Seven Years with Banksy (6 page)

On this moody night the chrome
gleamed through the fog. To me, it was like a living creature, ready to pounce, its personality was that strong. ‘Fucking hell, yeah, I
see what you mean. She’s a beauty,’ he enthused. He had a closer look and the clockwork in his brain took it all in. He looked up, he seemed to be smiling inside. ‘Come on,
let’s go up,’ he said and we got drawn back into the party.

His response to the motorcycle was like his take on Johanna – he liked it, and that gave it a deeper value for me. Maybe it was a weakness on my part but I wasn’t seeking approval.
It was affirmation that my judgement was right.

People had begun to eat; the wine, the beer and the spliff were in full sway and a more gregarious gathering of people you could not find. The conversation was ribald; the jokes explosive; the
food good. I ate and sat and chatted and watched and observed some more. I had become endlessly observant on account of my travelling, and
although I loved parties I could also
freeze myself out somewhat. So after sussing out the scene and the characters present, I took to looking at the art, especially now my head was expanded on account of the marijuana.

Robin’s stuff was just so good, so simple and straight up in its execution its cadence just sung to me, like so many others would appreciate. I picked up a chunky piece of white laminated
hardwood on which he had done a stencil – a picture of a bloodhound gang on the chase of a scent. I thought it was cool-as-fuck. It had been propped up by the window and I placed it back
there. Just at that moment Robin came over on his own and just hung there.

‘That’s a cool piece,’ I said. ‘You want to sell it?’

‘Mmmmmm – no, you can have it, it’s nothing,’ he said almost sheepishly.

‘No, go on, I’ll give you a tenner,’ I insisted.

‘Go on then,’ he said.

So I fished out ten quid, which to me seemed like a fair amount of money.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll put it towards the food.’ He paused and then said: ‘That’s the first painting I’ve ever sold.’

The words rang in my head as he moved off, but someone had seen the money change hands and a little coterie suddenly rounded on me. A self-appointed Scouse Nazarene was at the front. I had
actually shared a house with him for a spell in the past.

‘Rob, what are you... How could ya?’ he said incredulously.

‘What’s the problem?’ I said.

‘You bought that off him didn’t you?’

‘Yeah?’

I had crossed some line with them, some unspeakable, invisible code had been broken. There weren’t any more words said. They just looked at the Judas. ‘Fuck them,’ I thought,
and left soon after, belting down some moody, neon-lit backstreets on the motorcycle just for the hell of it.

Robin was going up to London a fair amount so every now and again he was gone from Bristol and would then reappear. Gradually his stays away were becoming more frequent so we
arranged to hook up while I was visiting friends up there. I used to live in the smoke in the early ’80s and had kept some friends with whom I used to catch up from time to time.

It was 1999 and there was that apprehensive ‘end of millennium’ buzz in the air. It was always a laugh to be in London, and I used a lot of my time up there to explore its hidden
corners. I’d always enjoyed getting down to the old industrial remains of Wapping and its warehouses, Rotherhithe, Millwall, the Isle of Dogs, and splendid Greenwich, so I was intrigued to
see the changes since I had been away. I was pretty horrified by the Docklands renaissance, the decay of the past had been hastened away along with its romance and it had become a gentrified stink
of a place.

The Docklands Light Railway took you on a tour of the new capitalist palaces and towers, the old quays lined with generic dwelling places of corporate minions. How crap it
was, how soullessly boring in contrast with the old dockers’ culture and haunts. Nevertheless, I was curious to have a look at the construction of the much-hyped Millennium Dome, and there
was Norman Foster’s state-of-the-art tube station to check out too. Robin wanted to see what was going on down there so I arranged to meet him and a couple of my London mates as they
hadn’t yet been to see the mess.

