Seven Years with Banksy Read online

  And then there were the dreams. He had entered my dreams like none other and in those dreams our adventures were all the greater magnified.

  Another dream of many: Robin and I sit silently within an ancient stone circle reminiscent of Stanton Drew under a yew tree. Wearing heavy dark coats we watch a flock of crows curve through a cold sky. We listen to them. We converse.

  I: ‘We have a surveillance culture.’

  He: ‘When negativity ceases, creativity is born.’

  I: ‘It is a luxury to not be recognized and deciphered.’

  He: ‘Creativity holds the transformative powers.’

  I: ‘In the future we will reject our fifteen minutes of fame.’

  He: ‘We are beyond them.’

  I: ‘Instead we will pay dear for our anonymity.’

  He: ‘When we are faster than them we hold an unseen space, a timeless zone.’

  I: ‘We create our Eden.’

  He: ‘The unseen place is where I operate.’

  I: ‘Then when they arrive there later they will see.’

  He: ‘Yeah, then they see and respond.’

  I: ‘The future is ours.’

  He: ‘The future will be the people’s.’

  I stand and throw around him a cloak of protection. In return he writes an oath with his finger on the sacred ancestral stones. A crow hops towards us, then Robin and the bird merge, become as one, and flap its wings and ascend to the azure blue of the limitless sky. I remain on my own plane, sure of life.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LET US OUT

  Reality was different, of course, and there was a humorous episode in which I was walking some Soho streets with him. He had a bag slung over one shoulder, as was often the case, and I knew he had several stencils in there along with some paint. I’d mentioned to him before that if he ever needed a lookout I’d be happy to provide him with some cover, another pair of eyes. I knew he did most of his stuff entirely on his own. In fact, other people would just be a hindrance to him, just slow him down. On this sunny spring day he must have been feeling generous because, as we were walking north on Wardour Street approaching the corner of Old Compton Street, he said casually, ‘Stand here, look out for me.’

  I saw him pull out a stencil and black aerosol from his shoulder bag. I thought we would be there for a while but as it happened, I turned, looked up and down the street, tapped my foot then looked around to see him. He was gone and in his place was an image of a monkey flashing a V-sign at me while riding on the back of a flying missile.

  ‘Fuck!’ I thought. ‘Where the fuck is he?’ I glanced around but saw no sign of him. The job was done, the art on the wall like it had been there for ages. ‘Shit,’ I thought again and scanned the streets of Soho, full of people rushing at London pace on the pavements, but I couldn’t see him anywhere.

  Then I looked across Wardour Street and a face popped out from around the corner of a porn shop. He made eye contact and his head popped out of sight again. ‘Fuck!’ I said out loud. What a mug I was!

  I rapidly crossed over, dodging the traffic and saw him nonchalantly ambling along Peter Street, so I caught up with him and adjusted my pace to his. He didn’t say anything and we kept on walking. I was laughing to myself by now. He was so quick, I couldn’t believe he executed his work in a second or less and then ghosted away and blended into the city crowds, invisible and without breaking sweat, in broad daylight. I felt perhaps I had let him down, but that wasn’t true really. His thoughts weren’t easy to penetrate so I never bothered to apologize for my lack of synchronicity. I’ve been back to that corner since and relived the fun.

  Sitting with Robin one afternoon in London, he relayed an interesting tale that held my attention. We were sitting in a park, chilling out and chatting, enjoying the scene and watching people passing us by when I tuned into him for what was a rare monologue:

  ‘I was out late one night last week, doing this railway bridge in a nondescript part of London. I’m posting up some of my stencil flyers and it’s dark as pitch. I’m all dressed in black, hood up, and making progress. It was dead quiet and rainy, not a soul out there.

