London Calling (57 page)

It is always problematic when an artist works in a variety of media: Derek Jarman is a case in point. He is best known as
a film-maker and screenwriter
but he was also an important painter, he wrote numerous books and volumes of journals, he was a celebrated set designer and
gardener. Because few, if any, critics have expertise in all these areas, his contribution to post-war British art has been
largely overlooked. It must also be said that although he worked inside the gallery system to sell his paintings, he was regarded
as a thorn in the side of the film and television industries. He was aware of what he was doing, even though it meant that
his films, when they received funding at all, were almost always made on a shoestring. Derek Jarman: ‘Why do I feel so alienated?
I made my own space outside the institutions. Am I glad I did it? Yes. What I found in those institutions were dead-beat heterosexual
toadies and a whole lot of queens who gave their tacit approval.’
¹⁶
Throughout his career he was an outspoken gay activist, which also did not help in attracting institutional funding.

Derek Jarman was filled with energy, ideas and enthusiasm and was central to the London scene in the seventies and eighties,
a force for creativity, honesty and intelligence in the world of Thatcherism and greed. He had a profound effect on society
by being out gay and living his art, but the art establishment didn’t like it. Caroline Coon identifies him as at the centre
of a movement: ‘One of the great art movements which the establishment can’t abide is what I call “heroic pop”. It’s the group
of artists around Andrew Logan, Duggie Fields, Zandra Rhodes, Derek Jarman.’
¹⁷

After graduating from King’s College, London, in 1963, Jarman took up a place offered to him at the Slade School of Art. He
spent his first summer vacation in the States and on his return he began to move in exciting new circles. He became friends
with Patrick Procktor, Ossie Clarke and David Hockney. David Hockney danced with him at the 1964 Slade Christmas dance. Jarman:
‘It is difficult now to imagine the effect this had, it was like diving for the first time from a very great height. David
was a “star”, not just a good painter, but – like Warhol – at the cutting edge of a new lifestyle which was the most enduring
legacy of the 60s.’
¹⁸
Hockney was the first English painter to openly declare his homosexuality. It was a brave move at a time when it was still
illegal and could have adversely affected his career, but he believed in honesty and openness, and also in having fun. He
died his hair yellow because, as he said, ‘Blondes have more fun!’ When homosexuality was made legal for those over twenty-one,
in 1967, Hockney, Jarman and their friends were ready.

Jarman’s first career was as a painter; in 1967, during his last term, his fellow Slade student Nicholas Logsdail decided
to open a gallery in his house in Bell Street. Jarman and several other friends threw themselves into the
project, filling holes with Polyfilla and painting the three gallery floors white. When the Lisson Gallery opened in mid-April,
Jarman was included in the opening show.

It is hard to live by selling art so almost immediately Jarman had to turn to set design, a subject he had studied at the
Slade. Astonishingly he started at the top; as he said: ‘The beginning of my career was to resemble the end of anyone else’s.’
He was asked by Frederick Ashton, the director of the Royal Ballet, at ridiculously short notice, to design sets and costumes
for Richard Rodney Bennett’s jazz setting of the nursery rhyme ‘Monday’s child is fair of face…’ for the Royal Opera House;
it was to star, among others, Rudolph Nureyev and premiere with Princess Margaret in the audience. His sketch designs won
him the job on 21 November and the ballet opened on 9 January 1968, giving him just forty-nine days to make the costumes and
sets. It was a triumph: when the curtain went up to a stage dominated by two huge red circles, between which stood fair-faced
Monday in a glittering skull cap and a leotard that faded from pink to white and wearing one white glove, the audience erupted
into spontaneous applause. All seven scenes were as stark and abstract, simple and intensely colourful. The audience loved
them and, though the critics grumbled a bit about the music, most reviewers gave the ballet high praise. The audience demanded
seventeen curtain calls and on the closing night there was even an encore, almost unknown in ballet. It was a great triumph
and Jarman even got to see Nureyev naked in his dressing room, though he was too flustered to do anything like proposition
him.

