Tea with Alan Aldridge

Penguin books, the 60s, psychedelia… Here's what we talked about the first time we had tea. You can read my interview with the cult artist below.

The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes

Alan Aldridge grew up in East London and moved to Los Angeles 28 years ago. In his early 20s, the young artist went from unemployed and unknown to a designer at the Sunday Times in four months. At first, he received hate mail for his unconventional depictions. Aldridge became the art director of Penguin a year later. Soon after, he was illustrating for the Beatles, drawing posters for Warhol, and hanging out with rock stars. Aldridge created album covers for the Who, Elton John, Cream, and the Rolling Stones. He also made successful children’s books filled with colourful beasts. Film deals, beauties, and traveling around the world factored in along with creative output. Aldridge is currently writing a book called Pandemonium, which is out next spring. I met up with the charming man in Soho to talk about his past and thoughts about the future.

When did you start drawing and designing?

We’ll get one story straight. I wasn’t good at art in school. In fact, one term I came bottom in the class. When the teacher read out the results, I kept thinking he would call my name out next, but no, it was so-and-so, and then so-and-so, “And last of all, Alan Aldridge, 3/100.”   He glared at me; he thought I could do better than that. I mean, I wasn’t really trying, so he said, “Aldridge, you would’ve gotten 4/100 if you’d spelled your name right.”

 I didn’t start drawing until my 20s, and that was drawing in bars, trying to sell portraits and they were all terrible. Never sold one. Then I went to a graphic workshop, because it said Free Coffee on its flyer, which I thought was really weird, ‘cause the flyer was in a coffee shop, so I went and it turned out to be a class for graphic design. I convinced the guys that ran it that I was broke and they let me sit at the back. It was a ten-week course, twice a week. Slowly I got into it and finally I won the big prize, to do a Penguin book for twenty-five pounds. Very quickly after that, Germano Facetti who was head of Penguin’s design group started giving me work and one of the jobs he gave me was a book called Private View by Lord Snowdon so I had to go to the palace. I became very good at putting layouts together. At the end of the gig, Lord Snowdon recommended me to the Sunday Times, which at that point had one of the best design groups in Europe. So I go along to the interview and I get the job. I had gone from literally nothing to the Sunday Times in about four months. I had only been there a year when I became art director at Penguin.

How did you shake up the place when you were designing the Penguin book covers in 1965-67?

Well I was made art director, so I was the boss. It’s a funny story-I was getting to have a reputation and I had done some Penguin books because I had won a prize with the graphic workshop. I won first prize to do a Penguin cover and the art director at Penguin liked me so much he gave me two or three covers to do a week. Then the boss at Penguin, a guy called Tony Godwin  said, “Alan, you’re kind of trendy and know everyone. Do you know somebody, an American, to take over as art director of Penguin?”   I said “Yeah, I do know someone, ME.” And he laughed and I laughed cause it was kind of a joke to think you could be only a year at Sunday Times and then become head of Penguin Books art department. I forgot about it and then two weeks later, he called me up and said, “Do you still want the job?”  I said, “What job?”  And he said, “The art director of Penguin.”  I said, “Are you kidding me?”  He said, “No, it’s yours.”  I was twenty-three or twenty-four at the time. I had only been in the art business for two years, three at the most. Suddenly I was art director of Penguin and I brought my friends in to do the work in the studio. I started to get photographers and designers involved. We threw out the old grid; it was good fun.

 Your Chelsea Girls poster is famous.  How did you get to know Andy Warhol?

 He didn’t ask me personally. There was a place called Arts Lab in Covent Garden, which is a real bohemian, existential, beat generation kind of a joint. They were putting on the Chelsea Girls premiere. Somebody at Arts Lab called and told me Andy Warhol had asked if I’d do the poster, something like that. The poster became more famous than the movie.

Do you see any parallels with the creativity and upheaval of the 60s and the current cultural climate?

No, the difference between the 60s and now, is that the 60s already broke all the barriers: graphically, musically…if you listen to 50s music and the transition into 60s music, it was partly a drug culture as well which took over. There was colour in magazines. Colour became prevalent, as opposed to black and white magazines. It was like the whole younger generation wanted to try out everything...and did. Today it would be very hard to say your vision is unique when so much has already paved the way before you. My drawings had no precedent in the 50s or early 60s. I drew whatever came into my head and I guess that, in its own way, is revolutionary.

I know a lot of people who are obsessed with the 60s and particularly influenced by the style and music of that time. It’s as if there is an imagined nostalgia for a superior era.

