#0033 GROW UP ART - CHOOSE LIFE! CHOOSE ART!

Welcome to the Creative Nowhere Land Podcast. 

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose art!

Well, if you're of a certain age, then that might sound a little bit familiar, but on this episode, we're joined by an artist who has done just that... they've chosen art.  

An artist who now uses their love of creativity, screen prints, fluorescent inks, and, in their words, potty mouth high jinks to shine a light on some of the inequalities and injustices in the world that make them angry.

On this episode, we are joined by Blam from Grow Up Art. 

Blam grew up wanting to be an artist, but not knowing what that looked like, he found himself working as a designer within the film and music industry.

And it was here that Blam helped create some of the most iconic imagery of the nineties. When a brief for the Danny Boyle film Trainspotting landed on his desk, he was asked to design the poster. 

Yeah, that's right! Blam designed the original Trainspotting poster, and that alone would be a great reason to have him on the podcast. But the creative journey didn't stop there.

Leaving the limitations and deadlines of the design world behind him when his children were born. Blam began to pursue different avenues of creativity and, for the next 10 years, worked on his own ventures and, more importantly, on being a dad to his children. 

The transition from designer to artist came much later, when Blam and his eldest son, Jack, began working and creating together as Grow Up Art, producing a wide spectrum of work, all with that comedic potty-mouth edge. 

But now, having grown apart, Blam is riding solo, and with his influences in punk, his work has taken a slightly more political edge, using art and creativity in his words to 'Call out Cunts!'

The most famous of which being the 'Turd Reich'. A piece of work that went viral in 2025, being picked up by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian.  And a piece that was released for free and has been downloaded over a hundred thousand times worldwide. 

We discuss the whole journey and so much more. We talk about everything from making work that makes people spit their drinks out. The Broken Filters, Democratic Art and Blam's latest project with Atom Gallery, TrainSpotters, the exhibition. 

An exhibition that takes us full circle, and which celebrates the 30th anniversary of Trainspotting. Revisited and reimagined by 30 other artists, and where some of the profits will go to The Big Issue.

You can check out the links to Blam's work while you're listening to the podcast, of course. 

But we go into so much in this one that it's probably best to leave it up to the Blam to tell the story. 

Hope you enjoy this episode of The Creative Nowhere Land Podcast.

GROW UP ART INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/grow_up_art_/

GROW UP ART WEBSITE: https://www.growupart.com/

Transcript

Welcome And Meet Blam

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello everyone and welcome to the Creative Nobeland Podcast. Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose art. Well, if you're of a certain age, then this might sound a little bit familiar. But on this episode, we're joined by an artist who has done just that. They've chosen art and who now uses their love of creativity, screen prints, fluorescent inks, and, well, in their words, potty mouth hijinks to shine a light on some of the inequalities and injustices in the world that make him angry. On this episode, we're joined by Blam from Grow Up Art. Blam grew up wanting to be an artist, but not knowing what that looked like, he chose a career. And he found himself working as a designer within the film and music industry with clients like Sony, EMI, and Film 4, to name just a few. And it was here that Blam was part of creating some of the most iconic imagery of the 90s. When a brief for the Danny Boyle film Trainspotting landed on his desk and he was asked to design the poster. Yep, that's right. Blam designed the original train spotting poster. And that alone would be a great reason to have him on the podcast. But the creative journey didn't stop there. Leaving the limitations and deadlines of the design world behind him when his children were born, Blam began to pursue different avenues of creativity, and for the next 10 years worked on his own ventures and more importantly on being a dad to his children. The transition from designer to artist came much later when Blam and his eldest son Jack began working and creating together as grow-up art, producing a wide spectrum of work that all had that comedic potty mouth edge to it. But now, having grown apart, Blam is riding solo, and with his influences in punk, his work has taken on a slightly more political edge, using art and creativity in his words to call out guns. Most famously of which, the Third Reich, a series of images of politicians and world leaders dressed in World War II German army uniforms, which, well, melted the internet and went viral in 2025, being picked up by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian. And a piece that was released for free and has been downloaded over a hundred thousand times worldwide. The work is powerful and may conflict opinions, but at the heart of it is a sense of justice. And Blam always tries to give back and often works with multiple homeless and mental health charities. We discuss the whole journey and so much more. We talk about everything from making the work that makes people spit their drinks out, uh, the broken filters, democratic art, and Blam's latest project with Atom Gallery, Train Spotters, the exhibition, where we go full circle and which celebrates the 30th anniversary of Trainspotting. Revisited and reimagined by 30 artists, and where a percentage of the profits will go towards the big issue. Look, there's so much inspiring stuff in this one, so be sure to check out the links to Blam's work while you're listening to the podcast, of course. But for now, let's get into it. Everyone is gonna want to talk to you about the Third Reich, but I would like to talk about some of the iconic imagery that you're a massive part of. Can we talk train spotting? Yes. So before you were Grow Apart and Blam the artist, you spent 25 years as a graphic designer. Yeah. Working with some pretty big clients like Sony, Adidas, Roger Sanchez, Torian Albert Museum, all sorts of things. But shall we say the big claim to fame is the iconic train spotting campaign? Well, it was early 1995. We did some film paster visuals for a film that came out called ID, which was about football violence and hooligan. So we did some really graphic typography, which is by blood. And we showed them to Polygram Film, and they were just like, This is too dark, we can't show these, but it's brilliant. We've got this project that's coming up called Train Spine we'd like to you to look at. And it's directed by Danny Boyle. And I'd seen Charlotte Graves, so I was just like, wow, I really want to be part of that project. And I worked at Stala Rouge, which was I'd worked there for four years since leaving college, graduating from Newcastle College of Design and Tech. Yeah, and you start way down the pecking order as a junior designer and work your way up. And it was like Styler Rouge worked for the Banshees, Squeeze, Pretenders, Blur, Jesus Jones. So all the big projects like that would go to the people who'd been there the longest. So train sporting wasn't at that point considered a big project. No, it was kind of I just always loved film. And everybody who was at Styler Rouge, it pretty much specialised in music sleeve design. So everything was record covers. But didn't do many film posters. So nobody was really that interested in doing the project. And me being way down the peck in order, it just kind of landed in my lap. I was a massive fan of Saul Bass, his poster design. And the time poster design was like it was really tired and horrible. It was just like heads-on posters and and like the wrong name above the wrong head and just generic bullshit. But I've been a massive fan of Swiss modernism and Saul Bass, I just was like, how did they create such iconic posters? And it's almost like that was my bar to try and jump over to try and achieve something that was just as simple and as iconic as those classic 1960s pieces of art. So what does that look like when that brief comes in? Do you go and watch the film? Do you have a synopsis of the film? Where do you start? The film wasn't made. So when you design a film poster, the film company usually go to design company and go, We've got these stills that we shot during production. How can you turd polish them and turn them into something? And that's kind of why film posters are pretty bad. Because they could actually go to a design company and say, come up with a brand, do something with them. We put all this money into making this film, but the marketing and the design for its last minute afterthought. Right. Um they're just more interesting to the way they approached it was here's a script, here's the Irving Welsh book, go and make it. So they were after filming, and then the following day, the actors had one day schedule to go into a photographic studio with Lorenzo Aduce, the photographer, and we'd spent months doing ideas and visuals and test shoots of what the actors would do and propose visuals. And then we just kind of all just based on the book and based on the script. Yeah. So it was ideas, but we hadn't seen anything. A couple of production stills. And we'd been given a production still from a film called Backbeat, which was a film about the Beatles, their kind of story in Hamburg, and told to make it look like that. Other than the fact it was photographed on a railway bridge, it just didn't make any sense. So our original concept was based on it was an arena home front cover of five models. So we showed it and they really liked that as the poster. So we proposed that as the main poster. At the time the Reservoir Dogs campaign had been out and they'd done these really iconic singular character posters with Mr. Orange and Mr. Pink.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Yeah.

Inside The Shoot And Design Choices

SPEAKER_00 8:07

And I just loved that campaign. So I said, let's do individual character posters to support the main campaign. So when we did the photo shoot with the actors, the group shot of them it just didn't work. Because it kind of really picked up on the fact that it's not they're not a group of friends. They're a group of individual characters who would stab each other in the back just to get the next fix or to you know it's like Renton runs away with the money and you just leave some money for Spud. But that's the closest thing there is to a kind of a close friendship. The very kind of individual characters. So it just didn't work, the group shop. They just jarred. And it wasn't until we photographed them individually that there was like real energy in it. So that's why the poster we did visuals with them at the group shop and just couldn't get it to work. And we'd worked out the character the individual character posters, which looked amazing. I thought why don't we combine that into one image and just put them in boxes with numbering systems on? And the numbering system came from the novel, which was Junk Dilemmas. So each chapter is rent and trying to come off heroin. So there's a dilemma involved within doing it, but it's interspersed throughout the book. So we use that numbering system to number the characters as well. Yeah. And what was it like being in the studio with these guys? Presumably at that point, like you say it's in Shadow Graves, so you knew who you and McGregor was all these sorts of people. You yeah, when we spoke on the phone, you said it was quite an experience being in the studio with Begby. Yeah, it was good, it was just because he was just as soon as the camera went in and he went into characters, he was just like we had some kinds of tenants as props, and he was just like smashing them open and like shouting down the camera. Proper method, yeah, it was scaring it. Yeah, it was properly bum squeaky time because it's like oh fuck, he's like a proper lunatic. And I'd seen him in he'd been in an episode of Cracker where he played uh a football hooligan psychopath who he kills Billsborough in the thing. So I was like, I just remember seeing Robert Carlisle and thinking this guy's the next De Niro, he was just like really yeah powerful actor. So he was just amazing to be in that room with that energy, was he? Oh, I can imagine. Yeah. Were any of the other actors more method like Robert Carlisle always? No, not so much, but Spud was amazing, and you know, Ewan was amazing, Diane was amazing. It was just it just energy was just them as individuals, it just fitted it. It's just it was worth and just from being with them and them explaining like they've been filming this film for three months, so they understood the characters more than I did. Right. And it just made us realise, oh fuck, we've gone down the wrong direction trying to do this pally group shot of them all together with arms around each other like mates, because they just they just weren't. And that, as I say, for for people of my age, those film posters, the train spotting, they're iconic images. I'm not sure there's many people of my age that wouldn't remember that poster. Yeah. Or the film. That's quite a claim to fame for you there, Blanc. Well, it was just kind of it was lucky because when they made the film, I think it was made on a budget of 1.1 million. And uh we created this campaign and the film company loved it. So they ended up spending like a marketing budget of 3.3 million, which is three times the budget from making the film just to promote it. So it's one of those moments of just if they hadn't done that, we wouldn't be talking about it because nobody would have seen it. And they also did this brilliant move of so the poster was original format, was it was a teaser poster for the film. And all the students who were going back to college in the summer, September, they got this pack for HMV records where they could go to the store and get a free poster as part of Freshers Week. And that train spotting was one of the posters that's clever. But I'd go away to go away for the weekend, go up to Nottingham to see friends and stuff, and they were like, Oh, I had that in my I had that in my kitchen when I was a student, and it's just but it was kind of that moment that just pushed it into everybody saw it, and that was all pre-internet, it was just before social media and stuff. So it was and it was that's so interesting though, but a film with a budget of 1.0 million, yeah. You got three times the budget spent on it. Yeah. They must have seen something pretty special in the film and in the zeitgeist of the time, maybe that I think I think it was the perfect storm because all the actors were relatively unknown. Yeah. They weren't big Hollywood actors. Daddy Bald's first film was amazing, and Irving Welch's book was amazing. So it was perfect chemistry that they believed in and invested the money in to promote it. And that was another thing why the poster worked, because there was no designing film posters is really weird because say you design a James Bond film poster and it's for Piers Brosner, and BMW have sponsored it because they're cars, the Bond car. Like there'll be a contract that says Piers Brosnan's name has to be 25% ratio, and his head has to be this size on the poster, and then the BMW car, if it's used on the poster, has to be a percentage size. Yeah. It's just like how can you design something good where you just so many limitations, restrictions? It's just restrictions. And the the nice thing about the transporting poster it being a teaser poster, it didn't have to have loads of text on it. There was no Iran McGregor's name to be a percentage of this. It was just a bit more free reign for you to Yeah. And we had none of that. It was just kind of it was independent. I went into work from music design working to a film poster company that did campaigns and I hated it because it was back into that restriction. Yeah. I tried to do film posters for big blockbuster stuff, such as Stardust, the Matthew Vaughan film, yeah. That's something really left field and abstract for it. And I'd realised during that period, and I also did nil by mouth. I did not. But I enjoyed doing a nil by mouth film poster. Because it made me realise that my work is more kind of left field and independent rather than mainstream. And it's like Danny Boyle himself. He made the beach after making and a life less ordinary after making those films. And he massively struggled with Hollywood and trying to cross the pond and do all of that other stuff. You know, it's probably why he didn't do Bond recently and went on back to making 28 days later, because it's just it's more his voice. So I just found I couldn't do those. I could never do a Bond poster. I'd like to do an alternative Bond poster. Maybe you should. Maybe I should. Were you getting that ability to explore some of those ideas, some of that more left field stuff that you were discovering about yourself? Was that coming across in your design work, or was it, again, just too many restrictions? I don't know. I think it was just with transporting, it was just the perfect storm. It's just I'd spent four years as a junior designer working differently. It was just by the time I'd done train spotting and done it, people were still questioning me what it was I was doing. I just felt like I need to go away and work on my own now because I feel like I've outgrown where I am. It's just I'd made this giant leap forward, and then everything that I was doing from a design point of view was just back into being lower down the pecking order and making stuff, and I just thought I kind of have to go away and be independent and work on my own and choose the briefs of the clients that you want to work for, rather than being at a big design agency where you're just given projects you wouldn't. So, what does that look like? You were working more freelance as a designer. Yeah, I went freelance, I just um yeah, I just added my notice in, just got fed up of doing it and got impetuous and just do these mad things and thought, oh fuck, where am I gonna go? And had seven nights of restless sleep, just going, shit, what have I done? And then I went for an interview at the film marketing company, Crave Partnership, and it was weird. I was interviewed by Mia Matson, who'd created the Reservoir Dogs campaign. So it was like, I want to work for her, she's amazing. And Mia still just she's done so many amazing film poster campaigns, and he's so good at doing those big commercial projects that I just couldn't do. So I did that for six months and then just didn't really enjoy it. And then people were asking me to do like Film 4 approached me to do Acid House, which was another Irving Welsh book. So I did that independently, and wasn't that I don't think it was the greatest post, I a nice image, and it's weird. I found out recently that Irving Welsh has it in his living room. Really? Above his fireplace. So I was like, that's nice. So yeah, it was just um it was just stuff again, a bit more left field. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, away from the film stuff, can we talk a little bit about the rest of your graphic design career, as it were, before we move on to the changes that came a bit later down the line? It's strange because my interest has always been Swiss modernism and Joseph Muller Brockman, Wim Crow, real kind of classic modernist designers. Which is almost weird because a lot of it's based on grid systems and simplicity, and it doesn't really translate into record sleeves, which is just type thrown over an image of a band, and it's just so I was deeply into branding and corporate design, which is weird because I never went into that part of the career. It's like when I designed Train Sporting, I saw it as a brand that could evolve over the series. I don't understand why film directors don't have a like a branding technique they use continuously as part of their voice. It's like when they did Train Sporting 2, they could have just photographed the actors in exactly the same white background, simplicity, just 30 years older, and just done the poster again in exactly the same format typeface colour way. Just had 30 years older photographs of them. They didn't. It's just like it wasn't broken, it didn't need fixing.

