Banksy (21 page)

One source in Los Angeles suggests that the problem was that Lazarides ‘just got too big. He had about ten or fifteen artists he was representing and he didn’t have the time or even
the will to devote all his energy towards Banksy. Banksy was feeling a little bit short changed and he just needed a lot of attention because he had grown up so big and fast.’ But perhaps the
best way the split can be explained is in biblical terms. Lazarides had taken Banksy up to the mountain top, he’d tempted him with the likes of Angelina Jolie, fame, money, success. And
instead of Banksy telling him ‘Get thee hence,’ he had, for a time at least, lapped it all up. It was this deal with the devil that appears to have ‘weirded out’ Banksy and
in the long run ended their relationship.

Lazarides is a very good salesman – there is something of the great American showman P.T. Barnum about him. According to the profile that ended his relationship with Banksy there was
‘nothing of the sharp suit about him’, but that was a few years back – nowadays he can be just as sharp-suited as any other dealer, perhaps more so. He is shaven headed but
somehow his friendly smile overcomes any hint of the football yobbo and he is fast talking, entertaining, fun – you feel he could sell you anything.
Banksy is an artist
who has no interest in being a celebrity and the fact that he has no interest has made him into a celebrity. It was thus a very intense marriage with considerable benefits for both of them. One of
the outer circle says, ‘Lazarides was representing a superstar who wanted to remain anonymous. And thus he became a superstar by proxy, he was very much seduced by fame.’

Being a showman Lazarides embroiders history a little, although probably rather less than Banksy does. His father was born in Famagusta in Cyprus, known best by Brits for its cheap package
holidays – at least until 1974 when the Turkish army invaded, capturing the town from the Greeks and turning it into a ghost town. His father came to Britain and settled in Bristol where he
ran a kebab shop. He married an Englishwoman – although they eventually split up – and Steve, born in 1969, was one of eight children across different marriages. Among his siblings he
numbers a plumber/builder, a truck driver, an electrician, a landscape gardener, a school secretary and a pet-life insurance saleswoman. While Lazarides has driven himself way beyond his
background, he is still connected – when he opened his Euro Trash show in Los Angeles, for instance, he flew his father out to join him.

By his own account Lazarides started life as a painter and decorator and occasional chicken plucker and concrete mixer, but these jobs were never going to turn into anything permanent. He tried
his hand at graffiti, realised he was no good at it and at about the age of fourteen turned to photography instead. He managed to get a place on a foundation course at Filton Technical College (now
Filton College) in Bristol where he happened across Inkie, the graffiti artist who was later to introduce Banksy into the city’s graffiti scene. Inkie says now: ‘Where I lent Banksy his
“credibility”
in the UK graffiti scene, Steve in turn marketed his work to make him the global phenomenon he is now.’

From there he went to Newcastle Poly to study photography while DJing in clubs at the weekend. After a couple of very short-lived jobs, first as a studio runner and then assistant to the
photographer David Bailey, he finally found a permanent job painting sets for a film studio.
Wilde
and
Sliding Doors
are two of the sets he remembers and some of the people he saw on
the set from afar are now his clients. From there his long-time partner Susana introduced him to a friend at
Sleazenation
, which together with its sister magazine
Jockey Slut
was
aimed – unsurprisingly, with a name like that – at the youth ‘subculture’ slice of the market. ‘They needed a picture editor, so they just gave me the job as I walked
in the door,’ he says. In 1997, while he was at
Sleazenation
, he went off to photograph Banksy, or rather the back of his head. Starting over a cup of coffee – as Mills and Boon
might have it – the two outsiders, making their own way in the world, became friends. Banksy was soon tipping Steve off about where to find his latest stencils so he could photograph them
before they were wiped out. In Banksy’s first book
Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall
, published in 2001, all the photographs – and there were a lot of them – were
credited to Lazarides. At this time Banksy already had an agent from his Bristol days, Steve Earl, but it was an arrangement without a contract and it ended when Lazarides came along and showed he
could do the job better.

