Planet Paul

‘A jigsaw with no picture’: An exclusive interview with film editor Angela Slaven

November 16, 2025

Way, way back, many centuries ago…when I first worked as a director in TV there was a saying often bandied about by film crews when anything went wrong on a shoot: ‘Don’t worry, you can always fix it in the edit.’ This may have a different meaning now but back then it meant if you had an excess of unwieldy footage it could be whittled down into the most succinct of content by the editor. If an interviewee continuously ummed or ahed their way through an interminably meandering interview your editor could sharpen their words into the most pertinent of answers.

A good editor can make average content good and good content brilliant.

The best editing is not a craft, it is an art form. You never notice the best editing because it flows seamlessly like a piece of beautiful music.

The best editing makes the audience focus solely on the story being told.

Angela Slaven is one of the very best film and television editors working today.

Born in Glasgow, Slaven started her career working in the Mail Room at Scottish Television. From such a seemingly unpromising beginning, Slaven made the move into post-production as an Assistant Editor where she learnt her craft and soon proved her unique talents as an editor. This led to Slaven cutting highly successful series like Taggart, High Times and Skint. Then moving into documentaries editing Michael Prince’s film on author John Irving and then his superb film on photographer Brian Griffin before working on Grant McPhee’s award winning documentary films Big Gold Dream and Teenage Superstars which focussed on Scotland’s post-Punk music scene. More recently Slaven has edited films on the Pet Shop Boys, Ivor Cutler and worked with Paul Sng editing in conjunction with Lindsay Watson his documentary on photographer Tish Murtha and cutting his film Irvine Welsh: Reality is Not Enough.

Tell me about your background.

Angela Slaven: I grew up as an only child in Glasgow, in Yoker on the boundary with Clydebank, and came from a railway family. The prevailing soundtrack was Mantovani and the Spanish and Italian eps my parents had bought on their holidays, journeying around Europe courtesy of their discounted railway passes.

Angela Slaven with her father Jimmy Slaven, grandfather ‘Papa’ James Smith and Bobby the dog.

AS: I was a bit of a tomboy, loved trainsets and cars and always had my nose in a book. Although my mum had to give up work when I came along, she would sometimes take part-time jobs, for example in Lewis’s at Christmas (therefore she knew the real Santa, not the fake Goldbergs or Frasers ones!). When she and my Dad were working, my Papa who lived close by in Clydebank would take me over to the Clydeside with Bobby the next door dog, where we’d play football on the old railway lines at the Rothesay Dock in the shadow of Yoker power station, stash the ball under an old railway sleeper then have a milky coffee and a buttered roll with chocolate buttons at the local café Pelosi’s near the Renfrew Ferry.

Angela’s parents Joyce and Jimmy Slaven cutting a rug on holiday in the 1950s.

What did you want to be when you were growing up and what attracted you to becoming an editor?

AS: My dream jobs would either to have been an architect or a writer/journalist, but my creative writing skills were average and I wasn’t great at maths. I studied English Literature and Film and Television at Glasgow University and as part of the film course had to make a short film on videotape. Ours was called The Princess and the P – no spoilers but the P turned out to be the letter P written on a scrap of paper which blows away at the end, for some reason. But it was when we got to the editing stage that I had a kind of eureka moment, realising the possibilities of manipulating sound and pictures separately. This sounds like stating the bleeding obvious, but I hadn’t really grasped the power of it till being involved in the rudimentary video we were making.

Portrait of the Artist channeling John Wayne.

What films or TV series which inspired you? What about directors or editors?

AS: I do remember late one night, perched on the arm of the chair nearest the TV, switching the set on and O, Lucky Man! had just started. I was riveted (uncomfortably) to that spot for the entire duration of the film. So that was an inspiration. I love Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger, Lynch, all the usual suspects. But I hugely admire films where the sound design is really bold. I’m thinking of films like All the President’s Men, where music is used sparingly but very effectively. I love music, and I love working with music and sound design in films, it’s my favourite part of the process, but I don’t like music being overused which happens a lot. It’s like an additional character, making a statement or punctuating a thought or adding a layer of unease or happiness or whatever, and loses a lot of power if overused.

How did you start your career?

AS: Synchronicity is everything really. I temped for a while after graduating, and as luck would have it was sent to Scottish Television to work in the Mail Room. It was so showbizzy then – Arthur Montford would say hello when he passed in the corridor, imagine! And the place was dominated by the PAs, a troupe of formidably glamorous women who had a corridor all to themselves. Think Lauren Bacall, Kathleen Turner, Sophia Lauren and you’ll get the idea. But I basically hounded the editors, sitting in with them whenever possible, and one of them recommended I call the Head of Post Production at the BBC, John Grove. As luck would have it, I called on the Friday and a job syncing up film rushes had just become available, and so I started in the portacabin at the back of the old BBC building in Queen Margaret Drive – alongside now renowned Scottish film editor Colin Monie who I’d been at Uni with – where squirrels played on the roof.

I can still remember the smell of the polish in the lift when I would be ferrying the film cans on the way to the cutting rooms, which were arranged in a circle around a turret. It was magical. I think the first drama I worked on was with wonderful film editor Dave Harvie on a single play called These Foolish Things, starring Lindsay Duncan and James Fox. I had the grand title of Second Assistant which generally involved making tea, hiding under the trim bins when a viewing was in progress to be as inconspicuous as possible, and learning to love whisky when the Bowmore appeared from the filing cabinet late on a Friday afternoon. All very useful life skills. This particular play was directed by Charlie Gormley and produced by Andy Park – they were a great double act, very funny and very generous. We’d occasionally all jump in a cab and go to Babbity’s or the Caprese in Buchanan St for lunch on their tab, very exotic for a newly ex-student like me used to eking out my grant in the Grosvenor Café. Those days were an education in many ways.

You worked as a dubbing editor – what does this mean and what does the
work entail?

AS: A dubbing editor – well, you can get away with ropey pictures but not really with ropey sound, so dubbing editors are key. The role is usually called Sound Designer now. There are different areas of expertise within the scope of the job, depending on the scale and budget of the production.

For example the Dialogue editor will smooth out recorded dialogue, replace takes if something is unclear or background noise interferes, oversee additional dialogue recording (ADR).

The FX editor will layer up different sound FX, background atmospheres, creating a unique soundscape from thousands of different sources, often recording sounds if necessary to enrich the soundtrack.

The foley editor will supervise a foley session which involves the live recording of footsteps and sound FX to mimic what you’re watching onscreen, from spectacles being lifted up and pages turned, to stabbing cabbages to simulate gory murder scenes (as seen notably in Berberian Sound Studio, but Taggart was way ahead of the curve!).

I was incredibly lucky on a couple of occasions as an assistant dubbing editor to work with the mighty ‘Beryl the Boot’, I think it was on a 1997 Hallmark film called The Ruby Ring which starred Rutger Hauer, Judy Parfitt, and a lot of horses. Beryl Mortimer was a legendary foley artist ( she’d worked on Lawrence of Arabia!) and specialised in equine scenes, so she was brought up from London by our sound designer Douglas MacDougall, strode into the dubbing theatre with immaculately coiffed hair and a fetching white pants suit, and opened her case which contained an array of chains, leather belts and handcuffs to simulate the reins and bridles; coconuts to simulate the larger horses, and ‘donkey nuts’ for the smaller ones. I can only imagine what the customs man at Glasgow airport must have thought if he’d opened it up.

As an aside, I was also an assistant editor on that film, working with John Gow the editor of Gregory’s Girl which was and remains one of my very favourite films, so that was a treat.

Angela Slaven editing Michael Prince’s documentary on photographer Brian Griffin. Photo: Michael Prince.

How do you work as an editor? What is the difference between scripted programmes and documentaries? How do you navigate each?

AS: I’ve worked on both scripted and unscripted, and both are very challenging in different ways. In drama you’re working with a script, and although the structure can change sometimes radically from the original premise, there is at least a framework to get started with. With a doc, yes sometimes there will be a shooting script and a general outline of how the film might take shape, and a director with great ideas, but sometimes there is just a huge pile of material and a vague suggestion of how it might take form. It’s a bit like having a jigsaw with no picture, many of the pieces missing and quite a few thrown in from another puzzle altogether.

In both forms there is a huge amount of input required from the editor in terms of structuring and pacing the programme or film, as much responsibility as you want to take on really. Obviously, this is slightly dictated by who you’re working with, but most directors are extremely collaborative and very happy for someone to have fresh eyes on the material after the shoot, which can be an intense and stressful time. The cutting room is often like a therapy room, and a large percentage of the job can be counselling. What happens in the cutting room stays in the cutting room!

But what both of these forms have in common is the massive impact that the placing of music and sound design have on the rhythm of what you’re putting together. In the edit the editor is often responsible for choosing what the music is and for deciding where it goes, so I spend a lot of time sourcing music, whether commercial or library music, or if the budget allows, working with composers, and this is the most creative part of the process for me. An example would be Undisputed: the Life and Times of Ken Buchanan, about champion Scottish boxer Ken Buchanan, directed by Brian Ross. For a while I was pondering what would work musically for the fight scenes – didn’t want to do classical, too Raging Bull. Rock would be too…Rocky! Ken’s parents loved ballroom dancing, so I kept coming back to that and thinking about different types of dance music, and it was when I tried some big band jazz (Louis Prima style), it suddenly clicked. We were so chuffed on behalf of Ken to win an RTS Award for that in 2022.

What are your decision processes when editing? How do you know when to cut?

AS: Synchronicity again! Sometimes it’s accidental, something unintentional will happen and you think, ooh that works. Sometimes it takes hours of tweaking sound and pictures and music, it’s really not a spectator sport. I saw editing legend Thelma Schoonmaker answer this question last year during an interview, in which she was asked this three times. The first two times she patiently explained how she’d watch sequences over and over to get a feel for them, she’d think ‘Hmmm, needs a bit more of a pause here, less of a pause there, too long now, too short now’, make tiny adjustments etc. The third time she was asked she just said ‘It’s my job’! I did love that because it’s quite hard to explain, it really is just a case of getting a feel for the sequence, and once you have a version you feel can be watched in one go rather than scrutinising frames here and there, literally standing back from the screen to see it objectively as a viewer, and trying not to let all the other many choices you could make intrude.

‘Taggart’: Blythe Duff as DS Jackie Reid, John Michie as DI Robbie Ross and Alex Norton as DCI Matt Burke.

Would you tell me about the hugely successful and long-running detective series editing ‘Taggart’? How did you become involved in this series and how did you work as an editor?

AS: I’ve worked over three decades, starting on film then videotape then nonlinear (Avid) editing. A couple of years after I started at BBC Scotland, I was offered a permanent job as an assistant at the BBC OUPC (Open University Production Centre), so moved to Milton Keynes for three or so years. It was a great place to work, but I was desperate to get back home. I would watch Taggart to get my Glasgow fix and dream about working on it one day, which did seem pretty impossible to be honest. Anyway, I remember very vividly on Children in Need day 1993 I got a call from Bob Dowie, head of post at STV at the time, to offer me a job back in Glasgow, so I leapt at the chance. After a while I worked my way up to dubbing editor, while Mark McManus was still the lead, and then editor on Taggart, which felt a bit unreal.