unknown 17:56

Yeah.

Leaving Agencies And Going Solo

SPEAKER_00 17:56

So it was just um so it's always been my push has always been in an opposite direction from doing record sleeves. It was just I don't know. I was just wondering I was just wondering about some of the other work away from train spotting that you were doing in your freelance career and those sorts of things, just to give that sort of almost backstory that you've earned his salt as a graphic designer. Yeah. And life circumstances change and stuff happens and you want to move forward and do something different. Yeah, well it's weird, it's like since becoming an artist, there's an artist called Rugman. Oh, we met him at an art fair and he said this great quote of don't look behind you, you're not going that way. Which I just loved. I just loved that message. And since becoming an artist and not wanting to do graphic design anymore, I really loved that kind of message of just weird. Yeah, it is. No, it is, it's quite triggering. But like I went to a meeting recently about the doing a retrospective of the 90s next year, which we've agreed to do. But I came away after the meeting just going, Oh, I just it felt weird to just look back on stuff I'd done 30 years ago based on stuff I made this year. It just felt like, why am I talking about stuff that's I just want to move forward now and not look back at I understand that, but presumably you must be quite proud of something. Oh, yeah, massively. As I say, you that's iconic imagery. Yeah. Yeah, but it's just weird as an artist, it's just you've made it. Like if you've become obsessed too much about what you've just made, it paralyses you from making the next thing. So it's just like you have to just and I've it's something with my brain just like people go, What you what have you just worked on? It's just my brain doesn't really process that. It's just I'm working on this now, you know, it's just yeah, just driving it forward, and you want to you can only focus on that completely. My brain just forgets. Well, I apologize for asking you all these questions about the past, mate. But yeah, okay. So how do we move from what was the life circumstances, shall we say, that took you from being a designer to, should we just say at the moment, not being a designer? Yes. Because you weren't an artist at that point necessarily. No. I didn't go from being a designer to being an artist. So the transition point was well my first son Jack being born, which was 2003. Um my wife could work for Disney. So she'd become the main breadwinner and she went on maternal leave for a a year and then had to go back to work for Disney and had all that anxiety of leaving the baby at home and childcare and nursery thing. And I just went look I'll just stop doing what I'm doing. I'll do something else and you know I'll I'll look after Jack. Was that a hard decision for your own easy? It was just a really natural thing to do. Um and it was as he grew up as well it became really weird because it's just like it's like reverse feminism. It's like you go, oh the mum was picking up the kids from school today it was just like it's not just the mums who pick their kids up it's just like this stereotypical mainstream pigeonhole in of it's a woman's job to do that. It's a man's job to do this. It's just the modern day world it's just like things aren't like this anymore. But again pushing against the system I was still I'm like one of the mums at the gate but it was just I can just embrace the fact that you know it's a man's job as much as it is a woman's job to bring up raising children. Yeah. Yeah partnership during that period so Jack did still go to nursery and childcare but I just couldn't manage deadlines and clients and like in the old days we used to do work for Jamiraquis so we'd do 20 adverts that we had to deliver that week. You just can't take on a burden like that when you're going to let the client down and just go, I've got to look after my child. So I had to do something different. So I set up I originally I set up a shop called Blanco which was working with other graphic designers that I knew and other graphic designers whose work I admired and reprinting classic posters as additions and selling them. So I worked with Wim Crowd who was an absolute design legend and he came and he went through a period of being relatively unknown as a designer but he was like he designed matrix typefaces pixelated typefaces before for Olivetti before people were using computer screens. So it was like we always used to joke that he was like a man of the future you travel forward in time to steal this technology and go back and invent these pioneering things that didn't exist. And then he'd been made famous by the fact that Pete Savile designed a record sleeve with Joy Division Atmosphere it used one of Krell's typefaces that it designed so he had this resurgence again as a designer and because we printed the poster somebody loaned us an original Vaughan Gaves poster which was a poster we designed for the Stadelicht Museum in 1968 and we had it scanned and we touched it and we had all the pen skips of his original we could have drawn it in Illustrator in a couple of hours but instead I spent 80 hours retouching it to keep all of the imperfections of how we'd drawn the poster. Brilliant. And then we flew over to Amsterdam to meet him at his house and he signed the prints and so does that work does he presumably have to give you the rights to use that yeah and it took us two years to do it because we had to find the original poster we had to reproduce it we had to contact the Stadelix to see if they could remember what paper it was printed in. So it was just and the original poster like was trading hands for£2000 so it was really hard to therefore find an original to do the reproduction from so that took a while we had it scanned I had to drive to Wales to have it scanned on this amazing camera got back and realised the scan was too low res. So I had to drive back and have it done again and pay through all to be done again. So it was just it was an absolute labour of love. But a learning curve I'm sure well it was just really lovely to touch something and be involved in something and not alter it or modify it. Just keep it exactly how it was as a reproduction with the original designer's permission. So he was like really happy with how it turned out and he was on the right papers and everything. That's incredible. Yeah like it's really it's fascinating because you do learn a lot of stuff about all this history of how paper was made and it's just every day's a school day when you're doing these random weird projects that you set yourself. And that's quite niche I suppose is it those minim minimalist design posters and yeah very much because lots of people haven't heard of Wim Crow or it's like people don't really care about graphic designers other than other graphic designers.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Yeah.

