Seven Years with Banksy (7 page)

‘Ah, I got some work on – for a record label. I’m gonna do Blur’s record cover for their next release.’

‘All right’ I say and nod. If he was in there he was in all over I figured and besides the earnings he was getting connected to another world well outside of Bristol. He wasn’t
going to stop moving up. London had him now, beyond the parochial confines of the West’s capital. I felt a little sadness at this realization but could only wish him on, usher him forward
(not like he needed it) but as our friendship went through its paces
I felt for the first time that he was on an upward spiral of his own making that would make him
international, that Bristol would be robbed of him. It is hardly a betrayal and he’s never forgotten the City – far from it.

After we parted that day I headed down to see some architect friends who had an office in a large communal warehouse space near the Westway. As I walked in the main area, which was the size of a
tennis court, I casually looked up and bang! On the main wall was a large canvas displaying a rioter, arms outstretched, preparing to throw flowers. The iconic image I had seen at the studio in
Easton. This was one and the same. Sold. ‘Shit! He’s London’s now,’ I muttered as I headed for the stairs and regarded this familiar piece from the balcony.

I was just doing my own thing – running here and there, helping to run clubs and what-have-you; running about in various guises; spending time in
Europe when funds would allow and getting onwards and upwards as much as the world at large would let me. I came to realize that I had encountered and befriended one exceptional person in Banksy.
We kept in touch and I always liked to see him but I could feel this other force pulling him in a certain direction. He was headed somewhere I wouldn’t be going.

There was an independent bookshop called Greenleaf on a street called Park Row in Bristol, that is sadly now defunct, and was run by some rather nice ladies. They kept an excellent stock of
books and periodicals and I was often in there, looking at something, purchasing something. I was cycling past one day and saw that a few prints had been displayed in the window and they were for
sale. They were some of Robin’s stencil works, in colour no less, but they were
pieces you could see just yards away in any direction on the walls. It was the first time
I had seen any prints of his for sale and they were signed and numbered. They looked good but did not have the impact that they had out on the street. Still, there was one of my favourites –
‘Bombing Middle England’ – a stencil of proper English ladies practising the refined sport of bowls. All clad in white as befits the civilized game, only the bowls were bombs. The
prints were not expensive, maybe twenty or thirty pounds, so I snapped one up even though my cash flow had become severely limited of late. I stuck the print up in my hall with a few
thumbtacks.

I told my family and friends that this guy’s prints were on sale and that they should go and get one before they all flew out the door. My mum was about the only one who thought they might
be worth buying. Most people were too strapped paying the bloody council tax to even bother considering it. Can’t say I didn’t try.

Perhaps six months later they were selling another selection of two prints and I gazed at them from the pavement unable to buy one before they were all gone. By now I was
done-in financially too. Sure as hell should have bought one but that would have meant going hungry. Oh well. The price was minuscule in comparison to what one of those prints would go for now.

It wasn’t long after that his first ever exhibition was to be shown down in the old docks in what was then a new restaurant, the ‘Severnshed’, an old
industrial shed transformed into an eating establishment. I mentioned it to my brother and a few other mates and we got down there on the opening night. Robin hadn’t told me about this event
and, of course, he wasn’t going to be present there either. We walked into the pretty swish surroundings, all bright, new and expensive-looking, juxtaposed to the gritty streets around it.
This is about the time that
people started getting a bit precious about Robin leaving his roots, beginning to sell out and all that. I probably felt a little that way myself
but put that out of my mind to take in his new framed works. They ranged from little to large and they all looked good. A lot of it was new stuff I hadn’t seen and I was suitably
impressed.

The crowd was pretty sparse. Quite a few Eastonians were there, milling about, appreciative but a bit sniffy about their ownership of this young man. There were others, more moneyed, more
clueless, the ones who had never actually seen a Banksy on a wall. And then there was us. All the pieces were for sale but they were more pricey than the works at the Greenleaf Bookshop. I think
they started at perhaps forty pounds and went up into the hundreds. ‘Fuck, we should buy one,’ I said to my brother. But he didn’t have any spare cash – same as me. I had
another look round before we sat back on a couch, taking in the evening and looking
out over the water, watching as little sticky red dots were placed on each piece that was
sold. It felt horrible to not have enough cash while they all went, one by one. We couldn’t even afford a round at the bar. But what we did know was that this artist was one of us and that
was reward enough; we could see all this stuff on our streets for free anyway, any time.

