Forever Young: Gilbert & George

15/5/23 & 24/5/23

We are currently shooting a documentary featuring the artist(s) Gilbert & George. Today (25th May) we are filming them among their latest collection of pictures, ‘The Corpsing Pictures’, on display at the White Cube Gallery in St James’s, London. ‘Corpsing’ refers both to mortal bodies and to the theatrical/music hall term for forgetting your lines or getting the giggles. At 79 and 81 bodily decay and mortality are on their minds for sure. Their sense of performance and theatricality though remain undiminished, as is their sense of humour.

[Image courtesy of Mike Christie]

They showed up, as ever, in impeccably tailored suits, George’s with a suave double pocket on one side. When we were chatting later they surprised me by revealing the suits were the work not of some Savile Row-type tailor up West but by a bargain of a Greek suitmaker nearer their East End lair in Fournier Street, Spitalfields, london E1. We talked a little about my grandfather’s clothes factory round the corner from their studio in the 60s/70s which first brought me to their manor as a child. It is the art deco building at the junction of Hanbury Street & Commercial Street, opposite their local The Golden Heart (called Jimco back then, now returned to clothing-related purposes as All Saints, after a low spell as a spice warehouse).   

Writer Michael Bracewell under the direction of Mike Christie and in association with journalist Michael Collins carried out a fascinating interview with the duo. The highlight for me was when they were talking about their break-through performance piece or “singing sculpture” featuring the music hall song ‘Underneath the Arches’ from 1968. They spoke about how the people living on the streets of the East End and elsewhere in London at the time included many damaged by the First and particularly the Second World War, and how resonant this damaged humanity was for their evolving art. When I was at school I had a teacher called The Major with an old-school moustache (Major Blatchley-Hannah). I didn’t realise until much later how close  World War Two was to my era. Now I have a strong sense of all these silent, PTSD-damaged men among whom I must have been growing up. G&G’s words reminded me of the grotesque world of another GG, Georg Grosz.

A distinctive way of displaying a Gilbert & George at Palazzo Butera

My first exchange with G&G was about a gallery they had just returned from visiting in Palermo, Sicily, the Palazzo Butera, astounding home of the collection of Francesca & Massimo Valsecchi (beneficiaries of an automobile fortune I vaguedly remember).  It includes a half dozen excellent 80s works by Gilbert & George. They were very enthusiastic about the place. I told them I was visiting Palermo soon (for the first time) and would take up their recommendation. I am now sitting finishing this post on the terrace of that palazzo having had my mind blown by an astonishing collection & building, graced by the unique colour sense of Gilbert & George which constantly drops my jaw. I had to order some tiramisu & Italian coffee from the lovely cafe to steady myself.

Back on the shoot, towards the end we went upstairs to the buyers’ room of White Cube. By chance they had a Gilbert & George from the 70s. I guess they hadn’t seen that particular work for a good while so it was interesting to watch them reacting to that old friend. It featured black & white images of the East End (Commercial Road) looking rather bleak. And in red the letters VD. I observed to Gilbert that most young people would have no idea of the meaning of those letters any more as STI then STD took over since then as the official acronyms.

The pair were charming and warm, and became increasingly energised by the filming. I saw their Hayward show back in 1986 and have been aware of their work ever since but from first starting this film I have been totally won over by their work – I find it unique, satisfying & energising (especially their colour palette), and ever youthful.

Spit heads (1997)

Depression (1980)

The top floor

Hastings vs Frith Street: The birthplace of TV

One way or another I spent a lot of time around Soho last week, including at Bar Italia on Frith Street. Above it, not that obvious unless you happen to glance up, is the best Blue Plaque in London, epitomising British understatement. One of the most influential inventions of the 20th century and all it gets is one simple sentence of a dozen words. I took that sentence as gospel and have spent decades in the secure belief that telly came into being in that small room above what has been a classic London coffee bar since 1949, what was Logie Baird’s lab back in 1926. But that’s not really how invention and innovation works…

I went to Hastings a few days ago, to visit Hastings Contemporary art gallery (it turned out to be shut unusually due to staff shortage caused by the Covid pandemic). As you enter the town there is a mosaic road sign that says: “Hastings & St Leonards: the birthplace of television”. My world shook on its axis. I’ve spent my entire career in Television, I have a stake in it, I need to know the basics.

I also have a small stake in Logie Baird having delivered the John Logie Baird lecture at Birmingham University a good few years ago with Dr Christian Jessen of ‘Embarrassing Bodies’.

So what’s the connection between Logie Baird and Hastings? In short, before the Soho demo in 1926, Logie Baird (let’s call him JLB for convenience) experimented with the transmission of TV images in his house in Hastings. That was from 1923, three years before Frith Street.