One was called Kes, the other, Jesse, both of whom I used to work with. I had been looking around the tube station with Kes for a while, which was refreshingly awesome – and we were to
meet Jesse and Robin outside on the plaza at a certain time. Robin hadn’t met these two friends of mine before. Kes was now a fireman and looked pretty hard with close-cropped hair (as was
his taste). Jesse looked relatively harmless by comparison. So we were just hanging out there waiting for Robin to show, which he didn’t do; at the appointed hour we
waited and talked a little and waited some more. Then we were getting hungry. My friends were starting to get bored and I had to coax them to stay, explaining that this bloke Robin was actually a
pretty interesting character and that they should meet him. I started to despair a little and began clock-watching, feeling like a mug, when suddenly I caught some movement out of the corner of my
eye. The place was quite wide open and I had been expecting him to emerge from the bowels of the underground but I was scanning 360 degrees anyway. And then from the same corner I saw movement
again. ‘That was him, I’m sure,’ I thought, picking out a glimpse of his features.

He was about a hundred yards away but he disappeared again. ‘What the fuck is he playing at?’ I said out loud. ‘What?’ they both
chimed in. He was
sizing up my two mates in case it was a big set up – or something.

This was becoming amusing, but daft. All of a sudden, he just popped out from behind a close-by pillar. ‘All right then?’ Robin said as he shuffled his feet in front of us and we
were all a little taken aback. How he had got from the first place I saw him to appear from behind the pillar I do not know because I was looking about the whole time. He was here and he seemed a
little nervous so I tried to put him at ease and introduced him to the chaps who were, by now, regarding him with mild amusement.

We started talking and Robin relaxed. However, it taught me again about how careful he is around people he doesn’t know; how seriously he takes his liberty and how trust with him was a
rare thing – and if you had that trust, even a little bit, it was hard won. By now it was obvious he did have a tag on his tail. He was known and if a copper could take him in for all his
graffiti it would
be a very serious business. But still, the image of him checking us out and dodging behind walls and pillars before he made his mind up to meet us that day
still makes my ribs tickle.

As it happened, Jesse and Kes had things to do, so they left shortly after, leaving the two of us alone in the square. I looked at him enquiringly but he didn’t offer an explanation, as if
his behaviour hadn’t happened.

‘Let’s have a look at the Dome, or what?’ I said, and we trotted off through this brave new landscape to view this corporate wonder. It was a big site and obviously we
couldn’t walk in past security but it had fences, which you could see through all around its periphery. The white Dome was actually up and it was quite an impressive sight. There was a lot
going on: earth movers, lorries and workers. They paid us no attention as we circumnavigated, as best we could, the whole place. We ended up by
the waterfront looking over
towards the new buildings of the World Trade Centre, then over at Canning Town on the north side of the Thames.

Robin was pretty distant and I could tell the cogs in his brain were whirring.

‘What do you think then?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got a few ideas,’ he replied. I never did know if he carried out an art attack on the Dome and its surroundings. I haven’t been down there since. The new
architecture creates very exposed spaces so get-away plans are limited.

Every time I was in London I would hook up with Robin. I was moving mostly between Stockholm and Bristol but also felt a pressing need to get up to the capital as often as I could. By this time
he was mostly living there and things were starting to happen for him. As a side effect of his bombing campaigns, in which he would litter neighbourhood after neighbourhood with his judicious work,
he was getting
known. I was personally amazed at his all-town obliteration. His art was getting bigger and bolder. Shoreditch walls and Brick Lane bridges, Soho for its
centrality, Camden, Notting Hill and several other places all had his signatory efforts.

He never once told me about what he’d been up to, never pointed out a new piece. I just came across them as I moved around – and I didn’t even live there, so the spread of his
work was obviously much wider than I could ever take in. And all this as his work in Bristol was increasing too. He was becoming notorious. Some of the locations were breathtaking like his
‘Wrong War’ on high bridges. How did he get up there? How did he remain unseen? He was outrageous, he was everywhere, like a nocturnal tomcat on the prowl. He saw the city’s
ripped backsides at an hour of night that not many of us are privy to.

The remarkable aspect is that it all seemed effortless. Whenever I saw him
he was just the same as always, admitting nothing, releasing nothing, just composed. I made a
comment that he had hit the ground running in London, that I’d seen his stuff all over. He didn’t even respond. He was totally unconcerned. He was just doing it. Full on, non-stop,
rocking-the-block. Rising again and again.