After a spell in a nearby river-fronting property, Derek moved in August 1969 to 51 Upper Ground, a warehouse next to Horseshoe
Yard at the end of Blackfriars Bridge and virtually on top of the site of Shakespeare’s Globe. Jarman’s friend, the sculptor
Peter Logan, took the top-floor studio, which he painted yellow to enhance the brilliant sunlight, and Jarman had the large,
airy, high-ceilinged, L-shaped room below. It was filled with light reflected off the river. In the mornings he was woken
by the tugboat
Elegance
towing barges downriver, seagulls swirling overhead, some of which would land on his balcony demanding to be fed. In the
winter it was bitterly cold, his anthracite-burning pither stove doing nothing except keep the water in the lavatory from
freezing, but for the first year Jarman lived most of the time at his old flat in Liverpool Road, using Upper Ground just
as a studio and only occasionally staying over. When he did move in it was not for long; in 1970, property speculators swept
away Horseshoe Yard and the warehouse was demolished leaving only the old doorstep.

The use of these warehouses by artists set in motion an inevitable train
of events. The popularity of warehouses as living spaces was pioneered in New York in the late forties and early fifties by
the abstract expressionists, who needed large spaces because they were working on enormous canvases. In Britain, the cost
of heating, and the lack of suitable empty warehouse space, meant that the idea was late in catching on. The idea of loft
living became associated with an artistic, rather bohemian lifestyle, so when artists did colonize an area, property speculators
followed, often demolishing and building new ‘loft-style’ apartments. The demand was such that they began to introduce polished
wooden floors and other appurtenances of loft-living into ordinary flat conversions. The popularity of lofts was to price
most artists out of their spaces except in the newly developing East End, where they were often in unattractive areas. But,
for a decade, artists were able to live by the river before rent increases and a suspiciously large number of accidental fires
cleared the way for the developers.

Money was tight but fortunately, through an accidental meeting on a train with a friend of Ken Russell in January 1970, Jarman
was offered a job designing the sets for Russell’s film
The Devils
, and though some of his more ambitious plans were scaled back, he did get to construct an enormous life-size set for the
city of Loudun in the back lot at Pinewood studios (Jarman had studied architecture under Pevsner at King’s before going to
the Slade). It was valuable experience for his own future career as a film director.

Jarman was part of a heavy-partying, club-going set that characterized the early seventies. Most of the excesses in sex and
drugs and rock ’n’ roll that are attributed to the sixties in fact happened in the seventies: a decade of seriously long hair,
of cocaine and speed, of orgies and appalling fashions. The chief party-giver was Andrew Logan, but Derek came close. He described
his period in the warehouses as ‘one long party; there were always two or three people living there.’ They all liked to frequent
gay clubs such as El Sombrero, which was an important setting for both the early seventies glam rock scene, and later as a
haven for the early punk rockers.

El Sombrero, in the basement below the Sombrero restaurant, distinguished by its Mexican hat neon sign, at 142 Kensington
High Street, was a popular hangout in the late seventies. For a time Derek Jarman, Ossie Clarke, Angie and David Bowie, Mick
Jagger and Bianca, Long John Baldry and Dusty Springfield could be found there every week, and even Francis Bacon sometimes
peeped in. It was the first disco in London to have coloured underfloor neon lighting beneath its flashing, star-shaped, glass
dance floor.
¹⁹
There was a raised section overlooking the dance floor which could be reserved by ordering champagne. To comply with the
licensing laws, everyone was
given a paper plate with a thin slice of pork pie and a smear of coleslaw. That way you could dance until 2 a.m. for a couple
of shillings. The patron was Amadeo, known to all as Armadillo, who sat at the bottom of the steep staircase, counting the
pound notes. The waiters José and Manuel balanced glasses on trays held high above their heads as they weaved their perilous
way through the crowds. It was mostly a gay club and later changed its name to Yours or Mine?

Jarman’s next move was to a huge old corset factory at 13 Bankside, near the end of Blackfriars Bridge opposite St Paul’s.
In November 1970, Derek, Peter Logan and their friend Michael Ginsborg took studios there, though Derek was the only one to
actually live there. His was on the top floor, a seventy-foot room with high, uninsulated ceilings with a large, three-pane
skylight filling the room with light. Next to the three large arched windows overlooking the river he built a platform which
ran the whole length of the room. He piled it high with cushions made from old Dutch carpets that he found in the flea markets
of Amsterdam so that guests could lounge there watching the tugs pull the long low Thames barges up and down the river and
the colour of the dome of St Paul’s change with the sky. The wooden loading bay let down to enable goods to be hoisted up
from the boats below and was a perfect place to sit out in the summer. In the centre of the room was Derek’s bed, installed
inside a garden greenhouse to keep in the warmth in the winter. One wall was dominated by two enormous capes, like Bishop’s
copes, made by Jarman in the sixties and displayed in great semi-circles on the white painted walls, surrounded by paintings
and collages. The wooden floor was covered with old oriental carpets and yet more cushions. A large white hammock was slung
between two columns. By the rear window he planted a garden of blue morning glories and ornamental gourds that gave big yellow
flowers. On the landing at the top of the stairs that led to all three studios he installed a bath, visible to one and all.