21 Linton Crescent, Hastings, East Sussex

The house was at 21 Linton Crescent. It has a rival blue plaque from The Institute of Physics, made up of much the same words as the Soho one but in a different order. JLB came to live in the town early in 1923 while convalescing from illness and hoping to benefit from the sea air and more benign South Coast climate. Through to mid 1924 he carried out experiments that led to the transmission of the first television pictures. Similar to Edison’s famous thousand duff light bulbs, the 1926 Soho demo and the 1924 Hastings one both rested on extensive trials, tests and experiments. On failures Edison, responding to a reporter asking: “How did it feel to fail a thousand times?”, said: “I didn’t fail a thousand times. The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps.” Edison has a part in the history of the invention of TV as he speculated early about the possibility of telephone-like devices that could transmit and receive images as well as sounds.

So it was in Hastings that JLB created the first televisual image, a shadowy outline of a Maltese cross. The contraption he constructed to generate this image was made from a Heath Robinson collection of household objects including lenses from bicycle lights, scissors, a hat box, darning needles, a tea chest and sealing wax .

The first transmission of moving TV images took place in February 1924 above a shop in Queen’s Arcade, Hastings which JLB had rented for his workshop. In July that year JLB received a 1,200-volt electric shock, but got off lightly with just a burnt hand. In the wake of the incident he was asked to leave Queen’s Arcade by his landlord, Mr Tree. That’s when he went to London.

From 25th March 1925 over a period of three weeks JLB gave the first public demonstrations of moving TV images at Selfridges. On 26th January 1926 he gave that Soho demonstration, the world’s first of true television, to fifty scientists in the attic room above Bar Italia.

In 1929 yet another plaque enters the story – it was unveiled at a ceremony which Baird attended at Queen’s Arcade.

Rewinding just a little, in 1927 JLB demonstrated his television system over 438 miles of phone line between London and Glasgow. In the wake of that he formed the Baird Television Development Company (BTDC). The following year BTDC achieved the first transatlantic television transmission, successfully sending pictures between London and New York. Also in 1928 he pulled off the first transmission to a ship in mid-Atlantic. During his astounding career he also did the first demonstrations of both colour TV and stereoscopic television.

JLB eventually returned to East Sussex to live out his twilight years in Bexhill-on-Sea. Then he went dark and disappeared in a little dot.

A Circle of Sound – 150 years of the Royal Albert Hall

An appropriate colour of light for its address on Kensington Gore

The day before yesterday (19 July) marked the first full-capacity concert at the 5,000 seat Albert Hall since March 2020. It was a piece called ‘A Circle of Sound’ composed by David Arnold, known for his soundtracks for Bond films, Hollywood movies (Independence Day) and TV dramas (Sherlock), to mark the 150th anniversary of its opening on 29th March 1871. In 10 parts, it addressed the history of this very special London venue through various lenses – pop music, the Proms, sport, remembrance, activism, etc.

It was set up as the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences, a direct result of Prince Albert’s brainchild, the Great Exhibition of 1851. After the success of the Exhibition, he proposed a permanent presence for Science, Art and Learning near the Hyde Park site. He didn’t live to see its fruition, but it ended up bearing his name when Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone in 1867 in memory of her beloved husband who died six years before the Hall finally opened. (The foundation stone sits under Block K of the stalls.)

David Arnold and special guests – Mel C (white suit), Jemma Redgrave (white dress), Helen Pankhurst (between them in Suffragette scarf)

It’s an important spot for London architecture because you see juxtaposed at close quarters the two main influences on modern London – the Classical as represented by the coliseum-like circle of the Albert Hall and the Gothic as represented by the pointy, churchy Albert Memorial, just the other side of Kensington Gore. 

Circle of Victorian red brick

Highlights of the celebratory evening included:

• Helen Pankhurst, granddaughter of Sylvia, great-granddaughter of Emmeline, introducing a speech of her great-grandmother given in the USA (Hartford, Connecticut) known as the Freedom or Death speech, considered one of the great speeches of the 20th century.

