So, the new Radiohead record came out back in May and it went quite well. We did all sorts of things and lots of things happened but that’s all been extensively written about by people who write for (presumably) money and are considerably better at it than I am. So I have nothing very much to add except that it was a crazy time. After that I went away and hid for some time in a variety of locations until I judged that it was safe to emerge. I have grown a great big bushy beard so that my appearance is transformed.

I’m not going to apologise for the lack of ‘up-dates’ on my stupid blog because I do that every time now and it’s getting boring even to type the word ‘sorry’. Instead, here are a couple of things that I’ve been occupying my time with, if you are interested.

THE BOMB

When I last wrote here I had been involved – as an ‘art director’ – with the making of a film called ‘The Bomb’, along with the directors Smriti Keshari and Eric Schlosser, and with quite incredible technical expertise from United Visual Artists. The film is essentially a history of nuclear weapons from their conception to the present day – there’s no narrative, and the visual experience is more reminiscent of Koyaanisqatsi than Four Weddings and a Funeral. This film was premiered in New York back in April as an immersive, 360º crazy experiential screening in a bizarre building called Gotham Hall on Broadway – see the photo above. Red carpets and everything. It went incredibly well, loads of great reviews and three people fainted. The only thing was that there were only four screenings and we could only fit in 500 people for each, so only 2000 people have seen the film. So currently we’re figuring out how to bring it to London, and from there to a global audience. I would say ‘watch this space’ but as you’re no doubt aware, I’m not a very conscientious blogger. There is more information on the website over here.

GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL

I’d also been involved with Glastonbury Festival. I made a linocut for this, called ‘Somewhat Slightly Dazed’, in homage to David Bowie who died at the beginning of the year – he’d made a song called Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed back in 1969. As well as being an homage to Bowie it’s also a good description for most of the people at the festival. Well, most of the people I bump into anyway. As you ay (or may not) know, the festival this year was the wettest and the muddiest ever according to official sources. Me, I’m not so sure. It was bad, but not doubleplusbad. Anyway, as you can see from the artwork above, I went for an almost literal picture this year. Although some people might say that I took a few liberties with the sky, that’s purely a matter of opinion and entirely dependent on individual brain chemistry. As ever, an edition of prints were made of this image and sold out immediately on the Glastonbury website. However, it’s rumoured that a very few might be available on this year’s Slowly Downward Manufactory Zmas Boutique. If that interests you it’s best to keep an eye on my stupid Twitter account or my stupid Instagram account.

Back in March of 2015 I wrote about the Broomway on the Essex coast, and the very peculiar day I had there the previous summer with the band and the video directors, making a pop video. And about a year and a half later the record has now been released. I ended up making four drawings for the gatefold sleeve, adapted from photographs taken during filming.

There have been only 333 copies of the record pressed, and they’re all numbered. If you want to know more, or buy one, or see the fucking bizarre pop video (in which I appear as a hare-headed person) then click through to the Cariad Records website… 

One of the reasons that the Broomway was chosen as a location was that Robert Macfarlane had written about walking the path (said to be ‘the most dangerous path in Britain’…) in his book Silt. Researcher/explorer Bradley Garrett was similarly inspired to visit what he calls the ‘Doomway’ and you can read his highly entertaining account here. The photos are very good too.

The dangerous nature of the place does seem to concern people. Massive amounts of unexploded ordinance, deep quicksand-like mud that looks exactly the same as non-quicksand-like mud, tides that come in faster than you can run, a very disorienting flatness and a huge sky that fucks around with your head. So I should state unequivocally that making a pop video there is a very, very bad idea.

My trajectory into worlds I never imagined back when I was a young anarcho-punk scumbag dole-monkey (or rather, dedicated ‘jobseeker’) continues. The latest place I unexpectedly find myself is on the cover of Granta magazine. Next thing you know, I’ll be eating buttered crumpets on a fucking punt, quoting Rimbaud and discussing weighty matters with like-minded aesthetes.

The painting reproduced on their undeniably top quality literary periodical is called Hurt Hill, and hopefully it won’t put anyone off buying Granta. If it does, don’t worry, they’ll be using someone else next time. But if, by any chance you’re interested in acquiring a copy, you could either go to a bookshop or to their website, which be right here. 

