So when Banksy, who came from a much leafier part of town, decided to go there for the first time he was nervous. You never quite know with Banksy whether he is telling the truth, embroidering the truth or simply just inventing things. But he told his fellow graffiti artist and author Felix Braun: ‘My Dad was badly beaten up there as a kid and had his trousers stolen, so he’d always put the fear of God into me about the place. By the time I’d worked up the courage to cycle over and check it out, I was so terrified I actually remember choosing my best pair of pants for the occasion just in case.’
Why would Banksy want to go there in the first place? The answer lies with John Nation, who Banksy described to Braun – correctly – as ‘that shouty red-faced little social worker’. Nation was the man ‘who made it all happen, [he’s] had more impact on the shape of British culture over the past twenty years than anyone else to come from the city.’ Today the link between Banksy, international artist and film-maker, and John Nation, now in construction and hating it, might seem improbable; sadly, when Banksy staged his exhibition at the Bristol Museum, Nation did not even get an invitation to the opening night – although by the time the exhibition closed he had taken himself there no less than eight times. But without Nation there would not have been the throbbing graffiti scene that developed in Bristol and there might well not have been a Banksy.
I met Nation on his home territory at Barton Hill. He arrived unshaven in his Ralph Lauren baseball hat, jeans, a light blue tracksuit top, a Bristol City three lions backpack and a cigarette lighter with a St George’s flag positioned carefully on a girl’s bare bum (although he has since managed to give up smoking). He says he has ‘the gift of the gab’ and he certainly has, it is almost impossible to stop him talking about graffiti in his round Bristol accent. He is generous with his time and generous with his gifts – for instance he pulled out of his backpack a set of twelve postcards from Banksy’s Bristol exhibition and gave them to me; the web now prices them at an average $15. Now turning fifty with two grown-up sons, he looks back at his graffiti days as the best years of his life.
Nation’s story is one of redemption. He lived on the fourteenth floor of a block of council flats from where you could look down and see the best thing going on the estate – the Barton Hill Youth Club. From the age of eleven he was usually there four nights a week. There is a photograph from those days where someone has altered the sign on the club so it reads Barton Hill Yob Centre, instead of Youth Centre, and Nation admits: ‘My mum didn’t like me going there for it did have a reputation, very unruly, rough and tumble,’ but the Club was better than home where his mother was ‘a victim of domestic violence’.
At 15 he got involved in violence himself. It was very random. By sheer coincidence fans from Bristol City, the team he followed, and West Ham bumped into each other at Bristol station – they weren’t even going to the same match. A fight followed, it spread outside the station, he picked up the nearest weapon he could find, a yellow flashing beacon that was protecting road works, and brought it down on the head of a West Ham fan. The fan ended up with a fractured skull and Nation ended up in detention centre, being given what William Whitelaw, Conservative Home Secretary at the time, called a ‘short sharp shock.’
But John was fortunate. The club’s youth worker realised that the middle-class workers commuting into the working-class ghetto every day were not gaining much respect. So John Nation was taken on first as a volunteer and then, at seventeen, as a parttime worker. The youth club might have carried on in much the same way, with a concentration on five-a-side football and occasional raucous punk rock concerts, but for two things. First Nation saw Malcolm Mclaren’s 1983 ‘Buffalo Girls’ video, a wonderful folding together of square dancing and hip hop, complete with scratching, breakdancing and graffiti writing. And then he went on a visit to Amsterdam. ‘I’ve got to be truthful,’ he says now, ‘I went there for a smoking holiday and to visit the red light district. I was young, free and single. But the first thing that struck me about Amsterdam was the graffiti. Just seeing the sheer volume of it.’ While there he came across the city’s main graffiti collective and he was hooked. Barton Hill Youth Club, he decided, was going to become the graffiti centre of Bristol. No more tagging (writing) in the street, on the buses, on the bins, on the front doors. He would offer graffiti artists – ‘aerosol artists’ as he liked to call them – a home where they could paint all they liked but it would be completely legal.
He brought back from Amsterdam pictures of what he had seen. He got on the graffiti network and soon he was being posted pictures from around the world – this was in the days before everyone had a computer. He never tagged himself, but he photographed every piece he saw. So Bristol’s vandals soon had a useful reference library, complete with sketch books of outlines and designs ‘the lads’ had done. To this Nation added a whole cupboard full of paint, marker pens and various mixing nozzles in the hope that this would keep graffiti writers from their usual practice of stealing the paint. Among the many people he approached for financial support was the Prince’s Trust, but this was a step or two too far for the Trust. He did however have more luck with Dulux, who provided ‘shedloads’ of emulsion – the paint that often provides the background canvas for graffiti.