  ‘All of a sudden I hear this car coming so I blend into the wall. The car slowly comes to a halt below me, because I’m above the road, then they position the car across the carriageway and rev the engine and then blam! They drive straight into an electronics shop, smashing straight through the windows, glass everywhere; they pile out, three of them, bagging all kinds of consumer desirables in a cool, calm and collected manner. They barely spoke to each other. I was watching the whole thing, wondering whether to scarper or not. I saw all of it. Meanwhile another car approaches, quietly, slowly, and these three run and jump into it. Laden down with stuff they roar off down the road at full horsepower. Fucking unbelievable! It was all over in less than five minutes flat. I was frozen to the wall still, while the shop’s alarm was waking up the whole neighbourhood. It was time to leave obviously. But I thought to myself, while I picked up my stuff, “Fucking hell, look at me up here, thinking on what I was doing, they are the real revolutionaries, right in front of my eyes!” I got out of there double-quick, but I was cracking up all the way back to my place.’

  I imagined him up there on the bridge taking it in.

  At that time ram-raids, as they were known, were the crime of the day and since then most shopping areas have placed concrete bollards strategically to prevent such acts occurring. I could tell he was impressed by what he’d witnessed.

  The summer solstice began to approach and that meant one thing – Glastonbury Festival was coming round again. I had a pass from my brother, who was working the ‘drug tent’ as usual, and I was to stay up at that part of the site with him in our mate’s family tent. I had been across to the Stonehenge midsummer gathering and had camped out, so I rode down on the Harley from Salisbury Plain. I arrived the night before the festival was due to start and stuck the motorcycle under a huge oak tree. The air was fresh, damp, a little cold and there was an audible hum of people arriving. Thumping beats drifted through the surrounding meadows.

  I entered the main site and found my friends sitting around a campfire in boisterous mood. My old mate Phish greeted me by telling me how healthy I looked. They were making merry and that made me feel right at home. But then as the darkness fell around us, it began to rain. A little at first, and then huge, ripe, bulbous drops. I’d never seen rain like it.

  We got through the night and morning broke and Phish and I decided to stretch our legs and see what was going on outside of our area, which was fenced in with security on the gate. We moved into the festival proper where people were up and mooching about. Then, smack! We virtually walked straight into Robin. One second later and we would have missed him.

  ‘Hey!’ I exclaimed. He looked surprised. He hadn’t expected such an early morning encounter, so he stood and looked at me. And then looked at Phish. And then he looked at me again. It was early, very early, and he could have been up all night (which wouldn’t have been unusual at Glastonbury).

  His natural reserve rapidly kicked in as we started to talk. What was I doing there? What was he doing? What was going on? We had caught him off his guard and so many questions meant that I could feel his paranoia started creeping up on him. I didn’t mean to make him feel uneasy but I knew by now that his paranoia was strong and sometimes off the mark. I introduced him to Phish. They had actually met as I had taken Robin round to Phish’s place previously. Robin was obviously trying to place him. Then he started to relax a little and he was civil in all respects as we walked a little way together.

  It was an unusual place to see him as nothing much went on near our area. The site was huge and most of its happenings were a significant distance away. I sensed Robin was still uneasy so I let him go off on his own, but the meeting spoke volumes about his personality. He didn’t really trust anyone easily and his private self was just that – off limits. With Robin you never took up from where you had left off bef
ore. I didn’t expect any great friendship. What I did was look, and observe, because there was a lot to see in him and I felt strangely protective of him and his path.

  Sometime later that summer I found myself up in London visiting a couple of people and doing some stuff. One of them, Jesse, was intrigued by this character I was hanging out with so I arranged that we should all meet up in a salubrious pub down on the Ladbroke Grove end of Portobello Road. We all made our own way down there separately. I had been tramping the London streets all day, visiting a couple of galleries and remembering haunts and hangouts from my past.

  I was walking down Portobello from the Notting Hill side and it was already dark. The streets were quite empty and there seemed to be an early autumn chill settling in. Suddenly a local kid with a knife surprised me by jumping out of a doorway. I had to fuck him right off and he was not happy. This event got my hackles up and I was worried he would have some friends close by. I was angry at the arrogance of the kid in thinking I would be a soft touch for a mugging. Nevertheless, these incidents happen in life, so I made a beeline for the pub as quickly as I could.

