well behave like it! So, now, instead of wanting to punch his lights out when I remember it I laugh my socks off. It couldn’t have been a better meeting.

  We spoke about a few things, of South America, of Sweden, of what he’d been up to, not that he’d remember anything that was said. He told me where he lived, asked me to come by and then he said ‘Come on, let’s listen to some good music.’ And he led the way right into the pit of the crowd in front of the main stage. Johanna joined us and Portishead opened up their set to a rapturous, thundering crowd. The West is best.

  Summertime was unrolling itself over the city of Bristol when one day I found myself walking down the old Welsh Back, a long-since redundant harbour lying near Bristol Bridge in the city centre. From a couple of hundred yards away, I saw a lone figure next to a wall of an old warehouse. I knew the building and the last time I had seen it, it was its usual red-bricked self. Now a volume of colour emanated off it. There was no one else about and I stopped to survey the scene. I walked on a little more and the figure, which was silhouetted against the wall and was clearly in no hurry whatsoever, reached for a spray-can and employed a few stokes. Now I could see who it actually was. Robin. The artful dodger. I approached cautiously, not wanting to disturb him and also remembering our last hairy encounter. I walked up and took in his work; it was relatively similar to his New York cartoon stuff on the walls of the hotel. It was like this: a figure sitting in an armchair being blasted by a hubristic TV set, the piece was full of characters coming out of the TV and the tag line was, ‘There’s a lot of noise going on but you ain’t saying anything!’ It ran about four metres long by three metres high – a big piece. He didn’t hear me coming and I didn’t want him to think I was sneaking up on him so I said: ‘Oi!’ and kicked a can towards him. He looked around casually and his eyes brightened when he saw me. That was a good sign and we started to talk and although he was surprised to see me he didn’t miss a beat in his friendliness. I talked about this painting he was doing in broad daylight. He must have had permission to do it judging by the time of day. He was easy-going and after a while he got back to the wall, spray-can in hand.