Steve Earl’s story is a sad one. He was brought up in Wakefield where his father was a bricklayer. His parents supported him while he was at college training to be a butcher. At nineteen
he had gained all the qualifications he needed, but decided he was going to abandon the butcher’s trade for the music industry. At that
point he had what his brother
Julian describes as ‘a fall-out with my father. My dad said, “Well, if you’re going to be a musician you’re going to have to go fend for yourself.”’ He left home
as Stephen Earl Young and ended up in Bristol as Stephen Earl, his surname abandoned. He kept in touch for a few years but the family never saw him again. Many years later his brother, with
considerable help from the police, managed to track him down to a flat in Barcelona. But although he wrote to him, Steve never replied and he died alone and pretty much penniless in 2007 aged
forty-three. In between Wakefield and Barcelona he had an up and down career in Bristol, London and New York as DJ, DJ’s agent and Banksy’s agent.

Julian talked to Steve’s friends after his brother’s death to try to piece together his history. ‘He seemed to see a talent in people and get them to a certain stage and then
someone else would come along and take them off him.’ That was certainly true of Banksy, whom he represented when he first came to London but whom he fell out with in 2003. ‘I
don’t think he had a contract or anything like that,’ says his brother. ‘He told a friend “That’s it, I’m over with Banksy, it’s all done with.” But
he just carried on with his life, he didn’t seem to get too wound up about it.’

Martin Worster, a former music journalist, met Steve at an internet café in Barcelona where they both worked. ‘He told me he had been Banksy’s manager but he wasn’t any
more. It seemed that there had been some dispute over money. I think it was possibly over Blur but I am not sure.’ As well as being entertaining and good company he was also ‘an elusive
guy, quite hard to pin down . . . when I first met him he reminded me a bit of an eighties pop star who had fallen on hard times.’

Both in London and Barcelona Steve was never short of a
Banksy or two. A DJ who used to visit his office in Notting Hill said it was completely full of Banksy prints and
canvases. In Barcelona too he decorated his flat with an impressive array of Banksys, including one massive painting, ‘an amazing piece’ depicting grannies outside a burning
supermarket. But he was having money troubles and he traded two Banksy stencils on board for a business debt he owed Martin – since the debt was about £500 it would have proved a bad
deal for Steve in the long run, but this was in the days before Banksy had become a big name. Two years later Martin left Barcelona and lost touch until he was told of Steve’s death. Steve
Earl had gone out to make his own way and lived a life that had been heartbreakingly close to being a huge success, but in the end he had had to rely on a dwindling supply of Banksys to keep
afloat.

Lazarides tells of his first business venture together with Banksy in various different ways, but the essentials are that Banksy needed a lift to Bristol where he was going to sell his prints
for either £5 or £10 apiece, depending on which version of the story is more accurate (whatever the price, it was mouth-wateringly cheap). ‘I said, “I’ll buy them all
and sell them on.” I had friends who had a few quid who quite liked his stuff, so I wound up selling more than the person that was looking after him [Steve Earl]. And it just spiralled from
there.’

So Lazarides was not quite there from day one, and he and Banksy never quite had the same symbiotic relationship as, say, Jay Jopling and Damien Hirst. But he was in the picture from early on,
and Acoris Andipa says, ‘It was Lazarides building it from nothing. He is the one to be credited for all the hard work he did.’ Lazarides himself says, ‘I think it was very much a
two-way street in the sense that we helped each other in those early days. It’s
probable that without Banksy I may not have got to where I am today.’ Note the use
of the word ‘probable’ rather than ‘certain’ or ‘true’ – understandably he is not going to give Banksy all the credit.