Good evening. Here I am, adding to the enormous weight of words that already exist; not adding any new ones, but rearranging some old ones in an effort to explain myself. Certain things have been occupying my time, among them a film about the Nuclear Bomb. I think often about it (them) and have recently been conducting some ad hoc research into ‘awareness’ of it (them). I and several others have been asking strangers how many active nuclear weapons exist on our planet, and have received a variety of answers; from a beautifully naive “I think we’ve got rid of them all,” on through “lots. Oh, lots. At least a hundred,” and on to a very confidently specific “four hundred and eighty-nine.” What has emerged from our extremely unscientific approach is that really, no-one has any idea. There are, in fact, at least sixteen thousand of them.

It’s a worrying figure for many reasons; when you factor in accidents, terrorism, sociopathic leaders, mechanical degradation and so on, it’s enough to make you want to find the nearest bunker or something. But there were more than double that number at the height of the Cold War, so from a more ‘positive’ outlook you could say that, well, we’ve got rid of half of them, at least. Which is true. But the general level of ignorance about these weapons (and how many there are of them) is very concerning. I have spent my years very worried about nuclear war, worried about some sort of nuclear disaster (and there have been a staggering number of close calls) and deeply concerned about the proliferation of these bombs. Arguably it was the work of Peter Kennard which first got me interested in making useful art myself, and much of my earlier work (for instance, the cover of Radiohead’s Karma Police) referenced issues around nuclear war. And now I’m art-directing a film about the Bomb.

I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to say about it yet, but, you know, I’ll do my best to ‘keep you posted’…

Hello. Like a fool and a klutz I neglected to make the button that goes to the shop direct people to the shop. It does what it says it does now. zmasboutique.com, which is open, not slowlydownwardmanufactory.com, which is closed for the season.

My apologies for any confusion. It was all my stupid fault.

It’s the ending of the year and, amongst other things, I’ve been making some prints. Pretty soon (perhaps by the time you read this?) I’ll have opened the ZMAS BOUTIQUE, wherein they are for sale to the discerning. Or, at least, those with a bit of spare cash. This season’s colours are rather sombre on the whole, with a preponderance of grey and black, although there’s a lovely Farrow & Ball colour – ‘Middleton Pink #245’, which which I’ve reprised a piece you may have seen before in both ‘Mouse’s Back # 40’ and ‘Arsenic # 214’. I should explain, really, particularly for those overseas who would (quite reasonably) fail to appreciate the significance of Farrow & Ball paint.

Farrow & Ball manufacture household paint which somehow has become synonymous with the upper and upper middle classes of England. Personally I feel that we have a sort of Farrow & Ball government, a government of surface appearance. There’s all kinds of unpleasantness (damp? dry-rot? mould? evil?) underneath the faux-nostalgic, futility-heritage, ‘conservative’ façade. But then, we don’t really have a government – we have a gang of robber-barons determined to fleece the place for whatever they can get, utilising a sort of cultural and economic scorched-earth policy. The gap between rich and poor grows wider every day. Hey, though; never mind, eh? House prices have never been higher.

Farrow & Ball colours are ‘classic’, ‘elegant’, ‘timeless’ and, to my mind, subtly reinforce the notion that ‘things are as they should be’. These are the colours of an Enid Blyton, Ladybird book version of a 1950s England that never existed but serves as a useful psychic shorthand for the sort of people I have very little time for. This, I should say, is not the fault of the paint manufacturers, who have been around since the 1930s, and whose products are used for all kinds of historic restorations. It is, of course, entirely inappropriate that I should use their paint to create such dreadful things as this:

But there it is. ‘Middleton Pink # 245’. I like to think that this series of prints will continue, until I’ve used every shade and tone in the entire range, but it’s much more likely that I’ll get bored of it and do something else.

And now for something completely different: here are three prints made using hot-foiling, which is a technique that uses a heated engraved stamp to fix silver foil to paper. The pictures are called, from left to right, Nin, Fuinseog and Unjin. These are all old names for the ash tree.

The ash tree is one of the most common trees in Europe, the old Norse tree of knowledge – Yggdrasil – and the names of these prints are, respectively, Old Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx names for the tree. Unfortunately these trees are under an ecological threat from both ‘ash die-back’ and some dreadful beetle. Certain people are discussing whether or not some kind of genetically modified solution could help. That, however, is an entirely other can of worms.

Anyway. These and several more are/will be/have been available to you, the public, at the ZMAS BOUTIQUE. Do pop in and have a browse. I’ll be in the back room having a cup of tea.