Dad Years, Blanca And Print Process

Bowie Projects And Curating As Craft

Jack, Jealous Gallery And Growing Up

Potty-Mouth Comedy And Early Political Work

Kinky Slaps, Sarcasm And Speed

SPEAKER_00 24:28

So you are selling to a very niche market and people you know they'll buy a record sleeve buy division a new order but they won't necessarily have heard of Pete Saville or Neville Brody or Mark Farrow but interesting for you to take that skill set and that passion that you've got for design so when did you start Blanker? So I started Blanker I think it was between 2003 and 2005. One of the first things you did when you were looking after Jack then presumably yeah because it was just it just fitted in with my experience and design knowledge. And your lifestyle at that point presumably it was more on your terms rather than the deadlines that you say. You could go into the office and push projects when the baby was asleep or your wife was home and so you didn't have to be nine to five in the office work around it. But it wasn't only Blanca you started a second online store as well was it's just funny this is all pre-digital print and print on demand stuff it's now I also I guess we should say it's probably it's pre-social media as well, right? To to get it out there and promote it. Yeah it was all like other than email and mailing list there wasn't a lot of social media so we we did a retrospective we did a show called One an exhibition in Mono to celebrate our first year of Blanca and we printed all the posters and everybody was given one word and they had to print a black and white poster so we and we decided rather than do it in one gallery we worked with London Design Festival and we put it in 28 locations around London so people who were coming down to design festival and going to all these events could go to Habitat or Heels or wherever all these design stores um that was our first year of Blanca. It cost us quite a lot of money to print all the posters and some of them sold instantly sold out and some of them we sold two or three and we I've still got them on my shelves in my office. So it was 2007 it was my friend was working on a documentary about Helvetica and he told us he was working on it. It was like oh this is the 50th anniversary of Helvetica coming up so we decided to ask 50 designers to make 50 posters celebrating Helvetica. So everybody was given a year from 1957 to 2007 and they had to do something an event from that year for their piece everybody wanted to do 1969 because we were moon landing but anyhow we realized that it was going to be so expensive to print editions of all these posters that we'd make it print on demand. So we went to Epsom we tried to get sponsorship we couldn't get them to give us a printer they gave us discounts we we bought a digital printer. It was like and it didn't work with the blanker for that because they were limited editions. So I decided to call it print process whereas you'd order the print and we'd process the order and fulfill the order there'd be no waste there'd be no posters on shelves 25 years later we would just drop ship them. Yeah. This is before like drop shipping happened. Yeah it's weird as well because like I closed them down a few years ago and I don't run them anymore. And they were good little businesses but And you told me that you didn't get into design to fulfill orders and do all shipment and stuff like that. So it felt like a bit of a groundhog day after how long were you doing it? Ten years, yeah. And by this time Jack had grown up so he's now at school and you know had another son and Harry they've grown up and they're out at school during the day. So you get a bit more time back and you do other things. But it just become it filled a niche a time period where I couldn't really do anything very creative. Although it was kind of working with creatives it was still fun. It was just printing stuff out every day and putting the poster tube and print out an address label and ship it was like I thought I didn't go to college to do this. This is just groundhog day there was one year we worked with the VA on the Bowie is exhibition they approached about print we had on the website and they were super lovely. And it was just like I love Bowie so I don't just want to do a print that we've already done is there any chance I can go away and curate some content to the show and they were like it's difficult. You can if you want to but the Bowie estate don't want new work done. So if you want to take the risk of developing stuff we can show it to them but it it won't necessarily get approved. You won't be wasting your time and I was like okay I'm happy to do that because I've got some ideas I think would really work. So I approached a couple of other people we'd work with other designers through the Blanca and the print process network and we curated a load of ideas and which we showed to the VA and all four of the ideas which he said would never get through because they were in New York all went ahead. Really? Yeah so Gregory Gilbert Lodge did a beautiful print was called Thin White Duke of Bowie from the low period of his life we did work with Simon Cryer Mike Joyce who did a series of Swiss posters from Spiders of Mars from Tor. And then I asked a hundred designers to typeset the word Bowie in a font of their choosing or create a typeface just five letters and send it to us and the idea was that Bowie was just he constantly evolved his style and changed his style. So the print was called the changing faces of Bowie as in typefaces. Brilliant and a hundred designers sent us the typeset we did a print of all of the designers work for like the DNA that's cool showing that was 2012 I think. Okay. Yeah that was giving you a taste a bit more of getting back into the creative again and and again a bit more curating. Yeah that's interesting. Yeah it's weird as well because it's almost like I work with galleries now and we so I've got experience of running my own gallery and curating my own gallery and paying artists and working with them. So it was like it was just a really good experience. But I just wanted to get back to creating again so I kind of started to it was Jack had was 1415 and I was gone back to doing little bits of design not much and the design was really infuriating me. I wasn't enjoying the process anymore. And bits I was and then I'd do the occasional bits and it'd be really rewarding it just and then everything else would become a trudge of you know it's just depressing to work on these projects where the clients would constantly question you and send stuff off to market research and it's just and similar to those too many limitations again like you were chanting before. Yes. Anyhow that's frustrating though isn't it when you're asked to compromise on your ideas presume. Yeah it can be because it's like the going back to the training point of the thing was when we started doing it we showed proposals I remember I was like why have we done so many proposals as a design company? We're not just narrow this down it's the best ones. It was like throwing shit at a wall and hoping somebody would stick so when we did the final presentation with the poster I walked into the meeting with one visual which I'd never done before just showed them one thing. I'd made loads of versions but there was only one version that worked so it's like why show all the shit versions just show them the best thing and it was just the meeting just went really well it was just like why do you employ a graphic designer who's got skill to answer your problems and there's trains and all these things and then if you want 50 options. Yeah and it's just death by a thousand cuts because it's so you definitely sound like you were frustrated with the whole thing. Oh yeah massively so what was the catalyst to propel you to become shall we say the artist that you are now? Well it's strange because I'd always as graphic designer you do self-initiate projects that just are your own making and they're really fun because there's no voices telling you to stop making them so part of the blanker and the print process and the VA experience had been oh this is great because it's just I've had this idea, I've made it it's worked but I was still a graphic designer didn't feel like I was an artist because I think the two are completely different things. I think a graphic designer is you're solving other people's problems for a fee and an artist is you're solving your own problems you invented for no fee because you're not guaranteed to get paid anything. In fact it costs you money to make the thing and then you make it and hope it sells which is where I'm at now but the jumping off point was Jack was 14, 15 and wanted to do works experience. So I contacted an old friend a KT screen print Mark Jenkins who'd screen printed some stuff for the VA for us and said do you know anybody who works in a gallery that does street art? Presumably Jack had taken an interest in that that was a route that he wanted to explore. Yeah his paintings were unbelievable like he was just both of the kids are just really talented at design or art, film and music. They're just part of that creative path. Well they've been surrounded by it mate. Well yeah because like we grew up with music and it's just normal I think all children are born in natural artists. They all have the ability to draw with the crayon it's just society just beats it out of it. Beats out of it's like the Rishi Sunak thing you've all got to do A-level maths it's like why we've got algorithms and computers and calculators that can solve those problems now why does everybody have to do this another shit mathematician and a shit accountant bang average. Yeah you can do it in Excel spreadsheets it's just like we digress. Yeah so Jack wants to do work experience he's building a body of work presumably yeah he went so he said he wanted to do work experience and the school one interesting is really boring mundane jobs I was like can I ask a friend if he'll give him two weeks works experience said yeah if he can find something that's more interesting they can do it. So I asked my friend Mark and he said speak to Dario Jealous so Jealous is a gallery jealous is a gallery in Shoritch yeah like a really big gallery they work with Trigley Stanley Donwood Jamie Hewlett so it's like wow that's amazing so we contacted Dario and he said yeah come in for a chat see how we got on and I said to Jack don't just turn up and just be a name that's instantly forgettable take a portfolio if you work so you they remember you for one piece of work. So he did like stencil paintings and he did a portrait of our dog Dottie and he had a painting of Tankel by Jimmy Hewlett. So we went for the meeting and I left them to go on with it and they just instantly bonded over talking about art. They were both massive Keith Heron fans I love that's pretty cool. So how old did he say Jack was at this point? Jack was 14. Oh wow yeah and quite mature to be able to put himself in those situations and just connect on yeah Jack's always struggled to fit in so he's always been like the school he went to he was a square pegging around hole and he was always told to grow up which is where the origins of grow up came from so he was just he just didn't fit in and he was like but when he was with artists or older people he just found his flow he was just like yeah and he didn't struggle anymore and he's always been like he always meet my artist friends and they're always like your kids are amazing. They're just like they're just really easy to speak to and it's just like yeah but he's got the social communicative disorder which is like on the artistic spectrum that he struggles to communicate but completely the switch just turns off when he's with her artist he just flows. So anyhow the creativity though right is he finding something in the creativity that helps him release to vent to process maybe that perhaps you can't do around other similar 14, 15 year olds it's like everything isn't it's like society is you just constantly trying to fit into the the baseness of society and it's just like you want to be a rainbow spark sparkly unicorn that poops out glitter as an artist. And it's like society doesn't necessarily want you to do that. But when you meet up with artists there's loads of sparkly rubber unicorns running round in the field pooping out glitter. So it's just okay this is like the best place imaginable when you do art fairs and you work alongside them. So you find your fit. So you're just like this is where I want to go. So Jack's meeting all these artists through Jealous gallery and then am I right in thinking you got invited to do one of the pop-ups? Yeah so we went to see them in the summer and then Dario just very kindly said we're doing our carpoot fair in December would you like to make some of the he said we can't do anything with the Jamie Hewlett things because they're his artwork because I love them but you've bitten somebody style and but I really love the dog paintings and he'd done some trainer painting. He said would you like to exhibit with us for that because it's like a 14 year old kid who's been wow given his contract. So it's like but Jack was also struggling with depression so I was helping him to do some of the craft of this is how you cut a stencil and this is how it works and absolutely loving it. And it I'd through helping Jack get into the art you were getting your creative buzz back as well. Is that right? Yeah so when I was a kid of Jack's age I wanted to be an artist I didn't know what a fucking graphic designer was. My cousin was into embroidering patches of AC Dyal on the back of his jacket and he came to use this phrase called commercial artist which I didn't know what it meant but it sounded cool and sexy and I was like I want to be a commercial artist because it's like you're an artist and you get paid. And it was the 1970s term for graphic designer. Right. It's like when they took the word artist out of the word graphic design the industry lost a bit of respect because you weren't a creative you just like kind of a technical it was a trade on so it was and it taking art out of the thing it's just it's a weird one. So I I went off to college wanting to be an artist and then in my final two years ended up going down the graphic design route. I grew up drawing comics 2008 I'd like I wouldn't be an artist without 2008 in Spider-Man because I just constantly copy and draw and try and work out to draw Judge Dredd or Rogue Trooper and all these amazing artists that inspired me. So I would kind of but this thing of like it's like a weird I'm like really frustrated graphic design and I'm really enjoying helping Jack out. And there'd be some projects where we'd like we'd take the project on and then Jack's depression would kick in I couldn't let the because I'd managed deadlines for years and I would need to still carry on delivering so you would take over the projects in those times. Yeah always with Jack's permission and he'd always be happy with stuff and it as we got on and stuff it just became harder and harder in later life to because I was I was having these mad crazy ideas and Jack was like I don't agree we should do that. I think well you were collective at this point because Grow Up Art originally was you and Jack wasn't yes well it's it's funny we weren't grow up art we were known as Bland when we started and Jack came up with the name grow up which is weird because it's grow up as an Instagram account had gone so we had to put the word art on the end of it. Yeah which is we it's a weird kind of karma thing that we no longer work together and we've grown apart and we've probably called grow apart. So my son spotted the other day I was like oh I've never noticed that before about doing their work separately. But anyhow our two voices worked for a while but we just started to conflict about I want to go this way and Jack wanted to do paintings of he does life drawing he does a bit more fine art should we say now Jack Yeah more fine art but he's also massively inspired by Bascia and he's worked with Dave Buenegradi so he didn't get to do his work experience at Jealous because of COVID and the following year I said to Dave Buenegredi who we'd met through Jealous who for anyone listening is real Hackney Dave. But he doesn't run a mentorship program and he'll probably hate me for talking about this but he just helps so many artists and he just so much so that you call him Uncle Dave don't you? Yeah call him Uncle Dave just and I called him Uncle Dave from another artist go I call him Uncle David. Because he's just this lovely fatherly, like an older brother figure or a cousin who just go, he'd just point you in the right direction when you're floundering, and he'd always be right as well, annoyingly so. I was like, Oh shit, I really am gone down into a cul-de-sac and didn't realise it. And he's pulled you out of the cul-de-sac and we pointed you in the right direction. Helpful though. To have some. Oh, it's amazing. His spirit is just like to be that helpful is I don't know where he gets the energy from. Because he's like prolific and don't know how he finds the time to do it with not just burning out. So yeah, I said to Dave, because of COVID, Jack didn't get to work and jealous. So Dave said, Jake can come and work for me for two weeks. So he he learned screen printing from working with Dave and he hated it. He hated the repetitive nature. He didn't hate working for Dave. He hated the repetitive nature of just making the same print a hundred times. So I don't want to make prints. Four years later, I've just wanted to make one-off originals. He now implements screen printing into the paintings that he makes. And he uses my print table and shares my print studio. But we work separately. Because we were just we were just a father and son. We were just there's clashes that come with that, I imagine. Yeah. We share a house space, and I've got a print studio and an office in my garden, which I've built myself with my cousin Dan. As studios to work from. So we do have the work-life balance, it's harder to separate when you work from home. Yes, it is at the bottom of the garden, you can get away from the thing, but it's not the same as having an office and closing the door at the end of the day. Yeah. So it was just there'd be times where I'd come home and I'd been thinking about design all day, and then Jack had asked me about a project he's working on at 10 o'clock, and I'm trying to detune my head and watch television. I was just like, I need to switch off and not think about this now. And it had just become it's hard as a creative though, because you never really switch off, do you? Well, it's weird as well, because it's like you're solving your own problems, and and then you find that you're both pointing in different directions, so it's hard to tune into our message that can become fractured. So before the message gets fractured and you both want to go off and do different things, what sort of work are you creating together? Oh god, I can't remember now. Because I'm I'm draw to my for some of my favourite stuff is the nice cock, nice pussy, funny the comedy stuff. Yeah, well, we'd we'd always done stuff that what was the tagline that you used to get we come as a pair, but we also come alone. Yeah, so the weird hilarious. We were doing we've been invited by Dave. Dave was working out of a gallery space, and the person who was curating the gallery space did this show called Kink, which is about fetishism and BDSM and all those dark subjects. So my kind of silly brain, which is very sarcastic and that's seaside humour, isn't it? It's vaudeville, yeah, potty mouth comedy, I think, is how we pitched ourselves in the early days. I just we came up with a nice cognized pussy with an image of a chicken and a cat, with just big type smashed