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Home , Jamie Oliver, Kipper tie, Pork pie hat, Suit jacket, Turner Prize

Fuel For A Future Reminisce: A Journey To George

Scott King We still don’t have a blind in our bathroom. Religiously, every week, my girlfriend tapes a new piece of plain A4 paper to the window. In her imagination this works as a temporary blind, stopping the local perverts and sex pests from staring at her while she has a shower. I don’t know why she doesn’t tape up three pieces of A4 to com- pletely block out the window, or why we don’t get a blind.

As I stood in the shower a few weeks ago, trying to hide behind the sheet of paper, I was struck by a thought, ‘If we lived by the sea, with no neighbours, we wouldn’t need a blind. Or a piece of paper’. This is my ‘escape fantasy’. Nothing new. I dream of leaving Lon- don a few times every week. I don’t just think about leaving either, I take my fantasy to new heights, I research it, I live it.

I’m one of those people you see in seaside towns; one of the tossers who spends their whole weekend looking in estate agents’ windows, blocking the pavement while loudly discussing the relative merits of the Kent coastline, marveling at how many ‘sea glimpses’ you can buy for the price of a basement flat in Finsbury Park.

After the shower I go and I sit at my desk. I type ESTATE AGENTS WHITSTABLE into Google. It’s always the same thought process:

‘We could sell this and move to the seaside. I’m not bothered about moving into a big house so we could buy a dilapidated two-up two down and have plenty of change. I’d then get a big studio and concentrate on making ‘real art’ - not the diagrammatic explora- tions of self pity that I’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, not the irony or the diagrams. I’ll make real art. Big bold expressive art. I will become a painter! I will find the ‘real me’! I will become someone else!’

And so it goes on and on like this, and has done for years.

After two hours of looking at houses for sale in every seaside resort in , I tragically and inevitably go on to e-bay to look at sports bikes. Two wheeled speed porn. I look at motorbikes for sale every- day, remembering the easy freedom that my bikes brought me.

While I sat looking at motorbikes, seaside homes and plotting my re-birth, my girlfriend came home and said ‘Did you see that George Shaw’s been nominated for the Turner Prize?’ I hadn’t seen that. I’d been too busy, but I’m genuinely pleased for him. He deserves it.

Later that day I have an idea. It is this; I will get a fast bike from somewhere, maybe see if Arena Homme+ can borrow one for me. I’ll ask for the new BMW S1000RR, the best bike that money can buy. I will ride the bike to George’s house in Ilfracombe, taking the B-Roads, discovering England at speed, making notes and tak- ing photographs. This will allow me to escape from briefly, and if nothing else, also allow me look in estate agents windows in Devon, several fantasies all wrapped into one. I email the magazine explaining what I’d like to do.

I tell my girlfriend the idea. She says, “Bit embarrassing making a fuss over George now he’s nominated for the Turner Prize isn’t it? You haven’t spoke to him for months - groupie.” The bike arrived later than expected on Friday afternoon. I’d been wandering around the house in full racing leathers for over an hour. I’d spent the morning at my computer, trying to understand the tech- nical data on the bike. It seemed very complicated, different settings of BHP, optional ABS and lots of other abbreviations. I’m terrible with instructions. My mind goes a complete blank when I’m faced with even the simplest technical task. The most basic Ikea challenge becomes a Rubik’s cube in my hands and I have to confess, I was a bit anxious, too anxious to sit and read. The last time I’d been on a fast bike, I’d ended up in hospital and the bike in the scrap yard.

But, when the driver pulled up and rolled the bike out of the van, I was instantly transported back to childhood - a birthday or Christ- mas; you know that feeling, the one where your dad wheels your new bike out of the kitchen? The excitement quashed the anxiety.

As if on auto-pilot, I headed for the A13, the trunk road that connects London to Southend. Like Billy Bragg, but with a smaller house, I absolutely love that road, especially as it opens up past Dagenham and the now extinct Ford factory with it’s artificial lakes and gigantic wind turbines. It’s hard not to feel like you’re at the extreme edge of Modernity around there, ‘Post-Indust-Reality: artificiality in all its beauty’. I actually thought that as I rode past the dead car plant. It’s a funny thing on motorbikes, like being just a bit drunk, when you find yourself temporarily yet incredibly articulate, bikes at speed can have the same effect. The velocity and the vibration seem to wake up your mind.

