Banksy (9 page)

Once he had found the right medium he was on his way. Another of his Bristol friends says, ‘From the first he was very ambitious and centred,’ and another writer from those days told
Steve Wright, author of
Home Sweet Home
, ‘When I first met him, which was probably in 1993, even then he was very driven. He wasn’t much concerned about what anyone else was
doing, even though he was, back then, up for getting together and collaborating on projects and pieces, something he seems less likely to do these days. But he already had that “goal”
then – wanting to get his message across, have that dig at the system, make that point. It seemed obvious that he was going to become big or well known, he just had that air about
him.’

He had some sort of agent from quite early on and while others just painted at Barton Hill, he managed to stage his first show, with a few other artists, in the laundromat in the block of
council flats next to the youth centre. He said later with some pride: ‘All the people who lived there checked it out. It was really funny seeing trendy kids in Carhartt next to big fat
ladies with Iceland shopping bags.’

Who were his early influences? Apart from 3D there was no one in Bristol who he could turn to, but in Paris Blek le Rat – a very genial artist despite his name – had been stencilling
life-size rats across the walls since 1981. Blek, who has an impeccably bourgeois background, tells a romantic story of how he was inspired to go into graffiti by a fortune teller who told him she
saw him working
with walls. He studied architecture before moving on to stencils, so she was certainly in the right zone. Perhaps more to the point, he remembers being on
holiday in Italy after the war and spotting an old stencilled propaganda portrait of Mussolini. What impressed him was the power of the stencil – still there long after the dictator had been
done away with. The first time he ever saw graffiti as art was on a trip to New York back in 1971. He told
Swindle
magazine: ‘I wanted to do American pieces like I had seen in New
York. [But] I told myself, “No, I mustn’t do that.”’ Why? Because he was determined, in a very French way, that if he was going to do art on the streets of Paris it had,
somehow, to be graffiti in a uniquely French style.

In the early days, when he was besieging Paris with his rats, Blek needed to be as anonymous as any other street artist attempting to avoid the police, but now he is as open as Banksy is closed.
Somehow an image of the street artist has evolved, all hoodies, jeans, sneakers and aggression, but Blek fails to meet the criteria. When I met the well-dressed, middle-aged Blek at a book launch
party in London, he told me how excited he was to be flying to Brisbane in a day or two
first class
. He had never flown first class in his life and not only was his ticket being paid for,
but he was being provided with a legal wall to paint on once he got there.

Quite when Banksy first learned about Blek is unclear. Blek suggests it may have been through their mutual friend Tristan Manco, who showed his work to Banksy at ‘the end of the
nineties’, but it may well have been earlier than that, for a slim book called
Paris Graffiti
was doing the rounds of the graffiti writers in Bristol at about the time Banksy was
coming on to the scene. (None of the graffiti in the book is attributed, but there is what looks like an early Blek rat and possibly other pieces by him – certainly the book
revealed what the blurb called ‘a new chic on the streets of Paris’.) Whatever the date, there is no doubting the influence Blek had on Banksy. Once you have seen
Blek’s work it is impossible to see a Banksy piece, especially his early work, without thinking of Blek. Blek does not play with words in the way Banksy does and he is also much less
political (a rare political piece of his with David holding a rifle, done in support of Israel, did not go down too well in the street art community). Nevertheless the line between the two of them
is a very strong one, for like almost any artist Banksy has been influenced by those who have gone before him.

The two artists are almost always impeccably polite about each other. ‘Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it,
too,’ says Banksy, ‘only Blek did it twenty years earlier.’ And Blek replies with just a little more edge: ‘People say he copies me, but I don’t think so. I’m
the old man, he’s the new kid, and if I’m an inspiration to an artist that good, I love it. People want to know me now . . . I have a major book deal with the biggest publishers in the
world. I have waited thirty years for this. It’s only today that my street art has become big news, and that’s thanks to people saying Banksy is inspired by me.’ All of which is
true, and only once has he been slightly less polite about him: ‘I can tell you now that I have a stock of good ideas for him. Really, I do! I have many good ideas but this time he will have
to pay because we all know that he is fucking rich. (laughs) . . . He takes, but we all take from someplace.’

