Banksy (5 page)

And besides that, as Adam Clark Estes wrote on Salon.com, ‘Banksy’s knack for anonymity intrigues us. Even if he stepped forward or another exposé were published, we probably
wouldn’t stop wondering because wondering is fun.’ Certainly the reaction on the
Mail
’s website proved his point, for most people seemed to resent being told who Banksy
was. Rather like Father Christmas, the legend was better than the real thing. One
Mail
reader wrote: ‘Why have you done this? I don’t understand. You have ruined something
special.’ When they named his wife the reaction was much the same: ‘The vast majority of people don’t want to know
who Banksy is. We enjoy his anonymity just
as he does. Leave them be and leave his wife’s family alone! Spoilsports!’

Despite his PR’s assurances, he is not ‘very working class’. One of his friends says: ‘This image of him as a lovable rogue, it’s an image. He’s public school
educated and he’s a very intelligent man.’ Another says the idea that he is ‘very working class’ is ‘a load of bollocks. I am not going to put anyone down for where
they come from, but anyone who goes to Bristol Cathedral School is not “very working class”.’

To survive in the rough and tumble of the macho graffiti world Banksy, like others, had to blur his background a little. ‘Dare I say it, I think he made out he’s a little bit less
switched on than he is,’ says another graffiti artist from those days. ‘With the whole street culture thing you have to play it all down a bit, you can’t go into it being all
highbrow and intellectual. A lot of the places he painted are not the nicest places in the world and you can’t go there all “Oh hi, hello” sort of thing. There’s two sides
to him and I think he kept the one side, the side that he went to one of the poshest schools in Bristol, very quiet. I think you will find quite a lot of his story is embellished. It sounds good
but there’s a lot of mystique about it all.’

Banksy was brought up in a leafy suburb on the edge of the city. It was not the most fashionable part of town – there was none of the buzz of Clifton – but still it was totally
different from Barton Hill and it is easy to see how he would have been a bit nervous as he ventured into the high-rise council estate for the first time. In addition the school he went to was
– at the time – no state school but the fee-paying Bristol Cathedral School (it became a free Academy school in 2008). Some years ago he told
Swindle
magazine: ‘Graffiti
was the thing we all loved at school – we all did
it on the bus on the way home from school. Everyone was doing it.’ It’s a lovely picture of all these
public school boys busy at being vandals, even if Banksy is mistaking everyone else for himself.

Quite how easy a childhood he had is unclear. In his first self-published book,
Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall
, produced in 2001, Banksy himself tells one story from his childhood
which is surely just too heartbreaking for him to have made up. ‘When I was nine years old I was expelled from school,’ he wrote, ‘it was punishment for swinging one of my
classmates round and round before dropping him onto a concrete floor.’ The child was taken away by an ambulance that had to pull in to the playground to pick him up. He sustained a fractured
skull and did not regain consciousness for a week.

‘The next day I was made to stand in front of the whole school at assembly while the headmaster gave a speech about good and evil before I was sent home in disgrace. The unfortunate part
of this story is that I never actually touched the kid . . .’ It was his best friend who had ‘put him into casualty’. Banksy and another boy just watched – startled –
as Banksy’s friend swung the boy round and round until he was too dizzy to stand up. When the friend, who was a big lad, saw that things were serious he persuaded the other boy to lie: they
both said that Banksy was the culprit.

‘I tried many times to explain that I hadn’t done it, but the boys stuck to their story. Eventually my mum turned to me and said bitterly that I should have the guts to admit when I
was wrong and that it was even more disgusting when I refused to accept what I’d done. So I shut up after that.’ He tells the story to illustrate that ‘there’s no such thing
as justice’ and ‘there’s no point in behaving yourself’, but it might also suggest that something was not quite right at home.

He told one interviewer he did art at school but never made it any further. He never went to art college and he says ‘I’m not from a family of artistic
people.’ But a fellow pupil recalls now: ‘There were several good artists at school back then, but one really stood out and that was him.’ However, the art department at school
and Banksy did not appear to get on, for he says he got no more than an E in GCSE art. Asked if this was due to a lack of inspiration, he replied: ‘That, plus I had also discovered
cannabis.’ (The school says it cannot discuss any individual pupil’s achievements there.) From all that he says it appears as though he was miserable at school – it never made any
sense to him – and it was only when he had an aerosol spray can in his hand that he discovered his voice. What happened to him between leaving school at sixteen and surfacing again as an
up-and-coming artist remains unclear, although he claims to have spent much of the time apprenticed to a pork butcher. He says he was politicised during ‘the poll tax, the Criminal Justice
Act and the Hartcliffe Riots’ (which developed after two men who had stolen a police motorbike were killed in a collision with an unmarked police car). ‘I can also remember my old man
taking me down to see the Lloyds Bank – what was left of it – after the 1980 St Pauls riots. It’s mad to see how the whole thing of having to do what you’re told can be
turned on its head, and how few people it takes to grab it back.’

When Banksy did eventually make it up to Barton Hill he arrived at a good moment. He had started painting at the age of fourteen and he was only fifteen at the time of all the arrests, so he was
not in any way involved and in many ways this was fortunate. Operation Anderson had not wiped graffiti off the streets but there was certainly a gap; it had made people pause and weigh up the risks
and Barton Hill now had the reputation of
being hot. Surveillance cameras were being introduced in force and there were fears that these cameras might have been installed in
the area. Banksy and others were the second wave, the next generation, with new enthusiasm, new ideas, new ways of approaching things and no criminal record.