As I got on to an open straight near Basildon, I wound the throttle back. This is not a bike, it’s more of a jet plane. It’s incredible. I start to think of how I’ll write about the irony of visiting George (from Coventry) on a motorbike that can trace its lineage back to the Focke-Wulf Fw190 fighter-bomber of World War II.

No matter how much you tuck your neck into your shoulders, you can’t stop the head shaking sensation that happens on a fast bike. Then somehow, when you really shouldn’t, when you really need to concentrate, your mind starts to wander. The faster I went the more my mind wandered. Fleeting, unrelated thoughts flashed through my head as cars, caravans and trucks merged into a single blur.

I started to think about ‘The International Language of Homosexu- ality’. That kind of half sign language Esperanto that some gay men have. Why, wherever you go, be it Rome, Lewisham, Sydney or Scunthorpe, do some gay men, the really camp ones, all speak in the same way? Why do they all move their hands in that butterfly way? Is it genetic or is it learnt? And when did some Mancunians start walking like monkeys? Is that a post-baggy affectation or is that genetic as well? Is it reverse Darwinism? Men turning back into monkeys?

As the A13 crossed the of Canvey Island, I couldn’t resist. I turned off and headed for the Lobster Smack pub. I had to go Down By The Jetty. It was beautiful down there; oil towers set on marsh- land, pylons and ponies - the urban countryside. I took a picture on my phone and made a note for a future project, ‘Travel the world photographing significant yet utterly insignificant places’. Over the weekend, I tried to plan my journey. I was to set off for Ilfracombe on Monday morning, 240 miles from my house if I took the motorway. But I had no intention of going via the motorway. The project expanded in my mind. If I chose to, I could become lost in the south for England for an eternity, like a provincial Easy Rider seeking out old transport cafes and coaching inns rather than LSD and New Orleans. If I wanted it to, this trip could take me a lifetime, lost forever on the ring road around Basingstoke, a high speed archaeologist and Professor of Pubs.

The journey became more of a mythical idea that a practical reality. If I were my dad, everything would have been meticulously planned weeks in advance, his fear of getting lost so great that he still won’t venture into Leeds city centre alone. When he visits London he’ll stand and marvel at Highbury Corner roundabout, shocked by the insanity and chaos that only he can see. And If I were him now, the Sat Nav would be checked and re-checked and there’d be several anxious phone calls to George, “Hello. Just me again. I did tell you that I’ll be arriving on Monday afternoon?”

Lost in the romance of travel and history, I never really planned a route. How much more exciting I thought, just to set off. Surely I’d get to Devon if I just headed West? I kept thinking about Canvey and the Lobster Smack in particular, one of Lee Brilleaux’s favou- rite pubs and the setting that Charles Dickens chose as Magwitch’s riverside hideout in Great Expectations (meaning it must be on some kind of important pop cultural ley line). I got caught up in the idea of ‘incidental history’, trying to make connections between places and events where none necessarily existed. And I know why. Just recently I’d been reading a lot of Iain Sinclair books and I started to imagine myself as Sinclair On Wheels. I would make a high speed version of Sinclair’s semi-psychogeography, but instead of his am- ble from Hackney Wick to Stratford, I’d power across hilltops and through valleys, I’d seek out heroes’ roundabouts and fast bends. I’d make something modern and ancient, a journey across Salisbury Plain on the fastest production bike that money can buy.

It’s so easy to link towns and their histories while sitting at the com- puter; horrible ironies and accidents of geography offer themselves up without effort when you’re only travelling across a 15” screen on Google Maps from say, Hungerford to Wootton Bassett.

Hungerford will be forever ingrained into the national conscious- ness as the home of Michael Ryan. We’ll never forget the lone and lonely gunman’s effect on that small market town as he wandered the high street killing at random. A Berkshire handyman Rambo, in full camouflage, blasting away at neighbours and strangers, killing sixteen before killing himself. A high score in his murder fantasy; too early to be curtailed by a ‘first person shooter game’ played on heavy rotation in his mother’s front room.

Then, just over twenty miles away is Wootton Bassett. The Last Post where the tragic young men, government-paid to in cam- ouflage and shoot strangers, are delivered back to Britain in Union Jack draped coffins. Single file, slow drive from the airstrip and through the town, past the broken relatives before they’re delivered home to Luton, , Newport and Dudley. The Monday morning rain put an abrupt end to my fantasy road trip. Only an idiot or a hero would ride a bike like this along wet B-Roads on new tyres. I had no choice but to set off to Devon along the M4, heading for the M5. Bollocks.