Well, 1967 was voted the year of the century, primarily because of Sgt. Pepper. The 60s are all about free love. I mean, I didn’t see too much of that…there were a lot of concerts, a lot of drugs, people were taking their clothes off. That didn’t happen in the 50s…Some of the Pop Art was spectacular.

 Is there anything left to discover?

Oh yeah: computer art. You see what kids are doing in Photoshop. I find it very creative but it’s also cold. It’s almost like no hand has ever touched it. It’s very technical. I think my stuff has a bit of spirit to it.

Do you listen to music when you work?

I have an itunes electronica channel on all the time: XTC. It’s techno mostly.

What is your favorite book?

 Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck. It’s about Shamanism and the effects of psychedelic drugs.

What do you think is the most mind-expanding art out there?

It really depends on the viewer I think. I once when to Ghent in Belgium to see the Jan van Eyck altarpiece, the triptych, and nothing has every blown me away quite like that. At the same time I could look at psychedelic art and feel far less tripped out by it because it’s something I can understand. Jan van Eyck’s paintings don’t seem human to me. It was something that said to me technically you can get a lot better if you try. He was a genius.


Then I suggest playing Exquisite Corpse. We whip up some pictures of hybrid creatures while he regales me with stories about when he was a teenage butcher and old East London. Back when Shoreditch was the roughest part of London, the pub Dirty Dicks used to have dead cats nailed to the wall. But Shoreditch has changed; they took the cats down and Alan Aldridge hasn’t been back since. 

-Words and interview by Margo Fortuny. Published in Exit Magazine, 2008.

Aerosol Optimist: An Interview with Futura 2000

Here’s an interview I did with the charming graffiti pioneer Futura 2000 for Exit magazine.

                                            Click to enlarge or read text below.

The Aerosol Optimist

Futura 2000 is a graffiti legend famous for an abstracted style of spraycan art. He has exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London, the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, the Picasso Museum in Antibes, and the New Museum in Manhattan, among others. Exit spoke to Futura 2000 recently about The Clash, his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the New York art scene.

MARGO FORTUNY: I love all those 80s movies about New York's early hip hop scene: Wild Style, Krush Groove, Style Wars… Were you in any of those?

FUTURA: When some of those movies were filmed I happened to be away in London with The Clash. When I came back I managed to sneak into Wild Style ; I’m in a scene in a club with the late Dondi White, and I’m at the end of Style Wars on the boat.

FORTUNY: What was it like touring with The Clash?

FUTURA: That was an introduction to Europe and ultimately, that helped create a name for me. I didn’t know those guys when they came to New York. It was their scene coming here as opposed to,“Oh yeah, I know London Calling. I know Sandinista.“ I didn’t know any of that. I met Joe (Strummer), he was an amazing individual, almost like an older brother, a very deep man, an emotional guy. That was amazing to meet someone who was so well-known and very talented in his field. I got to sing on a record with the Clash called Overpowered by Funk, on the album Combat Rock. You know how things are when you’re in it and it’s all going on and you don’t really even know what’s happening? It was quite a little tornado. That was the most amazing experience of my life- at that time- short of meeting my wife and having children.

FORTUNY: Did you hang out with Basquiat back in the day?

FUTURA: 1979, ’80, ’81, ’82, those were the wonder years in New York   when it all started to incubate. People like Jean and Keith (Haring) were more conscious of being artists, that was their thing. Graffiti writers weren’t educated like that. We didn’t think, Oh we’re getting into the art world. These kids, Jean, Keith, Kenny, and all the more famous guys of that era, Clemente, Schnabel, were artists. They were educated, and so for them to do what they did ultimately was not a surprise. 

There’s so much revisionist history, people can say what they want... but Jean was a very good friend and he was part of all of it. I remember thinking, “Wow, he’s doing a very permanent thing.” And people said, “Oh, my kids could do that.” But no one understood he was interpreting Cy Twombly, and he was showing relationships in art, which is what the art world wants you to do. What he created gave it respect. It’s cyclical. He was a master. I regret that he killed himself through his addiction. Keith is another story. Warhol as well, I knew all of those people, though with Andy I was a little standoffish because I thought he was a pretty strange guy.