Although I work mainly on docs now I did originally work more on drama, but recently cut a series called Skint, 8×15 min short films on a theme of poverty. I’d worked with producer Carolynne Sinclair Kidd years before on a series called High Times, a very funny counter cultural comedy drama which won BAFTA for best series in 2004. Skint was mostly written and sometimes directed by people who hadn’t been involved with TV before. It involved a great cast of actors, including the likes of Michael Socha, Saoirse Monica-Jackson and Peter Mullan. And great writers and directors, amongst them Cora Bissett, Jenni Fagan, James Price, Lisa McGee. This happened during the latter stages of covid so I worked home alone, sending cuts to the directors. The schedule was one week per film; essentially a couple of days to look at rushes and pull together a rough cut, find music, send to director, then work on notes, refine, get the time down and have the film signed off on day 5. It was a tight turnaround but I loved this project, it was so interesting to work with different people/different styles one after the other like that.

The impetus to work more on documentaries came about when I went down to London in 2003 to cut an observational doc called Don’t Drop the Coffin, set in an undertaker’s business in Bermondsey. The characters were fascinating, the subject matter was sensitive, and it was the first time I’d been up to my elbows in an ob-doc series so I got a real taste for it. I love working on Arts and Social History docs especially, and have made quite a few for the BBC with Independent Producer Maurice Smith and the same team of female directors (eg Sarah Howitt, Shruti Rao, Margaret Shankland, Alison Pinkney), Directors of Photography and assistant and archive producers, who are just brilliant, intuitive and practical.

One doc in particular is a favourite of mine – Six Weeks to Save the World (directed by Sarah Howitt in 2018) which charted the phenomenal reach of American evangelist preacher Billy Graham as he took up residency at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow for six weeks in 1955. I remember my Mum telling me that my Uncle and my Gran had been there, she was in fact in the choir. There is a lot of archive footage from the event, which I scoured, and did in fact spot my Gran! Composer Kenny Inglis composed a wonderfully atmospheric score for this programme. We had a few long chats about the sort of Boards of Canada-y analogue-y sense of disquiet that might work and it really did.

Angela’s Grandmother Elizabeth Smith singing in the choir for Billy Graham’s Glasgow Crusade, 1955. Elizabeth is in the middle of the bottom row wearing glasses.

AS: Two other programmes I’d mention in particular are Artworks: Michael Clark’s Heroes. directed by Michael Prince in 2009, which followed enfant terrible post punk ballet dancer Michael Clark in the year where he was presenting a David Bowie- based performance both at the Venice Biennale and the Edinburgh Festival, and a doc I made with Director Alison Pinkney in 2018 for Sky Arts, Ivor Cutler by KT Tunstall.

I’ve worked with Michael many times and I think the first thing we made was a doc about Franz Ferdinand. He shoots beautifully and is also a great Stills photographer, but the best thing about him is that he’s always questioning things. Each morning he comes in and the first thing he says is ‘are we missing a trick here?’ So we’d go back and interrogate how we’d structured such and such a piece. No complacency. And we also got into trouble for laughing too much from the adjacent cutting room!

Angela with filmmaker and photographer Michael Prince at the opening of an exhibition of Michael’s landscape photography.

AS: I normally dislike watching anything I’ve worked on as I can always see things I should have done better, but one favourite edit is in this programme. There’s a scene where we go to Venice where the Bowie choreography is happening. Michael Clark visits Stravinsky’s grave in San Michele cemetery, over which we hear Rite of Spring. Then over a few shots of Venice and London we’re back to the London rehearsal room. I couldn’t quite get the transition to work, then all of a sudden I could hear in my head the Aladdin Sane music emerging from the Stravinsky, and that’s what made the transition. I realise it’s not as impressive as editing a flashy opening montage for a Bond film but it pleased me! Later on I worked with Michael on a film he made about the brilliant photographer Brian Griffin, The Surreal Lives of Brian Griffin.

Photographer Brian Griffin (1948-2024) with Angela Slaven. Photograph: Michael Prince.

AS: Brian was a great subject as he was quite intense, idiosyncratic, very funny and hugely talented. Strangely he also features in the film I’m working on just now, ‘The Revolutionary Spirit’, about the Liverpool music scene of the late 70s/80s, as he was famed for his record covers including those for Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. I’m so glad Michael had the foresight and determination to make that film as Brian died unexpectedly last year and is hugely missed, what a talent.

Team Griffin. Malcolm Lindsay, Brian Griffin, Angela Slaven, Michael Prince, John Butler, Cathy Stokes, Cy Jack, Ian Ballantyne. Photograph by Douglas Corrance.

AS: The Ivor Cutler doc came about because I’d earlier worked with director Alison Pinkney on a film called Team Tibet, a passion project she’d filmed while working in India on another project. While there she’d met some Tibetan exiles who were setting up their own amateur Olympic team as they were banned from playing in the Beijing Olympics that year, so she filmed this off her own bat, along with producer Shruti Rao, a translator and small crew. They did a beautiful job and it’s a very moving film. Obviously quite difficult to film and work on something in a language you don’t speak, although we had onscreen subtitles, and that presented a few challenges as it was difficult to cut down until we could get hold of a translator who could guide us through the syntax and ensure things still made sense. Anyway, it played in festivals worldwide, winning the Best Self-Funded Film at Cine Pobre in 2019. As the Chinese Government take a dim view of any supporters of Tibet, we did wonder if we should change our names for the credits (we didn’t), but googled what our anagrams would be – as I recollect, I was Elven Lasagna and she was Insanely Pinko, a name which stuck!

AS: The Ivor Cutler doc we went on to do was presented by KT Tunstall, and included interviews with Ivor’s son Dan, his old BBC producer Piers Plowman, and his wife Phyllis. As a fan of Ivor – and someone who had timidly gone up to him back in the 80s at the Edinburgh Book Festival to say ‘Hello Mr Cutler’ and been given one of his famous stickers – it was a dream to do. I didn’t know much about KT but she was a true fan, a brilliant interviewer, genuinely interested in all the people who appeared and sang Ivor’s songs beautifully, guided by Alison’s very sensitive direction. It went on to be nominated for a Scottish BAFTA, and as Alison is pretty shy, I ended up at a Q&A at the BFI in London talking about Ivor as part of the Eccentric Miscellany Festival in 2023.

You made two music documentaries with Grant McPhee ‘Big Gold Dream’ and ‘Teenage Superstars’ in which you were editor as well as writer and co-producer. How did this come about?

AS: After working on the Brian Griffin and Tibet films, I started getting more into indie filmmaking (aka no budget and you do it in your own time because you love it). A great director friend of mine Becky Brazil put me in touch with Grant McPhee, as she knew I’m a massive music fan and I came of age musically speaking with many of the bands featured in Big Gold Dream; Josef K, Fire Engines, Orange Juice, the Associates etc. So when Grant outlined the project to me, I was in! It was a huge privilege for me to sit there going through hours of interviews with the likes of the spectacularly funny Davy Henderson, Malcolm Ross, Alan Rankine, Paul Research, Thurston Moore, Douglas Hart and so on.

AS: I didn’t at the time realise quite what a huge undertaking it would be in that so many people had already been interviewed – I think in the end there were 70+ interviewees for what turned out to be two feature length docs. It’s a lot of material a) to go through, b) to work out a structure for, and c) to find archive for. Also of course a huge difference when you’re used to working with a bigger team and there are people responsible for scripting, archive and music research, etc, but this was just the two of us until producer Wendy Griffin came on board, working remotely; me sending cuts to Grant and trying to whittle things down and him sending notes back.

But Grant is an amazing archivist and has the collector’s gene, he doesn’t rest until he’s unearthed every scrap of evidence and spoken to every person relating to a story, and is great at pointing up any inconsistencies or areas that need greater attention, that I might miss.

I did accidentally end up writing the VO for the films though. Writing is not my forte so I kept it as minimal as possible, imagining that a professional would be brought on at some point to reshape it properly. But that never happened! So I had the pleasure/pain of hearing the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster and the Pixies’ Kim Deal reading the words wot I wrote, in true Ernie Wise style. Big Gold Dream went on to win the Audience Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2015, which was completely unexpected and amazing, so I guess we must have struck a chord somehow (no pun intended!).

You worked with Jim Burns on ‘It’s Not All Rock ’n’ Roll’ – how did this come about?

AS: Grant knew Jim was looking for an editor for his follow up to Serious Drugs and put us in touch. Jim invited me round to look at some of the rushes for the doc, about US/German band Swearing at Motorists fronted by extrovert singer Dave Doughman – sending me a brilliant little hand drawn map from the train station to his flat, which intrigued me right away. As soon as I saw the material I absolutely loved it. He has such a great eye and is very lateral thinking and therefore very insightful and inventive. He’d followed this band in Germany and over to the States on a road trip, filming everything himself. We went over to Hamburg to show the film to Dave before anyone else saw it, and screened it in the St Pauli stadium as he’s a huge St Pauli fan. It was quite emotional, I don’t think he knew what to expect.

How difficult is it to get programmes commissioned and made? Has the process changed
over the years? How? Why?

AS: It’s becoming very difficult to get programmes commissioned/films made nowadays. Broadcasters like to play safe, they tend not to go for single docs, as there’s more return on a series. The arts seems to be a dirty word. Funding for films is so difficult to get; there’s just less money around. It’s becoming more frequent that you almost have to make the film as proof of concept in order to attract funding, which means it takes a long time as you still have to do your day job to earn money.

Next came a brilliant documentary on the Pet Shop Boys. What was that like?

AS: I am a huge fan of the PSBs so was delighted to be asked to make this film, particularly since the director was Lou Lockwood who is terrific and I’d wanted to work with her for ages. I was worried that maybe they might disappoint a bit, not be as lovely or as funny as I’d imagined, but the opposite was true, absolutely brilliant, the pair of them, very funny and courteous. And I still love listening to the music! Sometimes when you work on something for a while you can’t listen to those tracks for a long time, but not with them. And we got to go for dinner with them! So that was very exciting.

You recently worked on ‘Reality is Not Enough’ about Irvine Welsh. What was this like?

AS: We started cutting Reality is Not Enough in January 2023. Director Paul Sng already knew Irvine, and the genesis of the film had come about one night when they’d gone to see the Todd Haynes’ Velvet Underground doc together, and Paul had asked Irvine if he might be interested in being filmed himself. He teamed up with Edinburgh based company LS Productions and with a small crew followed Irvine Welsh all over the world for a year– Miami, Dublin, LA, Toronto, etc.

The film evolved a lot from the initial premise, which was Irvine in conversation with old friends in all these parts of the world. It gradually became more introspective, and the device we used to frame it was a controlled drug trip Irvine goes on while in Toronto at a book fest. We’re then inside his mind, and Paul cleverly filmed this using historical archive in a warehouse with Irvine wandering through, while he reflects on his life in voiceover. We paused the post production of the film for a few times, while more filming was being organised, so although it didn’t come out till August 2025 we weren’t working on it throughout. Again I worked mainly from home alone and sent cuts to Paul, and he’d come over to Glasgow and perch on the uncomfortable chair in the living room with a tiny table, no mod cons other than a plate of cookies, and go through notes with me. Paul is a very collaborative director with a positive attitude and vision. He managed to enlist a fantastic array of names to read from Irvine’s work, including Nick Cave, Stephen Graham, Maxine Peake and Liam Neeson.