It was also the point when Robin’s work started to become popular in a different way, with rich collectors, looking for an investment. They would buy a picture and then sit down to eat. We
couldn’t take much more so out we went and stood in the rain instead, silently.

It wasn’t too long before Robin and I met up again, although I was more likely to see him in London than anywhere else. Things were continuing to happen for him up there and he was
enforcing his carpet bombing campaign of all available public space from traffic bollards, to billboards, to bridges,
to walls, to signs, to pavement, to cars, to tunnels, to
wheel clamps, to all available surfaces. He was becoming a fixture.

The newspapers were beginning to wonder who he was. He was never one to explain his activities or what he’d been up to but if something significant had occurred he would mention it. We
were sitting somewhere in Central London when he told me this tale.

‘I was out just the other night, setting up a stencil on the walls of the Telecom Tower. It was late and I had some mates sitting in a car next to the kerb. The paint was by the door of
the car and I was just going to get it when out of nowhere the cops show up. One copper comes out with a sub-machine gun, you know the kind they carry at airports, and holding it cross-wise over
his chest, you know how they do. The cop looks me up and down and asks what I’m doing and he looks at the car and at the paint, and then at my mates inside the car.’

‘Shit!’ I said, ‘What did you say?’

‘I said something about how we were moving the paint around in the car because it was in the way and by this point he’s well suspicious and the cops in their car were running the
registration through their records. I was sure he was going to notice the stencil taped to the wall, but he just kept looking at me. Then he turns to me and says: “You better be careful, I
might shoot first and ask questions later.” And he just stared at me. He was wired and nervous and he just kept looking at us while they were checking up on the registration, it went on for
ages.’

I could imagine the face-off underneath the Telecom Tower, early in the morning, some traffic rushing past. Stencil hanging on the Telecom wall. If only the copper had twigged this was the
underground legend ‘Banksy’ he would be on about it over his tea and biscuits for years to come. Robin was good at keeping his mouth shut and just seemed to play out the moment. It was
hardly his first encounter with coppers. He had run from many of them in many towns and usually got away. But this was a little different, a little snappy copper with a
top-of-the-range sub-machine gun strapped on who ‘might shoot first and ask questions later’. He continued, ‘Eventually the copper got a signal from those in the car and he told
us to fuck off.

‘We drove off and I was mentally begging him to not look at the stencil on the wall. We took off and that was that. He just hadn’t made the connection.’

‘What happened to the stencil in the end?’ I asked.

He looked up, almost surprised by the question. ‘Oh, I went back a couple of nights later and sprayed it.’ I cracked up completely. The tension of the story and then his brazen
attitude had me reeling.

This story has got to be a perfect illustration of the boy’s resolve, but the cop with the Heckler and Koch certainly
made an impression on him, for he was to mention
that incident again on a number of occasions.

Summer was coming up and the West Country was a pleasant place to be. Bristol got even more laid back than usual and Somerset (‘summers setting’ to the ancient Britons) was
gloriously fecund and its coasts cooling. Music festivals were in full flow, you could spend your entire summer moving between them. However there is one festival that every native of Bristol
thinks they have a divine, ancient right to attend gratis, just courtesy of the fact that they were born and raised in this magical landscape. That festival is, of course, Glastonbury. Down in a
valley, lost to England in normal days, near Shepton Mallet, on a farm that is relatively anonymous for most of the year, takes place a circus extravaganza that has beguiled hundreds of thousands
since the early ’70s.

