Banksy (31 page)

Once the wall was down and safely tucked away into its steel cage, it could be taken to a restorer to be cleaned up. Unlike the Detroit wall, which was taken down so soon after Banksy had
painted it that no one had time to add their own tag, the Croydon wall was covered with a mass of additional tags that had to be dealt with. To the inexperienced eye all this additional graffiti
looked as though it would make the Banksy impossible to clean up, but Ridge and Loizou had found a restorer who had tackled
much harder jobs than this one. Having been stored
in Lincolnshire and New Covent Garden – Bradley’s father runs a greengrocery business – now it was on its way to Faversham in Kent for restoration.

There Tom Organ runs the Wall Paintings Workshop. A craftsman more accustomed to restoring twelfth-century Romanesque paintings on church walls or uncovering a fourteenth-century scene depicting
the martyrdom of Thomas Becket than he is to conserving graffiti, for nine years now he has been travelling to Istanbul for a month or two at a time to work on the sixth-, ninth- and
fourteenth-century mosaics in the dome of Hagia Sophia. So Banksy is not in his usual line of work, although the artist has provided the workshop with quite a few one-offs over the last few
years.

He and his small team took about forty days to clean the Croydon Banksy and he says, ‘It took a lot of testing and then a great deal of patience.’ He explains that from the practical
point of view, there is often very little between cleaning one painting and another. But the paints that are used to create graffiti (nitrocellulose and alkyd resin binders over emulsion paint, for
those who need details) have specific properties and his job was to determine which solvents could be safely used, where and when. There was one large, particularly noticeable silver tag which
fortunately had enough metallic material in its structure that it could actually be taken off with a hand tool, using binocular magnifiers to do the job.

The whole operation – buying the wall, taking the wall away, constructing a cage for it, transporting it, cleaning it up and storing it – has cost in the region of £30,000.
Bradley says, ‘I would love to keep it but I live in a first floor flat, so that’s not going to
happen.’ Inevitably the wall eventually appeared on the
market – but, like most things to do with Banksy, it was not the usual kind of market.

Four Rooms
, a new series on Channel 4 – described by the
Independent
reviewer as a ‘kind of
Dragons’ Den
for overpriced brica-brac’ – invited
viewers to bring in the treasures they would like to sell. It is not exactly Sotheby’s. The idea is that the seller goes in turn to four dealers in four different rooms, hence the title, has
a haggle and hears each dealer’s best offer. If the seller turns down one offer in the hope of getting a better offer in the next room, then that’s it: if no better offer materialises,
the seller can’t go back a room or two and accept the original offer. The show feels a bit like a game show, and all the drum rolls and camera cuts to the nervous sellers’ twitching
fingers make it much more comic than the ‘real edge of your seat viewing’ that Channel 4 had promised. Yet it was in this bizarre bazaar that Banksy’s wall came to the market.
Other items on the same programme included a pimped-up ‘entertainment chair’, a Victorian hangman’s rope ‘with full letters of provenance’, a collection of Superman
memorabilia and the nose off a scrapped Concorde.

The two lads said they were looking for a price in the region of £300,000. Only one dealer was prepared to go anywhere near that amount, offering what seemed an amazing £240,000. But
that was not enough. The lads were not going a penny lower than £250,000. The dealer – looking rather relieved that his offer had not been accepted – would not come up. So the
wall was still theirs – and by the end of December 2011 remained theirs.

If Banksy had been unfortunate enough to have tuned in to Channel 4 that night, the programme would probably have given him nightmares. Outwitting the police might be cool, but having
to endure being the centrepiece of a game show along with a hangman’s rope is just embarrassing.

If it was any consolation for him, the following week Tracey Emin’s twin brother Paul was on the programme trying to flog a print his sister had given him entitled
Mrs Edwards We Wish
You Were Dead
, a reference to a dinner lady at their old school that neither Tracey nor her brother took to. (He got £2300 for it.) Banksy probably feels the same way about the sellers
every time he sees one of his walls go on the market.