Director Paul Sng with Angela Slaven at the Edinburgh Film Festival premiere of ‘Irvine Welsh: Reality is Not Enough’, August 2025.

AS: Maxine is the connection with Tish, another film I’ve worked on with Paul, as she narrates the voiceover. The film is a profile of Northern working class photographer Tish Murtha, seen through the lens of conversations between Tish’s daughter Ella and old friends, colleagues and family. Tish was already in post production with my good friend, Edinburgh based editor Lindsay Watson cutting it. During one of the longer breaks in Irvine I was brought on to make a 60 minute version, then it was wisely decided that that would essentially bastardise the film so it never happened. However the film kept evolving after that so I was lucky to be able to carry on working on it till the end. Tish herself was never recognised properly in her day, and Ella, force of nature that she is, has ensured that this has been rectified and Tish’s work is now in the permanent collection at the Tate. Interestingly I’ve read interviews with Ella and also with Irvine Welsh, and both said “there’s no one else I would let tell this story”, which speaks volumes about the level of trust they had with Paul (and also Jen Corcoran, Producer of Tish and Sarah Drummond, Producer of Reality).

The great thing about both of these projects is that they had two brilliantly intuitive composers attached, Alex Hamilton-Ayres on Tish, and Donna McKevitt on Reality. I don’t have a great musical vocabulary but each were geniuses at interpreting what was required at each level of the score as it went backwards and forwards with each cut.

Can you tell me what you’re working on next?

AS: Synchronicity – again it plays a major role here! I’m currently working with Grant again on not one, not two, but three feature length docs spanning the arts, music and culture scene in Liverpool from the early 70s to the mid 80s. This project has a long genesis. The very first time I met Grant – we met in Mono for a coffee – he was outlining what turned into BGD and I remember mentioning to him that it was odd that the Zoo Records story had never been properly told. That was that. For the moment.

A few years later the idea was resurrected. Grant by this time knew Dave Balfe and Bill Drummond, and I put him in touch with a friend of mine Paul Simpson from the Wild Swans, who is not just a brilliant musician but also a great raconteur, and he knows everyone as he was at the centre of that scene. (His memoirs Revolutionary Spirit: A Post-Punk Exorcism came out last year and are well worth a read). Again, that was that. Then a couple of years later some short film clips appeared in my inbox, sent by Grant – he’d been filming Paul in Liverpool. And also filmed, rather wonderfully, Bill and Dave in bed like Morecambe and Wise, reliving their 40 year friendship, talking about the Zoo story, all the personalities involved and generally winding each other up. Charming and fascinating.

Since then Grant has enlisted many other great characters such as Will Sergeant and Les Pattinson from Echo and the Bunnymen, Mick Finkler and Gary Dwyer from the Teardrop Explodes, Pete Wylie, the indomitable Queen of Eric’s (and indeed Liverpool) Jayne Casey, Andy McClusky, Paul Rutherford and many more. Not only that, Grant then unearthed the story of the heart and soul of the predecessor to the Eric’s/Zoo era – The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, an arts hangout based in a converted warehouse in the famous Mathew St, erstwhile home to the Cavern. It was started by poet and Jungian disciple Peter O’Halligan. [Carl] Jung had never visited Liverpool but in 1927 dreamed of finding himself in this “dirty sooty city”…”Liverpool is the Pool of Life”. He believed that synchronistic events are a reflection of the subconscious, that coincidence and chance can be meaningful, that things can have more than one way of making sense. Hence the inclusion of ‘Pun’ in the name of the School. And it would see the likes of Jim Broadbent take to the stage with Ken Campbell’s 23 hour long staging of Illuminatus!. Carol Anne Duffy and Bill Nighy hung out there. Letter to Brezhnev director Chris Bernard started as stage manager there. Bill Drummond was a humble carpenter, manufacturing complicated 3D collapsible sets from virtually nothing but sheer imagination. It is a truly fascinating tale, we have incredible film archive from Chris Bernard to illustrate it too, and Peter is a unique other-worldly character with a vision and a philosophy, but he is a do-er as well, he makes things happen, same with Bill Drummond. They have wonderful magical ideas and make them happen. Very inspirational.

Anyway, we have no money or funding so I’m not sure if we’ll ever get these finished but at the mo the first and third films are at a good rough-cut stage. We just need a philanthropist to help ease the way!

With thanks to Angela Slaven.

‘Team Griffin’ – Photograph copyright Douglas Corrance, used by kind permission

Angela Slaven editing and Angela with Brian Griffin – Photographs copyright Michael Prince, used by kind permission.

All other photographs courtesy of Angela Slaven.
Peter Boyd Maclean on the legendary Duvet Brothers new immersive production ‘Ritual Virtual – Inside the Sacred Rites’

July 2, 2025

I don’t know how Peter Boyd Maclean isn’t more famous than he is. It’s one of those Arthur C. Clarke Mysteries. You know the kind where the big question being asked is: how the fuck doesn’t everyone know about this guy? That is, in other words, how the fuck don’t the majority of people know about Peter Boyd Maclean? It’s probably part of the reason I originally set up Planet Paul way back in 2010 to give light to those who deserve blessings from the Great God of Luck for their Natural Born Talents, etc. etc.

I’ve known Peter for well-on thirty years and have always marvelled at his brilliance as a filmmaker, artist, musician and all-round-good-guy. (The last is a bonus point in my book.) Most people in TV or Film have sharp elbows intended to keep you away from a fair share of the main course.

I first met Peter when we worked together in the Music & Arts Department or as one wag named it the Musical Farts Department at BBC Scotland in the early 1990s. He seemed like a teenage wunderkind whose talent was never quite fully appreciated by those idiots who run the meejah. You know the kind of people. Those people who think beige is the most fashionable colour and wish the Guardian did horoscopes.

Peter first came to note as one-half of the twinset and perils known as the Duvet Brothers, alongside Rik Lander. If you’ve never heard of the Duvet Brothers then Duck-Duck-Go the scratch videos for Pump Up The Volume or Blue Monday both of which changed promo-vision and accidentally unleashed Adam Curtis-style documentaries upon the world. The Duvet Brothers changed television and film. But sadly, like all good nursery stories in search of a happy ending, they got fucked over by the conglomerates who saw their unique and original work as something to be retooled for their own petty ambitions.

Plus ca change plus ca meme chose.

Peter progressed on to a very successful career as director/producer with the BBC and Channel 4, making documentaries and series as diverse as In Search of Steve Ditko, Pete & Dud: The Lost Sketches, Crapston Villas, and Banzai. In 2009, Peter wrote and directed the short film documentary in collaboration with the artist Millree Hughes called Lummox which deconstructed the whole concept of documentary filmmaking with a nod to Lacan’s theories on destructive envy.

Okay, you’ve had the intro, so now let’s find out what Peter or rather the Duvet Brothers are doing right now.

This week the Duvet Brothers present an immersive theatrical experience called Ritual Virtual – Inside the Sacred Rituals which is based on the Greek myths surrounding the mother and daughter Demeter and Persephone. Now, if you’ve never heard of these characters you should have a quick butchers of Robert Graves’ classic books Greek Myths Vol I and Vol. II. In fact, we’ve got Robert here (He’s dead – Ed.), so what’s it all about, Bob?

Robert Graves (for it is he!): I’m glad you asked, Planet. Demeter was the ancient Greek goddess of the harvest. Or death and rebirth, if you will. Now, as is typical in these Greek myths Demeter had a beautiful daughter called Persephone.

One day, Demeter and Persephone were walking through a beautiful meadow admiring the bounty of Nature, when whop, bang, fizz, Hades, the rascal and god of the underworld appeared and decided to steal Persephone away for his own wicked and disgusting ways.

Unsurprisingly, Demeter was well pissed-off as any mum would be when some random abducts her daughter. So, Demeter decides she will fuck-up the harvest by bringing winter upon the land and destroy all of the crops – fruit, vegetables and any of those Whole Foods outlets that were around back then. Serious shit, as you can imagine. So much so, that ye great god and nasty mad-shagger Zeus has to intervene.

Zeus goes down to kick Hades’ butt. But, Hades says, Persephone can only leave if she hasn’t eaten any of the food he has given to her. Thankfully, Persephone hasn’t touched the Maccy D’s or the KFC but unfortunately for her, she has devoured a pomegranate which now means Persephone is stuck in Hell.

Zeus being Zeus comes up with a deal. Persephone will spend six months in Hades and six months with her mum Demeter. Obviously, this was way before women had any rights. Hades accepts the deal.

So, now Demeter has her daughter back for six months of the year, which becomes the time of spring, summer and harvest, while Hades has Demeter during autumn and winter or the time of death and rebirth. This is where seasons come from. (As if – Ed.)

This is only part of the story as Demeter and Persephone were honoured in ancient times in an annual festival known as the Thesmophoria which celebrated human and agricultural fertility at harvest time. These festivals were held by women and involved a series of sacred secret rites known as the Eleusinian Mysteries which focus on the abduction of Persephone, Demeter’s search for Persephone, and finally the ascension or rebirth of Persephone. These rituals tied into concepts of eternal life through fertility and the possibility of an afterlife.

What is ‘Ritual Virtual’ about?

Peter Boyd Maclean: It is a recreation of the celebration of Demeter that took place for over a thousand years at the temple of Demeter on the Eleusis known as the Eleusinian Mysteries

How did you become involved in it?

PBM: I conceived the idea as a documentary and a possible VR experience. Then Rik [Lander] my old Duvet Brothers partner said that University of the West of England were commissioning projects to showcase their brand new tech centre that had robots and a studio with 22 speakers surround sound and a massive screen.

So we adapted the idea to suit the brief

What attracted you to the story? Why this story?

PBM: The story attracted me because I discovered that during the rituals they would imbibe a hallucinogenic drink called kykeon. They say this drink was made with some of the barley which came from the bakery next to the temple. This barley was supposedly infected with the fungus ergot which causes hallucinations. Many centuries later, Albert Hoffman made LSD from ergot sparking a cultural revolution of the 60’s

The participants at these rituals would have revelations, and overcome their fear of death.

Plato was alleged to have been inspired to write about the Cave of Shadows which Carl Jung picked up a couple of thousand years later. I also like the idea that the fathers of modern (well up till a a few years ago) civilisation, Plato and Aristotle developed their ideas while under the influence of hallucinogens in week long festivals. A couple of thousand years later we got Woodstock and the Grateful Dead, Sgt Pepper’s etc

Demeter was the God of the harvest, birth, death and rebirth and this was something that deeply interested me.

A few years ago I went on a retreat involving ayahuasca and I had revelations that helped me deal with the prolonged low-level grief I had after my brother died years ago. It all came up and I received a message which helped enormously.

What was the message?

PBM: ‘Tend to the living.’

I realised through an internal dialogue with myself I had been tending to the grief, keeping it alive as it was my connection to my brother I suppose.