we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death

• Jemma Redgrave, daughter of Corin, son of Michael, in that English acting dynasty, performed the speech with great energy, bringing a tear to the eye – the achievement of the British Suffragette movement is one of the most admirable and proudest moments for this country
• Mel C of The Spice Girls introducing the section on all the pop music that has been played at the Hall, featuring a young band invited from the Rhythm Studio in W10 including the drumming talent of Finlay Gee (nephew), who provided the only fist pump of the evening he had gotten such a kick from playing this huge venue at the age of just 18
• Brian Cox helping us all feel like an insignificant speck in the universe as he framed the perspective of the Science section, Science being as much a part of the original conception of the Hall as Arts
• Charles Dance receiving a warm welcome as a national treasure with an edge as he introduced the Remembrance section – he stole the show thanks to that edge when we made Was It Something I Said? at Channel 4 
• Michael Sheen performing in Welsh barnstorming style as he introduced the final movement looking forward to the next 150 years

With regard to pop music played in the Hall the landmark shows include:

The Great Pop Prom // 15 September 1963 (the week I was born)
The first time The Beatles and The Stones performed on the same bill. Paul McCartney remembered the night like this: “Up there with the Rolling Stones we were thinking: ‘This is it – London. The Albert Hall.’ We felt like gods.”

Bob Dylan // 26 & 27 May 1966
The tour when he “went electric”. Ironically the concert famously known as the Albert Hall concert actually took place a few days earlier in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester – that’s the one where an outraged audience member accused Dylan of being “Judas!”

Bloke in audience: “Judas!”

Dylan: “I don’t believe you!”(reference to the title of a song he had played earlier in the gig)

Dylan: “You’re a liar!”

Dylan (to band): “Play fucking loud!”

Jimi Hendrix // 18 & 24 February 1969
The Jimi Hendrix Experience first played the Hall in 1967. They returned two years later to play some blues rather than their hits. The fans were appeased with an encore featuring ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Wild Thing’ and Hendrix on the floor playing the guitar with his teeth.

Pink Floyd // 26 June 1969
Pink Floyd excelled themselves by getting a lifetime ban from the Hall on their first gig there. During the song ‘Work’ Rick Wright constructed a wooden table on stage wielding hammer and saw. After that a gorilla burst into the auditorium, that is a man in a gorilla costume. As a finale, two cannons were fired and a pink smoke bomb exploded. The Hall’s management swiftly banned the Floyd from performing there ever again. Then in 1972 they decided to ban all “pop and rock concerts” because of the “hysterical behaviour of a large audience often encouraged by unthinking performers.” But Rock triumphed. The Floyd were back playing there just a year later, and the blanket ban was similarly short-lived, although The Who’s 1972 show fell victim to it. 

David Gilmour & David Bowie // 29 May 2006
When Bowie was invited onto the stage by Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour in 2006, it turned out to be both Bowie’s first & only appearance at the Hall, and his last ever UK public performance. The two  duetted on the songs ‘Arnold Layne’ (a nod to the influence on both of Syd Barrett) and ‘Comfortably Numb’. 

 

One of the many magical moments at the Albert Hall – Gilmour & Bowie

Amy Winehouse in Camden Town

Atmosphere (2013) by Pegasus – Junction of Parkway & Albert St (Earl of Camden pub)

Junction of Bayham St & Pratt St

by Bambi – Amy (& Morganico – Michael Dixon) – Michael, the man in black, was a local hairdresser, friend of Amy, added later

a fresh one – under the railway bridge at Castlehaven Rd

by Pegasus – just in the doorway of the Old Market Hall (Camden Lock Market) straight off of Camden High Street opposite Castlehaven Rd

by Otto Schade aka Osch – Hawley St

by Scott Eaton (2014) – The Stables Market

The above are all the traces of Amy Winehouse around her manor ten years after her tragic passing. 

The below are previous street art pieces which have gone the way of most street art, to that  blank wall in the sky.

by Mr Cenz

by Amara Por Dios and Kaptain Kris

by Philth (Phill Blake)

by Amara Por Dios and Kaptain Kris

Here’s a good snapshot of Amy art in the summer of 2017 when the Jewish Museum, which sits firmly in her stomping ground (on Albert St near ‘Atmosphere’), held an exhibition in her honour, appropriately including a series of street art commissions in the area.

The 10th anniversary of Amy’s death is on 23rd July.

forever with her gran

THE ARTISTS

Pegasus 

Bambi 

Osch

Mr Cenz

Amara por Dios

Kaptain Kris

Philth 

SMART – The London International Smartphone Film Festival

The launch of SMART – the London International Smartphone Film Festival – set up by Adam Gee & Victoria Mapplebeck was covered in this week’s Observer in a piece by Arts & Media Correspondent Vanessa Thorpe:

 

The full article is here

Coincidences No.s 344, 345 & 346

No. 344 Magdala

16.4.21

I meet documentary filmmaker and Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab Sheila Hayman at Parliament Hill. We talk about the Magdala pub, a short straight walk from where we sit sipping tea, infamous for being the site of Ruth Ellis’ shooting of her nogoodnik lover. I ask Sheila “What’s a magdala anyhow?” She also doesn’t know.