The joy of last Friday’s test ride to Canvey drained away as my filled with rain. Streams of cold water crept up from my wrists and towards my armpits. I plodded blindly into a service station.

Could anyone point out Moto Reading Services on a road map? I couldn’t, though I’ve been here many times. Shop, Burger King, Little Chef, WH Smith and Halfords. Moto Reading is a min- iature ‘pop-up-everytown’ that’s mostly populated by the traveller in need. These places are only ever, and literally, in the middle of nowhere, where they’re designed to be, where you have NO choice. A bad joke about capitalism where in return for a free piss you pay £8.40 for a cheese and a cup of tea.

I’ve often tried to imagine what it must be like working in a motor- way service station. For those of us who are just passing through, everything is fleeting, a glimpse or a whiff (coffee, burger fat, flash of fag smoke, toilets), but if you worked here even for a month, you just know that every detail, every battered chair and torn bit of carpet, every stain on every wall would be ground into your mind, indelibly, forever; the pointed subject of a yet to be rose tinted memory. And for my part, I only have to stand in Burger King for a minute to see that I’ve been a fool. My fantasy road trip was just that. Even if I’d taken the B-Road, how many old fashioned transport cafes would I have seen? How many on-the-run Hannay’s being given a lift by Sid James? How many Highwaymen on the Marlborough to Chippenham Road?

This, here and now in Moto Reading Burger King is reality. A long way from history and Google Maps. This is the fuel for a future reminisce of the teenage girl who’s just served me. As she sits watching TV in twenty five years time, chortling at the C-list celebs as they mock the post-noughties with its Facebook and its petrol cars and its laptop computers, she’ll remember her time at Burger King Moto Reading. The Christmas party when she threw up or the woman who left the loo with her tucked in the back of her knickers. She’ll remember the smell of hot fat and and how it was all so long ago, but is still so vivid. And she’ll wonder what happened to what’s his name, Dan, the one who used to spit in the milkshakes and wank in the toilets.

I fill the bike up with petrol and set off again, determined to make some progress. The rain has slowed and the thins as I head further west. I do contemplate going back to my original plan but the minor epiphany in Moto Reading Burger King, the damp un- derpants and already aching back determine that I’ll stick to the motorway. I promise myself that I won’t stop for another hundred miles, then I’ll fill up again one last time and make just one detour. Regardless of the weather, I am determined to make this diversion; I have to see it for myself. The 70’s postcards have been pinned above my desk for years. It’s my one weakness as a graphic de- signer. I collect the ancient, insanely tinted postcards and stare at the luminously coloured, though long dead holidaymakers.

The only reason I make a detour to Minehead is because it has a Butlins and I have a thing about Butlins, a romantic idea, probably misguided. In particular I have a thing about Filey Butlins (closed 1983, demolished 1989). I first went there in 1977, when I was sev- en years old. My dad desperately didn’t want to go, he wanted to go fly fishing in Perthshire, but my mum was determined. My mum is someone who loves ‘joining in’ - egg and spoon races, congas, sing-along-coach trips. Everything that my dad hates.

What I mainly remember about Filey Butlins is the smell. Too much bleach and chlorine, everything paint chipped and stained from thir- ty years of constant use, no time to redecorate. The chalets were the worst; bunk beds with TONY OV HARTLEPOOL, SLADE and WOT NO SHEETS? carved into their wooden frames. I remember my dad making the same point every day; “We only live an hour away, we could go home every night and come back each morn- ing. Or I could”. But no, he was forced to stay, forced to endure the bawdy Trevor from Donny at breakfast, because to make things worse (for him), my mum had insisted that we go ‘full board’. No escape, trapped at breakfast, dinner and tea opposite boring, joke cracking 1970s Trevor and his be-flared family in the open-plan canteen. Hell for Dave, heaven for us.

The queues to get into Minehead Butlins are incredible, a mile of families packed into saloon cars spiralling from the sea front, stuck, going nowhere at all. Apart from the Butlins traffic jam, the town is almost deserted. A lone man/advertising hoarding wanders past the arcades, promoting the proximity of Minehead Market to Minehead to hardly anybody at all.