It was like a medieval saying, tending to the garden, tending to the grief and the strong message was tend to the living, to my kids. Loved ones. Everyone.

I wrote the song and then the Greek myth of Demeter’s search for Persephone her grief then the acceptance of life death rebirth

They were clever them mythmakers no wonder they still inspire.

You say it’s immersive, can you explain what this involves?

PBM: It’s immersive theatre, the mystics, or initiates or punters go through the initiation that the ancient Greeks did at the temple except they didn’t have the advantage of robots haha and they don’t take drugs so they experience stuff through the VR headset instead

I made the VR headset film over the last six months and am producing the live stuff with Rik.

Gary Bridgewood my partner from our band the Book of Shame has composed a fantastic soundtrack that takes us to the Underworld and back in a continuous swirl of emotions.

Zoe Portella in ‘Virtual Ritual’.

Apart from Virtual Reality and robots who is in the production?

PBM: Zoe Portella a fantastic singer and performer I’ve been working with is Demeter in the VR and the high priestess for the initiation ceremony

Gary is playing live and Zoe will also sing a song at the end of it.

Ceri Seel is an academic and Ancient Greece expert and does a lot of rituals

Brad Crowley is the town crier of Glastonbury and a host that guides the initiates through to the ceremony.

Marie Helen Boyd is another guide to the initiates.

What do you think people will experience from ‘Ritual Virtual’?

PBM: I think it might be a bit far for it to be a life changing experience.

Firstly it’s entertainment and I hope people will have fun joining in playing a part in the fun. There’s live performances and theatre and a VR experience the likes of which you won’t see on many other platforms

Secondly maybe a moment of self reflection, that would be an achievement

Thirdly a wish to join the new cult of Dementer!

The Duvet Brothers’ immersive production of ‘Ritual Virtual’ will be held on the 3rd and 4th of July at the Bristol Robotics Lab, University of the West of England, T Block, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol, BS16 1QY.

There will be two productions on Thursday 3rd July.

Tickets for first performance 3rd July available here.

Tickets for the second performance 3rd July available here.

Tickets for the performance on Friday 4th July available here.

With thanks to Peter Boyd Maclean.
Carrying On: An interview with artist Malcolm Ashman

June 30, 2025

Malcolm Ashman is known for his work as a landscape artist and for his portrait paintings. His landscape pictures encapsulate the beauty and shimmering magic of the countryside, while his portrait paintings reveal the character of the subject. Ashman also works in several different media to communicate his ideas with an audience. He is a sculptor, a print-maker, and a photographer.

Ashman knew from an early age he was destined to become an artist. It was intuitive. Just as Barbara Hepworth noted about her own artistic vision: “Perhaps what one wants to say is formed in childhood and the rest of one’s life is spent trying to say it.”

Raised in a rural environment, Ashman’s working-class parents had little knowledge in how best to help their son develop his talent.. Necessity meant he used whatever stray materials were to hand. He honed his talent through self-belief and hard work.

After studying graphic design and illustration at the Somerset College of Art., Ashman designed the book cover for Angela Carter’s novel The Bloody Chamber. This led to a career illustrating books including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Ashman continued to paint which led to his first group show. Since then, Ashman has had many solo exhibitions and received numerous awards.

‘A Late Evening Walk through Owl Wood’.

Can you tell me about your childhood and your first interest in making art?

Malcolm Ashman: I was born into a rural working class family, an only child until the age of seven. My parents had no knowledge of anything connected with the arts but were quite practical in domestic matters. My grandfather lived with us and I spent all my pre-school years with him. I had acquired all the skills and daily routines of a 70 year-old by the age of five.

He encouraged me to paint, draw, garden and appreciate nature, all the pursuits I still enjoy today.

The materials for making art were all to be found in the home; scraps of wood and fabric to make objects and puppets, old magazines for collage and remnants of house paint. I was allowed to paint and draw on my bedroom walls and made the most of this. My parents, though they didn’t know how to help, didn’t discourage me which, looking back, was the best thing they could have done for me.

You have said you wanted to become an artist from the age of four – what exactly did you mean, understand or know about this ambition and how did you think you would achieve it?

MA: As a four-year-old making work felt good, it was the thing I could do best and I was happy for this to continue. In 1960 small children weren’t usually asked what they were going to do with their lives. In fact they weren’t asked anything at all as I remember.

What sort of artworks did you make as a child? Did you have art class at school? What did you learn from this?

MA: I went to a small village school which had a progressive headmistress though I didn’t realise it at the time. She recognised strengths and prioritised individual needs. I was an oddball with no love of the team spirit so she didn’t force the issue. She gave me confidence to follow my own ideas and encouraged experimentation. We kept in touch until she died in the late 1990s.

‘Ariel’.

Art can be about making sense of the world – what was it you wanted to make sense of?

MA: Aged eleven I went to a local grammar school where all the things I loved were pushed aside, individuality was out, fitting in was demanded. It almost broke me. After a wonderfully supportive start, education had become a minefield. I realised that the world didn’t make sense and sometimes they really are out to get you. Art was a place where I could cling to any shreds of self confidence that remained.

You have said ‘Whatever I make, landscape or portrait, it’s saying something about me. Ultimately the artist is the subject…’ Can you discuss this?

MA: Everything I or any artist makes is the result of thousands of decisions, it’s all in my head so ultimately it’s all me. This personal short hand is vast and translating it into the spoken word is nigh on impossible for me at least. Hopefully a few people will catch my drift. I’m not explaining this very well which rather proves my point 🙂

Where did you go to art college and did you enjoy it? What did you learn from your time there? What sort of friendships did you make?

MA: Halfway through my time at grammar school, it became a comprehensive, amalgamating with an adjacent secondary modern. Immediately I had access to a well stocked art room and committed teachers. Encouraged to think about art college I eventually managed to secure a place after a number of rejections.

It wasn’t the experience I’d expected but to be fair I was dealing with some personal issues which were more important. On the whole I enjoyed many aspects of my three years there but it became clear that formal education wasn’t working for me.

I’m still in touch with one friend from that time, in fact we’re having a show together later in 2025.

‘Leaving art school was liberating and daunting’ – what do you mean by this and how did you become involved in book illustration?

MA: I was glad to move on though trying to find freelance work was daunting. I’d worked in the graphics department at college but I was not interested in the subject so for the last year I’d worked on illustration briefs I’d set myself. The results were often bizarre and regularly failed to communicate anything to my fellow students.

No one had suggested being a painter, in fact the fine art tutors had been openly hostile and I’d fled to graphics to escape them.

During the last six months there I made many appointments with various art directors and artists agents in London. I met some wonderful people during this period and many small acts of kindness kept me going. By the time I left college I had some experience of the wider world which helped enormously. I didn’t want to live in London so getting jobs was slow.

Tell me about your work as a book illustrator – which in particular are your favourites?

MA: Fantasy subjects were quite big in the 70s and one of my first commissions was from Victor Gollancz, the first edition cover artwork for Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

This is an early favourite, all the elements were suggested by Angela but the interpretation was left to me. Clearly there were possibilities for the future.

Malcolm Ashman’s cover for Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’.

MA: Within a year of leaving college I met a group of professional painters and sculptors who invited me to exhibit with them. I visited their studios and learnt more in six months than three years of art education.

Some years on I had my first solo show of watercolour and gouache paintings at a gallery in Bath and by chance the director of Paper Tiger publishers happened by as the show was being hung. He invited me to work on a project of my choosing which they would publish. I’d bought many of their books when I was a student and this was an unforeseen and wonderful opportunity. Over the following eight years I worked on four book projects with them. The final publication Fabulous Beasts is my favourite.

Its size and format is the same as many of the fantasy books I’d bought years before, it sits on my book shelf alongside them.

Each book I worked on was, for me, a collection of individual paintings so I always felt calling myself an illustrator didn’t quite fit. After the final book everything changed.

What happened?

MA: Up to this point I’d painted from observation often en plein air and definitely naturalistically using watercolour and gouache.

During the summer 1996 I walked the Lyme Bay coast path with a small group. I took paper and pens so I could draw along the way but the rest stops were short so I quickly learnt to simplify the landscape, basic shapes and written notes for colour.

This coincided with with a friend giving me a box of oil paints which I’d never used before. The resulting paintings were by and large disliked by most people but some sold and gradually I gained a degree of control over the new medium and a few galleries started showing the work.

‘Chalk Down Dorset’.

You have said painting a portrait is like a collaboration between the artist and the sitter – can you please elaborate?

MA: In 2004 I rented studio space at Bath Artists Studios. It was similar to my earlier experience of meeting a large group of professional artists, it revolutionised my approach.

I developed ways of working and organising ideas that made total sense to me.

There were a number of portrait artists working there and I began to explore possibilities.

Spending time with a sitter inevitably brings other ideas to the work.

There’s another voice to listen to and I found I liked that. I’d never got the hang of other people try as I might. I like people but I like them one at a time. Painting portraits can create an immediate connection if you’re lucky. Small talk can quickly evolve into very personal conversations. The calm of the studio environment has a feeling of the confessional so I was often told.

‘Mask’.

MA: These conversations influenced the way I presented the sitter and I was always happy to consider any ideas they had for the work.

In 2020 lockdown I began a series of imaginary portraits without sitters and very much like my approach to my landscape paintings, memory based. These were tiny paintings and I call them Small Heads. I’m still working on this series.

How do you paint? Tell me about your processes – the use of colour, how you block out a canvas, how do you start? Is it daunting to put a mark on canvas?

MA: Over the years my process has evolved. I’ve worked in many different mediums and disciplines, but I still make simple drawings for both landscape and portrait paintings. Once I begin the work I rarely refer to them but they get me started. I painted with water based paints in my early career then oils. I switched to acrylics after I began to have health issues from the solvents. I miss the luminosity of oils but I prefer to breathe easy. I like working on panels, scraping and sanding the surface. I have used canvas but it requires a less aggressive handling also I’m rubbish at stretching.

I’m never daunted by a ‘blank canvas’. I block out the basic shapes drawing with a brush then underpaint the entire panel. I paint in layers but try to leave some of the underpainting. Colour is instinctive, if it doesn’t work it can be changed. Too much theory gets me down.

What is a typical working day like?

MA: I don’t have a studio routine though I always work at weekends. I like to set myself projects which I switch between during the week. I’m becoming increasingly aware of time passing and my focus is growing more intense. I spend an hour on the garden at some point in each day, it’s the only activity that stops me overthinking.

Art is a process of trial and error – is this true? What do you learn from this? When do you know something is right?

MA: I’ve reworked many paintings several times, often years apart. I’ve cut down work to find a better painting and used leftovers for collage. Knowing something is right is sometimes wrong, it’s of the moment and can change. I’ve destroyed many paintings that I thought were right but ideas and skills improve over time.

I have a greater confidence than I had twenty years ago, I’ve put in the hours and I think it shows.

I often work with pencil or ink. black and white with no colour. I feel comfortable with this and I sometimes like to put my feet up and go with it but colour has always been a challenge and has certainly been a case of trial and error over many years. This preoccupation runs through everything in my life painting sculpture, gardening and interiors. I’m working on a new series of paintings for an exhibition later in the year that reference my landscape work but pared down compositionally and focusing on colour relationships in a more abstract way.