I remember Jean giving me a hundred dollar bill once. He sold some postcards, sort of like that scene out of the movie (Basquiat) He sold them to Bischofberger or Warhol, I don’t know, but he had a pocket full of hundred dollar bills, and he was like, “Lenny, here you go, get some art supplies.” I thought “Wow. But I really shouldn’t take this.” He said, “No, you have to, come on. When you’re doing well, hook up artists, man. Tell them to do work.”  I was like, “Wow, thank you.” And you know, I went and bought some canvas, some paint, whatever. I’ll never forget that day. Just before he passed away a lot of people used his generosity and his openness. People would hang around his studio and drink, do drugs, people were taking advantage of him because sometimes he would get so fucked up I guess he needed people around. That Basquiat isn’t here is a real tragedy. Everything that he’s done and everything that’s said of him is all worthy. He was way ahead of his time. He was a brilliant artist.

FORTUNY: How has your style evolved over the years? Is it more graphic or theoretical?

FUTURA: Yes, it is more graphic in a sense. You can’t really alter the aerosol medium as it is. It’s always going to be a quick dry response medium. It’s very workable. I like to think I’ve gotten better through practice but I’m still trying to discover what I really want to paint. I am returning as a painter now. All of my recent graphic art and design, I’m putting that on the back burner. In the last decade the movement has spun back around and now I’m getting caught up in this gravitational pull. It would be nice to get a little bit known in my own country, finally. My aim is to redirect traffic to other things I’m doing now. I made a lot of decisions for 2012. It’s gonna be a new me. I bought a suit. You know what I’m saying? It’s that kind of change in lifestyle.

FORTUNY: So your fashion collaborations are over now.

FUTURA: I have bigger fish to capture. I’m holding back on all those other things that are not quite as fascinating. Right now I have some potential clients that are very, very big. 

FORTUNY: What kind of direction are you moving in? Galleries, public art projects?

FUTURA: I like public art more than galleries.  The gallery I’m working with in Paris,  Jerome, they’re amazing. However, I am looking at other ways of exposing my work and some of those could be public art . I’m trying to work with some hotels, and painting a private jet. I’m looking at art that doesn't have to be in a gallery. I want to do murals around the world as well. There’s Os Gêmeos and Shepard Fairey, Twist, I want to do something like that in the public view. Where can I take my work to reach a new audience? I think that’s the most important thing. Everything’s already starting to line up. I’ve got a book deal with Rizzoli. They’ve done Murakami, KAWS, but that’s not until 2014.

When I was a kid I would write my name on the wall. Now I can figure out a better way to save my signature. 

FORTUNY: What artists inspire you or your style?

FUTURA: I would say that no artist has inspired me. I always try to find a negative space. When I first started writing graffiti I had a signature. Everyone did. But when I started painting I wasn’t looking at who was doing what. I was looking for what didn’t exist.

I’m influenced by life itself, whatever I’m exposed to.  Because painting is an emotional experience it’s not like “Oh let me do a logo for Supreme,” where it’s going to be crafted and clinical. We know what they want, whereas with painting it’s more like “Let me show how I feel,” and based on my feelings that’s how I’m going to work.  

Thirty years ago I was mad scared. I needed to know who’s Kandinsky, who is this, what is the Bauhaus movement... I never had access to that.

FORTUNY: What do think of Banksy?

FUTURA: After this many years he’s put graff or street art on the map again in some commercial fashion. There’s a limit to how long you can be witty. I come from a different school. We don’t stencil. Yeah, I’ve always dug him as a clever kid very much trending, but I’m not drinking all the Banksy Kool-Aid. Everything else: the movie, all that, it’s a lot of hype. To the uninformed, or to the people 30 and under, they think he’s the greatest thing ever. They don’t have true historical perspective. They don’t know any better. I saw his show at the MOCA at last year. Your Banksy, your Jeff Koons, any other artist that has a team of people-  it’s not my cup of tea. 

FORTUNY: It becomes a factory.

FUTURA: Totally. Warhol taught everyone how to do that. I don’t like that as much. Whereas if I go up to someone’s studio, like Space Invader in Paris, and I see this kid surrounded by work and it’s all him, all these creations worldwide, I appreciate that more. Don’t try to sell me a theatre. I don’t want a theatre. Give me a performance. 

The thing about Banksy is that I don’t think I would be back in the art world if it wasn’t for him. I don’t want to come off bitter; I just want to be honest. I think the guy’s amazing but he’s lost it. 

FORTUNY: If I came to your birthday party and my present was a work by any artist, what would you want?

FUTURA: I would highly recommend you didn’t do that but if you were set on it I need a Michelangelo, a little sketch. The thing is I don’t live with art, so that would be one of the pieces I would have. Michelangelo, he’s my favourite.

FORTUNY: What do you think of social media and art?