I ring George and tell him, “I’ll be with you soon, one or two hours. I’ll give Butlins a miss, massive queues. By the way, did you ever go to Butlins as a kid?”

“Yeah! Or was it Pontin’s? Pontin’s was the poor persons Butlins! In 1972 my dad gave us a choice: one week at Southport Pontin’s or two weeks in a caravan in Morecambe. We ended up in the caravan. All I can remember about it is my brother saying, ‘Holidays are meant to be better than being at home aren’t they? But at home I have my own bedroom. And we’ve got a telly. And a bath!’”

I tell him that I wish I’d gone in, but I’m not going to queue. I tell him of my romantic idea about Butlins. How if I could get in there and see through the shell , the Wiis and the mobile phones that it’d be just like Filey ‘77, the same people, or at least the children of the same people. But he disagrees.

“I bet Butlins is shit now. It’s not going to be the 70’s working class jamboree that you or I look back on. I mean, that working class don’t exist anymore, the people are different, their values are differ- ent. Butlins is different! In The Sun you can get vouchers to spend a week there for £5.50. A holiday for £5.50! How good can it be? It must be shit!”

As I ride out of Minehead, having failed to go to Butlins, having failed, so far, to do anything that I’d intended, I start to worry that this whole trip is a waste of time. A fantasy without foundation. I eventually arrive in Ilfracombe; damp, aching and desperate to sit down (in the normal position). George comes out to greet me in the street. I always forget how big he is, a strapping, ginger bloke who, were it not for his designer clobber, could easily pass as a dairy farmer from All Creatures Great and Small.

Years ago, the first time George and I had arranged to meet, was in a pub. I’d only ever seen a picture of him as a young Smiths fan; a black and white photograph of a solitary, skinny, bequiffed teenager standing alone in a park. So when this huge , with a wide grin and a bone-crunching handshake walked in I was thrown for a few minutes. I couldn’t equate the mournful romance of his paint- ings with the burly, jolly bloke sitting in front of me.

I park up the bike and am escorted to George and Kathryn’s house. It’s fantastic, the seaside artist’s home that I’d imagined, only per- haps more genteel; an old chemist’s shop on the high street trans- formed into a studio, the floors above converted into their home. The view from the front is CHEAP BOOZE and CHARITY SHOP. At the back, from the kitchen window you overlook their long gar- den as it stretches towards the sea. I note, as is my passion, that they neither have a full sea view nor sea glimpses from this window, it’s something in between; ‘several glimpses of a sea view’.

George’s studio is the whole ground floor. I don’t notice until he points it out, but all the windows are boarded up, no sea views, no natural light. Nothing to look at except what he’s painting. If he re- ally were a ‘landscape painter’, it’d be hard not to think that this is odd, but I have a small theory; George is a ‘self-portrait painter’, the paintings just happen to take the form of landscapes. Maybe I’ll test this idea on him later.

He paints from photographs not from ‘the real world’. Dozens and dozens of Boots prints are taped to the walls and every one of them is a different scene from Tile Hill, the estate on the western tip of Coventry where he grew up, and that’s what he paints, that’s all he paints, really.

I’m no good at interviewing, I’m unsure of the formalities or the tricks. When is the best time to press record? Still in my leathers and boots I try to catch George unaware. I start to ask him lots of questions before he’s even finished giving me a tour of his studio, and then I confuse him by answering my own questions and talking about myself before he’s even had a chance to reply.

‘Would you call your work ? I would, to a degree. It’s really the idea that is making theses paintings, in my opinion’.

George looks uneasy and suspicious. All this recent attention over the Turner Prize nomination has made him slightly wary, I can see that. In fact, there’s initially a bit of embarrassment between us. I can’t help feeling that it’s me that’s making him uncomfortable. Does he think I’m a Turner Prize groupie as well?

Even when I inadvertently give him the chance, he only answers half of my questions. After about twenty minutes he just says, ‘Get changed and we’ll go to the pub’. It’s a relief to both of us. I can see why George made this place his local. It’s a sunny afternoon outside, but forever midnight inside the pub; pitch black. A lone dun- geons and dragons enthusiast sits making roll-ups in front of his pint of cider. It’s one of those pubs that are easy to disappear into forever. No lattes, olives or sharing platters here.

We go and sit outside. There are more people sitting out in the beer garden than in the pub; a reflection on the smoking ban more than the weather.