‘Exmoor Fields’.

Tell me about your landscape art? What attracts you to a certain location?

MA: My early influences were the nature paintings of Tunnicliffe via the Ladybird books of the seasons and I studied these images in detail. Interestingly I never bothered much with the text, the paintings had so much much more to offer.

These books made me look to the countryside for my own subject matter. It stayed with me. I’m drawn to the wilder places, the West Country moors and the coast have always been favourite starting points. I suppose it’s the familiar but I’m always happy to be surprised. As I’ve said I work from small drawings often made in nature but the shapes of landscape are so much part of me now I can call on them at any time.

You are a multimedia artist – can you talk about your sculptural work? Where do your ideas come from? How would you describe the conversation you are having with your audience?

MA: I’ve always made 3-D pieces but it’s only since Covid that I’ve started showing them publicly.

I always start with donated materials and ‘play’ with them until an idea begins to form. In the early days I used my parents leftovers, later odds and ends from other artist and friends. I have an ongoing piece that invited everyone to donate a small item to be included, it has the appearance of a roadside shrine. I made it as an interactive piece for open studios but it continues to attract offerings many years on.

Currently I have several works in a show, Connecting Threads, at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol. I’ve been working on these for the last five years.

In 2020 I’d helped clear the house of a relative, 90 years of collected stuff. She’d been a maker of all things domestic: clothes, soft furnishings, embroideries and tapestries. I couldn’t bring myself to throw anything away so continued using her collection of as yet unused materials, though in a very different direction. I’ve always been fascinated by the point where the man-made meets the organic, dereliction and neglect offer interesting starting points. The latest pieces are neither one nor the other, initially they have the appearance of ‘creatures’ but they also have architectural elements.

‘Symbiont’.

MA: I’ve made these pieces for myself without any thought of an audience. Truth to tell this has always been so but these new pieces have taken this further and there’s definitely an air of defiance in them. I’ve no thought of selling or pleasing anyone other than myself.

This current show will determine if there is a conversation to be had but does it really matter?

Tell me about your photography and print-making.

MA: In 1962 I took a series of photos of my parents on the Downs in Bristol after we visited the zoo. They were black-and-white and slightly blurred but quite recognisable. I was extremely pleased with myself. This began my relationship with photography.

Over the years I’ve tried to master the art but the process felt remote and vaguely scientific. I have patience but not for this then the digital revolution came along.

Instant success or failure, no complex processing or waiting. It felt more like the drawing or painting process, wrong decisions could be put right quickly.

With my first digital camera I spent several years photographing people at the same time I was exploring the painted portrait. The photographs were a different proposition, immediate and often unposed. Here the sitter had the same control if not more than I did. I have a small collection of old photo albums bought at sales with no information about the photographer or the photographed. I’m intrigued by them. Maybe my aim with the digital project was to set up a future mystery for someone.

I admire printmaking and printmakers. I’ve attempted all aspects of the discipline but I’ve never formed an enthusiastic connection. There are so many rules and I don’t have the right temperament.

In 2014 I met, via the good old days of Twitter, a Norwegian printmaker, Inger Karthum. She was an etcher but had embraced digital printmaking in recent years. We decided to see if we could collaborate on a series which collaged elements of both our work.

This was a very important time in my life and although we haven’t made anything together for some time, we continue to meet and compare ideas which most definitely influences my own work.

‘Drawing the Weather’.

What artists, books, music or even films have influenced you as an artist?

MA: Everything that has passed before me has been an influence both positive and negative.

The Tunnicliffe Ladybirds set me on the creative path followed by early Marvel comics, CS Lewis, Alan Garner and especially John Wyndham. I like fantasy and sci-fi that also contain strong elements of the everyday.

Poirot and the Carry On team got me through difficult times in my teens. Characters who didn’t quite fit in were good role models, doing what they did best despite pressure and disapproval kept me on track.

Later I enjoyed stories by MR James and HP Lovecraft, again the combination of the fantastic and the ordinary, very much part of my latest sculpture series.

These days I find reality more interesting than fiction. I prefer published diaries and search for helpful advice to get through, as Victoria Wood says in Pat and Margaret, “this sod of a life.”

Since the Internet I continually discover artists I admire, there are so many talented individuals who keep me focused and ever hopeful. The dedication and skill of others is infectious in the best possible way.

Looking back, everything I’ve done though primarily for myself has been an attempt to find a way to talk to other people against difficult odds.

With thanks to Malcolm Ashman.

All images copyright of the artist, used by kind permission.

Portrait of Malcolm Ashman by Anne-Katrin Purkiss.
‘I’m a writer and a broadcaster’: Melvyn Bragg unpublished interview from 1984

March 9, 2025

May 15th 1984: You walk into the ground floor reception of the South Bank Studios, London. Outside, it’s a bright blue sky day. Wind whips around this black and white multi-storey building. Smell off the Thames. Glitter of traffic crossing over bridges. A young woman in her twenties greets you. She says your name then come this way. You go into a lift. Up sixteen floors to an open plan office. You try to make small talk. Out of the lift. Bright ceiling lights. Desks with young people busy working, talking, keyboards clicking. You wonder if you could ever get a job working here. You’re offered tea or coffee. Water, please. I’ll let him know you’ve arrived, she says. You are here to interview Melvyn Bragg. Through glass panels you can see into his office, hear him speaking. Then you’re led in.

Bragg sits behind a large executive desk. Papers, files, mail carefully displayed across the top. He stands up. You shake hands. The office is a wide rectangle with a view over the Thames, the Houses of Parliament, the OXO building, Saint Paul’s Cathedral. On the window ledge behind Bragg are a potted plant and a selection of books. Graham Greene, John Mortimer, M. M. Kaye, Roald Dahl. Bragg asks about your journey down. You have travelled from Glasgow on an overnight bus. But you don’t mention this. What you’re studying. History. You set up a tape recorder. The assistant returns with a glass of water. You’re nervous. Should have written more questions. You worry your hand might twitch as you take a-hold of the glass. Sit down. You do.

Bragg is in his mid-forties. Wears a dark suit, silk handkerchief poking from breast pocket, white shirt, tie loosely knotted. You wonder why he always wears a suit. You wear black cargo pants, a grey denim jacket, John Lennon specs and high-top sneakers. He says: “I wear suits now basically because it’s easier if you are doing a television programme to wear the same thing all the time. You don’t want to go in way over the programme. It’s another way to get people to forget about me and concentrate on the person I am talking to.”

Since 1978, Bragg has edited and presented The South Bank Show. On one wall a white board lists the subjects of the current series in blue and red marker pen. Jack Lemmon, Catherine Cookson, Ed McBain, and Ken Russell’s Symphonic Portrait of Vaughan Williams. You have been a fan of the show since its first episode when Bragg interviewed Paul McCartney. Saturday 14th January 1978. Your father’s birthday. The South Bank Show was more of an arts magazine programme then. It evolved into single subject programmes. Bragg’s idea was to mix high art and popular culture.

Bragg tells you: “I think The South Bank Show is the most eclectic Arts show there’s ever been and it deals thoroughly with every subject that comes up. We make straightforward accessible programmes. It reaches out very democratically. We don’t talk down to anyone. I don’t think anyone respects you for that.”

You first got hip to Bragg when he presented a book review series on the BBC called Read All About It (1974-79). You watched the show with your parents and brother. You were working class but your parents had aspirations towards self-improvement. To learn. To read. Your father may not have read any of those red bound Russian novels from the Heron Book Club, but he wanted you to read them.

Bragg is a highly talented and original writer. At the time of this interview he has written twelve novels (including The Cumbrian Trilogy – The Hired Man, A Place of England, and Kingdom Come), and four books of non-fiction including a biography of Laurence Olivier.

His novels reflect his Cumbrian upbringing and his antecedents – farm labourers and coal miners – which has lead to a few critics describing his work Lawrencian. He has also written about people who work in television. His books are brilliant examinations of working class life in the 1800s to life in the more complex and cosmopolitan world of the 1970s.

You have read six of his novels. The most recent read The Nerve caught your imagination . The story of a man having a nervous breakdown. You wonder if Bragg has had a breakdown. You don’t know. And you are unaware until much later that Bragg’s first wife committed suicide. People only tell you what they want you to hear. You wonder again if you have enough questions, if you know enough about your subject.

Fuck it.

Interviews are not just about questions, they are about listening. Listening to an answer then interrogating it. It’s a conversation. It’s about engaging with the interviewee and the subject matter.

Another reason you like Bragg is because he worked with Ken Russell. You want to know more about this. But this will come later.

You ask your first question: How would you describe yourself? Bragg is eating an apple. Lunch. He pauses and thinks before answering.

“I’m a writer and a broadcaster. I’ve done the same thing since I was about twenty-one or twenty-two. I started out writing short stories and knew that’s what I wanted to do. I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to make a living out of it so I had to get a job. I got a job making television programmes. I liked doing that a lot. I liked everything about it. I like working with other people for a start. I don’t like the life of a writer in terms of being on your own all the time writing and reading. I don’t like that. I like that to be a part of my life but I don’t like it to be all my life. I get too depressed. I get too cut off. I like working for other people. So I do two things. It’s what I’ve done all my working life and I don’t see any division in it.”

Bragg’s words “depressed” and “division” catch.. But you are nervous. Instead you ask what you’ve already written down.

You are a writer, a broadcaster, a journalist and a screenwriter, do you think you may be doing too much, spreading yourself thin?

Melvyn Bragg: Well, it depends how you look at your life. (Pause) One or two people say that. It’s a fairly modern phenomenon that writers have just written and I’m not sure they’re the better for it. I mean Dickens edited a daily newspaper at one stage apart from running campaigns and so on. Henry Fielding was until the end of his life a very busy magistrate. They’re very good writers. Ted Hughes farmed properly for years and years as well as writing poetry and verse and goodness knows what else. Philip Larkin has been a full-time librarian. Graham Greene wrote reviews until he was in his forties, about my age. So I think there is an idea around that writers should sit down and that’s fine for certain temperaments.

I would like to have spent more time writing than I have been able to in the last five or six years. As to whether my writing has suffered because I haven’t enough time to it – I don’t know. There’s always a balance, I think. Or there is a balance in my life. Of going and finding out about the world. being in the world and having to think about it and to work on it. Then going away from it. To sit down and write it. Especially novels because they tend to take a long time to write..

(You say nothing.)

MB: I would like more predictable, more solid time away from everything to start a book because you need about six weeks to start something. You need six weeks to get into it. It’s very hard to get but it’s much harder to get because of the family, because of the job.

But the family would be around if the job wasn’t around. Do you see what I mean?

I sometimes think that I’ve enough time to write. Instead of publishing nine novels I could have published two or three and taken just as much time to do it. I don’t think you, anyone has to moan about that.

I think it’s very, very difficult to prove on my part or anybody else’s that the books have been affected by the other work either for the better or the worse. I think the argument is unprovable.

Actually, I think it’s unimportant. If the books are good then they’ll hang around for a bit. Or, if they’re not, then they don’t deserve to. I actually take it as axiomatic which I think is perhaps a mistake. But nevertheless, I take it as axiomatic that if something is good it will survive. I think that is an axiom. An act of faith on my part. I don’t think there is anything else you can say that matters very much. If a book is good it will live on. If it’s not, it won’t.