Thirteen

How Pest Control Routed Vermin

A
ny reader may well ask, how on earth can a book about an artist have such a strange chapter heading? But this is Banksy and none of the usual rules
apply. What follows is a story about a serious battle for control of every aspect of his art. It is a battle that Banksy – in the form of Pest Control, the organisation he established to
verify his art – won decisively, driving from the field the rival organisation, Vermin, set up by dealers to authenticate Banksy’s works themselves. It was a short battle and Banksy
took no prisoners.

Banksy’s past is always catching up with him – not in disastrous ways, but in difficult, awkward ways that force him to make decisions he would rather not have to make. Back in
November 2007 a note appeared on one of the Banksy forums: ‘Authentic Banksy for sale – Mystic Swing art.’ The details then followed: ‘It is the frontage to a fairground
ride called the Mystic Swing which has attended festivals and green fairs for the past few years.’ Anyone interested was given a choice of web contacts including googling ‘Mystic
Swing’ as a phrase, ‘ignoring the movie of the same name’.

This was not exactly a high-pressure sell. At the end of the message the seller warned: ‘I’m not actually on the internet and use the local library for a
connection so please don’t expect an immediate response. Be Lucky!’ It was signed ‘Flatcap’.

A little later Flatcap posted more details. The ride was about thirty years old and the artwork, a collaboration between Banksy and one Dave Panit, ‘the celebrated fairground
artist’, was completed in 2000. ‘I’m just thinking that, as the work got slightly damaged this year (sometime whilst I was asleep at a festival) I’m not willing to travel
this anymore. Believe me, I think it’s a shame. But, I’m not rich and am looking for the cash to buy my “safe haven” as promised by thatcher (I’m not going to put a
capital “t” on the start of that word) for my family.

‘Anyway, I’m not having some pissed up prat playing ping-pong with his head with the artwork (my friend witnessed this one and politely told him to “go away”), nor an
imbecile with a Cosworth collide with it on a roundabout (close one, that) so it’s got to go.’ In response to further questions he added, ‘It does have a Banksy tag and I’m
currently getting it authenticated to ease the cynics minds.’

Flatcap said that he was in ‘no rush to sell’. Which was fortunate, for four years later the piece still sat in a shed, with nothing to fear from Cosworths but still no buyer. For
Banksy, or rather Pest Control, will not authenticate it. And without their signed certificate, complete with half its Lady Di tenner, no one wants to know.

It is a big (roughly 6m × 3.5m), really enjoyable, unusual piece, with all the brighter than bright colours of the fairground, but depicting a rabbit playing the piano, a trapeze artist
monkey, a performing seal tossing a TV set instead of a ball, and a couple of
rabbit ballerinas en pointe wearing tutus and
gas masks
. To me it looks like Banksy at
his freehand best, but is it a Banksy?

The journey to see Dave ‘W.E.T.’ Panit was a long one, deep into the heart of Somerset near Huish Episcopi. From a local pub I was guided down country roads which soon turned into
country lanes, which eventually turned into a large field. And there sat the fairground artist and dyslexic sign writer who long ago had trouble with spelling the key words ‘Wet Paint’
– hence his adopted name of Panit. The long hair evident on his website had gone, and in his mid-fifties, with a beard, he looked almost like an academic, but we were definitely in the
alternative world here. The field, where various neighbours seemed to pass by and where they would sometimes reside, houses his own touring van, as well as a huge ex-Teletubbies van which turns
into a bar at festivals when it is needed, some mobile toilets, the caravan for his travelling freak show, and his own overstuffed studio.

He has done everything he wanted to do as a fairground artist; he painted one helter-skelter not once but twice, when fifteen or twenty years later it came back for some rehab. A couple of years
back he achieved the pinnacle for any fairground artist, a ‘set of gallopers’ – thirty-three horses, two cockerels and a chariot. ‘It took me a couple of months, it was a
bloody nightmare at times but it was worth it.’ We talked in his studio, which was more treasure trove than anything else, containing everything from Lord Sutch’s bowler hat and a dead
fairy (nothing serious, just a skeleton with fairy wings) to lots of teddy bear heads and hundreds of dolly parts, all of them waiting to be key players in his next freak show.