I make a conscious effort to talk to George about art before we have too much to drink. I know that our conversation will stray to music and memories within the hour, so I get out my iPod and hope that I’ve pressed the record properly.

“One thing that always strikes me with you is how hard it must have been going to art school when you’re so good at drawing. Most peo- ple can’t draw in art school, and as tutors pushed you towards abstrac- tion or high concepts straight away, didn’t it feel like you were giving something up?”

“Well I got into art school really by painting loads of self-portraits. That’s what I did, all in a more or less realist way. That’s what you did didn’t you, when you were young? You try and make things look in art as they do in reality. That’s what makes you good at art in school isn’t it?”

“Well it’s a great commodity in the school yard isn‘t it? Actually be- ing able to draw.”

“That’s right. If you’re good at football or have the best clothes or are the best looking or whatever, that’s all school stuff. But if you’re good at drawing, drawing realistically, making a picture of Terry Hall look like Terry Hall, there’s a certain credibility in that.”

And so we go one like this, both trying to fulfil the interviewer/inter- viewee task that we imagine is before us. George goes to buy another round of drinks and as he does so I start listening to the two blokes sitting across from us. One of them, a tall northerner, is describing the reproductive habits of the Blue whale to the other.

“People always get it wrong. They have no idea.” “What about?” “The gestation period of the Blue whale. Not comparable at all to an elephant’s. But people just assume it is ‘cos of their similar size.” “Right.” “Elephants gestate for twenty two months and Blue whales for ten months, less than half the time, more like us.” “Well, they’re mammals aren’t they? Like us.” “That’s right. We’ve got a lot in common with whales.” “And dolphins.”

When George comes back, we both listen to the men. It’s unspoken, but obvious; pubs are breeding grounds for great philosophers, great semioticians and great artists - though the better ones never bother to write anything down and they don’t have the time to paint, nor work at all if they can help it. The late and extremely great writer, Gordon Burn, was a fan of George’s painting and a personal friend. They shared a similar ter- ritory. Burn’s book, Happy Like Murderers, is an almost forensic and deeply painterly account of the miserable and wretched ‘ex- cesses’ of Fred and Rose West. The book is magnetic. The way Burn describes Cromwell Street; you can almost smell the mildew, the roll-ups and the raw onions that Fred West liked to snack on as if they were apples. Gordon Burn got right behind the net curtains - and under the floorboards - of the apparent (if seedy) banality of a dilapidated working class street.

George stands outside and photographs his chosen streets, the ones he grew up in, then he repaints them as pictures of houses, broken fences, pubs and patches of lawn. Depictions of a world that is neither city nor countryside, but somewhere in between. I’ve never been to Tile Hill and it’s perhaps more urban than the part of East that I come from, but there are similarities. Like the world portrayed by Shane Meadows in Dead Man’s ; semi- yokels in battered bargain bin who inhabit a world that was once working class, but in post-Thatcher, post-Ecstasy, post- primary industry Britain has become something else entirely. Too many people at a loose end, too much daytime TV. As Mark E Smith describes ‘the hunter’ in Jawbone and the Air-rifle: London Gallery, Courtesy the Artist and Wilkinson

“There’s been no war for forty years And getting drunk fills me with guilt So after eight, I prowl the hills Eleven o’clock, I’m tired to fuck”

Too many bored souls hunting rabbits by night, nothing to do, Lidl and lager by day and crisps for tea. A world that Jamie Oliver is single-handedly attempting to erase. A portrait of Britain that is per- haps unrecognisable to many curators and collectors, people who’d find a trip to Greggs bakers terrifying in the extreme.

As we sit in the pub garden, I tell George all of the above and he nods in agreement, the pints are helping us to get to a point of sorts.

“Yeah. It’s like here in this pub, in pubs all over, in Nottingham or Sheffield, on the edges of these cities. They’re melting pots for old, dead youth styles and something genuinely ancient; the countryside. There’s a bloke comes in here, Malcolm the Ferret. He’s amazing Malcolm. He brilliantly, like an original or skinhead from the sixties - tonic , Crombie . You know? He really looks the part, except for one thing. In the top pocket of his Crombie, where a red handkerchief should be, were he to follow the correct George Shaw, ‘Day Return of the Exile’, 2010 , well, in that pocket, he keeps his fucking ferret!” Humbrol enamel on board 56 x 74.5 x 5 cm I tell him about a lad at my school who referred to himself as the Ace Face; always in a suit , and shades, but when it rained his mum made him wear wellys instead of his loafers.