Right from the start of Banksy’s switch to stencils the humour, which was almost non-existent in his early freehand pieces, started to appear in his work. At Bristol harbour a sweet, but
startling-looking girl appeared on the wall hugging a large bomb instead of a Barbie doll. He repeated the image in years to come, but the
stencil work got cleaner and she got
younger and grew a neatly plaited pigtail in place of her rather wild ponytail. The changes made the image even more arresting. He had two CCTV cameras grow legs and do battle like fighting cocks
– the first of several pieces on the subject of surveillance – long before Ai Weiwei’s troubling CCTV camera, carved out of marble, drew critics’ praise when he was
exhibited in London in 2011.

Other pieces from that time include a tiger that escaped his bar-code cage by bending the bars and elderly bowlers, properly dressed for the occasion and concentrating just as hard as every
bowls player does, but using bombs instead of bowls for their game. The melding of the familiar with the shockingly unfamiliar; the humour, the quality and craft of the work; the way that even now,
when the original has long gone and they are no more than photographs, they simply stop you in amazement immediately you see them, marks out Banksy as brilliantly different from the beginning.
Forget all the hype, all the argument about the name, the influences, the money, the fame, here was an original artist – and apart perhaps from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, who in
the 1970s and 1980s both jumped from New York’s streets and subways into the galleries, he was making himself known on the streets in a way no other artist had done before him.

Quite apart from his skill as an artist, Banksy had another skill: he could organise. Kato, a graffiti veteran equally at home with lettering or characters, recalled in an interview with Felix
Braun the day when he was painting with the Dry Breadz Crew and Banksy ‘just turned up. He said he was into graf and wanted to paint with us. He was already doing stencils by then. He had a
knack for putting them in the right places, and they always had just the right content. He invited us to do workshops and stuff and
he always seemed to be able to blag good
spots.’ When Kato and Banksy painted the side of a house in Bristol it was Banksy who knocked on the door and persuaded the house’s owner to give them permission.

Inkie was another key contact and friend he made in those early days. Inkie moved up to London about the same time as Banksy, and carved out a very successful career for himself both as a
graphic designer in the video games industry and as an artist in his own right. He now has a family to support and unless fuelled by alcohol he is no longer quite the wild outlaw he once was, but
in the early Bristol days, one writer remembers, ‘When Inkie turned up at Barton Hill it was like the Pope coming to visit, the red carpet came out . . . he had a presence about him –
and, of course, a reputation as a really good writer.’

He might not have been pope, but he was still a very useful man to know and Banksy had no qualms about introducing himself. Inkie was painting – legally – the shutters of
Rollermania, a Bristol skateboard shop, when Banksy came by. ‘He came up and introduced himself. I hadn’t really heard of him to be honest. He said he knew the guys from Glastonbury,
he’d got an opportunity to paint there and he invited me to come along. We did the main dance stage along with Dicy, Feek and Eko.’ Their first piece there was a cartoon of Michael
Eavis, who runs Glastonbury, on his tractor being chased by a herd of cows. After Glastonbury they started painting together quite regularly.

‘From the minute I met him he was always quite motivational. At that point I was a bit laid back about it. As far as I was concerned I had become one of the best in the world. I had done
what I had set out to achieve. We’d had our fifteen minutes of fame and I never thought of it as a kind of career or anything, I just liked
doing it. But he was taking
things to another level. I lent him my credibility in the graffiti world, which he didn’t have at the time, and he used his organisational skills. It was a meeting of two halves
really.’

Nowhere were those skills better displayed than at the Walls on Fire graffiti festival which Banksy and Inkie put together in 1998, with the city’s agreement, using a line of hoardings
stretching for 400 metres around building work at Bristol harbour as their canvas. Posters announced an event that sounded excitingly edgy: ‘WALLS ON FIRE! Britain’s top graffiti
writers representing their skills in a massive paint battle over two days.’ All this to be accompanied by ‘raw hip hop and funk’.