FUTURA: I’m in contact with KAWS. He’s commenting, I’m commenting back. But I don’t know if I’m talking to Brian (KAWS) or someone who works for Brian. It disturbs me that we’re creating all these buffers and filters between each other. It’s bullshit. I can be real in a place that’s very fake. That’s one of my missions right now.  Because we’re living in a very fake world. It worries me. I’m very old school. There should be more interaction between us.

FORTUNY: Do you think social media and apps help or hinder interaction?

FUTURA: Well, as a rule, I think they’re garbage. But if you want to go in and do something really interesting they can help. Obviously you can touch a lot of people.

FORTUNY: What’s something you wish people knew about you?

FUTURA: At the end of the day, whether it’s a really nice hotel or restaurant, I’m more likely to be chilling with the kids in the kitchen than all the important people in the crowd... No matter what happens I hope people know I haven’t changed.

I've become what I wanted to do. Creating a family has been very important for me. I’m so grateful. In the 80s when things fell apart, ’85 when the house of cards that was the New York City art world crumbled, I thought, I predict that I’m going to live to the year 2000, so things were bound to get better. I was very optimistic even though I was in relatively hard times.  In 1985 you could put a tombstone on the New York scene- but there was another inspiration at that moment: my son was one years old. My children, my family, that’s been the support I’ve always needed. Finally, in some crazy twist, the stars are aligning again.

Exit Magazine, Spring/Summer 2012

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Futura 2000 is currently exhibiting at Gallery Magda Danysz in Paris from February 21 – April 42015.

Here’s a video of young Futura talking about working with the Clash:

Meet Robert “3D” Del Naja of Massive Attack

Audio/ Visual: 

An Interview with Robert “3D” Del Naja

Words: Margo Fortuny

Robert Del Naja, also known as 3D, is an award-winning musician and artist. Del Naja is famous for cofounding the seminal band Massive Attack and for his colourful, subversive artwork. Before Massive Attack, he was a graffiti artist in the art/hip hop collective The Wild Bunch. As 3D, he created all of UNKLE’s album art. Del Naja has also contributed to soundtracks including Lost Highway, Hackers, The Matrix, Snatch, and The Simpsons. Collaborating with Neil Davidge, their score for the Hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water was nominated for an Oscar. This summer, Massive Attack is staging a “collective hallucination” with filmmaker Adam Curtis as part of the Manchester International Festival. EXIT phoned up the amiable Del Naja to talk about the link between music and art, conquering doubt, and his new exhibition in London.

Who inspired you as a young artist?

When I was young I didn’t have a formal art education. Instead I would draw, paint, sketch… and from the world of music I was introduced to the world of art. A lot of the graffiti I saw at the time, including Basquiat, was influential. Then I saw Basquiat’s collaboration with Andy Warhol. I was aware of Warhol but never really studied his work. After Warhol’s retrospective I thought about the work differently. Those artists had an impact on me as a designer when it came to record sleeves and working with the idea of repetition of image.

How did punk and hip-hop shape your work?    

  

For us, punk was a very strong, visual, anarchic, exciting, anti-establishment movement. It gave everyone an outlet to the angst and rebellion that was hormonally happening inside, and regardless of whether it had any real political meaning it gave us an opportunity to fight against what we wanted to fight against.  Then hip-hop came right after that, again it was something that had its own sort of energy, which wasn’t passed down from the media, television and radio. It came from vinyl; it came from clubs, parties. It was created by the people. It had its own sense of social network without having to be informed by conventional mass media. You know, following punk, hip-hop was very exciting. It had the same cut-and-paste/ do-it-yourself in the garage, on record decks, on the microphone, and with graffiti art, as punk did in the art school garage band sense. They’re very connected. I was excited by bands like The Clash with Futura and the Sex Pistols with Jamie Reid, Malcolm McLaren and Westwood. That was fucking super visual.

How does punk and hip-hop relate to what you’re doing now?

It’s the cutting and pasting. Despite computers having the ability to manipulate everything easily, there’s still a place for cutting things up with scissors and moving them about. Using icons, imagery and words, and taking them out of context, that’s the way we make music, using samplers, cutting things up, looping things, turning small sections of songs into big songs that have never existed with a vocal like that, and it’s the same with art.  In the studio we’ve got loads of computers and keyboards but having the decks and being able to loop things around is still a central part of the process.

                         

How much does your art affect your music and vice versa?