I was on one of several anti-globalization demos in the wake of the riots in Seattle around this time. The police were trying to kettle us in Oxford Circus and a group of us managed to break
away and move south, pursued by the coppers – who were on horseback, on foot, in their riot wagons and in a couple of helicopters. They chased us to Broadwick Street in Soho, where the
inevitable face-off ensued. The tension was high and the coppers in body armour, shields up, truncheons raised, moved in. Then boom! In the corner of my eye I saw ‘Mona Lisa Wielding A
Bazooka’ straight in front of us, the size of the back of a bus. It
was a Banksy, of course, and it lent such an inspirational uplift to the proceedings that I felt his
art had become the very soul of the city, empowering us with its intelligence and liberty and encouraging us onwards. We got the fuck out of there, like slippery eels, and later that night I went
back to that spot just to relive the moment, to look at his art on my own. It blew me away and I was all the more inspired because I knew him.

The next time I saw him I told him of the piece of theatre that had taken place and the effect of his Mona Lisa on the proceedings. I think he smiled at that – it was high praise
indeed.

Sometimes when I saw him in London we would just wander without any destination in mind. Just me and him, no rhyme, no reason. And it was in these quiet moments that he would explain his latest
ideas to me. I would just listen. It wasn’t that he ever asked for a response and all I could express really was my interest in whether it sounded good
or not. As we
wandered I remember him telling me that he was going to commission a sculpture of Liberty and her scales, wearing stockings and suspenders, as a prostitute that could be bought, and that he was
going to have it raised in a public square somewhere in London.

I acknowledged the idea but was foolish enough to assume it would never happen. I just thought he was getting ahead of himself. His thoughts were always on full tilt. The money it would cost, et
cetera, seemed too far-fetched and I asked him about this but he said he was going to put every penny he had into it. He was so into his plans for bigger things, bigger statements, that I kept
quiet, in case he didn’t achieve them. But how wrong I was. I wasn’t there when he raised his Statue of Liberty in Clerkenwell, maybe I didn’t deserve to be either. Oh me of
little faith! He bowled me over with his conviction, having the wherewithal to carry this project entirely at his own expense.

He never gave me the impression of having much money; his clothes weren’t extravagant, we never ate when we met, he was skinny. Every penny went to further his vision.
I was just lucky to hear about some of these plans. But I could see he was fulminating on his course. He’d only just started doing work that wasn’t graffiti. His energy was definite and
careering, naturally emanating. He was on an upward curve, God-given and righteous.

Similarly, when we were walking past the impressive statue of Boadicea and her chariot outside the Houses of Parliament he just said casually, ‘I’m going to put a wheel clamp on
that.’ And later, he did. The image of this British warrior being stopped in her tracks by petty officialdom is so him, irony for the masses. And, then again, he had this idea: ‘You
know how students always put a traffic cone on the heads of statues on a Saturday night when they’re pissed? Well I’m going to get Rodin’s
‘The Thinker’
cast,
full sized, with a bollard on his head.’ And we would just jog on whilst the City polluted us. Silence falling again between us.

Sure enough it was done – on Shaftsbury Avenue! It was huge and weighed tons and would have cost an arm and a leg to commission and he needed a truck and a crane just to plonk it there.
It’s incredible that he believed in this so much that he would cough up all his hard-earned cash just to have the satisfaction of bugging-out the passers-by on their way to work the next day.
For the city to remove them also raised questions: ‘Who put this here?’ ‘What are we going to do with it?’ ‘Move it?’ ‘Where to?’ ‘How can
someone just set down a huge sculpture and inflict on us their humour?’

I was wondering about where he was getting money to carry out these guerrilla operations in such an audacious fashion. He didn’t seem to be holding down a job. I
didn’t ask; but one afternoon as we were
walking up Wardour Street he went into a record shop and said he just had to pick up something. The guys behind the counter knew
him and chatted and handed over to him some money while I noticed his work on T-Shirts which they were obviously selling. And then, later, we were hanging out down Westbourne Grove. When we were
just about to part company. ‘So what’re you gonna be doing then?’ I enquired.