over top of it. And it was called We Come as a Pair, but we also come separately, which is another lair to the joke or the pun. So we proposed it for the show. And the gallery owner just went, This is beige, can you not come up with something better? And I was just like instantly triggered, like, this isn't graphic design, you're not paying me to make this. You've asked me to make an idea when I've made this idea. Why the fuck did you get a say in what I want to just put it in a frame and hang it? And if it sells, and if it doesn't sell, then we've made a flop or we've made a hit. We made an image of Boris Johnson dressed up as a policeman with in stilettos, fishnet tights, and trunching of just a massive tilto. Which took me about 80 hours to make, and it's but it was just it wasn't as a piece of craft. I learned a lot from making it because it was like my version of Judge Dredd. It was like my the way I would have had to. I can't draw, I can draw, but I can't draw like Brian Bolland or Jamie Hewlett or Dave Gibbons. I just don't have that ability to draw comic book characters. So I'd manipulate it through photographs and composite, and it took me 80 hours to do it. It was this comedy perverted version of Judge Dredd with a dildo transaction. That was actually Boris Johnson. But it was like, I was after I'd made it, I was like, Jack, are we going to release this? And he was like, I like it. I was like, I hate it. And it was because the nice cock knife, plus, it was a better idea. So anyhow, we just I thought I fucking you spent ages working making it now. We printed it and released it. But when he asked to do a project, you come up with multiple ideas. So it was the first idea I had, and it was just like the show was called Kink. So I'd asked myself the question, what's your kink? And at the time the conservatives had been in government for ages and really fucking annoying me. And Rishi Sunak has in power. So I thought, what's Rishi Sunak's kink? And they'd just done this deal with the nurses where the nurses had gone on strike. So it was named Rishi Sunak with type of it, it says, What's your kink? And his kink was, I'd love to shit on nurses. So it was just like it was just and it's like everybody I showed it to laughed. And I was like, Okay, there's something in this. So we we went to another show that Dave was at, and he said, How's your thing coming to that? And I was like, I'm floundering a bit, I'm not struggling. We've made this, but I'm not sure about it. I showed it to him and he just spat his drink out. He went, That's fucking brilliant. You should make that. And I was like, Yeah, but by the time we've bought the paper and the ink and printed them, it's like you've got with politics and you're making stuff up, you've got to make it instantly and smash it out there the day it happens, because it just it dies instantly. That's the old adage tomorrow's chip paper. Exactly. So I said to Dave, yeah, but we'll buy the ink, we'll buy the paper, I'll print them, and he'll make a fucking agreement with the nurses, and that joke isn't funny anymore to Craig Morrison. So he said, No, you can't think like that. You've just got to make it. You've just got to make it and not think about the. Why is Uncle Dave again? Well, yeah, just why is Uncle Dave? And it is it's the curse of a project is overthinking it. Like the the joke itself was just it was like a brain fart that popped into my head and got it down on paper and it just made people laugh. It was like, okay, it works. And then we overanalysed it and do it and made something else. But then we went to the launch of the show, and I decided that make stickers to just give away to the artists, and they were called kinky slaps. So I'd made loads of images of all the Tory politicians about so by the time that we were making them, Rishi Sunak had decided to sue the nurses for going on strike. So I was like, oh, brilliant. I wasn't expecting you to double down on your stupidity, suing the hospital workers. And everything that they said was just like evil and hideous, and it's like, well, I can twist that and subvert that as sarcastically do it. And Theresa Coffey had said something fucking random and weird about turnips. So her kink was she fucking loved turnips, and James Cleverly had made some pun on stage at a conference about slipping his wife date rape drug drugs. So I was like, What's your kink? Making jokes about date rape drugs. And he was just Was this a sort of first venture for you into the more political-based stuff? It wasn't. We'd done something about a year earlier, which was Boris Johnson that was at some conference going on about green energy, and we started quoting Kermit the Frog. I was like, what the fuck's happened? And he later on did something pepper pig as well. I was like, this guy's off his tits. So we'd I just did this print called Big Green Muppet, and it was just Boris Johnson on a half-tone dot pattern printed on luminous green paper with big green Muppet on it. We stuck Googly eyes on it, turned into a Muppet character. And we went to a gallery to show it to them, and they were like, Yeah, it's great, but you can only sell this for 30 quid because nobody wants to pay more than 30 quid to have an image of a cunt on their law, which was like an analogy that stuck with me forever. It's just how would you price that? It's like, why would you want to pay more than 30 quid to have an image of Boris Johnson on your? But it did okay, it did okay, and then Putin invited Ukraine and the war crime thing, and of course, obviously the mad monk and Rasputin and stuff. We just did a straightforward print that just went mad cunt, and it was an image of Putin with googly eyes, and that that flew as well. I was like, I was told to swerve during politics as art because it just it'll die a death, it'll or you you sort of you're alienating one side or the other as an artist. Sometimes people don't want to do that, but also the subject matter, it's probably not the easiest thing to sell as a print, right? I listened to Six Music Logs, I listened to the radio logs, just turned it on one day. And Sarah Pasco was on talking about her comedy routine of how she'd grown as an ice. Uh she's saying in an early days she'd done really ranty stuff and lost the audience and it just tumbleweed, it just didn't work. And then somebody said, 'Cause you're not using sarcasm in your work. So as soon as you use sarcasm and irony, so she re-evaluated him, and then just people started laughing. People started funny. And I just realized if it's preachy and it's ranty and judgmental and it's politics, people won't be interested. It has to have some kind of comedy and sarcasm, irony, seaside end of the peer humour for it to work and just make people split their drink out. That's a high bar now. If I'm I can make like the nice crock, nice pussy. I showed it to everyone and they went, These are fucking brilliant. That's so your sense of humour. Apart from the gallery. They didn't want to do them. So they end up making sometimes as an artist, you just go, eh. Because they don't like it. It doesn't matter. You just have to make it anyhow. Yeah. That's like the make art like nobody's watching. You make it for yourself, and it makes you s want to not step in front of a car, stops you wanting to do that, and you're solving your own internal conflict. Do you battle with that internal conflict? That was you describe yourself from having some broken filters. And I think that's a very complex. A lot of us creatives have got those quote unquote broken. Well, it's strange because I said Jack didn't fit in necessarily at school and he struggled. I was like, I think I've always struggled. I've got broken filters, can't read the remote and then when I realized that the inappropriate things I'd say sometimes that people didn't get, they'd also make people bow laugh at what I was saying and go, fuck that. It's like we literally could grow apart, and I'll do the third right stuff. I'll do posts of it, and like all these random people who disagree with me just going, Oh, for fuck's sake, grow up. And I was like, Oh, great, you've got the point, but you haven't you haven't got the point because it's just like you know, it's just I'm like a I'm a child trapped inside a man's body. It's weird, it's weird because it's like me and Jack have this weird relationship. I'm this I'm a grown-up with like still a stupid 12-year-old brain. And Jack's telling me, Dad, you can't do that. He's like the grown-up of the relationship. You have this weird, symbiotic relationship. He's like, so he's they're now 18, he's done one year of art school, he's taking on the debt, he's got literally no training from his lecturers, they do two hours timetable with them a month. He's like, Where the fuck have I taken all this debt to get this? It's it's a waste of time. Um, I'm gonna drop out. But I was like, Yeah, I pushed you into doing it because my experience of doing it was completely different because we got grants and it was funded and we didn't have the debt. And it's capitalism stepped in now and it's horrific being a student. So like, yeah, you actually don't need a certificate to say Banksy hasn't got a certificate to say he's an artist. I did all my degrees and everything. No one's ever once asked me what I got in my degree. They look at your portfolio. And the last job you did. So I'd like, yeah, okay. So he said, I'm gonna go traveling through you. So he went, he worked in a he worked in the garden actually to save. He did six months hard graft to save up the money to are you still producing work together at the same time? No, so he'd said, Can you buy me out? It's it's ran its course and it had, can you buy me out? So I said, Yeah. And he asked for such a low figure, I just went yeah, he's the money. Could he have got away with more? He could have got away with more, but what we did was with the money that he didn't ask for, we built a prints geo deo with it. That you can both use it amazing. Yeah, so I need to have conversation that we owned half of that. Yeah, see, he went off travelling, and just before he went, I'd noticed that, like Elon Musk was irritating me. We did a print for Dario Cellis called Capitalism Creates Cunts. And Dario had said to us, You do realise that you can't make a print that says this and then take a fee from it because you're part of capitalism. And I said, fine, let's give the money away to the shelter or to the trussel trust, or let's just do it, run it for a week and say you just wanted to make it. I think always as an artist, you have to feed yourself, so it's always nice to Yeah, of course. I just don't want to be a hypocrite. So Darius said, You're a hypocrite by doing it. I was like, okay, give the money away then. So we did that. Can I just start? So there's a moment in where you you did some other bits that weren't prints, and we spoke about it, and you called it your sort of democratic art. And you started doing a bit more merchandise-based stuff. Yeah, I've listened to a few podcasts because it's like Dave Wonegre does great podcasts, so if you get the chance to interview him, you should. Because he's just hear that hackney, Dave. We're coming for you. Yeah. And he'll do it as well, probably. But yeah, let's tune to this podcast called The Clean Break by Matt Gondek, who's this American artist. He's been running the podcast till 2017. He'd done a hundred episodes, interviewing artists. It'd become Groundhog Day for him. So he stopped doing it, had a break. And then when he came back, he'd met this guy who ran a gallery. And he wanted to do this show about introducing the emerging artists into the process of working with galleries. So he'd do a 30-minute podcast about how you should price your art. Yeah, finances, social media, leveraging, those sorts of things. Yeah, so it would be one episode about working with galleries, how it works that they open their address book to you, and there's this really symbiotic triangle of relationships between you and their clients, and you and your followers go into the gallery and they're working in equilibrium. So that'd be one show, and there'd be another show about merchandise. Like one gallery told us not to do merchandise because it'll affect your art sales. But it's if it's a revenue stream that can bring in 20% of your annual income. Is that a snobbery thing then? It's not very fine art to do merchandise. Well, it's strange as well, because I'm not sure how we fit into a gallery template anymore. But that's another complete coldie sack to go down. So, what did you do when you you're looking at merchandise and you're being warned off it? We'd done t-shirts in the past when I'd run Blanca. You'd print 15 small, 20 mediums, 20 large, and 15 excels. And all your mediums allowed it to sell, and you'd be left with dead stock. Yeah. But by this time, the print-on-demand module, you can now do it with t-shirts. You can put a t-shirt online, um, as customer orders, and one garment gets produced and shipped to them. Yeah. You can integrate it into your website, but you don't even have to just put an address label on it. So that Groundhog day I'd had with print processes, packing stuff. I was like, this is great because there's no company that just does the fulfillment. They make the garment, you take the money from your website, you pay them a fraction of the money. And this was all from listening to Matt Condek podcast of just doing it. So, like just random ideas. That does this idea work? How do I test it? Just as a slogan on a t-shirt, it's just instantly, does it work? Is there something about that as well? Like some of the work you're producing that is, shall we say, quite politically charged one way or the other? That's something that could be potentially quite divisive as a print on a wall for everybody to see, but as a t-shirt or something else, it's just it's not art, quote unquote, shall we say? Well, I don't know, but it's strange because billboards are just massive canvases in the street, which unfortunately is run by capitalism. So you get this message force fed to you that nobody asked if they wanted to see it. So I don't want to see McDonald's advert force fed to me all the time. And banks is great for subverting that. Street art's great for pasting over a billboard. But like t-shirts and walking billboards, it's just they're just blank canvases that you can repurpose. And I don't know, it's just like I don't know. I just want to go back to the fact that when we spoke about it, you described it as that slightly more democratic art. It's a bit more for the people. Everybody can have a tea towel or a t-shirt or a mug or something like that. The merchandise element's a bit more of the people. It's strange. So it's as an artist and stuff, you have to feed yourself. And I've been running it for six years, and I've not paid myself a salary in six years. Every all the money gets recycled back into making the next thing in the hyper. So I would also be on this price of trying to scale up. How do you make work that's more expensive? So you try and go down this thing of chasing this dream of making more money out of it, and then everybody to do it is to scale up. And somebody called me a hypocrite for doing that. I was like, you do realise that I've not I like, I have to pay myself a salary. Like, why are you calling me a hypocrite? Because it's like a lot of the stuff we do for charity, we make no profit from it, or we give half the profits away. We're always trying to raise money for homeless people or for mental health because it's part of our message. And you know, we're doing the train spotting show, 30-year anniversary in February, and we're working with a big issue. And I was like, and I've not paid myself a salary in yeah, so it's not a bit difficult for people to say you're cashing in on the old capitalist thing if you haven't paid yourself a salary for six years. Yeah, and you go to exhibition and stuff, and people are selling stuff for thousands. It's great, but it's if you take a step back away from that and you look at Banksy when he started or Shepherd Fairwriter Bay, their work's very democratic because it's really affordably priced. They weren't trying to become artists in the sense of I think Banksy wanted to sell his work for£50,000. I think he'd rather be selling£75 prints because he's a socialist or he's got a social mess, it's the market that forces the price to be that. And it's often with people like Banksy, it's that after event, isn't it? People buy the work and then inflate the prices, and it's nothing to do with him by that time, is it? It's all the smoke and mirrors, isn't it? Of course. And it's people who collect as well, it's just like uh buying it as an investment piece. It's like, why are you buying it as a buy it because you like it? Yeah. Yeah, it's like the it's the balloon girl image. It's like in the nighties they couldn't, galleries couldn't get rid of that image, and then they shred it, and it's there's like it becomes part of the the P. T. Barnum magic effect of that happens with banks. Clever though. Yeah, yeah, very clever. So I just realized the fact that just make stuff affordable, make it democratic. It's just like why try and push the price, just make stuff and don't think about that. So we'd made the kink stickers, the kinky slaps. And by this time, the amazing response, it just went whoosh. I don't use TikTok anymore because I find it idiom. But we did a post on TikTok and it exploded. And it was just all of the stickers of the Tory politician. And it was something that we never would have made unless Dave had laughed at us and gone, that's fucking brilliant. So it was like encouraged us to push the idea over the line, which was great. So it was the general election that was coming up, and Dave had asked us to do a show in his gallery. He'd now taken over the gallery that the person had left, and he was doing a show about I think it was the London Mayor. He said, I wanted to encourage people because the footfall for people turning out for the election had been really low, the previous election. So encouraging people to engage with politics more. So he did a show about that. I'd worked out what we want to make for the print, and I was sitting in a cafe reading. The Guardian. And I saw an image of Vishisunak carrying two burgers after lockdown from COVID. And it was just said, eat out to help out. And after 14 years of the Tories, I just spoke the word eat for vote, vote out to help out. And my brain just went, That's a brilliant slogan. Self-praise is no crazy. Do that. And we just did it. And I made a tea towel. Like tea towels are just like they're£15 item. So with a tea towel, it's just like a thing that dangles off of it's art that's on a piece of fabric, but it's still a piece of art. Yeah, a bit like that t-shirt thing, is it's a bit more throwaway, isn't it? It's like, and if someone doesn't like it, you probably just draw anything with it. It goes back to the thing, why would you pay for£30 for an image of cunt on your wall? It's like, you know, the the the vote out to help out thing had images of 30 politicians, and it's just like 30 cunt. Yeah, exactly. So it started out as a tea towel, but we put the stickers onto a sheet of papers and then we did it as an art print as well. And I was like making this like nobody's gonna want it. And it just they just sold out. But it was really nice because like we made a tea towel and we printed a hundred of them. We went back to the format of physically printed stock and holding stock, paid£300 to make£100 tea towels, and then sold them, and they just sold out. And we had to we're like can have another£300. Well, the the the company that printed them delivered them, and I was like, the day that they turned up going, they've sold out. How can they sold out? We've only just sold them. Because we're like, we pre-sold them.