How do you write?

MB: It depends. It’s very erratic from book to book. Silken Net took a year-and-a-half. Hired Man about thirteen days. Love and Glory sort of peddled along for about nine months quite steadily. I just kept slamming away at that. It depends.

I do first drafts. I write in longhand. I do an awful lot of writing and overwriting. I wish I did more.

I work on a book and when I see it out I think, ‘Oh, Christ, I could have done with another shot at it.’

Some critics have suggested your books are autobiographical. Is this true?

MB: I’ve used a lot of detail from life in terms of context and in terms of a general passage of a career sometimes. That is to say, I too was at a grammar school in a small mining village. I too went to Oxford and I too went into a broadcasting system and made television programmes.

In The Hired Man my grandfather was a coal miner and an old farm labourer. In that sense some characters have similar biographical details but there’s not much more to it than that.

When I have written sometimes about somebody who seems to be a bit like I can appear to be, it’s difficult for some to separate my life from certain lives in the books. But then when you look at the books, I mean the few autobiographical things that are in Want of a Nail are trivial, they really are. I can give you the six little facts there were and that’s a paragraph’s worth.

Second Inheritance was nothing to do with me at all. Without a City Wall nothing to do with me. The Hired Man is two generations ago. A Place in England is one generation ago. Same with Silken Net and Josh Lawton.

MB: When it comes down to The Nerve which I deliberately wrote using an autobiographical mode I knew I was taking a risk. I like taking risks. The thing is about being well-known and because of television diminished in the eyes of literary critics, I can take a lot more chances. I can take as many chances as I want. Because, fuck it. The snidies are always going to be out there and there’s nothing I can do to crack that lot. That’s all there is to it.

I can do whatever the hell I want. They can go and fuck themselves. They’re going to do that anyway. You can shit on any book in the world and London is full of extremely clever young men who can do that by the yard.

(You wonder if Bragg is including you in this swipe.)

MB: One of the things I wanted to do was run fiction very closely alongside documentary. To chronicle as to create. Especially to chronicle. I always liked that aspect of novel writing. I always did. A good shank of the novel was to be a chronicle of the times as well as to be an imaginative rendering of the times.

The first volume [of The Cumbrian Trilogy] The Hired Man is generally an accurate description of life – the hiring, the coal miner. I’m sure it isn’t faultless but it is generally accurate.

The second, A Place in England has a documentary accuracy of working class life in a small town during the interwar period.

Now, how was I going to carry the story on in the third [volume Kingdom Come] and stay with the documentation? I wanted to achieve three things. I wanted it to document a life. I wanted it to relate to my own family. I wanted it to be a work of fiction. The third volume meant I had to come into London. I had to come into television and all that. I delayed writing it for years. But I couldn’t get away from it no matter what I wrote. and I couldn’t get the central character balanced in my head. I couldn’t make him, couldn’t feel him at all. Then I just started to write and thought ‘Here we go.’ And that was the risk one took.

Do you think your work is taken seriously by the critics?

MB: They don’t take too many people seriously except for each other. Who takes who seriously? I mean Clive James gets shat on. Craig Raine’s last book didn’t get too well received. There are cliques in and out and in and out. I’m not at all paranoid about it, believe me. I do get some extremely good reviews. The last one [Love and Glory] got good reviews from good people like Fay Weldon, people I respect. What can be more satisfying than that?

I think [with critics] there’s a general five percent of smart, snidery that goes on. It isn’t at all important. You know what I mean? They pick up things like ‘Oh, he says that [character] Douglas [Tallentire] is such and such a chap.’ ‘Oh, that’s him, of course.’

You’re slightly aware of that so you’ve got to get unaware of that in order to make the book work. Actually, it’s a problem of comedy rather than anything else. If I had more confidence and a better talent then I would turn it into a comedy of juxtaposition because it is a trivial matter.

I’ve never had as much confidence as I’d like to have. I’ve always been rather in awe. That’s why I’ve enjoyed the television work a lot more.

Photograph: Michael Gallagher.

Tell me about your childhood and how you started in television?

MB: When I was a kid I used to read novels. I read a hell of a lot of novels. I was middle-aged when I was younger. Very.

I got a BBC traineeship when I was twenty-one. Went into radio, which I liked an awful lot. Worked in Newcastle. Worked in the World Service, Bush House. Then I worked in Broadcasting House in the features department. I was going to stay there, I didn’t like television except for an Arts programme called Monitor. I said I’d only go into television if I could get an attachment onto Monitor. Eventually one came up and I got it and I went to Monitor. If I had been doing anything else I’d rather have stayed in radio.

On ‘Monitor’ you worked on a series of drama-documentaries directed by Ken Russell which led to working together on the movie ‘The Music Lovers’ which starred Glenda Jackson and Richard Chamberlain. What happened?

MB: I had a big row with Ken [Russell] on that which is fairly public. I hated [The Music Lovers]. Hated it. I thought the first screenplay I did was rather good.

[Pause]

I hated it. It all went wrong.

I think the first third or half stands up a bit. Then it just went to pieces.

I think Ken is a very brilliant, eccentric and erratic talent. He can be marvellous but the trouble was for a long time, in my opinion, Ken just lost interest in writers and that’s fair enough but the consequences just showed on the screen. He just was not interested in the writer’s contribution. He was interested in the director’s contribution. He was interested in the cameraman’s contribution. The actors’ and actresses’ contribution. But he was not interested in the writer’s contribution. And that’s a mistake that showed.

What it meant was that although you can have dialogue, you can’t have character. Writers can create character. Anybody can write dialogue. Anybody in the world with an education can write dialogue – he said that, she said that. Anyone. I can write four pages of dialogue with my left hand while I’m talking. It’s just meaningless unless they are attached to characters who’ve come from somewhere and are going somewhere.

That’s what Ken got in the habit of thinking – what went on between two people was dialogue and not character. And that’s a shame. With The Music Lovers it was very depressing really and I gave up writing for films.

I’d had a good and a bad time writing for films and in the end I gave up writing films.

You know, life’s very short and the whole thing is an odd business anyway. You might as well do something that gets somewhere. I mean these television programmes on the Arts get made and they get shown. They matter to some people a great deal. The books that I write get written and get published and some people like them a lot. So I’d rather do that than write for films.

I mean if you want to make money and be glamorous then films are fun but I’ve never been particularly interested in it.

You also scripted films like ‘Play Dirty’ with Michael Caine and Karl Reisz’s ‘Isadora’ with Vanessa Redgrave.

MB: Now I enjoyed [Isadora]. That wasn’t anybody’s fault. Well, that was an amusing story.

The long version I’m proud of but nobody’s seen it in this country except at the NFT. I really was proud of it. But, that sickened me too.

The short story of it is that, I’m not telling you anything that isn’t true, but being abbreviated may be distorted.

Isadora which ran about 180 minutes and I’d structured it around Isadora’s memoirs. It took me bloody months to work out the structure. In the end the only way to do it was to have her as a blousy old lady dictating her memoirs on the Riviera. Now that seems very trite but when we did it in the sixties it hadn’t been done much. The problem you’ve got with biopics is that there is no structured drama in anybody’s life. What you’ve got are bits all over the fucking shop. And you’ve got to have that bit because she’s terrific. And you’ve got to have that bit because there’s hardly any relationship between them. Where if you write a play or a book there is a relationship because you have written it like that. But in people’s lives something happens there and seven years later something else happens.

Now the day before Isadora was going to have its trade showing Vanessa Redgrave burnt the flag of the United States of America on the steps of the American Embassy. It was wired all across America. It was a shocking thing for anyone to do. The next day this film opened with Vanessa playing a communist. Jesus Christ, they murdered it. ‘Do you want to see a Red actress playing a Red actress?’

The distributors panicked. They said it had to be cut so it could be shown five times a day instead of three times a day to make up for any losses. They took out fifty-odd minutes in a fortnight. I mean they just butchered all that marvellous storytelling stuff.

How did you become involved in making ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’?

MB: Skint. Utterly skint. I’d been out of a job for six years. I’d left television to concentrate on writing novels. Incredibly broke. We had a tiny house. It was over-mortgaged and borrowed on again. We were pressed to get rid of it. We were in terrible trouble. At the time it didn’t worry me a lot. It should have worried me a lot more. It worried other people like bank managers and solicitors.

I’d said to my agent I didn’t want any more films because I hated working on films. He rang up and said, ‘They’re stuck with Superstar and they can’t get it to work. If I send you a script of what they’re doing can you give me an opinion of it. and there’s five hundred quid in it for you.’ So, I thought it’s King of Kings with a beat. That’s what’s wrong with it. I hadn’t seen the show but I’d heard the record. It’s a contemporary pastiche. It works well as a pastiche. It now feels hackneyed but at the time it had a certain great freshness. So, I wrote that and they said, ‘What do you suggest?’ I got a ten week contract to work on it. I got paid weekly to pay off my debts and get the bank off my back.

After about three weeks I’d cracked it. They’re going to make this film because I’ve seen how to make it. I did this terrific treatment. I said all you need in an amphitheatre is forty people. They didn’t believe it would work. They were worried about Blasphemy Acts, you’ve got to remember all that.

I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, if you give me a small crew and I’ll go to Israel and shoot parts of it with half-a-dozen actors I’ll pick up in Tel Aviv and I’ll plan the track, sequence it and show it to you on film.’

And I did. I made a terrific job of it. Actually, I think some of it’s better than the film and Norman [Jewison, the director] not only used a lot of my locations but also a lot of the camera positions I used in the shoot.

It was a wonderful time. A terrific time. It was sort of like playing. Going into an actor’s studio in Tel Aviv and asking half-a-dozen young people if they want to jump into a truck and go into the desert and shoot for a week. We all stayed in crappy hotels and there was no money in it. They’d very grudgingly given us stock, old cameras and we had playback on a tape recorder [Laughs] Great.

Are you religious?

MB: No. Not at all. I don’t believe in any of the things you believe in if you’re religious. I mean God, eternal life, resurrection and all that.

How would you like to be remembered?

MB: I couldn’t give a damn. It’s nothing to do with me. I hope the people who knew me thought I was okay. That’ll do.

With thanks to Melvyn Bragg.

Photographs by Michael Gallagher, used by kind permission.

Buy Melvyn Bragg’s books here.
‘Painting is not a spectator sport’: An interview with the artist Paul Brandford

March 2, 2025

The artist Paul Brandford had an anxiety dream last night. He was late for something. Something important. But he didn’t know what. He just knew he was late. He had to catch a train from one red bricked Victorian station to another. Every time he was on the train, Brandford realised he was heading back to where he had started from. He was still late. And now he was lost.

He laughs the dream off. Fucking dreams. Fucking annoying dream. Just anxiety about getting up early on the days he teaches at college. An early start. Will the alarm go off? Will the trains be on time? Artists are dependent only on themselves and their talent, not on the intervention of extraneous circumstances.