He says that his route to the gallery world ‘started from selling work out of the boot of my car in a pub car park’. It is so difficult to imagine now that only a few short years ago
it was a real struggle to offload Banksy prints. From the car boot sale he advanced to making the rounds of London dealers. One of them remembers: ‘Stephen Lazarides would come round with
rolls of these prints under his arm and try to flog them off to us at, you know, £50 a pop. And we did buy them and we used to get discounts from him before anyone had even heard of Banksy
prints.’ From there things progressed so that Lazarides was wholesaling prints to places like Selfridges (yes, Selfridges!), the Tom Tom Gallery in London, the Green Leaf bookshop in Bristol,
and Tate Modern – Banksy was not hanging on the walls but you could buy a print there. Sales soon reached a point where Lazarides no longer needed the smaller outlets. It was a fairly brutal
moment. The same dealer remembers it well: ‘The thing that irked us a bit was one minute we were always first to be phoned, first to be contacted about new releases, and then suddenly the
gate came down. No discounts and not even no discounts, they didn’t want to sell to us as dealers at all. It was a kind of mean-spirited thing more than anything else. It was just like
“You’ve been useful to us and now bugger off.”’

In 2002 Banksy released his first properly organised, editioned print run,
Rude Copper
– a stencil of a policeman giving the finger – in an edition of 250, fifty of which were
signed. Originally the edition was only going to be 100 prints but at the last minute they raised it to 250 to see what happened. In those early days, says a
fan who
witnessed it all, everything was somewhat disorganised. ‘There were 250 copies and loads of extras. Number One might be unsigned, although it would be stamped, and then someone might want the
second one signed, so two or three would get signed and then there would be more unsigned. There was chaos, really, about which was part of the edition and which wasn’t. And there
wasn’t any consistency.’ These prints went for around £40; today they can be picked up at auction for about £8000, or around £13,000 for the few that have a
hand-sprayed graffiti background. In the next year fourteen additional prints were released in editions that ran from 500 to 750. Ironically, given the fact that today a signed print always fetches
a considerably higher price than an unsigned one, it was the signed prints, costing just that little bit extra, which were the hardest to sell – ‘They used to be hanging around for
ages,’ says one of the team who was trying to sell them.

So, suddenly, roughly 7000 Banksy prints or more were being released on to the market and life had to get a bit more serious. Early in 2004 Pictures on Walls was formally incorporated, the first
of Banksy’s companies. The finance was put up by Jon Swinstead, who published
Sleazenation
and
Jockey Slut
, and POW’s first base was at PYMCA, a youth culture picture
agency established by Lazarides and Swinstead on the floor above the
Sleazenation
office.

By the end of 2004, Swinstead says, he had ‘walked away’ from POW, but he did not want to go into any further detail. Steve Parkin, who used to employ Lazarides as a DJ in his
Newcastle days, replaced him and put up the second tranche of finance which kept the company afloat. The majority shareholder was – and remains – Jamie Hewlett, the creator of Tank Girl
and co-creator of Gorillaz, while Lazarides had eighteen shares. Nowhere in the records is there ever a mention of Banksy – perfectly legally,
without shares and
without a directorship, he is relying on his friendship with Hewlett for his involvement with the company.

White cube galleries might be the holy grail for ambitious young artists, but as the demand for the prints they were releasing grew, both Lazarides and Banksy realised they had stumbled upon a
new eager audience for art among people who had never set foot in a traditional gallery and had no desire to do so. Both of them enjoyed slagging off these galleries, although Lazarides is the more
loud-mouthed about them and the ‘chippy bastards working behind the desk’. There’s nothing he hates more than a white cube gallery: ‘I do black walls, I do red walls,
vintage wallpaper, anything other than fucking white. I have a pathological hatred of white walls.’ Banksy himself has always tended to be more rude about the art inside the galleries than
the galleries themselves: ‘Anti-graffiti groups like to say tagging intimidates people, but not as much as modern art. That stuff is deliberately designed to make normal people feel
stupid.’

Their way of selling art sounds simple now but at the time it was revolutionary. People could see for themselves a piece of Banksy’s work on the street, and if they lived too far away or
it had already been washed off by the anti-vandal patrols there were always good photographs of it on the internet – it would become something of a contest to see who could get their picture
up on the web first. Some of these street pieces would eventually become limited edition prints which could be bought on the web without their purchaser ever having to venture into a gallery
– accidentally the piece on the street had become an advertisement for itself. These online customers buying prints give Banksy a wider and more active web base than probably any other
artist, living or dead.