I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but we really fucking love doing these. Everyone we’ve interviewed and photographed has been either someone we already know we enjoy the company of, or someone we suspect we will – and we’ve not been proved wrong on the latter yet.
It might sound cheesy or facile, or a recipe for echo chamber, but honestly it’s as good a starting point as any given that our main subject matter is the actual nuts and bolts of subculture. We’re here to talk about how friends, family, teachers, locales, smells, sounds, sights all feed into the contribution that people make to the culture around them, and if you’re going to shoot the crap about all that for over an hour with someone, it helps if they’re simpatico or at least if you’re a bit fascinated by them.
Mark Leckey, our second Turner Prize winner alongside Jeremy Deller, was all that and more. This is one of the conversations where I most ended up kicking myself that I’d missed certain topics completely – for example I kept meaning to get into how his understanding of social scenes and group mentalities applied to the art scene – but the conversation went the way it went, because… well it just did. We were chasing particular ideas and having fun and the time flew by.
Leckey was a very natural choice for this. Brian suggested him, and it was a very “doh, of course” moment. His work often touches on subculture, most famously in 1999’s Fiorucci Made me Hardcore which recontextualises northern soul lovers and ravers in a dream-like narrative, and club/soundsystem physicality as in Big Box Action which formed part of a Boiler Room project during my… interesting… time there. He’s an outstanding electronic musician and DJ too. But just as importantly, he’s about conjuration, rearrangement of the collective unconscious, and mangling of your pre-suppositions about time and casualty, He looks like a space wizard, just arrived from a different timeline with important news, dammit. And as you’ll see he’s quite explicit about doing magic.
So yeah, Brian had a great time photographing him and I had a great time talking to him. Once again there are dozens of intersections with previous subjects, via Bowie, Burroughs, jungle, you name it - so if you haven’t, dig into the archive and start following those lines. It’s really good - and if we can just ask a small favour: if you enjoy it, tell your friends what a good time we’re having over here.
So what are you working on at the moment? What's taking up your time?
I've got a couple of things on the go. This weekend, Friday and Saturday, I'm doing a two-night residency at Cafe OTO. You've got three acts each night, and then I'll do a little something. I'm writing a short story. I got asked eight years ago by Film4 if I had an idea for a film, and I did, it was an adaptation of a book. At the very last minute, I didn't get the rights for that for the book so now I've rewritten it as a short story. Then in November, I've got a show at a gallery in New York. So I'm getting ready for that.
Do you feel comfortable when you're spread across a different mix of music, writing and whatever else?
Definitely. On one's hand it's trying to find an escape route out of art, because I get frustrated with it. On the other hand, art affords me these opportunities in music… So it's trying to find some kind of balance. And also, you know, the economics of it. I can't see how I'm going to sustain myself as an artist for the next ten, 20 years. I'm just trying to figure out what I can do if I'm not an artist.
What makes art unsustainable?
Mostly money. People don't buy my work or they don't buy work like mine – that might be fairer to me, possibly. I'm always a bit paranoid about this stuff. Video doesn't sell anymore. And the only thing that really sells are paintings.
Art is having its Britpop moment. It's reaching into its past and it's not really interested in anything else. My frustration always is that it – Britpop – always came at the expense of jungle, garage and all the other things that were genuinely exciting and forward thinking. It's a bit like that now. It's just painting, painting, painting. I don't paint. I think painting's the only thing that the market is interested in.
When you've been involved in some kind of industry for any length of time, you... you start to understand the cycles of it. But you're still surprised by the turns it can take. I guess there was an older idea that you would you would reach a certain age or have a certain longevity in art, then you’d make it to this plateau and you were an accepted artist. But it doesn't really work like that anymore. It's the same in any industry. It's the same in music. I guess the certainties, the expectations, they've crumbled. They've vanished completely.
I'm thinking about parallels in media and culture. I wonder if the embracing of disruption as an aim in itself is what's leading us to this shifting sands situation?
Yeah, definitely. Disruption with art is a strange fit because part of art practice for a long time was to be disruptive: the avant-garde program. Then when new tech, new media disruptive practices started happening, art seemed quite solid in relation. It held on a lot longer than all the other mediums. The NFT thing undid a lot of those foundations and solidities. The art world embraced them – or at least the auction houses did - and that shifted the value of everything. Because of NFTs, people began to understand the lack of value of digital media. The unique non-fungible aspect of art is painting.
