No. 6: Jeremy Deller

Bacon, Britpop and Beyonce with the craftsman of mischief.

Jeremy Deller took some persuading to do this. He’d got it into his head we just wanted to talk about rave culture - understandably, perhaps, given that every time we’d crossed paths before it had been in a context more or less orbiting around that theme. I interviewed him twice around his Everybody in the Place rave culture documentary film, once for The Guardian and once at more length for Resident Advisor’s podcast. He came to the launch for Bass, Mids, Tops which was lovely but my signing of his book was a bit scribbly as the rum punch was stronger than anyone had anticipated. Then I ran into him again earlier this year, in Stroud, where he and I were both separately speaking about rave for John Power’s Pop Up Subculture music/literary festival – him presenting Everybody in the Place, me part of a panel on Aaron Trinder’s extraordinary movie Free Party: a Folk History. The problem was, he was a bit fed up with being typecast as being just about that stuff - and rightly as his work covers a panoply of British strangeness from inflatable Stonehenges to gurning championships (not that sort), as well as very serious matters regarding political allegiance, poverty and more.

Anyway, I convinced him that I wasn’t just The Rave Guy either, and Brian shot some fantastic pictures of him in London, but being caught up in end of term stuff with my kids I couldn’t make it. We tried to set up a time to do an interview in person, that didn’t happen, so eventually it was a Google Meet, and that got delayed, and by the time it finally happened there was someone trimming a hedge outside my garage/office making a teeth-twisting noise, and what’s more he was probably a bit talked out having been on the promo circuit for his (truly brilliant) career retrospective book Art is Magic for most of the summer. So for the start of the interview, it all felt a bit on edge - Deller in his office, surrounded by festival posters, pictures, a life-size cut out of Rod Stewart, was fidgety and kept clicking his mouse buttons. But pretty quickly I realised that for all he seemed like he was giving me terse answers, every one was really on the money, and it got interesting.

He was someone we wanted all along. Not just because his work is shot through with subculture and hidden social connections, but because he’s an individualist, a world-builder, someone you can never second-guess. He’s a subversive partly because he wants to be, but also, crucially, because he always interrogates everything he apprehends afresh each time, so is kind of immune to received wisdom. And so it was talking to him: terse or not, his answers were always absolutely thought-through responses to the prompts, nothing pat, nothing taken for granted. And though in the hour we spoke, we more or less just ran through his “subcultural life” - the scenes he’d been in, the places he’d partied - the observations were always acute and astute, casting new light on those social scenes just as we’d always hoped to in this project, but also throwing up unexpected and fascinating tangents.

Best still, he delivered absolute gold for the Bass, Mids, Tops mission of finding subcultural interconnections with an extremely unexpected drum’n’bass revelation which locks this Q&A in tight to Sherelle’s from a fortnight ago. Deller is not far short of twice Sherelle’s age, an ex public schoolboy and art world staple - but in Moving Shadow there is a deep and profound connection. They may look at the vintage black and white dancing figure labels from radically different directions temporally and socially, but the sounds of the records and the chaotic (or Kaotic?) ethos of the label resonate through both of their lives and works. This is the occult social history we’ve always wanted to plot out.

ANYWAY, he may have started seeming as piercingly accusatory as the look in Brian’s pics, but this turned out to be a lovely chat in the end. It circles quite a bit around performance and spectacle, youth and ageing, sociability and individualism, and in particular contains some deep appreciation of the magic of goth - all of it glimpsed from those unexpected, freshly-considered angles. I enjoyed it a lot, here’s hoping you do too.

Can we start at the start? Do you remember the first time you were aware of pop culture?

Well it would have been glam rock as a child. All those classic acts from the early 70s, that would be the first moment of awareness of music and pop culture, and that was a big deal for me. That music was clearly aimed at children because of how it looked and sounded, so as a six or seven year old it was very exciting. I bought a lot of records at a young age too, not albums but singles – still have some of them. Sweet, Slade, Gary Glitter, all those... people. Then you had the more in-depth people like Roxy Music, David Bowie, Sparks – now you see them as very different bands, different acts, but as a kid not so much.

Did you have any sense of these as people out in the world with lives, connections with one another and so on?

No, not really. I saw them as almost gods, I think, watching them on telly every week. We were mortals. I was a child as well, so I was a child and a mortal – and they were definitely in another world, a very fantastical world that they were presenting.

Can you remember when you became aware that allegiance to these “gods” defined people and their sense of belonging?

That would have been secondary school. I went to an all-boys school and some were really into this thing and some really into that thing and you saw it was a matter of self-definition and self-identification with a thing. I never really did it at that age, I was into music but I wasn't pretending to be a thing – that came later. I think the Quadrophenia mod revival was a big thing, it boosted a revival that was happening anyway with 2-Tone and stuff, and was definitely noticeable in the way people attached to it.

What about punk? Was that a thing for you?

Oh yes, that's a good point actually. I was a bit young for punk, it was a bit scary for me. I was, what, ten, 11 by the jubilee, and I found it all a bit scary. I was too young for it, I didn't understand it, it felt grown up in a bad way and scary in a bad way. If I'd been a year older I'd have been into it. But I was still definitely a child at that point, if I'd been at secondary school it might have been different. A year is a long time when you're between the ages of 11 and 12, it's a difference between the world of children and the bigger world, and I was definitely in a children's world.

Well, each year is immense in those taste terms through your early teens too. I think of being 13, 14, the number of allegiances and evolutions were ridiculous, you kind of somersault through tastes...

You do, and I think in a way you were offered that with watching telly, watching Top Of The Pops, too: you were given five, six, seven genres in one evening, in one edition of Top Of The Pops. And I suppose what you're doing in experimenting with those different genres or sounds at that time is trying to find people. It's trying to find friends, basically: the people you identify with and like. So you go this camp and that camp and you see if they're the people you like, that you feel some kind of sympathy with.

And where was your school?

I was at Dulwich College, so in South London. But I never went into town. Occasionally, but not socialising. I was always very short, I looked about three or four years younger than I actually was, so there was no opportunity to have fun and do things.

When it came to these friendship groups, was it music and subculture that drew you to people? Were you “arty” and drawn to arty people?

I knew I didn't like sport. I think that's the important thing. I wasn't interested in that world and the people in that world, because they were usually idiots, so I had no interest in it at all. It was more oppositional in a way, it was about what I wasn't into. I did like museums and art, which was my way of ideas and looking into things literally and metaphorically – of looking at the world in a different way. Sport, there's nothing really intellectually challenging about it, it's not about ideas... Well, maybe later on there might be like that, but especially at that age, it's pretty basic stuff. It's about winning or losing and I wasn't interested in that. Being at school it was a very competitive environment anyway, you didn't want to overlay that with more competitiveness. Sport just seemed relentless, so it seemed good to go off somewhere else where things were a bit more subjective.

Dulwich College is a fairly prestige school – was it intellectually competitive in that sense?

Intellectually is not a word I'd use – it was academically. Just achievement. Sport was just just another aspect of that, a physical version. Academically and physically competitive? One is enough, frankly. So I was looking for something else, something very different from that.

Did that push you towards any idea of “dropping out”, of the subcultural sense of stepping outside of society?

No. I always saw that even if you're apart from mainstream society you're also an integral part of that society. You're what made life interesting, what made social history interesting and culture interesting. So for me you're actually at the centre of things, you're marking out a difference from people but it's a central part of history, subcultures. What happens in subcultures becomes mainstream after however many years in terms of how people look, how people behave – it's often the future, isn't it? Or can be. So for me it was just a sign for the future: how life could be.