“I was in here with my brother once,” George grins, “and people were taking the piss out of Malcolm, laughing at his clothes and his feather cut hairdo. He turned to us with his ferret sticking it’s head out of his top pocket and said, ‘They don’t understand the mod code do they George? IT’S A WAY OF LIFE!’’’ We move on to another pub, drunk now and enjoying ourselves. I’ve noticed, over the years, that the only time you can get most art- ists to talk seriously about art, and I mean art; not the art business, not the gossip, nor the sniping, is when they’ve had a few.

Down in a sea-side bar that is inexplicably populated entirely by old aged pensioners dressed as Victorians, I manage to get George talking about his work. I remind him that he once told me that all the work he’d done at art school before he hit on painting Tile Hill in Humbrols, was work that he described as ‘student art’. I ask him what he means by that. Crap Conceptual art or what?

“When you go to art school everyone is into , readymades, coolness, and that becomes the law doesn’t it? And I wanted to fit in! I didn’t want to look like a knob. I had to adjust a bit, well, quite a lot. I remember when I first went to college. I had a book of Ted Hughes’ poetry. I like poetry and this book had these great pictures of the Yorkshire Dales in it, great poems and beautiful black and white photos. I got it out in the canteen once and showed it to people. They all just pissed themselves laughing! I felt like I’d got my tiny cock out and slapped it on the table. After that I decided to keep poetry to myself. It’d be my secret pleasure. The bastards! If I’d got out a book of William Burroughs they’d have all sat there London Gallery, Courtesy the Artist and Wilkinson stroking their chins, thinking I was cool.”

I keep mentioning Conceptual art and particularly how it has be- come fetishised by some artists as a commodity/aesthetic. I test my theory on George. I suggest that he makes a form of Conceptual art; that the rigidity of the rules that he has imposed on himself, always painting scenes from the same place, always using the same Hum- brol paints, are not dissimilar to Sol Le Witt’s definition of Concep- tual art: ‘The idea becomes the machine that makes the art’.

George takes a large swig from his pint, “I think people confuse Conceptual art with . There is a lot of art that looks conceptual, but it isn’t! The press refer to the YBAs as Conceptual artists sometimes. isn’t a fucking Conceptual artist! Damien Hirst is all about the actual artwork, the object or the sur- face. He’s more like fucking Van Gogh. And ! That’s not Conceptual art, well, it’s half Conceptual art, half daytime TV, half Jeremy Kyle. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s not Conceptual art! It’s a sort of pop art. And they’re pop stars.”

I say being nominated for the Tuner Prize surely makes him a bit of a pop star, but he denies it, though he does worry that he might start having to open village fetes. Later on, as we’re walking back to his George Shaw, ‘Young Lovers Don’t’, 2010 house, a woman stood outside a pub across the street waves at us. Humbrol enamel on board 56 x 74.5 x 5 cm “Hello George!” “Oh no,” he mutters, “Who’s that?” “You don’t recognise me do you?” “Erm,” he hazards a guess and gets lucky, “Is it Sheila?” “Yeah! I’m the secretary at the chiropractors!” “Hello duck! Yes, I remember.”

There’s a short exchange of pleasantries before we walk off. Sheila shouts after him, “Good luck with the Turner Surprise!” Back at George’s, we carry on drinking in his studio and play The Jam’s All Mod Cons LP - as loud as it’d go. We stand opposite one another playing air guitar. I throw in a few Townshend-style wind- mills. We’re completely arseholed and Kathryn tells him to turn the music down and get to bed. That’s the last thing I remember, stand- ing there in our own worlds, middle aged men with duelling air Rickenbackers, miming to a record from 1978.