Like the way people go back to vinyl …
Exactly. You go back to objects. I'd find it genuinely reactionary in the true sense of the word. I don't want go back to vinyl.
I love my records. I've got all my shelves full, but I totally accept that it’s my cultural baggage. It's only ever going be a tiny thing in the scheme of things nowadays, for the sad dads who can afford it…
Yeah, exactly. For me, it's the medium that determines the form as well. Pop music is born of a 45 RPM record and its limitations. That's what gave it its form, it's medium specificity, you know?
I was just thinking as you were talking about how the digital innovations have slipped out of our hands almost. Whereas through the second half of the 20th century, everything that arrived – videotape, the 45, the twin turntable, the synthesizer, the drum machine – people could grab them, turn them over, open them up, look inside, work them out and then do a new thing with them. But it doesn't work that way with the new innovations.
It’s completely different. I think we're in completely different era with a completely different sensibility. That’s why the vinyl thing seems so out of date. It doesn't make sense except as a nostalgic artefact. The music I listen to now that engages with like digital culture understands what this new medium and how totalising it is. You are just in it. It's not something you pick up. It's not something you look at. You are within it. You are inhabiting and that's a whole different relationship to making things and being in the world.
Could we go back to your inspirations? As a young kid, did you have this fascination with where the stuff you were seeing and hearing came from?
Definitely. I always think of it like my education. There was some kind of need or thirst for knowledge that I obviously wasn't getting at school, that could only be satisfied through deciphering records and trying to understand both the content, what they were saying, the album artworks, and then picking up the music press and learning through that. This is where I learned about Marxism and who Gramsci was because I’d been listening to Scritti Politti1. That sense of being educated through music. I also wanted to know the provenance of everything, what it meant, what the context was.
Can you remember the first record that thought thought: “Oh shit, this is a window into something else”?
My dad … we didn't have many records in the house, but we had – I don’t know if you remember those K-Tel records, where they didn't have the rights for the performance order, so they used to do covers of them. We had a rock ‘n’ roll one. The first record I really ever remember loving was … I’ve forgotten the name of it! It'll come back to me. It's was a classic rock ‘n’ roll one with Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis. I guess the impressions weren't that bad. That was the first record I remember falling in love with. The record that I really loved is the one which is like an old story about a man who shoots his friend dead over a game of cards. What the fuck is it called?
“Stagger Lee”?2
Yes! That was the first record I ever… that really, well, not spoke to me, because I was a 12-year-old kid in Ellesmere Port, but it was very evocative, I guess.
That's a folk story, right? “Stagger Lee” is a folk story. It's a folk devil.
Exactly. I think I was young enough to appreciate it as a story, but also the way it was sung and told told was very evocative. So that was, that was the first song I remember. But the first records I remember buying… I went out and bought two or three at the same time, which was “Shaved Women” and “Reality Asylum” which was a double A-side by Crass, and “Gangsters” by The Specials.
That's a pretty good haul!
Good start, isn't it? There was a famous place in Liverpool called Probe Records that was amazing. Pete Burns used to work there3. I just went in and picked two off the top. They'd have a Top 10 and I'd just picked two. I was listening to John Peel so I had heard both those records. More than anything, I remember the Crass record was in a very thick cardboard sleeve. It felt like an occult object. It felt there was something quite terrifying about it. I wanted it, but at the same time, I found it very disquieting. There was something about that Crass record that just seemed completely beyond my experience of the world. I was both terrified and fascinated. It was a numinous experience
Crass were quite cult-like. They lived in a commune and everything was all part of one bigger artwork for them.
I went to see them after that at Eric's when I was 14, 15. The Poison Girls were on. That was like watching some kind of witchcraft. That lived up to all my anticipations and fears. Crass were a heavy band, you know?
Both the Specials and Crass had a quite a groove element.
I'm glad you say that! I think Crass were the funkiest punk band. The drum and bass is so danceable, it's so funky. They were the only ones doing it. The rest were doing plodding rock. They found some groove. I still listen to them. I think they're great. I think that first LP is great.
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