Good evening. It’s been another exhilarating day at the Slowly Downward Manufactory, where I’ve been numbering prints. Oh yes, the fun never stops around here. But what prints have I been numbering? Well, there are two of them; one’s called wait here, we will come for you and it looks like this:

The edition is 122 prints, and each will be priced at £111, including postage and packing. Is nice, yes?

The other print, holding hands, looks like this:

And again, the edition is 122 prints and they’ll be £111, including the P and the P. For the online retailing of these I will be opening a little electronic corner shop next week. 77 prints of each edition will be available as I’d like to keep hold of the rest for exhibitions and things like that. There will be more details forthcoming shortly; those who subscribe to my irregular ‘News From Nowhere’ advertising missives will get all the details that way, and I’ll make some sort of gnomic statement on twitter and the old instagram.

I’ve run out of wine so I’m going now.

Hello. Once again, I must apologise for the lack of up-dates here on my stupid blog. Real events out there in the actual world have occupied my time, at least to the extent that I’ve not felt like keeping a diary. Although perhaps I should have. Anyway, so – what’s a-going on, then?

Well, firstly, I’ve spent a while making some new prints, which are called wait here, we will come for you, and holding hands. Since I made the artwork for the 2015 Glastonbury Festival I’ve kind of had the moon in my head a bit, so they’ve both got the moon in them. I haven’t had them photographed yet, but there are some details over on my Instagram ‘feed’. Actually, that reminds me, I haven’t even written about the artwork I did for Glastonbury! Well, it was ages ago now so you won’t care anyway. All you need to know is that the Dalai Lama (yes) put it on his head to shelter from the rain. And it was called moons over Pilton and it looked like this:

And yes. The Dalai Lama. That particular event made the Daily Mail, you know. The Daily Mail.

Sorry to digress. So, right, you may be interested to hear that I’m opening another of my minuscule ‘web-shops’ pretty soon, and both wait here... and holding hands will be available within its gleaming digital portals. But nothing else. Not until I get my Zmas Boutique sorted out, anyway.

Right, what else is going on/has gone on but I forgot to tell anyone? Er. There will be another opportunity, or an opportunity, to see the artwork I did for the novels of JG Ballard. This will be in the Peninsula Gallery in lovely lovely Plymouth, England. There are some details here:

Here are some details.

I did some of the experiments (well, I didn’t do them, Dr Roy Lowry did the clever part) that were photographed and used in the artwork for my Ballard book covers at Plymouth University, of which the Peninsula Gallery is a part. The night before, they’re showing Spielberg’s film of Ballard’s ‘novelised autobiography’ Empire of the Sun, so if you fancy a load of dystopia and a movie with Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson and the versatile Nigel Havers you could do worse than going all the way to the edge of Cornwall. And why not. I spent about six years there. On the dole.

Apart from those two bits of news everything’s a little vague. Like I said, or at least alluded to, there will be a Zmas Boutique again this year, probably opening in mid-November. And there’ll be another little shop before that. Soon. Other things are happening, but I’m not going to tell you anything about them yet. Watch the skies! or at least, twitter and Instagram. Salut!

The Panic Office, my latest over-ambitious project, was at Carriageworks in Redfern, Sydney, Australia and it’s over now. Over. Gone. It’s been dismantled entirely, and no longer exists.

About three months ago I had great plans for this blog post, but time passed in its usual fashion, events conspired in their usual maddening way, and everything just got too difficult. I am actually genuinely sorry about my lack of ‘up-dates’ on this, the relatively new and technologically accomplished incarnation of what I used to call ‘My Stupid Blog’. In some ways the whole web-log medium feels a bit old-fashioned, as if I’m using a dip-pen (which I have done) or scratching a text on to vellum (which I’ve also done). It’s much easier to flip a load of photos onto instagram or type something obscure onto twitter. So that’s what I’ve been doing – I mean, for the whole time I was in Sydney, putting The Panic Office together, pretty much my only engagement with the online community was instagram and twitter. A bit sad, really. But to be honest, the last thing I felt like doing after a day in a giant warehouse was repeating the experience through the medium of a blog. Yeah, so, sorry about that. The truth is that as soon as I’ve done something I lose a whole chunk of interest in it (even if it was all-consuming in my mind whilst it was going on). Coupled with the fact that I’m a terrible photographer, my record of spending three weeks building a colossal punk Iron Age stockaded fortress in a massive warehouse in Sydney is pathetic.

I did about a million interviews whilst I was there, talking as usefully as I could (ie., not very) so there are things about the show and my idiocy to be found on the internet if you can be bothered to look. I can’t.