Probably more punk than fluff, told off by clowns, sold out by hippies, and there is reason in the ‘madness’.
“There has been no masterplan to my life at all; rather, through a series of sideways lurches and happy accidents, I’ve somehow ended up as a poet, writer, comedian, artist and a performer of what I like to call ‘lo-fi stand-up spoken word theatre’, which pretty much covers all my creative bases.
My desire to brazenly commit art seems to be driven partly by a need to be understood and accepted and partly by a yearning for genuine community, though I guess the two are inextricably linked anyway.
I much prefer small, intimate performances to big venues and crowds. I love things to be small scale and hand-made and DIY. I write stuff that attempts to find the big picture in the smallest corners, I paint on canvases I find in skips and make domestic protective deities and votive offerings out of salvaged junk, finding the spirit dwelling in the discarded. I didn’t spend years in tattered black uniform fighting the punk wars for nothing.
I have an uneasy relationship with ambition – on the one hand I’m driven on by this restless creativity, on the other hand I’ll seemingly do everything in my power to make it as awkward and unremunerative for myself as possible. I once blew out a gig at the Royal Festival Hall because someone offered me the chance to do a show in a tiny record shop which held an audience of eleven, but you could look those eleven people straight in the eye and have real authentic communication and I get so much from that: to me it’s what it’s all about.
However, such acts of career self-sabotage have meant I have never been as outwardly ‘successful’ as certain people- such as my late mother- tell me I could have been, if only I bucked my ideas up a bit! My family are all from Hackney and Tottenham, but I was brought up just on the fringe of London and since then I’ve lived all over; as an economic refugee from the Home Counties, I could never afford to go back to the Southeast even if I wanted to, and I don’t. I lived on a canal boat for years, and ended up down near Bath, and only left the canal when my partner was expecting, and it was a toss-up between Frome and Stroud. We knew people in Frome, and no-one in Stroud, but I’d always wanted to go there. As a lifelong anarchist I was well aware of Stroud’s radical reputation- things like the anarchist colony at Whiteway-
and a Saturday recce saw me return to the boat with an armful of beautiful radical letterpress prints that had been thrust on me by a recklessly generous Dennis Gould, and that was that. Frome was just shabby chic and designer bunting anyway.
I love living here. My favourite spaces are probably the SVA, with whom I’ve had a long and very lovely relationship, and Loganberry Coffee Shop. Jeanette who runs Loganberry is- like any good barista, barman, or barber– counsellor and confessional booth rolled into one. She is the enemy of any desire for efficient time management and productivity, and long may she remain so. I’d add The Albert, The Crown & Sceptre and Klang Tone Records as beautiful destinations, but I have to avoid them because they would take all my money and ruin my life if I didn’t.
I suppose in my most maudlin moments it does feel a bit like Stroud is being overtaken by its own success. As someone who up until recently was putting on quite a few shows, I can say from experience it’s now nigh on impossible for any event in Stroud not to clash with about ten other equally attractive options, and it wasn’t like that a few years ago. Am I complaining? I don’t think so; I’m probably just knackered and riddled with fear of missing out. There are some people here now with amazing address books, and that’s a good thing for the art.
How do I see the future of Stroud? Well, now it’s fallen again to the socialists, and Siobhan Bailey has been driven from town by pitchfork-wielding artisanal boulangeries, I’m hoping our progressive little town will go one further and fall to the anarchists, and I’m stockpiling wood and locally sourced biscuits ready for the defensive barricades outside Falafel Mama!
While I’m waiting for the revolution, I’m slowly building momentum toward a new show. I’m not sure what it’ll be about, or when it’ll be out, but I can feel the spark tickling my bones, so I know I’m pregnant. Actually, I do know what it’ll be about- it’ll be about hope. Most of my stuff is about hope these days. It is the duty of the artists in difficult times to keep the light burning.
I don’t really have much in the way of favourite objects. I lived down in Andalucia in a squatted village for a few years around the turn of the millennium, and almost all the objects I held dear went there with me – all the sentimental things, the old seaman’s trunk that had been in the family for generations, all the tat that I couldn’t live without- and then I came back to England on a three week visit but one thing led to another and I never went back, and some German hippies sold all my Precious Things at a car boot in Nerja.
All I have left now is my dad’s banjolin, and the family Electric Shock Machine, a wonderful wood-and-brass Victorian parlour ‘therapy’ device with which generations of Fluffypunks have apparently electrocuted each other regularly since 1883. It still works perfectly. You hold onto two big, polished brass electrodes, and someone cranks the handles and you get an electric shock, The faster they crank, the bigger the shock. It’s like being repeatedly booted in the arm. My dad did it to my brothers and I as kids, and now I do it to my own kids, and hopefully they’ll electrocute their progeny in due course, though to my horror it appears to have gone ‘missing’ in a recent separation.
I do still have the banjolin- it’s more anti-social than the electric shock machine and less attractive to ex’s. It’s basically a banjo-mandolin, but I’ve got it strung and tuned to play like a ukulele. My dad had a few – he was a massive George Formby fan, and when I was little, we would be woken by my dad playing Formby records at six in the morning, mainly to annoy my mother. He couldn’t play the instruments; he just picked them up from junk shops.
Then after he retired and my mum died, he developed prostate cancer, and every week he was collected by a minibus-ambulance that trundled round the Chilterns picking up elderly men with prostate problems and delivered them to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford for radiotherapy or whatever. And one of these men, it transpired, was an accomplished and evangelical ukulele player and very soon the little ambulance became a mobile ukulele class, pottering through the lanes in the morning mist with my dad and his fellow diseased pensioners banging out a wobbly Leaning on a Lamppost. I find it a very moving and beautiful image- a testament to the power creativity in adversity, and the greatest Alan Bennett play not-yet-written. The ambulance driver’s opinion is unrecorded.
A favourite photograph? I love this one; it’s one of the only photos to get a proper frame on the wall at home and it reminds me of very happy times. It was taken by a London mate, John Gladdy, who at the time was a press photographer. It’s me and my son’s mum, outside the Holy Trinity church in Dalston- the ‘clown’s church’.
I used to do a lot of street clowning in London, with my great friend and mentor Tony Allen, the anarchist comedian, mixed-ability shaman, and ‘godfather of alternative comedy’. This photo was taken on the day of the Clown’s Service’, the first Sunday in February, where hundreds of clowns come
together in the church to honour the great clown Joseph Grimaldi, and later that day we got told off for ’mucking around’ and ‘not taking it seriously’. By clowns.”
Pictures Simon Pizzey