They’re locked in together as a marriage of convenience. The art thing is good fun and it helps you get away from the music, so you don’t get stuck in a rut. Then you go back to music when you realise what your limitations are as an artist. I’m very aware of how lucky I am to be able to still work in both areas. The art is equally informed (as music) by other things that you take on board to stimulate you.

What else inspires you?

Films have always been a massive influence. Hearing and seeing great things are inspirational. Being excited by people’s work is part of the whole creative process.

I’ve always been one of those people who daydreams and likes walking and looking around at anything incidental, like a bit of rusty metal or broken glass. I find myself fascinated by patterns and the perceptions of colours.

Current affairs around the world are stimulating, not always in a positive sense, just that it moves me to take action. 38 degrees and Avid are both great websites. Though, those things aren’t artistic stimulation. That’s more about personal responsibility as a citizen in any country.

Which contemporary artists do you admire?

The Chapman Brothers: they have an anarchic and beautiful sense of humour; they have a great way of describing the past, present and future, and the mass production of art and culture, and the cynical commercialisation of everything. They’re brilliant. There’s another artist named Alastair Mackie; he’s a great British sculptor. There’s an unbelievable amount of talent in the urban art world now. Maybe it’s because graffiti art wasn’t as exposed pre-internet, people couldn’t share things so globally. Now there are so many brilliant artists out there. The scene has developed and gotten so creative and clever.

What are you listening to these days?

Today I listened to the new Primal Scream album; I really enjoyed it. Great songs, great David Holmes production. It’s got a sense of the psychedelic in a natural way. The new Knife album is good too. My favourite song ever would be Poptones by Public Image Ltd. That’s the tune of the week. Primal Scream is the album of the day.

How did your upcoming exhibition at Lazarides Gallery come about?

Steve Lazarides (the director of the gallery) has always been a big supporter of my work. Steve and Banksy both encouraged me when I was just getting into music and they’re the guys who pushed me to do more painting, and group shows, and James from UNKLE asked me to do a record sleeve. When I was concentrating on music Steve always said, “You should do a show” and I’ve always backed away and been a bit shy about it. I did a lot of work during the Heligoland period. Many of the paintings I originally created for the album I’ve painted over because I have a small studio so I tend to recycle the canvases rather than keeping them all.  I decided to use the archive of work from the last 19 years or so, everything I’ve done since Massive Attack started. I went through all these boxes of images from back in the day before we even used computers, just cut and paste sleeve ideas. We started scanning and printing them out. I thought they’d be good as a series, which is what I started doing for Blue Lines, in a kind of Pop Art sensibility, taking an image and repeating it in different colours and turning it into something else.

A lot of album sleeves were made with metal and bits of materials, like grass and found objects. I find that an interesting part of the process: recycling things that have been left for dead. Combined with the paintings, the work felt more like a show, something more complete than an album, a new way of archiving old work. In my own way, it’s a low-fi, low-key retrospective.

How do you deal with self-doubt and the equivalent of writer's block?

Look, this show is spanning nineteen years…this is the first time I’ve done it. Nineteen years of self-doubt all in one show.

But you overcame it!

(Laughing) I’ve finally sorted it out: my fear of flying, my fear of spiders, and my fear of my own one-man show.

So how do you conquer the doubt?

I don’t think you can. There’s always artistic doubt. Even recently, I’ve experienced it putting together this music show for Manchester International Festival, the project that I’m doing with Adam Curtis. It’s an operatic musical journey with film.  I’m really excited about that. Still, it can be difficult, scary, and there’s lots of doubt in the process of creating. You have to believe that at the end it’s interesting and exciting to people, because you know you’re going to put everything into it.

For the Lazarides exhibition, having Steve offer me his resources, the gallery and the print room to create this show has made it possible. I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own.  In the studio, if you work with great people you have to believe what you’re doing and how it’s going to turn out. Massive Attack has always been about collaborating with great people and when you get it right it really rubs off on each other. But there’s always doubt in everything you do, every tour, every record, every time I get back to painting…

This exhibition closes a chapter because I’ve finally managed to archive everything and put it all in a box so I can put it away.  Lately I’ve been thinking about getting back to work and drawing with a pencil.  When I was a kid I was a really good draftsman. I gave that up to be a graffiti artist and a designer and a musician. I feel like I didn’t really develop the skills that I should have developed. I want to get back to the drawing board.

Exit Magazine, Spring/Summer 2013

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Robert Del Naja and Thom Yorke have just released their score for the film The UK Gold. You can listen to it here. 

Massive Attack are currently collaborating with Run the Jewels.

You can see more of Del Naja’s art here.