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Seven.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:08

Yeah. So it was like, and then in the space of six weeks, we manufactured 700 tea towels. Really? Yeah. Again, that democratic art, it's so much more accessible. Yeah. And it was because you're not selling through galleries. Gallery is the traditional format is they take 50% to give you 50%. We just found that we had brought found this market where we're selling our own work and not relying on the galleries so much. And some of the galleries took them. And the political edge is starting to come through. You're finding a sort of almost niche of some sort, aren't you? It's you've described it as using your art to call out cunts. Yeah, there's no there's no filter. If you're a cunt, you you're fair game, essentially. Well, if you're always trying to find your art or the voice or what motivates you, what makes you authentic on the thing. And I've always had this thing where I'll get involved in these really stupid arguments with people who are way bigger than me because they're bullies. And I've always just think, what the fuck am I doing here? I'm gonna get my head punched off my shoulders by this person who's been a bully. But in the sense of if you believe it, you want to get that sense of justice for yourself, essentially, or your voice across, like you say.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:15

Yeah.

Vote Out To Help Out: Going Viral

SPEAKER_00 1:03:15

I did actually interrupt you, sorry. You were gonna tell me about when Jack was travelling and then Elon Musk was annoying. Oh, yeah, yeah, so that's quite a pivotal part, isn't it, of where we're going. Yeah, I just Musk had rebranded from Twitter to X, which is just this ludicrous move. And I was just looking at the logo thinking, if you put four arms on that X, it's a swastika. So I'd spent about a week just fiddling around with it as a piece of graphic design as a as a logo and a symbol. And he was hideous to work on because it's really triggering looking at that kind of language and stuff. So I'd made it. I was like, wow, but that's just so toxic. And I showed it to Jack and he went, That's a genius observation, but you do realise you can't do anything with it. I said, Yeah, completely. We're on the same page for once. Yeah. Um well it's fuck off. Yeah, I was like, you can't tell me how a swastika is in any format, whether you're trying to be ironic, satirical, comedic, sarcastic, whatever. Yeah. He just said you can't post it on your grid. I was like, 100%, I'd reached that conclusion myself. And then off he went to travel around Thailand, which he'd saved for and done all this stuff, and then we turned the news off one day, and Elon Musk had done the Nazis loot. But Trump didn't say anything about it, and it's just like, you know, it's just that thing if there are ten people sitting down at a table and the Nazi sits down with them and nobody leaves, there are 11 Nazis at that table. So it was just they're all guilty by association because they don't call it out. So we'd done I'd done the logo, and Jack just texted from Thailand saying, Dad, make the post. And I was just like, But when life gives you Elons, you know, it's just some fascists, you just have to do something about it. So we just posted and we we retouched Elon making the nuts, just lew it in front of the logo and said it made sense. Didn't look like we were right wing pro-fascist nutters. And again, it just it took off. And then Did that contribute to some of your social media and stuff? Well, it's funny, isn't it? You've had a few moments that have contributed to the big rise, right? Well, I think with the vote out to help out thing, we were very lucky because Phil Jupiter's cousin very kindly bought him a tea towel for his 62nd birthday. And I just woke up one morning and it said Phil Jupiter had followed you. I was like, what the fuck's happening? And then I would send me a photograph of him holding up with a tea towel. So I just messaged him saying, What the fuck's happening? Can I use that photograph on my social media to promote the tea towels? And he went, It's too late, I've already posted it to my grid. So it was just, you know, it was like awesome. And like that day was the first time it properly skyrocketed. I was like, like social media just started to work.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:52

Yeah.