The next day I am reading a pulpy detective novel whose plot kicks off in the Holy Land in the 20s. The second chapter ends:

” ‘It appears to be a letter,’ I said slowly, ‘from a woman named Mariam, or Mary. She refers to herself as an apostle of Joshua, or Jesus, “the Anointed One”, and it is addressed to her sister, in the town of Magdala.’ “

Mystery solved. A town in the Holy Land which gave Mary Magdalene her name.

No. 345 Suze

9.5.21

I am reading the biography of Jerry Rubin by Pat Thomas, having enjoyed ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7‘ very much. An interesting fact that emerges is that Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s girlfriend featured on the cover of the ‘Freewheelin’ ‘ LP, went on a visit to Cuba in June 1964 organised by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee based at Berkley. Jerry also happened to be on the trip. 

About two minutes before opening the book, I am looking at the contact print by photographer Don Hunstein on my living room wall (a limited edition of 25). It is the shoot for the cover of ‘Freewheelin’ ‘. Most of the time it is part of the furniture but the night before I was having a text exchange about Bob Dylan’s art and photos of him with a friend of mine after listening together to the Van gig at Real World and so today I am actually seeing it and looking closely.

No. 346 Prince

9.5.21

I am meeting the new Digital Experience Design MA student I am supervising, in Old Street. We walk around Shoreditch coming back via Leonard Street where I used to work when Little Dot Studios were based at No. 100. She asks me what my best ever gig was (The Clash at the Electric Ballroom). Then she tells me hers – Prince at some festival in her native Switzerland.

Exactly as she utters the name Prince we are at the window of Pure Evil’s gallery at No. 98 and facing us is one of Pure Evil’s tear pictures of …Prince.

by Pure Evil

• 

• 

A Thing of Beauty

by David Speed @davidspeeduk in Shoreditch, London 9.5.21

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness

John Keats – ‘Endymion’ (currently featured in Poems on the Underground to mark the 200th anniversary of Keats’ death)

“Our first set of poems for 2021 is now on trains. Poems on the Underground is marking the 200th anniversary of the death of the poet John Keats, and features six poems written or inspired by Keats and his love of nature. These poems are:

An excerpt from Endymion by John Keats
An excerpt from Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelly
Wish You Were Here by Julia Fiedorczuk
rising by Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze
I go inside the tree by Jo Shapcott
When I have Fears That I May Cease To Be by John Keats”

David Speed on Insta

Story snippets

7.5.21

While scouting a location for the music documentary we began shooting today in London, I crossed paths in Alan’s Records in East Finchley with the owner of the Terrapin Trucking Company record shop which was a key fixture in the Golden Age of Crouch End. It stood a few yards away from Banners, run by Juliet and Andy Kershaw, another key part of the picture. Here it is as preserved by the British Record Shop Archive.

And here’s Simon, the man behind Terrapin. (He doesn’t work for London Underground, just trying to stay warm and likes the gear.)

9.5.21

After a peaceful reading session by William Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields, I emerged onto City Road to be met by the sight of an elderly lady, dismounted from her bicycle, clearing up two broken bottles she had cycled past – for the sake of dogs and fellow cyclists. There was no bin in sight so I offered to guard her bike while she popped into the park to dispose of the now wrapped glass safely. She was very grateful but I was even more so because it’s nice being nice, service is a key to happiness. 

This is The End

The End by Heather Phillipson

The 4th Plinth on Trafalgar Square has proved to be a brilliant lens for Britain to look at itself through. The commissions are so varied that taken together they are also a rich record of British identity and state of mind at different times. Each commission takes into account the resonance of the location and its relation to surrounding public art, buildings, environment and the history linked to them. 

Heather Phillipson’s ‘The End’ is a worthy addition to the chain of public art that has temporarily inhabited the free plinth. It looks particularly good against blue sky and the collapsing gobbet of cream topped by the falling cherry matches the colours of the Canadian flags behind it on Canada House / La Maison du Canada. 

On one side is a huge fly, undermining any initial joy at the prospect of some kind of knickerbocker glory. On the adjacent side is a drone, on a different scale, with moving propellors.

a backdrop of the National Gallery

What does it all mean? There’s a sense of imminent collapse. An indication of rottenness. And a strong hint of surveillance.

The stalk paralleling Nelson’s Column

‘The End’ officially took up residence on the plinth on 30th July 2020, the 13th commission there (the first was in 1998). At 9.4 meters height it is the tallest so far and one of the brightest. 