Paul Brandford is a highly talented and original artist. He is among a group of British artists like Broughton and Birnie, Bensley and Dipré, Simon Leahy- Clark, Locky Morris and Alex Pearl who are “breaking the narrative” of British art.

Brandford paints large pictures filled with figures culled from classical paintings and images swiped from social media. If as John Berger once wrote that Turner “best represents most fully the character of the British 19th century,” then Brandford best and most brilliantly represents Britain’s culture in the digital age and its endless, chaotic stream of images.

The artist Paul Brandford.

Today Brandford is working at his studio. The studio is in Hackney Wick. He shares it with his wife the artist Jeanette Barnes. But never at the same time.

“The actual making of a painting is not a spectator sport,” says Brandford. “All sorts of things, instinctive things, stupid things, inexplicable things go on. They’re done for the painting to become itself – not for the amusement of others. Being watched does inhibit behaviour. Painting – in my book – is a distinctly private and personal enterprise. Which is completely at odds with the notion that you then want everyone to look at it once it’s done. I’m not the first person to acknowledge that the whole thing is completely ridiculous.”

Work in progress.

What are you working on today?

Paul Brandford: I’ve got plans for a painting based on derogatory photoshops that have been slung around twitter between people with some degree of creativity but nothing better to do with it. I like sourcing a subject by chance a lot of the time – it jars against themes that I’d naturally select to somehow energise an image.

How do you paint?

PB: I like to paint on a well primed board – it somehow enhances the physical aspect of paint and painting. Nothing soaks in – it’s all on the surface so that regardless of the illusion created the painting is also undeniably a thing. If I’m painting something from a collage – I’ll assemble the collage in a way that seems interesting and then draw it – maybe in charcoal, maybe in pastel and ink on quite a large scale to test if the collage is at all feasible on a much larger scale. I like to paint quickly and instinctively so that a decent amount of prep is essential to this.

If I’m painting something much smaller or want to be more spontaneous – I’ll just paint directly from the source without any prep. The big things take a few months from beginning to end, sometimes it’s good just to hack something out in a single day without too much thought or expectation.

When things aren’t going as you’d like or as you might have expected that actually creates an opportunity to develop what you’re doing in a new way – so it’s not all bad. The worse thing is when it’s going really well and you’re concerned about not spoiling the thing and you’ll fuck it up by being too careful.

How do you choose what you’re working on?

PB: I think the first attraction to a theme or subject has to be primarily visual. For some reason you like the look of a thing or the idea of what you might turn it into. It’s not a precise thing. There are always the odd things that you draw and paint that don’t seem to fit in with the rest of it, and that’s a good thing.

Themes go in cycles and invariably run their course, wars, politicians, film and television, glitches in communication. In a funny way the subjects occur and choose themselves. There does become a point though when more work on a subject or theme feels repetitious or safe in some way – when you know too much about what you’re going to do. Then it’s time to move on.

How do you start a painting?

PB: Quite traditionally in some ways – you have to make sure that on a large scale your design is going to fit but initially your sense of placement has to be flexible enough to allow for changes of mind – so big blocks of simple colour roughly where I think they should be. I avoid getting sucked into detail until a sense of the whole becomes more evident. On something smaller though I’d just do what I like – sometimes to break the habits of a fixed process. My paintings have been on board for about thirty years.

David Cameron.

Tell me about your paintings of politicians?

PB: These started by chance – a strange photo of a politician in a newspaper. They’re constantly photographed meaning unguarded and awkward moments will be used by the press to ridicule or undermine.

Mark Thatcher.

PB: One of the earliest examples was not strictly a politician but Mark Thatcher – on trial in South Africa – the press were jabbing microphones right into his face as he left the court. The resulting photographs were comedic and provocative, which I enjoyed painting (almost as if there was some cross over with Carry On characters.

Tony Blair.

PB: I did a lot of Tony Blair, Pope Benedict, Boris Johnson (when he was London’s Mayor) and David Cameron – who’s distinctly odd shaped head took some while to get to grips with. In the earlier pictures I’d sometimes tread on them to agitate the surface with footprints and studio dirt. They were painted not on an easel but on the floor so that the image could take whatever physical treatment I came up with without falling over.

Tell me about your paintings of Royalty?

PB: My family were big royalists, me less so.

The idea that, like the politicians, you begin with something or someone recognisable to most people means that the manipulations, oddities and accidents will appear more pronounced and the image is about that as much as it is about the original subject. I also like playing about with the respect agenda – accept your place, know your betters. I wasn’t quite old enough to be a punk in the mid to late seventies, but I was old enough to see what it meant. There’s also so much scope to be had when dealing with uniforms – I have no intention of carefully rendering King Charles’s medals, I have every intention of splatting paint about to somehow degrade their supposed meaning or value.

Queen Elizabeth II.

Where do ‘Carry On’ films fit in with your work?

PB: Carry On films have always been there. I watched them as a little kid, I still watch them from time to time now – not that you’ll find them on the telly that much anymore.

The best ones are very well scripted and the timing of the delivery is excellent. The cast of characters – though I never much cared for Jim Dale (though Carry On Cowboy is very much underrated in my book) or Barbara Windsor but Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Joan Simms are fine comedy actors.

Kenneth Williams and Sid James in ‘Carry on Cleo’.

PB: As a kid I liked the idea that big schemes of pompous figures, powerful figures, could be undone by the little man or by chance occurrences. They were anarchic, disrespectful and anti-establishment in a playful way. Sid is always earthy, willing to ride his luck and take his pleasures where he can find them – he often finds himself in a senior (and uniformed) position which he clearly does not merit. Kenneth has grand airs, disliking anything physical or menial. He aspires to greatness, even from a privileged position, without having the means to satisfactorily attain his goals. He remains jealous and thwarted. The nature of us all is somehow captured by this dynamic between them both – the body and the mind perpetually working against each other.

When Sid James appears in a painting, it’s a sign that the viewer that the situation is inherently ridiculous and prone to unravel – especially when pertaining to war or conquest. The man in the uniform doesn’t buy into the value system that put him there.

What are your favourite movies?

PB: The films I’ve watched the most times in no particular order:

The Talented Mr Ripley, Carry On Up the Khyber, Carry On Cleo, Gladiator and In Bruges.

My favourite art films are The Rebel, The Final Portrait and Love is the Devil.

More recently I watched Sorry To Bother You- which I thought was incredibly imaginative without being over reliant upon fantasy..

I also enjoy zombie movies – I find them very relaxing.

Who are your comedy heroes?

PB: In the seventies Dave Allen and Leonard Rossiter really changed my view of what entertainment actually was. Anyone sitting through a pure diet of The Good Old Days, Mike Yarwood or Seaside Special (or was it Summertime Special?) would think that actual entertainment never existed.

Mel Brooks is massively innovative – my big picture with all the comedic figures from fake or reimagined history was inspired in a way by the end of Blazing Saddles where all the different actors from different film sets collide and a huge punch up ensues. That painting also comes from seeing vast Tintorettoes in Venice. Mine tries to deal with how the internet throws past, present and future, truths and falsehoods, the serious and the inane simultaneously at the user in a potentially overwhelming experience.

Stewart Lee has his critics but the way in which he can structure threads is impressive and in my opinion genuinely inventive.

I also very much liked the way that Bruce Forsyth used to bully the contestants at the start of The Generation Game. I learnt a lot from that.

You have said you ”want to make poetry from the conflict between authority and fear’’, can you explain this?

PB: My dad was a bit of an authoritarian bully when I was a kid, but that’s because he lacked the personal courage to be something else or to do something else. Paintings of dictators and politicians most probably are re-enactments of all that.

Portrait of the artist as a young man

What’s your background? What compelled you to become an artist?

PB: My background is unremarkable in every way. Art was an escape from that.

My parents had nine to five jobs – I’d imagine they were unrewarding in every way but in the seventies people did what they did and so long as they could go to the work’s dinner – dance, have their week away in Clacton, have their suburban new build they didn’t think too deeply or ask too many questions. I knew that wasn’t for me from quite a young age. My parents wanted me to be an architect – the respectable face of creativity – or so they imagined.

Should art be moral?

PB: It really doesn’t have to be. People will see a thing and project their own values onto it regardless. Which is fine, if something is in the public domain – it’s theirs just as much as it’s yours.

Tell me about your British National Party (BNP) Youth Portraits? What was your intention? What was the response?

PB: My wife loves those paintings – the way that they’ve been made. They’re a few years old now but they’ve never been exhibited. I’m not sure that there’s much of an appetite to either show work like that these days.

It all began when someone sent me a video link on Twitter. It was a BNP electoral ad for the 2014 Euro elections. Kids barely out of school were reading a shockingly poor script featuring a tirade about the banking crash of 2008 and obviously immigration and a host of other perceived (or actual) unfairness crippling Britain at the time and how the BNP were the best hope for a new future. The production values were poor. The kids involved didn’t deliver their lines too well, collars were tucked into a jumper on one side, pulled out on the other. The thing that really interested me (I was as a theme concerned with the idea of artworks that no one would want on their walls at the time) was that at seventeen these kids were at the junction between childhood and adulthood. My brother at that time in his life got into heavy metal and then Christianity and quite quickly out of them – in the search for identity and belonging I suppose. Identity is up for grabs when you’re seventeen. So we’ve got these kids making these statements. Do they believe what they’re saying? Will they grow into being something or someone else. The film catches them at a transitional moment doing something that’s pretty far out. I do know that the kid who spoke with the most confidence got sent down subsequently for involvement in some sort of far right terror plot, one of the girls was apparently Nick Griffin’s daughter – but I don’t know which one.

PB: The portraits are trying to show a bunch of seventeen year olds without giving too much away. It’s the title that then sets the viewer’s mind to work. The original video was pulled from YouTube several years ago.

Do critics fail artists?

PB: Art critics, in my opinion, hardly exist these days. People around long enough to have insight and experience, open minded enough to understand meaning within the new. Most critics don’t criticize, they’re more like feature writers, an extended PR department. With such an overwhelming diversity of art practice currently available it’s hard to blame them to be fair.

I probably have more issue with curators. Artists seem to have become a lumpen chaotic mass which can only be made sense of by way of curatorial intervention. Curators have become akin to DJs to some extent. More important than those who actually create the music.

Curatorship is important – I’ve done it myself but they’ve skewed the game by putting their agendas, their catalogue essays in pole position. That sense of raw visual encounter is undermined by their academic priorities.

How long do you spend in the studio?

PB: Depending on what I’m up to. Big paintings need serious commitment time wise. Smaller things less so.

I’ve never gone to the studio every day as if it was a nine to five. You have bursts of activity rather than endless slog.

Once you’re there you’d want to put in a decent six, seven or eight hours – otherwise the journey’s a bit pointless. Sometimes you think you’re about to go home and find yourself still there a couple of hours later. If things aren’t going well creatively Jeanette and I tell each other to stay in the room like Eddie Morra at the start of Limitless.

With thanks to Paul Brandford.

All images copyright Paul Brandford, used by kind permission.

Buy Jeanette Barnes & Paul Brandford’s book ‘City Sketching Reimagined’ here.
A Few Words with Andrew Loog Oldham

February 28, 2025

Let’s not start at the beginning, let’s start…

London, 1964.