Authenticity Over Algorithms

SPEAKER_00 1:05:53

We had like a massive spike in followers and contributed to a lot of sales that week. We did A naught posters. So we made posters. I'd got into fly posting. We'd been introduced to a friend who said, Can you help us get these fly posters up so we can do a a campaign during the election? So we offered a guy called Savant. He's become like a really good friend and he's helped us with the Third Reich stuff. But he showed us how to paste that, do it, and then that blew up as well. It's like I'd like to. You could have started to paste up the the kinky slaps as the A1 then. Yeah, we'd made an A we'd made an A naught version of it. So we'd done the we'd done the slaps in the background and just smashed the word vote out help out over the top. It's weird. I knew that year there was a general election coming in in October. So I thought you've got to be ready with political stuff. And we'd done the show with Dave the year earlier because of the London elections. So I thought you've got you've got to be ready to go on the bang of the bee, the B of the Bang. As soon as the gun goes off, you've got to be ready. So they were printed and ready to go. I think I'd done the teeth graphic, and I thought, do I make these or do I wait till October? So I'd I'd well randomly karma kicked in because I'd I thought fuck it, I'll just make them because I like them. They're funny, they make me laugh. So I'd paid for them to be printed and they were shipping back to me. And soon I called the general election early, like that week. So I was like so ready to go. And we found this company that does Aug poster printing for relatively cheaply. So I sent off some of those, thinking I'll get them pasted up and it's marketing for the T Towel. And I thought, well, it've cost me£300 to print these posters and I've got loads of them. So I'll shelve 10 of them on the website, see if they sell, and just like overnight they're just gone. Just gone. So I'd put another ten, or they just went as well. So it's like shit. It was like a really epiphany moment where I'd made something, but I hadn't made it with the idea of why am I making this? I'm making it because it's something I'm angry about. It frustrates me. And it's frustrated me because I grew up under the period of Thatcher. And it seems like that is quite a fuel, isn't it? Yeah. Anger is an energy, is the to quote John Lyden from Public Image Limited. So I just realized that when you make stuff in that flow state of being angry about it, and you just make it, and it's an afterthought about oh shit, I should put some of those on my website on the off chance that somebody makes it. It becomes your most authentic voice. It's your most authentic because it's you just ranting in the kind of in a way that you're passionate about. Yeah. So communicating that visually, right? Yeah. So with the we did all of that and it was big. And it was like this is really nice. Kind of followers had increased, social media content was doing really well. But I'd become I've been doing it for nine months, and you get bored and repeating yourself. But you have to on social media. Because I learned again, somebody just said, because you post something today and it doesn't get any engagement. So the algorithm might have just kicked in. Yeah, tomorrow, those people that weren't online yesterday. So it depends. I think it's just like you can't overthink these things. You know what I mean? It's just like one platform will do that. And it's all such a fucking time thief as well. It's just like you're like, oh, how do I feel? It feels much more pure you just making the work that say makes you angry that you want to communicate the and then you go, I'll put it out there, it's for the world to decide now. Well, it's like some of the posts that we've had, I'll spend ages composing the post, and well, for whatever reason, Instagram will crash, my phone storage will be full. It won't make the post. And I'm like trying to get somewhere. And it's like when we did the Rike stuff, I literally was compiling a carousel of 10 or 20 images and it kept on crashing and it wouldn't fucking post. And I thought I need to drop my son off at the cafe where he works. And I literally got a 15-second clip of a video I didn't want to post. And I just I need to post it, posted it, but just blurted out some shit text and didn't overthink it and just well, it seems like a good point. Should we should we go down the third right now? Yeah, but it's just that thing about being authentic. It's like that was the poster blew up for us when we did the third right stuff, because I didn't overthink it. It's just like sometimes when you just do. Yeah, just act, just go, just let it go, let the universe decide what it will be. So come on then, Blam. So the Third Reich stuff. So we'd done the kinky slap stuff, and I've become bored of it. I'm sick of looking at them. I needed a break. So I I just retired it. And Jack's like, we need to re-release these, we need to drop these again. I'm like, no, I'm fucking sick of looking at them. I can't, I can't do it. And then we'd done the musk image. And then Trump becomes president, and the first person he decides to sit down with, how of all the leaders he could possibly sit down with, isn't Letni I, who's a wanted war criminal, and he's got other things going on in his past that he's not faced trial for. I was like, why have you sat down? Why is so I got really furious. So I did, I just thought, I just made the kinky slaps again, and it was just like, what's your kink? And it was just images of Trump with the Elon Laugh X logo, the swastika on his lapel, and his his kink was Hitler sitting down with war criminals, genocide. It was just and again, you just he just went moving. Was that an easy one for you to come up with? He was just there. The ideas for the sort of because I remember you saying you came up with like sort of 50 odd ideas for Trump in quite a short space of time, right? Yeah, it had taken us a couple of months to do 40 Tories because there's like the drip feed of the slow stupidity that they kept on saying about turnips and date rate drugs, and oh, there's another jam I can do. And so it's just but like I was and like there were so many things about Trump about the thing he said about windmills and paper exploding straws. I just literally I did about 48 in two hours. Because he says so many stupid things, it's just it's low-hanging fruit. So, how did that go from the Trump version of Kinky Slaps to what eventually became Well he just went rich again and Jack, we need to release these and want to sell them. I'm just bored of because you've got to make all the stickers and you've got to pack them all up and ship them all out, and it's just Again, you've done that. Yeah. Fulfillment's alright if you're perhaps not doing the same product over and over again. It's strange as an artist, I went through a period of like people saying, Why aren't you shipping all of your stuff out? And because of the print process experience, I was just really happy to work with galleries and them to take on all the work. By this point, I'd had a five-year break from it. I was like, Yeah, but like when galleries do that, they also take half the profit. And like people saying you're stupid for not selling it direct. I'm just doing it direct. But because of my triggers with the ground take that I think we're doing it, I just needed a break from it. By this point, I had a break from it. And I was enjoying doing it again. I was thinking, yeah, and sometimes you'd show the idea, so gallery and go, no, we're not interested. So you therefore got to make it yourself and ship it yourself. If you believe in it, yeah. If you believe in it, I'll say it doesn't happen. It's just become really easy to do. And because we were flyposting stuff up, we thought, oh, let's make uh my stupid brain works. I'd made an image of Elon Musk in a SS officer's uniform with loads of insignia and thing, and it hadn't taken me very long to do it, just came together really easily in Photoshop, and it just looked amazing and mildly funny without it saying anything. And I showed it to an old friend I've been friends with him since I was 14, and he just said Moscellini. I was like, brilliant. So we released Moscellini and I printed them out, A no, and we pasted them up around Shoreditch around Brick Lane, and it just stopped the street. Was it solely the Elon Musk when he did at that point? Yeah, it's on Princeton Street next to a really beautiful piece by stick. And is this the one that still hasn't been pasted over? Been pasted around, and people have put rouge on his lips and made him look funnier, but it's it's still there today. It's weird because as a paste-up artist, you're used to it being, well, that's going to be pasted over, ripped off, yeah, whatever, gone tomorrow. Like we say, the tomorrow's chip paper. Well, as long as you don't go over murals, you have to be quite respectful of the art of other artists. Of people's artists, yeah, not which is something we learned early on. So the Elon paste up goes up, and like you say, it's sort of The response was just it like literally stopped the street and people coming up and thank you for making that. I'm like Really? Yeah. And then are you on the thing of oh, how can I expand this idea more? It's strange, isn't it? Because it's like I've when I listen to your podcast, there's a really beautiful moment as your interview with Carl Stimson, and he says, What's the point of making art if nobody sees it? Then if you have hindsight. It became a performance way, like you're making art in a studio and you're taking snapshots of it. But there's something about the art of pasting up, the fact that it's oh, it's a bit risky and it's a bit legal and it's it's on the street. People get infuriated, going, Oh, you've vandalising something. It's like actually not. I'm sticking a sheet of paper over a sheet of paper that already exists on a building. So I'm just that if you've got a jet washer on it, you'd probably peel it off anyway, wouldn't you? Yeah. But anyhow, so it's weird that it's still intact. But now that we've said it, so we'd probably tag it over just to say that they've destroyed it. Yeah, quite possibly. Yeah. So anyhow, we made that, and it's the first time I'd made something that went out of type on it. I was like, Whoa, it's like I made an image. I don't really work photographically. I should make some more of these, because there's lots of cunts out there. So come on then, what was the list of people that you added to the list? Well, like Trump's obvious, isn't it? It's really weird. I didn't start with Trump. I worked my way up to him. I found this worry in Atlanta site about authentic costume. So it does GI soldiers, British soldiers clearly SS or. It's weird, isn't it? I don't think people who worked in the trenches or foot soldiers necessarily knew what they were doing. It wasn't until they discovered Auschwitz years later, they knew the horrors of what was going on. So the German soldiers thought they were fighting for their country and doing the right thing. Well, I go back to this. Have you seen Jojo Rabbit, the film?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:46

Yeah.

Mussolini To “Turd Reich”: Concept Lands

Paste-Ups, Billboards And Free Downloads

SPEAKER_00 1:15:47