John Nation remembers him coming up towards the end of his time there. He finds it hard to believe that Banksy was as nervous as he claims to be, but for ‘someone who wasn’t from
Barton Hill he probably was scared a bit . . . there were a lot of the lads who were there every day of the week, hanging out. He wasn’t one of those, he wasn’t one of the local lads.
But there were a lot who came up at the weekends, you could have up to 100 people here . . . I can remember him coming up. He was a lot younger than some of the other lads that were painting and he
would sort of tag along. There were always lads on the fringes who weren’t so pronounced . . .’

Tucked away in the corner of the youth club’s five-a-side football pitch there is a faded piece of graffiti that appears to be a Banksy. The wall has been sprayed silver and a poodle with
what I took to be a goat’s head has been stencilled across it (I read later that it was actually the head of a bulldog, not a goat). Bulldog, goat . . . it was not one of his best efforts and
it was so faded I was not even sure to begin with if the body was a poodle, yet it was certainly his stencilled tag at the bottom. Over the next few years he began to make his presence felt all
over Bristol and not just at the Barton Hill ‘Hall of Fame’ (the name given by graffiti writers to a large wall where anyone can paint legally).

He was experimenting with names – in these early days he sometimes signed himself Robin Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy, which had less of the gangster ‘robbing
banks’ ring to
it but was much more memorable – and easier to write. He was experimenting too with styles. Was he going to be a graffiti writer, writing his name
according to the strict set of graffiti rules? Was he going to be a freehand artist, using an aerosol nozzle against the wall in much the same way as a painter uses a brush against a canvas? Or was
he going to be a stencil artist, cutting out the shapes he wanted on stiff card, placing the card against the wall and then using an aerosol can to spray over it so that when he took the card away
only the shapes that had been cut out were left?

Graffiti artist. Stencil artist. Aerosol artist. To most people outside this closed world, the terms don’t mean very much: graffiti is graffiti. But within this community they matter
enormously. Thus a friend of Banksy’s from way back says, ‘He was never a graffiti artist who sold out, because he was never a graffiti artist to start with.’ So what, or who, is
a true graffiti artist?

Three

Graffiti Decoded

I
was fortunate to find a friendly guide who would lead me through the world of graffiti, a world which he described very accurately as ‘a
lawless activity with a million and one laws’. David Samuel grew up on a council estate in Kilburn, London. His own estate was tolerable but there were three others around it, one of which
was ‘horrifying’. He got into graffiti at fourteen, at about the same age as Banksy, and he says simply, ‘It sounds very corny, but graffiti saved my life.’ And this is one
of the weird things about graffiti: to the outsider it
is
vandalism; to quite a few of the graffiti artists I have met it is a way
out of
vandalism – or, in the words of one
academic, a ‘tactic of the dispossessed in achieving a sense of identity’.

Now thirty-one, the child of a volatile mix: mother Irish, father – who he never knew – Egyptian, he calls his story ‘the usual standard sob story . . . one parent family . . .
didn’t have any money . . . I was stealing from a young age. As a teenager you want to do something that makes you look good, to stop yourself getting bullied or beaten up. I was running
around with a gang from south Kilburn, doing a lot of bad things with them. When I stopped running with them things got really bad, they all turned on me
because I knew
certain things that could get them in trouble. There was a load of madness, once they tried to stab me on the high road and there was a knife fight in the bakery . . .’

Instead of gangs he turned to graffiti, going straight into it from school rather like an Etonian might go into stockbroking. ‘I thought, this will show I’ve got balls. This will
show I can do things myself and I don’t have to hurt anyone. That’s what mentally saved my life. And many of those people who I was doing those mad things with are either dead or in
prison.’ He has stopped painting illegally and, having been helped initially by a £4500 loan from the Prince’s Trust to establish a gallery in Brighton, he now runs his own
illustration agency, Rarekind. But if you know where to look on the web you can still find a short video of him painting trains.

Graffiti on trains has always seemed to me to be annoying, exasperating, dispiriting – in short, hugely anti-social. But watching David paint part of a carriage on this video I can see the
attraction: the combination of fear, adrenalin and satisfaction at having outwitted the rest of the world. ‘That’s the top, top thing,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing when you
see your train in the morning. You get there early enough and you see it pull out. Oh, I can’t explain, but it’s the best, best feeling.’

So why do they write only their ‘tag’ – in effect their signature? ‘’Cos that’s all we care about,’ says David. ‘We don’t go out there for no monetary gain. We go out there
for passion and for fame.’ There seems, I suggest, a fair amount of macho swilling around here. ‘Oh God, man, it’s all about it – how big are your balls. It’s fame,
ego, that’s what I did it for.’ But excuse me, he’s not famous and Banksy is. No, but graffiti writers are not doing it to impress the outside world, they are doing it to impress
each other: ‘We’re not talking to anyone out there apart from ourselves.’ Getting your
piece up, whether it be on a train or on a wall where no one else can
reach, the adrenalin of painting when any moment you might be caught, beating the security system, chatting about it afterwards to fellow members of the club, like footballers dissecting their
victory. This is what it’s all about.

He loves Banksy’s work: ‘He’s very clever. I think he’s a genius man.’ But Banksy, he says, is not a graffiti artist. Graffiti artists ‘only write their name
and do characters and it’s a whole ego trip and it’s all about us and our peers. It’s not about the public.’

In contrast, for Banksy and other street artists like him, it is
all
about the public. Maybe they care about their peers, but what they are really concerned about is a much wider
audience. They are painting the same walls as a graffiti artist but they are producing images which are instantly understandable – a gallery on the street that is inclusive rather than
exclusive. The image can be pure humour or social commentary or both, but every passer-by gets the joke.