I first spent an insane, tripped-out weekend there in 1978 and returned every
summer I happened to be in the UK. Even when I’m abroad, the summer solstice always tunes
me into the magic of Glastonbury Festival. We all know the festival has changed with the advent of the circle of steel fencing that is supposed to be impenetrable, but when I first went there you
could just wander into the fields where the festival took place and no one would challenge you in any way. I can still see the connection between the old times and the present day.

Now, Robin is a West Country lad and I’m sure he’d be the first to admit that if push came to shove, and although I hadn’t seen him in a while, the festival would be de rigueur
for him. Thus I had an inkling that we would bump into each other at this year’s gathering. I arrived at the site a day before it was due to start and settled in. I was lucky enough to be
crashing in the medical staff’s field where one of my mates and my brother were involved in talking people down from paranoid or insane trips over the weekend.

So I was ambling round the proceedings, looking at everybody setting up when I saw the graffiti bus next to a huge hoarding. Someone was painting on that hoarding and it
looked like Robin. And so it was. I strolled towards him, getting closer, and making out the details of his work. Nearby were four large individual letters as big as two-storey houses spelling out
‘LOVE’. The sun was shining, the grass was green, the wind a little breezy. The valley side rose up in the distance and it struck me as incongruous to see him in this environment; out
of the gritty city, his usual urban turf, but there he was, throwing up a vision of urban depravity and decay the size of a small hill that would be seen from all around.

I wandered up to him, stood there, looking up and he continued painting for a while longer then glanced down from his stepladder. ‘Hey, all right?’ he said carrying on with his
painting and we talked for a while. He was so relaxed and into it, in
his element you could say, and I just hung around, watching his vision come through, watching the clouds
rolling past, watching the grass grow with the Glastonbury Tor rising out of the end of the valley, glinting in the distance. Summer entered into me, and the fresh air was calming and serene. I
felt the city falling from my shoulders. I was back in the countryside and it felt good.

I was up in London again later that summer with Robin and we were strolling along in the warm afternoon and he was chatting away about this and that. He would have ideas and I still hadn’t
learnt to take everything he said seriously. He was so full of them I thought it would be impossible to realize all of them. Some I commented on, others I was polite about and kept quiet so he
wouldn’t lose face if they were unachievable. I mean, that was my fault, to think that way because in reality nearly all he said he would do, he did. He was a man of his word. I never heard
him boast, he would just sound off
about his complex plans and concepts and then, magically, they would be realized.

One idea he mentioned that day was the creation of public graffiti areas. ‘Yeah, you know these boards that they put up around building sites, about nine feet tall, usually painted white?
Well I’m going to turn them into public graffiti areas,’ he said.

‘Yeah, how?’ I asked, intrigued by the concept.

‘I’m going to just take an official working emblem, like off of a fag packet like this.’ He fished out his cigarettes, pointed to the emblem on the top and continued.
‘I’ll invent the name of a government agency and just stencil up that it’s a designated graffiti area. And then wait and see what happens.’

We kept on walking as I was imagining his idea in real life and marvelling at its simplicity. An idea that would inspire all the young hoods to do their thing all across town, thinking it was
law-abiding to do so. It was just a subversive inversion of the power
of the state. A twist on normality that would inspire a rush of creativity and would piss off the powers
that be at the same time. All I could do was laugh thinking about it. Robin seemed to be grinning too. His humour was irresistible but the prankster didn’t really laugh at his own jokes.

When I went back to London a month or so later I had forgotten his idea. I was out walking and rounding a corner I just happened to come across a large, previously white wall entirely covered in
graffiti, tags, and provocative images and statements. It was so completely bombed it was unusual. And it was no dark corner of the city either, it was a well-to-do neighbourhood. Why here? How
come so out in the open? I crossed the road to have a clearer look and then, I saw an official-looking stencil with emblem and numerical ordnance code that proclaimed civilly that this was ‘A
Designated Graffiti Area’. It didn’t say ‘do your worst’, naturally, but it communicated that very sentiment to
all young guns and they had indeed
attacked the walls with admirable energy. I laughed out loud, and that I was privy to this idea previously cracked me up all the more. In my usual journeys through the capital I saw many more
graffiti sites proclaimed as official by Mr Banks.