The summer evenings drifted by with Ravel’s
Daphnis and Chloë
on the hi-fi and Derek and his friends sprawled on the cushions high on acid. Derek wrote: ‘the light from the river reflected
in sinuous patterns on the beams, the phosphorescent stars on the glasshouse glimmered… At moments like this the room transformed
and glowed upon the waters.’ They could hear the incoming tide, the movement of boats on the river, gulls and distant traffic.
After an all-night session they would watch the sky above the City of London change through the colours of the rainbow, then,
as the first trains of the day crawled across the Cannon Street railway bridge, see the city come slowly to life. It was,
he wrote, the ‘most beautiful room in London’.
²⁰

Most of the units were empty, and the semi-derelict building had an air of foreboding. Jarman took enormous pleasure in taking
an unsuspecting boy back late at night, unlocking the padlocks on the old wooden doors and walking up the endless stone stairs,
dimly lit by low-wattage lightbulbs, through the enormous empty abandoned warehouse spaces. He enjoyed watching their fear
and apprehension dissolve when he opened the door to his top-floor space to reveal ‘The Studio’. It was here that Jarman began
shooting Super 8 films of his friends, who included the artists Andrew Logan, Kevin Whitney and Duggie Fields. They were shown
at Derek’s regular film nights when sometimes more than a hundred people would gather to sit on cushions and watch
The Wizard of O
z or some other main feature, accompanied by his Super 8s. Jarman: ‘Of course no-one watched the films, it was just a party.’
These Super 8s were later used, after considerable manipulation, as the basis of
Shadow of the Sun
, which featured a soundtrack by Genesis P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle. The Studio was the venue for fabulous parties, with
guests who included such luminaries as Katharine Hepburn and Richard Chamberlain, and for sumptuous dinner parties. One party
before Christmas 1970, cooked by Peter Logan, was for forty people seated at a specially built long table banked high with
scented white narcissus from the Floral Hall at Covent Garden Market. At the end of the meal, joints wrapped in American flags
were served with the coffee. Jarman: ‘Then we played charades behind a beautiful collaged curtain, a Rousseau Garden of Eden
that Andrew Logan had made on transparent polythene.’
²¹
Derek and Fred Ashton went first as Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, but he didn’t record who was which.

In May 1973, Jarman and the others were forced out once more by developers and he moved to a third-floor studio in Warehouse
A1, Butler’s Wharf, in the enormous nineteenth-century warehouse complex that extends along the riverfront just downriver
from Tower Bridge. Jarman’s new studio was much larger than Bankside, but apart from a row of cast-iron columns which divided
the space, it was otherwise charmless in comparison. Jarman rebuilt his bed greenhouse and set about making the space into
his home. The shared toilet was on the ground floor and there was no bath. He installed both in the open room for all to see.
As before, Peter Logan joined him in the new building, taking the two top floors, and it was here that he perfected his mechanical
ballet. This was staged by Madeleine Bessborough at her Sloane Street gallery as a live art event using his sculptures and
naked dancers from the Royal Ballet, choreographed by Jarman.
²²
Later in the year Peter’s brother Andrew took the top floor of Warehouse B and a number of other artists and architects moved
in, making a thriving creative community. Jarman’s
studio was at the east end of the building, overlooking the river to the north and a large expanse of waste ground to the
east. In
Smiling in Slow Motion
he remembered it fondly: ‘the forecourt where we made all the Super 8s – stark naked boys having it off all along the river
wall’.
²³
Among the Super 8 films were
Death Dance
,
Sulphur
,
The Art of Mirrors
,
Arabia
, and dozens more. Though they began as Super-8 home movies, edited on the camera, he soon moved on and in a film like
In the Shadow of the Sun
he used superimpositions and coloured gels to achieve a saturated colour effect. There was no narrative, they were visual
poems.