Exterior Night. A powder blue chevy is driving the wrong way down the Edgware Road. Sitting in the passenger seat is the Rolling Stones’ manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham (played by say Matt Molotov of the Molotovs). Driving is Oldham’s minder-cum-chauffeur-cum-wannabe-gangster Reg King (played by Tom Hardy). In the back is Keith Richards (played by some-as-yet-to-be-discovered actor). The car swerves right then left. Dodges on-coming vehicles. Lights flashing, horns blaring.

Interior Night. Inside the car Oldham is laughing maniacally. He leans out of the passenger window punching at on-coming cars.

Keith Richards is aghast.

Richards: Fuck’s sake, Andrew.

Exterior Night. A large lorry is heading directly towards the chevy. Lights flashing, horn peeping. At the last moment, King swerves the car away from the oncoming juggernaut.

Oldham is giddy with excitement. His view of the road is like that quote allegedly said by Greta Garbo or was it Marlene Dietrich? “rubies ahead of me, diamonds coming towards me.”

The car speeds another hundred yards. Weaving in-and-out of traffic. King pulls a handbrake turn into a side street parking the vehicle directly outside Oldman’s apartment at Ivor Court on Gloucester Place.

Exterior Night. Oldham emerges from the car laughing hysterically. He can hardly catch his breath. As the others alight in the background, Oldham looks directly at the camera and says.

Oldham: What a fucking blast.

Though based on true events, this opening sequence represents one of those cinematic tropes used to explain some narrative point or offer a potted biography of the central character. See Ken Russell‘s The Devils, or Dante’s Inferno, or The Debussy Film, or Lindsay Kemp’s dance at the beginning of Derek Jarman‘s Sebastiane.

You see, Andrew Loog Oldham’s biography is ripe for a movie. Two movies in fact. The first adapted from volume one of Oldham’s memoirs Stoned, covering his youth and early career up to getting the Rolling Stones their first number one. The second based on volume deux 2Stoned which would cover Oldham’s success as the Stones’ manager and producer and the unravelling of his relationship with the band. The films would be like That’ll Be the Day and Stardust with more than a soupcon of menace from Slade in Flame. Except everything in these movies would be true – well, almost.

‘Playing God was just my sideline, actually. Getting records cut was my principal business.’

We are all gifted a certain amount of luck in our lives. It’s randomly cast like seeds across soil. Sometimes it grows. Sometimes it withers. So much is life.

Oldham made his own luck through hard graft and ambition. Anything was possible because no one ever had told him otherwise. Oldham was an only child, which meant he never encountered older siblings to puncture his dreams or pin him down and fart in his face. Though I doubt this would have changed him other than to make him even more determined.

The son of an American airman raised by a single mum. His father was killed during the Second War. His father already had a family back in the USA. Oldham was a rebellious schoolboy who sensed there was something better beyond the classroom. An adventure to be gained. A teenager who starred in his own movie which played continuous performances in his head. He took his cues from Cliff Richard singing Move It. James Dean in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. He understood The Shadows were more than entertainment – they were life.

Most people end-up with just walk-on parts. Oldham had the smarts to know you have to believe in yourself if you ever want to make something happen. This starting point came when Oldham saw Paul Scofield as ambitious agent Johnny Jackson in the stage musical Expresso Bongo when he was twelve. In the play, Jackson watched teenage girls become obsessed with a no-talent bongo-playing singer. Jackson recognised the power of these screaming girls to give him mucho moolah and unparalleled success. As the artist Francis Bacon took his cue from the character of Charles Strickland in Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence – from whence Bacon pinched the line “the brutality of fact” – Oldham found his in music and film.

After school, Oldham worked in PR. He talked his way into working with Mary Quant – because no one told him he couldn’t. He was fearless. Everything was possible. He travelled to the south of France. Blagged his way around and met the likes of Lionel Bart and Pablo Picasso. When he returned to England he had a brief spell tour managing the Beatles. This made him want to manage a band. His own band. Then one night when he saw Bob Dylan in a dressing room quietly talking with his manager Albert Grossman. Oldham wanted that intimate rapport with another. He found it one Sunday evening when he was told to go and see a band called the Rolling Stones.

Andrew Loog Oldham by Betina La Plante.

What made you think you could be a manager of a band like the Rolling Stones?

Andrew Loog Oldham: I didn’t think. I had no reference point. I had no fear. It was all really simple. Peter Jones of the Record Mirror told me to go and see them. I did. It was good for everybody…I was quite happy doing PR and I became happier managing the Rolling Stones.

You loosely described yourself as a hustler. What makes for success and how do you recognise it? How does a hustler know?

ALO: Hustler is merely a mantle of disguise one wears when you’re winging it. As Mick Jagger said in that self-portrait portrait 25 x 5, “Well, Andrew was younger than us.” I’m not sure what he meant. But it does say it all in Keith’s Life when he said something like, “We got on very well with Andrew when we all liked the same music.” Both sentences are key to what you are asking about.

As for what makes success? I think you’ve got to regard yourself as successful already. Now you’ve just got to bring everybody on board. No cap in hand. No “Puleeze Mister, give us a chance.” It’s your job to have your act together. Nobody else’s. I read something recently about an act who had picked who went on the road with them by their ability to ride through the bumps.

How did you produce those classic Stones albums? How did you know what to do?

ALO: I just didn’t get in the way. I knew when I was contributing and when I was not and when it was time to go to the bathroom.

My older brother had two singles. “She Loves You” by the Beatles and “The Last Time” by the Rolling Stones. When I was a child, I used to listen to these two songs on our parents’ Dansette record player. “She Loves You” was like a beautifully carved Greek sculpture. It was something I could admire but not quite get into. “The Last Time” was all jingly-jangly sensation which opened up another world of excitement. It was a song which would not have been out-of-place 30 years later at the height of Brit pop. But it was the B-side “Play With Fire” by the Stones I loved the best. It was visceral. Haunting. Oldham’s production made it seem Jagger and Richards were singing and playing in my head.

It was powerful. It was raw. It was dangerous. It hinted at a secret world of sensation still to be tapped. Oldham’s work as a producer with the Stones is up there with George Martin’s work for the Beatles.

Looking back, what advice would you give your younger self? How did you cope with the success of the sixties?

ALO: I’ve had this question before and it does not make sense to me. You’d have to be Dorian Gray to get that one. Obviously I did not cope with the success or the stuff that went with living above your means. Both financial and mental. I was having shock treatment by the age of 23. But, if you look at things my way, Brian Epstein was put on this Earth to get the Beatles their recording deal in the place that they got it. Brian Jones was put here to form the Rolling Stones. And I was put here to uncover and press the start button on the Rolling Stones.

You seem to have a strong sense of yourself and you obviously like yourself.

ALO: Very. If you don’t love yourself how can you love anybody else? Just liking is too passive.

Yet, you sometimes make it sound like you were just in the right place at the right time and things just happened. But you worked hard. You hustled. You were nicknamed ‘Sea Breeze’ because you moved so fast so silently and always got things done. That isn’t life just happening to you, this is someone motivated to get things done for a reason.

ALO: Yes, it is. As per life happening to you. Cut to August, 1963. Great Newport Street. Stones rehearsal in basement. Rehearsal is not going that well. No song is rescuing us. I leave. I turn right. I get to Leicester Square tube station. Getting out of the car as John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney]. They can see I’m not as cheerful as they are. They come with me to the rehearsal and play the Stones “I Wanna Be Your Man”. We have our song. Now I’m happy as they were.

I could tell I, with emphasis on I, got the Stones second single from the Beatles. But that’s not the whole story. I know that this happened because I turned right, not left. That is life happening to me.

What influenced you growing up?

ALO: In the beginning Paul Scofield on stage as the manager at the Saville Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue (ironically acquired later by Brian Epstein) in Wolf Mankowitz’s Expresso Bongo. Wolf was the father of Gered Mankowitz who took such great photos of the Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull. Anyway, I had finally had a good school report and so my Mother’s boyfriend got us tickets for Bongo. The moment these tacky church windows descended onto the stage and our pop hero (played by Cliff Richard in the film) croons “The Shrine on the Second Floor” I knew which game I wanted to pursue. I was twelve.

When I was thirteen, I saw The Girl Can’t Help It with Jayne Mansfield at the Ionic, Golders Green. There were three pre-video clips in that film Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Little Richard that were life changers. James Dean in East of Eden – that’s where we learned to mumble. The Cain and Abel and Mum as Pimp and Dad as religious doormat was much more interesting than the Dad dilemma in the film that followed Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden was a much better film. Marlon Brando was not an influence as we were all too young to be able to see his films. Ironically, the same is true for a lot of Hayley Mills films.

Later for a volatile while Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. After I landed again after my “Out to Lunch” period, Graham Greene and Gay Talese.

Oldham’s period of being “out to lunch” is a tale of too much drink and drugs. One drink was too many. A hundred never enough. Oldham suffered from depression. Something he notes with hindsight his Mother may have had. It would explain her emotional remoteness and mood swings. The first sign there was something wrong with Oldham came when the Stones had their first number one. Rather than celebrate, Oldham fled to Paris to be on his own. It was a hint of the storm a-coming.

His Clockwork Orange phase involved henchman Reg King putting the frighteners on those who crossed Oldham’s path. On one occasion, Oldham had King threaten to break a journalist’s fingers after the poor hack had written some negative comments about Keith Richards’ acne. Keith’s Mum was most upset.

Yet for all this, Oldham was focused on success. He gave the Stones their bad boy image. He dropped keyboard player Ian Stewart from the band because he wasn’t good looking enough. Most importantly, he forced Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write songs by locking them up in a room until they had something good. This turned out to be “As Tears Go By”. Quite a feat for a first attempt at song writing. Oldham had good advice from famed producer Phil Spector who told him to make your own master tapes and license them to the record label. This inevitably led to Oldham setting up his own label with Tony Calder called Immediate Records which signed artists like the Small Faces, P. P. Arnold, Rod Stewart, Chris Farlowe, and the Nice.

Tell me about Immediate Records?

ALO: I did something for a lot of wrong reasons and it brought musical joy to many. The downside is inconsequential. To the acts that bitched about it – Get over it.

Wrong reason #1 I was too high to go to meetings with record companies so I formed one of my own. I had hopes it would be a vehicle for Mick, Keith and me but apart from a one-off with Chris Farlowe, that was not meant to be. The road is king. The road took over and that road divined the way music and recordings were going to be.

You live in Colombia do you feel more attachment to the Americas or England?

ALO: Of course I never had a total affinity with being English or British or anything like that. I was the only one in my family who was born in England. I only started to feel at home when I got to America.

What motivated you at the very beginning? What did you hope to achieve?

ALO: I didn’t set out to achieve anything specifically, I just wanted to make sure I was not captured by averageness. I had known what I wanted since Expresso Bongo

***

At the end of Andrew Loog Oldham’s email is a quote from the American basketball coach John Wooden which reads:

Talent is God-given, be humble.
Fame is man-given, be grateful.
Conceit is self-given, be careful.

***

With thanks to Andrew Loog Oldham.

Photographs by Betina La Plante .

Buy Oldham’s ‘Stoned’ and ‘2Stoned’ here.

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