Banksy might have been the young upstart but the event would not have happened without him. Inkie gave him his network of contacts, but it was Banksy who did most of the work. Here was a
completely unorganised activity – graffiti – being organised: someone had to negotiate with the city agency to allow it to happen legally, someone had to find sponsors willing to supply
paint, someone had to get the DJs. Most difficult of all, someone had to decide which artists were going to be invited to paint, and of course the key question: how much space each artist was to be
given and where that space was going to be, nice and obvious or tucked away at the end somewhere. And pretty much all of this was done by Banksy. A picture still exists of a line of young graffiti
artists working away on the wall, each sticking happily to their own space. They look very meek and mild, far from the ‘BATTLE’ the poster had been promoting.

Banksy’s own work for this festival was largely freehand – a group of the gloomiest-looking doctors you have ever seen gathered around an operating table. At either end the piece was
‘framed’ by television screens, each with a different Banksy stencil on it. The operating table itself was obscured by elaborate graffiti lettering that ran right
across the piece, reading ASTEK (a fellow graffiti artist), and there was a dedication in one corner which read, ‘For Astek in the Scrubs’. The whole thing was Banksy with a foot in
both camps. But no one complained. Unfortunately it rained most of the weekend but John Nation, whom Banksy tapped for sponsorship, says ‘It was the best event ever.’

While Walls on Fire meant a lot to the graffiti world, a piece that Banksy did several months later endeared him to a much wider community in Bristol.
The Mild Mild West
(it’s his
title painted across the top) is a huge piece on the side of an abandoned building. A teddy bear manages to look quite cuddly despite the fact that he is about to throw the Molotov cocktail he is
wielding at three riot policemen who are advancing on him. Eight years after it was painted,
The Mild Mild West
won a BBC online poll to find an Alternative Landmark for Bristol, getting
more than double anyone else’s vote. And it is easy to see why. Some saw it as a reference to the St Paul’s racial riots of 1980 – the front line was just a couple of minutes away
– others thought it more to do with the police tactics in breaking up the free party scene that was then thriving in Bristol. Whatever the influences, the message is clear: nice cuddly
citizens represented by the teddy bear – he looks too nice to ever throw the Molotov cocktail – against heavy-handed police.

If the madam running a brothel has a little black book where she keeps the details of her finest clients, then some graffiti writers often have their own rather larger black book where they keep
the preparatory sketches they make before they do their work. Banksy has said he never used sketch books ‘in the way you imagine a
“real” artist does’,
rather he uses them ‘to note down great ideas of somebody else’s I’ve just had’. But he certainly did a preliminary sketch for
The Mild Mild West
, the major
difference being that in this sketch the cuddly bear was holding a spliff as well as a Molotov cocktail. Whether Banksy would have got more or fewer votes if the spliff had stayed we will never
know, but the image he actually painted is certainly sharper without it. The teddy bear is still there – just – and in the spring of 2011 must have been watching with some amusement as
below him life imitated art, with rioters and police clashing violently in protests after a new Tesco store opened in the area.

The Mild Mild West
was one of the last pieces Banksy did before leaving Bristol for London and it is a good example of how his style was developing. Although this piece could easily be a
stencil, it is actually freehand but it shows him already light years away from the traditional graffiti that was being painted all around him. You don’t need any inside knowledge of the
graffiti world to know exactly what is going on. The painting is instantly accessible and, like many of his pieces, shows a clever sense of timing in capturing an incident, a protest or in this
case just a vague feeling of what people are thinking.

What followed next – the history of the piece – illustrates Banksy’s extraordinary trajectory through the art world. First there was the excitement of actually doing the piece.
It was painted over three days, with a friend holding the ladder up to the first floor site and keeping a look-out at the same time. Then a sort of anticlimax: nothing from the police, nothing from
the anti-graffiti squad, no angry denouncements in the council chamber. Next, over the years, a growing fondness for the piece which became a part of the ongoing attempt to turn a rather tatty area
into the sort of
bohemian art district that every city covets. Then, as the area began to improve, and nine years after the piece was painted, an application by a property
developer to redevelop the site around it into flats with a café on the ground floor covered in glass high enough to enclose the Banksy. So you could be sipping your cappuccino right
underneath a Banksy.