The first thing I do when I wake up, as I slowly realise where I am, is reach for my phone and excitedly read the ‘note to self’ that I remember typing as I got into bed last night. It reads:

IDAE!!2 - a nifhjbmare skrimish - whern J.olivier meets M.SMIT

George is suffering this morning. I’m still drunk so don’t feel so bad. I suggest a hair of the dog. “We could go back next door, con- tinue our interview.” He says no, he might have to go back to bed. I can see that George is vulnerable so I try to take advantage of his misfortune for my interview. It goes like this:

“Do you ever get called retro then? I imagine some critics try and write you off as being backwards looking or nostalgic?” “Strangely, I don’t. I’m surprised really.” “Well, I don’t want to sound too critical, but I’m surprised as well. I thought that there’d be a whole gang of critics who’d try to label you as being sort of ... backwards.” “Like Benny from Crossroads?” “No. I mean, harking back to your own past. Yearning for your lost youth. You know? Trying to capture something that has gone, or was maybe never there. Romantic maybe?” “I could murder a Cornish pastie.”

Before he disappears to bed I remind George what he said about the YBAs being like pop stars, being the makers of ‘punky-pop hits’.

“So, if the YBAs made a sort of punky-pop. What are you doing?”

“Ooh fucking hell. I don’t know.” Then he looks up, his eyes bright red, “I’m David ! I’m like Essex in that film, Stardust! You know? I want it all but I’m a bit unsure. I keep having to look back over my shoulder saying, is this alright?”

I laugh because he compares himself to David Essex. His talk is as littered with 1970’s references as his house with DVDs of 1970’s comedy shows, but somehow, he’s not retro. I look at him as he stands up and imagine him in a dickie bow and burgundy velvet jacket, not at the Turner Prize awards ceremony, but in 1975 in a working man’s club; cracking ‘blue’ jokes to the applause of thin men in thick specs, huddled around pints under nicotine clouds.

I ask one more question and it’s only because I’m still drunk.

“George. Do you think I’m a Turner prize groupie?” “Eh?”

I go out into the garden and he goes upstairs to bed. I’m not quite sure what to do with myself, but I don’t want to go to the pub alone. I sit in the sun and scribble into my notebook for a bit, then photo- graph a red rose in their garden. It’ll make a good picture, it’s a good symbol, an English Rose. Like the Jam song, played loud last night. I think that the lyrics come into my head, but I get it wrong. The song I can hear is The Place I Love. Right album wrong song.

“The place I love is a million miles away, it’s too far for the eye to see Still it’s me at least, and you can’t come there”

If fits somehow. I hadn’t found my imagined England. It was there alright, but I lack Iain Sinclair’s ability to locate it. Instead, and typi- cally, I’d skimmed across the surface (via the M4) and found myself sitting in a garden with sea glimpses, wondering when I could face the ride back and what I’d do all day if I ever moved to the seaside.

......

Weeks later, I email George. I need him to elaborate on something, so I send him one more question.

Hi George. With my pop star question. What did you mean when you compared yourself to David Essex?

Hello Scott. I’m just trying to think what was I thinking when I said that. I suppose the clever thing to have said would have been Jerry Dammers or Howard Devoto or Mark E Smith or but they all seemed too cool when the question glided into my mind. As a star, pop or otherwise there can be few figures more ridiculous than Essex, perhaps Alvin, but maybe the films Stardust and That’ll be the Day bring Essex and Alvin together. There’s something about the relationship ambition has with tragedy, glamour has with grime that these films throw up and then there’s something about the seriousness of these two sing- ers and the sheer drivel of what they produced - but it’s a kind of drivel with gravitas as opposed to a shangalang drivel or a Moon of Love drivel. They’re also anachronistic; bits of fifties and sixties and seventies treading through the Butlins ballroom of British history. And the films are anachronistic too with Adam faith and Keith Moon and Ringo Starr and the sixties look like the seventies. In the Quadro- phenia booklet, Chas the mod should be a sixties mod, all slim-line face but he’s not. He’s all seventies tie and flapping loons. He’s looking for the sixties. I’ve always thought that about Ringo, he’s a really. We had teds on the estate when we were growing up and they were familiar and very strange at the same time. The Uncanny Ted! That’s why I couldn’t say someone cool like Weller when you asked because I think what I’m dealing with in my work is something that rather shamefully trails behind me like bog pa- per stuck on my . My backward glances will render me ridiculous when I smack into the inevitable lamp post. I should have looked where I was going. That’s the tragedy of Jim McClaine in Stardust - George. Front: George Shaw, ‘The Age of Bullshit’, 2010 Humbrol enamel on board 56 x 74.5 x 5 cm Courtesy the Artist and Wilkinson Gallery, London

Above: John and George Shaw, Pontin’s, Southport, July 1973 www.scottking.co.uk