  I walked in, shook the cold off and stood by an open fire. I was already anticipating facing up to this mugger and some of his possible accomplices again and my inclination was to just leave the area and avoid any further trouble. My own brand of paranoia and dread was doing a fine job on me but I had to sit it out and wait for my friends. At least when they showed I would have some back-up and I figured I could rely on both of them. I sat at the bar and ordered an ale and looked about. It was quiet so I took out the book I was reading, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I tried to breathe calmly and turned to my last page. I sat facing the door and scanned the windows once in a while.

  I was wondering who would be the first to arrive. Robin was usually late. He always chose his entrance after checking it was safe. Jesse came through the door and we embraced; it was a while since we had seen each other and we both had stories to tell as we had both been travelling – Jesse as a tour manager for the San Francisco artist DJ Shadow and me in pursuit of love.

  ‘Some little cunt has just tried to mug me,’ I said, and I explained what had happened. I felt calmer now I was no longer on my own. Then, suddenly, the little bastard mugger came up to the window and started to look in. We caught each other’s eye and I said to Jesse: ‘That’s him, that’s him!’ So Jesse looked over and the kid took off. I was on tenterhooks, anticipating a later stand-off when we exited the pub. Jesse ordered a beer and then Robin waltzed in. He was like a crow as usual: no one looked up at him as he entered the bar.

  We settled down with our beers and Robin spotted my book on the bar counter. It was open face down, with the cover showing. ‘Fucking hell!’ he exclaimed, ‘He’s reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead here.’ And he looked to Jesse for a response.

  ‘That’s Rob for you,’ Jesse said, ‘he’s always got a book in his pocket.’

  Robin seemed amused by my choice of reading matter and asked what the book was about. I started to explain but I faced his humorous derision.

  ‘I was talking to my Gran recently,’ he said. ‘She’s been smoking all her life and she told me, “You know, you’ve got to go sometime. You could be hit by a bus tomorrow, may as well take pleasure where you find it.”’

  I looked at him. I was a bit put out and I said, ‘With all due respect to your grandmother, a lot of people think like that. But dying from lung cancer is a fucking horrible way to go; the suffering is deplorable. You wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Listen, there’s a whole world of right behaviour, of being born, created, cutting out the crap, trying to live in an environment that honours yourself, to get to higher plains, to supersede the bullshit around you. If you don’t honour that sacred journey that incorporates your whole life, you’ll never realize where and what you could’ve been. Do you follow?’

  He looked at me with interest and became silent. I was hyped up after my earlier experience. Robin looked at Jesse in silence. Jesse said, ‘Some little cunt just tried to mug him outside’ as by way of explanation and shrugged his shoulders.

  We all laughed at that, and I felt my tension bubble burst, and relayed the details of what had happened to Robin and asked what should I do if the kid with the knife was waiting for me outside later. They didn’t have any suggestions, they just let my paranoia go and we drank some more ale.

  A while later Jesse said, ‘That really got to you didn’t it, that kid?’ I looked at him and didn’t reply. Well, he was right, it had got to me. It seemed to me as if Robin was enjoying my paranoia, seeing my hackles raised. I wasn’t often like that so perhaps he was surprised. Maybe it gave him a different view of me. I tucked the book back into my pocket and we started to chat. Robin took to a theme. ‘Hey, have you ever been to London Zoo?’ he began. I had passed by it many times en route through Regent’s Park and Jesse even more as he used to walk into the city that way, but neither of us had been in. We asked him why, of course, and he said: ‘Well, I want to go in there when it’s closed, at night.’

  ‘What for?’ we asked, looking at him quizzically.

  ‘Have they got a penguin enclosure or something?’ Robin asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, I want to get in there and paint something like “LET US OUT OF HERE. THE FOOD IN HERE IS CRAP!” on their walls.’ We both looked at each other and at him and started to laugh.

  ‘What, you really want to do that?’ said Jesse.

  ‘Yeah, and something in the bears’ enclosure too.’