The drone transmits a live feed of Trafalgar Square at www.theend.today Here’s what it looks like right now, the eye of the sculpture itself:

What’s the legal status of those two people? Is it legit to spy on them for artistic rather than security reasons?

The artwork reflects Trafalgar Square’s heritage and function as a place of both celebration and protest, as well as its highly surveilled state.

VE Day (8th May 1945)

Anti-Lockdown protest (26th September 2020)

Phillipson came up with the idea in 2016, in the shadow of Trump’s election and Brexit. 

“For me, we’ve been at a point of some kind of entropy for a long time. When I was thinking of this work there was a sense for me of an undercurrent that was already there … this feels like a continuation of that.”

It was unveiled in the middle of Covid19 year, delayed a few months by the pandemic. The perfect temporal setting for the piece. 

This is the end

Beautiful friend

This is the end

My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end

Of everything that stands, the end

No safety or surprise, the end

I’ll never look into your eyes again

Can you picture what will be?

So limitless and free

Desperately in need

Of some stranger’s hand

In a desperate land

Jim Morrison & The Doors ‘The End’

Despite the title the artist does not envision the work as a dead end. 

“In the end there is the possibility of something else forming. There’s the chance of radical change inside any ending… there is potentially hope for something else.”

The artist

‘The End’ ends in Spring 2022.

The End

Things That Are No More #2: I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas – and forever

This is Michael Dickinson (filmed by me in April 2018) not far from Spike Milligan’s stomping ground. Sadly he passed away recently. He was a much-loved presence in East Finchley as well as other parts of London such as Camden Town. He came to East Finchley to visit the Phoenix Cinema (which BTW is about to re-open) among other things.

Michael was an actor, writer and campaigner. He suffered from a psychological condition called ‘retropulsion’, a compulsion to walk backwards, which is a symptom of Parkinsonism. He died from Peritonitis on 2nd July in his bedsit in Highgate, aged 70.

Michael was born in Yorkshire. He lived all around Camden Town in the 70s and 80s, then mov­ed to Istanbul. After 30 years living in Turkey and working as a teacher, he was deported back to Britain in 2013 after being arrested for exhib­iting a collage portraying President Erdogan as a dog collecting a rosette from George Bush.

He studied at Manchester School of Theatre in 1969. Michael acted and wrote for the Pentameters Theatre (which BTW urgently needs support to survive and has a crowdfunder on the go to that end) above the Three Horseshoes pub on Heath Street, Hampstead where he was considered a talented actor. His final play was about Keats whose manor included Heath Street. Léonie Scott-Matthews, who has run Pentameters for over five decades, witnessed when the condition kicked in: “I remember when he started walking backwards. He was in a play here. He got off the stage and just started walking back­wards. It was just after he had got back from Turkey.”

In a 2017 interview in the Camden New Journal Michael said: “I am not acting. If it wasn’t for the retropulsion, I would much prefer to be walking forwards.”

For some time he lived in a tent on Hampstead Heath. Other times his home was a cardboard box behind Sainsbury in Camden Town and various squats including Hampstead Police Station (also on Heath Street). Eventually he got more regular accommodation. 

The Erdogan episode took on international proportions. Michael arrived at the appeal hearing bearing a similar collage with Erdogan’s face on a dog’s body. During the shenanigans Charles Thomson, co-founder of the pro-figurative Stuckist group of artists,  wrote to the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to encourage the “strongest condem­nation of this prosecution”.  Thomson said: “The story got international media attention because they were trying to get into the EU at that time. I think without it he would have got a stiff jail sentence.” He described Michael’s art as “exquisitely wrought political collages”. Relating it to the movement he founded he said: “Stuckism is for individuals who feel marginalised and not prepared to kow-tow to the establishment. They are not afraid to be them­selves and often they pay the price for that.”

Besides plays, as a writer michael wrote dozens of articles, mainly published on Counter­punch. His output included various essays about his life.

Michael’s life is a perfect example of the richness of stories that can underlie people in our communities we are perhaps dismissive of or put in a judgmental box. Another such example from my own childhood community was Dr Stephan Hassan, known as the Edgware Walker. When I started working at Channel 4 the filmmaker-comedian Lee Kern (Co-producer of Who Is America? with Sacha Baron Cohen) gave me a copy of the film he had just finished (2003) as a tribute to a forwards runner, as mysterious as Michael Dickinson.

https://vimeo.com/386765081

Lee’s affectionate film, The Edgware Walker, was first broadcast in 2004 (Channel 4). Its core message is that is is important to engage with such people where we live, including asking them questions as you would your friends and neighbours. 

Things That Are No More No. 1