Flatcap had bought Mystic Swing in 2003 from Seb Bambini, a travelling showman who entertained children at festivals around
Europe. Seb had discovered the ride unused and
unloved and had done an enormous amount of work getting it back into its original shape. With the help of Mike Bodyart, a UV body and make-up artist on the rave scene, he completely covered the
barrel of the ride with recycled CDs to create a giant spinning mirror ball within which sixteen visitors could sit down and enjoy the illusion of being lost in space. For the front of the ride,
the part that encouraged people in, he commissioned Dave with his flamboyant, over-the-top circus style to do all the lettering – or ‘flashes’ as they are known in the trade
– and Banksy, who he knew from the music scene in Bristol, to do the illustrating.

Dave says, ‘Seb approached me and asked if I would decorate the ride with Banksy and I said “No problem.” I knew he was a graffiti artist but of course none of us realised what
he was going to become at that time.’ It was a combination that worked perfectly.

The work was done in the spring of 1999, in the back garden of a house Bambini was renting in the village of Hambridge in Somerset, and it was certainly rather more than one quick painting
session. ‘Banksy was funny doing this,’ says Dave. ‘He was getting paid to do it for a start, and as a graffiti artist you don’t normally get paid, do you? And he’d
been given permission to do what he liked. I was really amazed by what he could achieve with an aerosol can.’

The Bambinis provided the meals and the drinks as well as paying both artists £200 and their travel costs. There were several people, including Banksy, staying at the house and a lot of
cider was being consumed. Another artist who was said to have been present says, ‘Those days were a pretty hazy time. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you whether I was there or
not.’ Banksy took time – days – to get started but when he did start, most of the work was
done in one night. As recalled by Dave: ‘We worked together
and I thought, this is going to be interesting, how are we going to do this? All day I would be doing my bit and would he come and join in? No. He wouldn’t do it during daylight hours. He
waited until it got dark, put a headtorch on and got out there and did it then. That’s how it was painted, one half at night and one half in the day. It was just so funny, him in the head
torch. We’d all have enough bevvies by the time he started, so we’d go to bed and he’d go painting and we’d go out there and check on him once in a while to see what he was
up to.’

The division of labour was quite easy. The words ‘Frills’, ‘Spills’, ‘Ribtickler Entertainment’, ‘Mystic Swing’ and the like were all
Dave’s, as was the edging. Banksy did the rest, and since he was the last one to paint he could overlay his work on top of Dave’s, rather than the other way round. So it is an important
early work, and although Dave did a skilful job on the lettering it is without any doubt at all a freehand Banksy. The only stencil is his signature, which comes just below the safety certificate
the ride needed every year.

But when Flatcap approached Pest Control for authentication, he never got an answer. Flatcap, aka Jez White, a rather laid back traveller who has plans to use the proceeds from the sale to
provide a winter park-up for travellers to work on their summer festival projects, does not seem especially bothered by it all. He keeps the piece dry and well locked up and hopes that one day
someone will come along and make him an offer – authenticated or not.

Pest Control was set up by Banksy in January 2008. Its one shareholder is Pictures on Walls; its one director is Banksy’s accountant, Simon Durban; the company secretary is Holly
Cushing, who runs it. As Simon Todd of artnet wrote at the time, ‘MI5 has more information about itself on its website than Pest Control does on its own’; nevertheless it
took very little time for the company to change the rules of the game. The majority of its activities have been welcomed by every dealer in town. ‘We were crying out for somebody,’ says
Acoris Andipa. ‘Holly has brought a very, very big degree of professionalism into the marketplace, in terms of what is and what isn’t a Banksy.’ He admits though, ‘There
will be grey areas and I know plenty of people who have crossed swords with them because they have hit these grey areas.’