Spending my formative years in London growing up with the emerging drum and bass scene I am left with many vivid memories. It was a fascinating scene to watch unfold, starting with my first forays into nightlife with the late 80s orbital raves – massive parties on the outskirts of London (hence named orbital after the recently finished M25 ring road around the capital). They were the ’summer of loves’ – Chicago house, electro, balearic, hip house, Detroit techno and hip hop soundtracked the long days and nights. It felt revolutionary at the time – musically it was, a break with tradition of boring guitar music and whineing indie. We found our soul in the 303 and 808 drum machines – our vision of the future was electronic. The music sounded from another world; spacey, hypnotic, deep, repetitive, twisted, futuristic and perfect. Now, as electronic music IS the mainstream, it’s hard to imagine and remember how out of this world it first sounded back in the day. 

 

I went to many of the seminal clubs; Rage, Fitness Centre, AWOL, Labrynth,Telepathy, Energy. All of them merit pages of description but one of them merits the focus right now – AWOL. A Way Of Live. Absent When On Leave. AWOL took place at the Paradise Club in Angel, Islington which has since been demolished to make way for a shopping centre with coffee shops, HMV and Borders etc. AWOL took place roughly from late 91 to sometime in 1995. It stands out for me for being the single most hardcore dance with the rudest sound and clientele. By rude I mean bad. By bad I mean good. 

 

I don’t think I am exaggerating in saying jungle music was invented at AWOL. DJs like Mikey Finn, Ray Keith and Kenny Ken dropped the rumbling, earthquake basslines. Call and response basslines. Rewinds. Ragga chanting and patois inspired tongue twisting MCs. ‘Dibby dibby DJ, zibbidy, rude bwoy gwan mash up da dance, North South East West, raving massive wave your spliff!’ Original bad boy material. It was also perhaps the most drug enchanced dance – the whole club would be out of their collective minds on ecstacy – and lots of it. It made for some strange atmospheres.

 

Drenched in sweat and dry ice, the dance floor often took on a post apocolyptic air, especially on the atmospheric breakdowns with spacey synth lines filling the room, padded out with sub bass oscillations and the occasional urge of the MC to commence battle. Rat-a-tat-tat military snares rattled around the room like the call of a marching band. Figures hunched alone waiting for the beats to come back in, running their fingers through their hairs feeling the rush. Fog horns echoing around the space like air sirens warning of imminent drum attack. The MC would prowl around the room, cap perched on his skeletal skull, eyes rolling into the back of his head, spliff hanging off his bottom lip, a throng of rude girls encircling the master of the dance.

 

Looking up the DJ was perched in his eagles nest above the floor. Occasional glimpses were allowed as the lazars traced up to the booth showing the DJ bent over the spinning, melting vinyl, deep in concentration, sweat dripping of the nose. The punisher. Who can go harder and darker? Deeper and faster? Bigger and badder? The DJ as torturer pushing those buttons, unrelenting in his mission to mash up the dance and crowd as much as possible. Mash it up. This was the ‘mash up’ before it’s present meaning of melding two disparate entities, like records or Web 2 internet technologies. Old skool mash up meant mincing your brain with a masher so it was mulched like over boiled potatoe. 

 

Hardcore massive. Only for the headstrong. The popular lexiconography amongst the ravers and often sampled on the records urged that it was ‘only for the hardcore’. To be part of this cult you had to push it to the max – and as far beyond as possible. And the people did. I regularly saw people being taken out on stretchers – casualties of the dance. Some of them writhing around, perhaps having fits, pale and sunken, victims of the drum and bass trenches. Others looked less well off, strung out and expressionless, paralysed with post traumatic stress disorder. I am ‘out of my nut’ – literally. I have gone mad. People actually did die at the rave. It wasn’t called AWOL for nothing – it was more than A Way Of Life when people actually died at the hardcore frontlines. Only for the hardcore. You know the score. RIP.

When I first found out the news that Banksy’s latest show was to be at the Bristol City Museum I initially thought ‘how controversial, a man like the Banksy in a museum, who’d have thought it?’ It didn’t seem particularly revolutionary for a geezer who’s consistently courted reaction and made a career out of being anti-establishment. The last Banksy show I was lucky enough to see was in a large warehouse in a run down area south of downtown Los Angeles back in 2006. The show was roadblocked. A-list celebs like Angelina and Brad swooped onto the private viewing to invest in the Bristolian’s magic – shrewdly given what they now fetch at auction. An elephant was in the room – literally, to the consternation of animal rights campaigners who complained about the beast’s treatment. For the day I was there I spotted Macaulay Culkin, Mila Kunis and Beck.

 

I always felt a special connection with Banksy. Before he blew up in the mainstream I had the pleasure of being friends with his first (and ex) manager Stephen Earl (RIP) who I met in Barcelona. This was around 2003. They’d apparently fallen out over financial issues – as is common in these relationships. A then still largely unknown Banksy had just completed the album cover for Blur’s Think Tank. Stephen had a massive oil painting by Banksy in his living room titled Ghetto Superstore depicting an out of town shopping centre burning with rioting grannies in the foreground. I was lucky enough to acquire a few pieces by Banksy from Stephen. But that’s a whole other story.

 

I was very excited as I drove down to Bristol. Lucky to still be in England. To see Banksy’s show in his hometown. The queue was quicker than I thought it would be – 45 minutes. We’d been warned about how popular the show was and we came off lightly.