  ‘They’ll fucking eat you!’ I exclaimed.

  We sat there drinking and laughing and suddenly Jesse said: ‘Well, we can go there now. It’s not so far away.’

  I wasn’t sure Robin would take him up on this but he did. ‘Yeah, all right, how far is the walk?’

  ‘A mile or so.’

  With that, we downed our glasses and stepped out into the dark, damp night stoked up with a sense of fun and adventure. I scanned the streets but there was no sign of my little mugger. Long gone, I thought. Nasty bastards don’t usually have many friends and besides, he was probably tucked up in bed at home by now.

  We walked at pace through Paddington and approached the park from its south side near Marylebone Road. The entire park was ringed with elegant, viciously spiked Victorian iron fencing that came almost up to my neck. All the gates were locked, of course, but we hadn’t thought of that due to the spur-of-the-moment nature of the decision.

  ‘Shit’ we all seemed to say and our breath was visible in the damp cold night. We looked around, over our shoulders, and decided to hoist each other over the fence. Needless to say, Robin was exceptionally nimble and was over in a flash. Jesse and I had a few problems but over we went and immediately started to tramp the distance to the zoo at the north end of the park.

  While I was taking a piss against a giant chestnut tree a police patrol vehicle passed by some way off. We looked at each other and continued on and eventually the zoo perimeter became visible. It was a weeknight so things were quiet all around. We knew we were breaking some trespass law – as described in great detail on a Victorian plaque on the imposing iron fence – so we were stealthy and silent. Finally we arrived at the zoo’s perimeter and could see some of the cages and enclosures with their beasts stirring inside. Some of them made nocturnal whooping calls and noises from time to time but otherwise the place looked pretty sleepy.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I enquired. We decided that it was best for Robin to go in on his own considering he was a master at this kind of thing, and he soon found a good spot from which to hop over the wall. Jesse and I hung out behind a tree, relishing the darkness in the middle of the city and the silly caper we had embarked upon, warmed by ale. We waited maybe twenty minutes before Robin reappeared through the gloom and rejoined us.

  We were full of whispers: ‘Did you find it – I mean them, the penguins?’

  ‘Yeah, and the bears.’

  ‘Did you see a
nybody?’

  ‘No, but it’s a big place.’

  We didn’t have time to get into conversation and made our way back over to the outer circle of the park. We were a hundred yards or so from the fence when we spied a vehicle slowly circumnavigating the park. That put a spring into our step, and we charged up to the spiked fencing. Robin was over in a snap; we leapt for the rails and as Jesse was going over one of the spikes caught the seat of his trousers and did their worst. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted as he sprawled on the pavement to the sound of ripping cloth.

  The city traffic rushed before us. There was no blood spilt at any rate. ‘Fuck, I only bought these trousers last week!’ Jesse said, inspecting the irreparable damage of a twelve-inch tear. We sympathized. ‘I don’t care, that’s the most fun I’ve had in ages!’ he said.

  We hung there for a few breathless minutes. Finally Robin spoke: ‘Which way is south?’ It was the opposite direction to where Jesse and I were heading, so we parted company. We walked north to Camden and recovered with cups of tea back at Jesse’s place.

  It was just a few months later that year that the Evening Standard carried the improbable tale of an intruder painting cryptic sentences in several enclosures at London Zoo including ‘We Are Bored Of Fish’ on the penguin compound. Whether he got into the bears’ quarters remains uncertain, but it reminds me that he always had an ongoing concern for animals.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ZORRO

  We were in 2002 now, and when I saw Robin again I knew he had been busy. I was beginning to see him mentioned more and more in the press. The mainstream papers were picking up on his street popularity. All of this was just the beginning: it was attention that was only set to grow and grow. He never mentioned any of this. His ego hardly seemed to exist. I would hear stuff about him from folks that had never met him. He was becoming a subject of common conversation in the pubs, on the terraces, in the streets. People felt they had some kind of claim on him just because they liked his stuff and its messages.