And until I saw that, I in my brain I couldn't even think that the Nazi youth, the Germans thought they were the good guys. Yeah. Yeah. It's that Michelin Webb skirt with the skulls on the helmets. Yeah, are we the bad guys? Are we the bad guys? Yeah, it's great. And um, so yeah, just I'd found these images, authentic images of proper working people who were serving their country in their military uniform. And I took Farage's face and it just literally dropped. It took me ten minutes to the perfect fit you found to the retouch. And I think it was part of the Desert Corp. It was a desert corp image of one of the soldiers with Farage's face on it. It just clipped, it just fell into pace. But it looked weirdly camp and weirdly funny, like a carry-on movie, like a dad's army sketch. It was just this real kind of a subtle hint of humour in it that you don't expect comedy, yeah. You don't expect from looking at images of evil Nazis. And then I did Vance, and the Vance one just clipped. That's the JD Vance, the vice president, right? Yeah. Yeah. And at this stage, I also thought about parodying my own work from the Nighters. I thought about revisiting train spotting and calling it cunt stopping was the original idea. So sorry, to what to mimic the original train spotting poster with their own individual characters, sort of thing. Yeah. So who did we have? We had Farage, Vance, and we had um Farage, Vance, Trump, Musk, Trump, Lanyahoo, and Putin. Right. All white evil men. But could fit the train spotting posters quite nicely, right? Yeah. So I've done all six of them. So I was trying to design posters with captions on them, like the train spotting characters I'd had. It just didn't work. I was like you're moving things around on screen, trying to get them to fit and trying to find a solution. So you if in doubt, reverse it out, start again, back to a blank canvas and do it, and you build it back up. And I just took the type off to just move it around. I was like, whoa, it doesn't need any type on it. It's like the message is so strong. Yes. People get it. If it ain't broken, don't fix it. The mask image didn't have any type on it. We posted it and it just went insane. It just we literally stopped the street in Brick Lane. And it was that sorry, you posted you fly posted it first everywhere before you released it on social media or anything like that one. I did a couple of teaser images and we've spent ages trying to get Trump was really hard to get it to work, it just didn't work. So I'd spent a long time touching Trump because he was the most important one. You spent a long time touching Trump. I never thought I'd hear you say that much, but crossed over to Jeffrey Epstein territory. Um we do want this podcast to go out though. So the if anyone's listening to all our keywords that we're saying, please don't judge us. We're both blocked from travelling to America. I think so, yeah. So you remove the type and you were fly posting this piece. Yeah, so I did not think I'm gonna have pay for the prints to go out and I'll send them off, paste them up. I was like, oh fuck it, I'll put a set of six of them on the website. Like I've had this thing about I'm really precious about print, it shouldn't be folded. I collect movie posters, and the old 70s movie posters used to get sent out in envelopes, folded. So I was like, I'd ordered these posters and they'd come folded flat. I was like, nobody's gonna want to buy these because you wouldn't buy a piece of art that was folded. But anyhow, that's how they shipped them to them because they're just cheap, affordable prints. It's just again. So I just put them on at a fair price, you know. I mean, it was just but was this again because you'd sin the buzz that the the paste-ups had got? No, again, it was just one of those things thinking, oh fuck, how do I finance making stuff that's just for pacing up in the street? It'd be nice to cover your costs and recoup some money for it. Because it was never supposed to be that commercial thing, was it? It was just something I was angry or frustrated about and wanted to vent about. So I'd made them. And again, it goes back to that's its purest, most authentic form when you're in that flow state of just doing that. So I was just like, oh shit, I should cover my costs of seeing if Eddie wants to buy these ridiculous images. So I put a set of six of them on the website for 90 quid. And I think we'd made 20 sets of posters to print up, and they just went, they just disappeared overnight. And it was just like, I'll put the other ten on and re-order some more. We'd planned it, and it's really with Carl Stimson and Savant about helping me get them up. So you want to put them up and leave as quickly as you can. Be quick, have a team, get them up on the street and get gone. Yeah, get to get them and go. What happened on that day though? I just stopped the street. We put the first one up, and it was like a few people stopped. And then you I could hear people going, Oh, which one's coming next? It was almost like a performance of what are they gonna do? And they're putting another one up and there were just murmurs. I mean, we had a couple of people who didn't understand it because it's quite you first see it for the first time. These guys pro fascist or anti fascist? Because it takes a while for people's brains to just go, oh, it's definitely anti-fascist. But some people do completely misinterpret, think you're being pro. Did you already come up with the name at that point? No. Because it didn't need a name. It was just Yeah, you removed the type and everything, hadn't you? Yeah. And it just worked. They didn't need character names. They just worked. It said a message with although it confused a few people. So it just stuck the street. And I I try and film stuff to post it to social media. I was trying to do a carousel and said earlier imaging my phone kept stalling. So I literally did a throwaway post, and that was the one that I went to the cafe and my phone's just alerts all over it. Really? Like people sharing to their story. Like instantly, like there's 99, 99 people have shared this to their story, and three and a half thousand people followed us that day. Wow. From a throwaway post that I wouldn't have overthought. And then I guess also there's a knock-on effect from people, the age we're in. People watching you, Carl and Savant, put the work up, yeah, would have been filming it on their phones, taking pictures themselves, tagging the location. Suddenly you're like, oh. Well, even the day we posted them up, I said to Carl, what do you want to post up today? He just said, I've not brought anything. He said, This is far more important than any of us. What you just said though was like I was like, it's unbelievable the belief he's got in something that I've made. But let's face it, it did, didn't it? It was picked up by the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Guardian, celebrities, bands. It was pure viral. Well, it's strange as well, because it was we'd also copied the template that Shepard Ferrari invented with the obey poster, they've given it away for free. Because you guys did a free download that anybody could do, didn't it? Yeah. How many times have been downloaded so far? Over a hundred thousand times. Over a hundred thousand times. Or just maybe just under. But we're allowed to scale up out of it. A hundred thousand downloads of your work. Yeah. So it's just insane. What was that decision though? You just wanted to get the images out? Well, if you want to get that if you want to get the message out there and you just put it on your website and sell it as a product, a few people will buy it. You give it away. Yeah, you give it away for free. You hopefully create a tidal wave of people who are angry about stuff. You want to use that is definitely what happened, isn't it? Yeah, it's weird as well because I showed them to Phil Jupiter, so I'd become kind of friends with on social media. Heavens for a tea towel. From a tea towel, yeah. So he was just he just instantly sent back this message saying the turd right. And I'd been trying to work out a way that I could get because there were six individual prints this way, and I was trying to combine them into one print, but I couldn't work out what the type was. And then Phil just went the turd right and it made me spit my drink out. I thought that's a genius. I credited. Well, that's the response you wanted from your art, isn't it? To get other people to spit their drinks out. So if you spat your drink out, it must have been a quite a bit. Because I think that's perfect. So I just said to him, Can I steal that? And he went, Oh, I'd love for you to use it. He's the co-author of that work. Thank you, Phil. Yeah, thank you. Although he said that he'd heard that phrase before and he'd know, so he definitely didn't invent it. So he's very honest about his involvement in it, but yeah. Yeah, so we put down it. On stories, you can put type on things. So I'd done a throwaway layout of the six posters which we were selling on the website and just put some type on it. And that story just got an insane amount of response. I was just like, oh fuck, maybe this is a commercial thing. So we did it as all six of them on one print. And I I wanted to deliver some artwork to Atom Gallery to Mark and Richard, who we've worked with for years now. And uh because I was a graphic designer and I was solving other people's problems, and now I'm an artist. I have this real trigger that I don't like being told what to do or where to go with my stuff, because I'm not making it for you, I'm making it for my own mental health. And that seems to have been the stuff that's worse. When you make stuff that you find funny that you just want to make and put out there, that's the stuff that's been the other people get it because they're angry about it and frustrated about it too. So cross-pollinates or whatever. So we're saying to Richard, I'm getting fed up with the internet shouting at me, social media shouting at me, telling to make this into a t-shirt. I'll make whatever the fuck I want to make. Digging your heels in. Yeah, just being peeking around and belligerent and whatever. And Richard went, Blabbing, you fucking idiot. You've created a monster, just make some t-shirts for fuck's sake. You never know when that wave's gonna crash, do you? No. Yeah, and that was another thing, so it'll be over someday soon. You won't be able to capitalise on it. So I was just and it was that was the other thing. I was like, I don't want to make money out of selling fucking t-shirts of these monsters. But like you say, you have got to, as an artist, the creative, got to survive. Yeah. You're not gonna be begrudged that. I didn't think that anybody'd want to fucking wear it as a t-shirt either. You know what I mean? It's like, why would you want an image of walking around with t-shirts of these monsters on your chest? But it doesn't cost anything to do. So I left and I uploaded it onto Princel, which is the on-demand t-shirt manufacturers we use. Texted Richard going, fucking hell, good advice, mate. We've sold a hundred. This is 24 hours later. It just again, it just went woo. There's a really lovely thing in there. Rick, there's a Rick Rubin book. Is it called The Way of Seeing? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. I should know that because I've read it twice. Well, it's strange because I bought it for Jack. Because I'd just seen loads of snippets for it and stuff, and then we'd lost the book. So I bought it for him again for him to go traveling with, and he didn't take it with him. And I really struggled with reading that, so I listened to loads of audio books. So I bought it again on audio so I can listen to it when I'm driving around delivering stuff. And there's this really lovely section where it says about when you're making art, if during the process of making it, you start to think about how can I make money from this? You should just stop. You should stop making the piece because you've contaminated the piece. And it's again just that thing sometimes you turn the radio on with the Sarah Pasco message about sarcasm. It's just that you go, Oh fuck, that's really the good shit sticks. Yeah. That's what I call it. It's like when you hear something, you're like, oh my god, that was a four-hour podcast, but I remember this one quote, and that's the importance that I need to take away. It'd just been, I hadn't thought about making it as a print. I just something had made us frustrate me and wanted to make it as a in-flow state. So it just went off. And then some of I know you're not a capitalist, but didn't you make the previous year's takings in the space of a week or something? Yeah, so we'd like we'd we didn't take much in 2024 via our shop. We'd made more through galleries. But that single we we took our entire takings from the previous show in that wow, I think it was six days or something. Really? Yeah. And it was just that's something you have to take seriously as well, isn't it? Yeah, and it's it's weird as well because you're always trying to make something that takes off. And it takes off and you go, oh fuck. But this brings me to perhaps my next point, mate, is do you then feel like obligation to continue to create that sort of work because that's what's sold, that's what you've done well, you know? No, because it goes back to the Rick Rubin thing that you can't be as soon as you try to, if you try to emulate that again, it won't work. But what I'm saying is, like you say, you you're riding this wave, and it'd be very easy for you to just pitch on that wave and go, how do we push this? How do we milk the most out of it? That sounds really horrible. Yeah, it does, it does, yeah. And I know that's not what I try and mean, but like you say, as an artist, we've got to survive. Well, I was listening to, I can't remember, I was listening to you last night. Oh, it was a thing about the Ramones about um them making money and by this stage fucking hate each other and they hate working with each other because one of them just wants to make money out of it, and the other ones, no, we didn't get in this to make money. We made this to because it was fun and we wanted to make art. And that should always be your driving point.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:22