 

The premise of the show was that Banksy had ‘remixed’ the museum. After entering, the first room featured solely Banksy pieces – the rest of his work was to be found dotted around the large museum, hung amongst oil paintings or in the glass display cabinets with Egyptian relics or stuffed animals. The first room featured new pieces amongst some older work. Still always a pleasure to see it hanging all in one space like this. A large new oil painting depicted the main chamber of the Houses of Parliament occupied by monkey’s instead of MPs. School boy stuff. Funny and entertaining but hardly incisive or revolutionary satire, more apt on the back of a school book than in a gallery. Other typical Banksy themes and motifs re-occured; big brother and surveillance cameras, monkeys and rats, swipes at celebrity culture, anti-capitalism, punks, anti-Americanism, Third (should I say Developing?) World exploitation. All stock Banksy stuff – all imbided with his humour, visual one liners, art as if created by a punning Sun sub-editor. Stand out pieces included the Thomas the Tank engine being sprayed by graffiti artists and the model of Britannia as she holds aloft the CCTV camera. 

 

The next room featured sculptures and 3 D work. Most of it making me believe that Banksy must be a fellow vegetarian. Moving chicken McNuggets eating in front of a hen hatch. A fish finger swimming around a goldfish bowl. A fur coat model of a cheetah sitting in a tree. Other pieces included an artist monkey and a rabbit getting dressed in front of a mirror. Banksy seems keen to branch out from merely being a graphic artist. 

 

The rest of the work was dotted amongst the museum. This is where it really got to be fun. Some of it – particularly the remixed oil paintings hung amongst the classics – were easy to spot. The Virgin Mary and Jesus wearing iPods. A couple ‘dogging’ in a car amongst a bucolic setting, shepherd watching forlornly. Other works were harder to spot and really made you walk around the museum examining everything closely. In the taxidermy section amongst stuffed fowl and dogs a muzzled sheep. In a pottery display a Monet style ballet dancer in clay wearing a gas mask. A rubber dildo amongst a display of stalagmites. A Chinese terracotta soldier with a reduced price sticker on his back in the antiquity section. I am sure I missed lots of pieces as they were interspersed amongst the whole museum. I even photographed things I thought might have been Banksy’s as they looked strange, but on reflection, were probably just indigenous museum works. There was a very strange looking stuffed bird. An extra large skeleton of a ‘giant Irish deer’ which had once roamed the Emerald Isle – I thought this had to be made up. 

 

This was the original and clever part of the show – it really make you interact with the museum in a different way. Banksy had pulled the remix off.  This was to be expected – over the years  in his every day graffiti and stencil work he makes people look at the world in a different way using the urban space as his canvas. He’d now achieved this amongst the confines of a once stuffy and probably never before as busy museum. 

 

 

banksy37, originally uploaded by MartinWorster.

A Buddha who’s been fighting…

Copy of _DSC0099, originally uploaded by MartinWorster.

One of my favourites from the Banksy vs Bristol Museum show – I think as my sons are massive fans of Thomas. Choo choo!

Copy of _DSC0334, originally uploaded by MartinWorster.

More photos on my Flickr stream..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinworster/sets/72157620440638622/

A reference to Sir Bob Gandolf?, originally uploaded by MartinWorster.

A reference to Sir Bob Gandolf?
June 23 2009

_DSC0370, originally uploaded by MartinWorster.

TRISTAN AND OLIVER -
LEAK STREET, LONDON SE1

Copy of _DSC0594, originally uploaded by MartinWorster.

Still life of an apple…

SURFER DUDES – Southern California is surf central, Huntington Beach it’s capital. It’s the epicentre of a multi-billion dollar industry – most of the major surf brands are located here as are lots of pro surfers. Everywhere you go it’s dudes and ‘bras’. Yes – ‘bras’ – this is what some surfers call each other as a Hawaiian islands lexiconical substitute for ‘bro’. Confused? Said of course with no irony for the fact that they are in fact using the name of material to cover a womens breasts as a manly appellation. In fact the category ‘Surfer Dudes’ is so large as to deserved distinct sub-categories:

 

SURFER DAD – I obviously sit (or hopefully stand if I manage to survive ‘the drop’ when catching a wave intact) in this camp. Similar to ‘Dad Rock’, Surfer Dads cling onto the surfing lifestyle as a futile defence mechanism against encroaching middle age. ‘Cling on’ being the operative term – clinging onto their over sized surfboards, beer gut flowing over the rail, clinging onto the youthful aspirations that everything the ’surfer lifestyle’ represents. Clinging on for dear life – literally. Buttocks clenched as they take the ‘backdoor’ (surfer terminology – not what you think) when really they should be on the beach watching the sand fall through their fingers, like the minutes and hours of life slipping by. 

 

SOUL SURFER – Surfers who catch waves for the spiritual dimensions. Eco-warriers with haystack hairdos, deep perma-Indo tans, four day stubble, Reef sandals, ethic jewellery and bleached board shorts – and a constant, faraway look in their eyes. The surfer as mystic shaman, communing with the spirits of the water world. Oh man. Talk of epic Nias tubes, getting shacked on some outer reef on a South Pacific island nobodies heard off, secret Baja spots, should have been there…blah blah. And then there’s the faux laid back persona – as if nothing matters. “No worries’, ‘chill out’, ‘yeah dude’, ‘whatever’ all delivered in a strung out, heroin drawl when secretly it’s anything but ‘no worries’. Realy they’re experiencing existential angst to the point of being driven to popping caps on innocent victims in the nearest shopping mall.

DSC02229, originally uploaded by MartinWorster.

Trolley Hunters