Yeah.

Merch, Money And Rick Rubin’s Rule

Not Getting Pigeon-Holed

Full Circle: Train Spotters Exhibition

SPEAKER_00 1:28:22

Because as soon as you start thinking, this is back to the room thing. As soon as you start thinking about money, you fucking kill it because it's just not authentic. You've just introduced this thing in your message, which just okay. Take the money out of it. I guess what I'm trying to say is are you then pigeon-holed into that quote unquote political art? Yeah, a little bit. Whereas we go back to your older stuff, it was fun stuff, nice cop, nice pussy. And people can see that on your website, some of the older style work before this political voice comes in. Did you feel pigeon-holed in a way? No, no, no, not really. I think it's made me realise because it's as an artist, always like, this what is my voice? And I think a lot of artists find their voice and keep on repeating it to the point it's just it becomes so repetitive, it's just like do something new. And it's so I think it's yeah, I don't know. I don't I think I'll always be political because my influences have always been punk punk two-tone specials and like Basquiat, Banksy, they've always had an undercurrent. So there'll always be an element of your work that's there to call out cunts. Yeah, yeah, cunts need telling. Cunts need telling, yeah. And that sort of with the Terd Reich poster, which is a bit of a parody on the train spotting. Yeah. Does that then bring us full circle to something that's coming up now, which is the 30-year anniversary of train spotting? Yeah, yeah. Should we go into that and should we talk about what's going on, you Atom Gallery, a group of artists? Yeah. So it was weird. I by this time I'd walked away from doing graphic design. It just triggered me. Didn't want to do it. I'm like 2023. I said I'm gonna do art full time, and I'd I've got a 23 is my lucky number. So I decided to say yes to everything. And we did quite a brave move. Yeah, yes, because I've my I'm such a cynic, and I've like, no, that sounds like shit, I don't want to do it. And for a man that claims he's got some broken filters, saying yes to everything is that a bit dangerous? There's only one thing that we said no to, like, yeah, and it's I still regret saying no to it, but anyhow. Um we got asked to do Sean the Sheep in Brighton. What do you mean you got asked to do Sean the Sheep? They did 20 Sean the Sheep, 20 artists customized Sean the Sheep. Oh, like a sculpture. Yeah. That they put around the city. Yeah, and you pimp it in your voice. Why did you say why did you sign up to pimp Sean the Sheep in a grow-apart voice? Just I didn't we couldn't work out how you introduced sarcasm into uh Sean the Sheep. He's quite uh you know, he's like last stuff's quite squary and potty-mouthed and Sean's gonna be children visitors. We're gonna have to turn ourselves down. We came up with a brilliant idea of calling it Sean in two, and we were just gonna do a Damien Hurst parody where we cut the sheep in half and put it into formaldehyde tank. Brilliant and have one bit in the start of the trail and one bit at the end of the trail, and we were gonna fill it in with rubber ducks or something stupid. But like the there was only a thousand pounds to produce the sculpture. We couldn't have done it for the thing, but anyhow. So that was the thing you said no to. Everything else you were saying yes to. It's just funny, isn't it? To talk about the one thing you said no to rather than all the amazing things you did. Yeah, of course. Because there was some stuff like we did urban art fair in Brixton. I'll come back to your question in a minute because I've completely deviated from what you said. Yeah, we did urban art fair in Brixton because another artist said do this. And I went, that sounds popular shit. Because it's it's just on the pavement in the street of you've got railings and you put buttons on it and you put a screw in and you hang your artwork off it. And I was just like, nah, that's not gonna work. But somebody said it's amazing, and we trust them, so we'll give it a go. And it was amazing, it's one of the best art fairs that we do with go back, and it isn't an amazing event. All the people, Brixton come out, and we've always done really well there, and it's fun, which is always have fun, isn't it? Yeah. So I'd said yes to everything. We'd started doing it full-time, and it'd been fantastic. By this point, I was like, I don't want to do graphic design anymore. It massively puts me in a black mood. So I'm just not gonna solve other people's problems anymore. And I got an email from the Criterion Collection, they were a company in New York who released DVDs, prestige format DVDs, like limited edition re-releases, but really nicely packaged and really high-end art films. Okay. They're really beautiful email, which you don't get in design anymore. They put their cards on the table saying, we want you to redesign Train Spoting to re-release it as a 4K Blu-ray edition. And here's the budget, which is the pit that design clients don't do anymore. They just like usually go, Oh, we'd like you to do it, we've got no budget. They put the cards on the table and said exactly what they wanted to spend on it. I was like, Yeah, okay, that's okay money. Um, so I'd I said, can we do a little meeting and discussion about it? And I said, Can I involve Lorenzo? And I said, There's loads of really good photography that Lorenzo is because we've only used five photographs, and there's tons of yeah, great photographs we can explore. And I'm still friends with Lorenzo. We can ask him if he can contribute. And like the initial meeting with them was just like, if we just release it and repackage it exactly how it was twenty-nine years ago, everybody's gone it, so why will they buy it? And I've moved on from what I was making 30 years ago. So can we twist it and spin it and do it in the in the right language and the DNA of the film? But and they went, yeah, 100%. So we got permission to like special packaging, special print, use Lorenzo's image, like a decent budget. So it was like it was my swan song to design. It was like, and I almost said to them, I don't want to do it, because I don't want to open that kind of worms and Pandora's box and my brain being fried by doing denied. But I also didn't want somebody else to do it and fuck it up. And I just thought, what a really nice thing to do as the last piece of design I ever do. And it just went really well. It was really nice to do visit and to twist it and respin it. And from doing it, Lorenzo said we should do something next year for the 30th anniversary. It took me four months to agree to do it because I just didn't want to do it. It's that mantra of don't look behind you, you're not going that way. It's gone, yeah. Yeah. So it's in the past, I'm making the Turtrike stuff, and it's like so I'm surfing this really amazing wave now. I don't want to get off this wave and stop having fun and enjoying this. To what made you decide to jump off the wave for a bit? Because it just my brain just percolates and thinks about stuff all of the time from overthinking it. How do you do it? Because it is something that would have been nice to revisit, but it's just I don't want it to be a reheated dinner and a microwave of something that you know. But yeah, it is so iconic, isn't it? So like say you don't want to let someone else get their hands on it and fuck it up. Yeah. And I was for a meeting with Dave Bonigredi about something. Uncle Dave again. Uncle Dave again. Just um you're working with the wrong people and blah. I was like, yeah, you're right. And I was like, I had proper burnout as well from doing this thing. Sorry, burnout from doing the third right? No, burnout from doing it. A previous end, which had just hadn't worked out. And yeah, we'll leave that one. Yeah, chasing capitalism, which is sounds triggering. Yeah, it was. So any other he said, No, you're right. I said just do it yourself, bang your own drum. Don't bang their drum. Because you're just making money from them and you're losing money from doing it and blah blah blah. So anyway, at the end of the meeting, I just said, Do you think I should do something with Train's book? Because I just I don't want to look back at something. And he went, Nobody would have that in their arsenal, their archive, and not celebrate it. He said, You're a moron for not wanting to do something about it. Again, is that just the fact that you were always too close to it and it hasn't got that Well, I think I got stuck from after doing it, the fact that oh I'm now I'm the big I am, I've made this amazing poster. You you just get stuck celebrating something you made, and the stuff that you're making just you have to forget about it. Yeah and just I always try and outdo myself. How can I make something better than I've ever made it? Which is an impossible thing to do, but at least it pushes your standard up there. And it was like the Third Reich stuff. It was the same thing, like we put it up in the street, how do we do something bigger with it? Well, we would make more of them, and we've gone from doing mascelline to doing six of them, and then it was like, Well, how do we make I joked? Oh, let's project it onto the moon, that would be quite cool. And then I'll once I've done that, I'll stop. But my thing was getting it up as a billboard. I wanted to get it up as a billboard, so we had help from people who acquired a sniper. So we put that up and I was like, okay, I feel like we've surfed that way now. I don't think I can go unless I've projected onto the moon, I can't go any bigger than that. And it was just like, what do I do next? This train spot thing's still hanging around, and Dave's positive if she thought, yeah, I should do it. But what I should do is not revisit it. I should just imagine that poster didn't happen, and somebody had been given the brief for the book, the soundtrack, the film, the hobby, the cultural period of the night is. Yeah. And just give it to 30 artists who are are friends and also artists who work you admire and respect, but you don't know them, but you'd like to work with them. Back to the blanker thing of curate curating something, and also working with a gallery who you trust, Atom, who are amazing. So I spoke to Lorenzo about it and said, I don't want to do it as a retrospective. Looking backwards, I just want to make a load of new artworks and celebrate it in a like remixes of what happened in the past, but not doing parodies of the poster. Although we have done one parody of the poster, because in the 90s I was received a card in the post from Joe Cornish from the Adam and Joe show. He'd done toy train spotting, he'd used uh glove puppets and a Childhood Toys as a train spotting parody, and sent me this really cheeky note saying, See you in court, we've taken your graphic and stolen it. And I kept it in a sketchbook for years. It always made me laugh and smile that he'd done it. And it was one of my favourite parodies. So I just texted him saying, Can we reprint it? And he very kindly gave us permission to reprint it. Cool. And also when we met for the signing, they said they didn't want to make any of the proceeds from it. So we went to see Atom Gallery. They wanted to donate their portion to charity. So we're giving the profits on the south to the big issue. Wow. And big issues have asked us to design the front cover for their February issue. You personally or one of the 30s? So which is cool. They have to park my I'm not a graphic designer anymore. And so yeah, it's nice to be asked to do a big issue front cover. So that's very cool. And just like you say, it meets your authenticity, it meets your voice, it's all aligned. Well, it's kind of it's like you're doing a show with 30 artists, you want it to be a success for them as much as you do for you and the gallery. Of course. So it's there isn't it's back to that thing of social media versus the press coverage you get in magazines. It's like having a cover for big issues, pretty big exposure for the show. Oh, it's massive. But also, like you say, that cross-pollination of 30 other artists with each one of those having a following. Yeah. It becomes a melting pot of yeah. This collectively, there's 36 artists doing it. I think they've all got 1.5 million followers on social media. Blimey. So yeah, that's just gets some. It's a pretty big collective. And obviously, we've just released the Creative No Ellen podcast, which are obviously going to propel people towards the train spotting exhibition at the Atom Gallery. Yeah. So the show's called Train Spotters. Train Spotters. Yeah. So it obviously gets the way of the fact that you're not just pushes it away from just being about the film. Yeah. Because it's the 30th anniversary in February. And are you excited to see that? Because presumably you don't know what all 36 artists are going to do. They're all going to do something different, something interesting. It's been really lovely because a few artists have sent me the things and said this is what we're making. Oh, right, okay. So it's just like we've got to see some of it already. And each one, they raise the bar over time. It's like you're blown away by the quality of them. It's just Does that affect the work that you then produce? Well, I've already I already worked out what I was doing. I've already worked out what I wanted to make. But after seeing some of the stuff other people have done. Are you still sticking with that idea? Yeah, because then you end up. Yeah. I suppose there's always an influence though, isn't there? When you see someone you go, God, that person's raised the bar. And my feelings now a little bit simplistic or whatever that might be, but you stick to your gun. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And everyone will be able to see that presumably on your social media when it all goes live. Yeah, well, there's stuff on there already, and Lorenzo's sharing it, and the gallery is sharing it. And the artist, um Lucy Pass has done this beautiful. Lucy Pass does these. She does these kind of unfinished paintings, so she just chooses a section to paint and just focuses on that detail and then leaves other details out. But she doesn't do it from portraits. So we asked her to do it and gave her access to the photography. She'd never done that before. Really? I was and then she does this post on her story of this really beautiful thing about how she's composed the piece, and it's been really challenging for her to do it, but she's had real fun making it. Which is it was in the brief. Like, please have fun making your piece. Sounds like it's pulled her out of her comfort zone. Yeah, but she's really enjoyed the process, and then she made a post about it, and she's had like thousands of engagement with it, which is really lovely to see. And I think that's really cool how we've gone full circle 30 years later from you being the graphic designer, art director of the original poster to now being an artist, yeah. Recreating work based on that iconic film image book from the 90s. Yeah, it's just weird to see people's reinterpretation of something you've made years ago that you've parked and moving away for. It's just lovely to see people who you're your heroes. Have you got any people taking part in the exhibition that perhaps weren't even alive when the film? Yeah. Um or they watched it. They would probably listen to the soundtrack and weren't allowed to watch the film because they're seven, but they heard more slipping on the radio or whatever. Classic. Lou Reed, all the other. It's a great soundtrack. It's strange because I asked them all for a bio so I could do a press release for a thing. And I just randomly decided to throw in the question, what are we doing in 1996? So yeah, like Stanley Donwood, he was working on the radio album OK Computer. Oh wow. So he's doing a re-edition of OK Computer in Orange. Well, I've been lucky enough to get my invite in for the opening of the show, so I can't wait to come down and see it. Excellent. Blam, what have we not spoken about that you think we should probably speak about? I don't know. I think we've covered everything. We've covered a lot, haven't we? Yeah. Apart from the train spot and stuff, what's next for you? Are you a planner? Have you got ideas moving forward, or are you just again riding the wave of life and seeing what ideas generate? Yes, I've been working on I've been working on other stuff, but when you create a show with 30 other artists, you kind of want it to be a success. So I've had loads of distractions your brain going, go make that, go make that. And if I can make it really quickly and just do a throwaway post on social and it can do stuff and doesn't take up loads of time. But I have to put all of my energy into making sure that this show works in February. Because this is you're curating it essentially, aren't you? It's your brain child, or is that the right word? Is it's your illegitimate love child between you, Irving Welsh, and Lorenzo, or something that's you've allowed out, so you feel like you've got more responsibility towards it potentially. I don't know, it's just weird. It's just a it's catch 22, isn't it? So don't look behind you not going that way. But once you've said you're doing it, you have to give it 110% or 110 billion percent. Yeah. So it's just uh And I think, as you say, I know it's probably got different connotations for you, but to go full circle from that 30 years later, I think it's a Yeah, but I'm really happy that I've done it because it does fit the mantra don't look behind you, you're not going that way because 37 people have just reimagined it and done something completely different and not followed the brand guidelines, you know. Yeah, that's perfect. Well, Blam, we do have a closing tradition on the Creative Nobelland podcast where we ask the guest on the podcast to give us some sort of quote that resonates with you, but also someone in your world, your network, that you think could be an interesting guest to come on a future episode of the Creative Nobel. So I'll hand that one over to you. You can do it in any order you like, mate. So I think the single advice or message that I've learned in the last year is make art like no one's watching. And it's just don't overthink. Just make try and get into some state where you're just making it because it's something that makes you happy. People who listen to the podcast will know that we've spoken about that idea before, yeah, and how that's something that's really resonating with me at the moment as well is make the art that no one sees because that's where you find the patterns, the ideas, the things that work for you, the voice, yeah, the artistic voice that you were talking about. Yeah, well, it's just like you know, it's that thing of you're not solving other people's problems, you're not trying to work out a solution for a client's problem. And it took me a while to to transition from graphic design to art. You can't just do it overnight. It takes a while to work out all this training that you've got and forget it and just it's like all the rules that you've got that you've learned, yeah, but now you've got the facility to break all those rules, right? Absolutely. Amazing. Yeah. And what about someone or God, it sounds like your network is vast, mate. So I would say we're doing a show in March, which celebrates Fifty Years of Punk, and it ties in with the 35th year anniversary of the big issue, and it's with Camden Open Air Gallery, and it's curated by Lucy Bryant's House of Lucy, who does these brilliant ceramic figurines. So I just love her work. She's just like a really fun person, and she's just got really good humour and satire in her work. But there's also like Dave Bunny, would it be great to interview? Well, we'll take a list, mate. Yeah, we don't want the Creative No Land podcast to run out of guests, so yeah. So Roscoe Britton, you should interview Roscoe Britton because he's just a beautifully Ivy share. He's like one of the funniest person people I know who just makes me laugh. He reminds me of my cousin Dan. And then Should we give Dan a mention? Because I know he's very important to you. Yeah, Dan. This is where some of the stuff around mental health comes in, right? Yeah, Dan was a family member. He was my wife's cousin who we just met, and he was just like a because it's the same with Carl, really. He's just like a brother from another mother. It's just just instantly got I'd say something stupid, which I'm quite good at, and he could still make me laugh even more by saying something even stupider. And he helped us build the house when we extended it. And he was a carpenter. But and it was just so funny to be on site with him because he'd just do the most outrageous thing. An electrician'd been working in the house, and then Charlie'd be running around naked doing something, buffoonery and stuff. So but sadly he took his own life um a couple of Christmases ago. But is that why the mental health stuff and with Jack obviously, is that why it's quite poignant to you? Yeah, because it's like when I was growing up, I'd like we just didn't talk about it. I watched the thing about Kathy Burke about things saying we didn't know what empathy was when we were growing up, and it's just there's so much problems now with mental health and Jack going through it. So he was horrible when we got the message that Dan had taken his own life. But um So yeah, it's and it's uh a lot of the stuff we do now, like he would have it Dan would have loved the third rake stuff. Because he was we were always sitting watching television slagging off Boris Johnson and he was a socialist. Similar, similar sense of humour. Well he's from Wales and his father's a like a plaid conry counsellor, so he's got very good working class roots. I just thought it was important because I we spoke previously to recording about Dan and the importance of him to you and to Jack. So I just wanted to make sure that you got him a mention. I don't want to Yeah, but it's like he's he lives on through our work, and it's like and then I meet Roscoe and he makes me laugh in the same way that Dan made me laugh. And then we met Florist, and he I got the same spark off him that so Florist is another artist. Well, so we've got three amazing suggestions, yeah. But also as well, I worked with Jack and Jack's now independently. He's not like a he's starting his career as an artist, he's trying to find his foot in with galleries and stuff. So I think it'd be interesting to interview. I think it'd be interesting to interview somebody who runs a gallery and curates a gallery, not just the artist. Yeah, I think that would that would be interesting. You know what I mean? So I think it's not just doing the art thing, doing emerging artists and well perhaps we'll have to have a chat to the guys at Atom Gallery when I come to the opening of the Transport and Show. Yeah, that's a good networking event there. There'll be 36 artists there to choose from. But for now, Blam, I think that's been a hugely interesting conversation. I'm very grateful. No, thank you. And again, got to meet someone that created some really iconic imagery of my youth that was I don't know what it is. It's just ink on paper, get over yourself. I know, I know. But your story from going from graphic designer to now artist is uh really interesting. So thank you again for coming on the podcast, mate. Really appreciate it. No, thank you. Thanks for coming down and chatting. Thanks for having me, mate, in your beautiful home. That we should say is not that anyone's gonna get to come in here and I'm not gonna show anyone, but oh my god, your house is incredible with so much amazing artwork that's got every bit of a story from it, which is again what I said to you. I hate going in people's houses and they've got IKEA artwork or stuff like that. Well, it's funny we were talking about the other day about the the kind of the beige IKEA thing. There's nothing wrong with that. If they've got into collecting art through buying an Ikea print, falling in love with it on a grinder, it's like when you're a kid and you tape off the radio. It's like eventually it's it transitions into you having a massive vinyl collection and collecting music. So I think if it because it's like really hard to sell art, anybody like a lot of people aren't interested in in the slightest. So an ike a shit Ike air print in a frame gets them started into collecting nicer stuff like that. I take it back, Black. I think that's cool. We all need a starting point. We all need a starting point. Thank you, mate. I appreciate you doing the podcast. It's been a great job. Pleasure, sir. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to the Creative Nobeland podcast. 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