In many ways he succeeded. Barton Hill became the Mecca for graffiti writers, drawing them in first from Bristol, then from across England and finally from even further afield. A place buzzing with ideas, alliances, rivalries, a second family for teenagers in their rebellious years, it was a very, very unlikely creative hotspot, far removed from the sedate areas of the city’s middle-class life. The walls of the club were soon painted, and they even climbed on the roof and painted that. One visitor from a different part of Bristol remembers going up to the club for the first time to play five-a-side football and being overwhelmed by the graffiti on the walls of the pitch that he was bouncing the ball off – he in turn became a graffiti writer himself.
Go to the youth club today and it is something of a disappointment. It is now the estate itself that is vibrant, with a multi-million pound makeover and people of all races living there. Even with John Nation as a guide, jabbering away enthusiastically about graffiti with a passion that remains completely undaunted, the club still looks unloved, only partially used, waiting for the day it gets redeveloped. But in the 1980s it was humming. Tom Bingle, or Inkie as he is known when he paints, says now, ‘It blew my brains away as soon as I walked in. The graffiti on all the walls, people talking about it, people doing it and the train tracks right next to it – it was perfect.’ It was, as John Nation rightly says, ‘a bright beacon in a drab landscape’, a beacon that would eventually attract Banksy.
Barton Hill was an inspiration, but as a method of stopping graffiti writers tagging the streets of Bristol illegally it was a complete failure. Nation says it was a ‘place where people who were constantly being told that they’re nobody in the world could say “I am somebody.”’ The trouble was they wanted to announce the fact all over Bristol. Inkie lived in Clifton, the affluent part of Bristol, and he says: ‘We used to walk down the train tracks to Lawrence Hill [the nearest station to Barton Hill] and paint as we went. Everyone would tag from around there, the buses too, they’d be tagged out.’ Or as the graffiti artist Turo tells Felix Braun, in Children of the Can: ‘We were just basically destroying the city . . . Everyone would meet in Barton Hill, do pieces in the day then go out at night and do illegal pieces.’ Even John Nation admits now that ‘All the lads when they came here, they used to come up from the train station and cut through the estate and bomb all the bins and the doors. There was a lot of ill feeling from the local residents.’
It couldn’t last and it didn’t. British Transport Police started an elaborate surveillance operation – codenamed Operation Anderson – which went on for six months and reportedly cost close to £1 million. Eventually they got lucky: having arrested two lads they discovered that one of them had a diary in which he kept not onl
y the phone numbers of other graffiti artists but also their tags – or names that they used to spray on the walls – right beside them. It was easy enough for the police to find the real names and addresses to go with the phone numbers and in March 1989 they rounded up seventy-two artists. The police arrived at six in the morning at Nation’s mum’s house and he was taken away in handcuffs to the youth club. ‘I couldn’t believe how many Old Bill there were. It was like they were looking for Ronnie Biggs or something.
‘The officer in charge said, “We have established you are at the club to run this graffiti project,” so straightaway I said, “No, I am here to run an aerosol art project and there’s a vast difference.” He replied, “I am not here to argue the whys and wherefores of graffiti art versus aerosol art. It’s all fucking graffiti.”’ Inkie was seen by the police as the ringleader. John Nation describes him as ‘a caner – he’d cane everything, when they raided his house they found he’d even tagged the walls of his bedroom.’ Inkie says now, ‘I think the first charge was for about £250,000 worth of damage, but I think there was £1 million pending against me. It was everything I had done on the train tracks, everything. And they had photographs to go with it.’ But handwriting experts were brought in to challenge some of the evidence – their argument, for what it was worth, was that since the spray can had not touched the wall it was impossible to identify who had sprayed each tag. More important was the fact that there were almost too many photographs of tags to sort out exactly who was responsible for what. The taggers also benefited hugely from the fact that the prosecution was not allowed to lump everyone together to face one all-encompassing charge. In the end forty-six of the artists were fined, the amounts ranging from £20 to £2000. Inkie’s fine was £100.
Nation himself was put up on the serious charge of conspiracy to incite individuals to commit criminal damage. There was certainly ample evidence to prove that John Nation encouraged legal graffiti – often dedications were written on pieces: ‘to John and Lenny’, Lenny being his Staffordshire Bull terrier – but no evidence to prove he was encouraging these same writers to commit criminal damage. In the end the prosecution never took the case to trial. He was formally found not guilty, although he agreed to be bound over to keep the peace for the next year.
The police claimed success with considerable justification, for although they had not been as triumphant in court as they had first hoped to be, at the very least they had made graffiti writers stop and think. But at the same time the case also gave the artists a lot of publicity – suddenly they were on national television. BBC2 ran a documentary on Barton Hill and Operation Anderson, Inkie and two other writers were invited to paint live on Granada TV’s This Morning, John Nation appeared on Richard and Judy. For anyone deciding to retire from the scene rather than face imprison ment the next time they were caught, there were more than enough people ready to take their place.
John Nation stayed on at Barton Hill for two more years when, much to his regret, he fell out with the management of the club and was forced to leave. Perhaps Richard and Judy and all the other media appearances went to his head, for as he says, he was considered ‘to be getting too big for my boots . . . I lost my focus . . . To be honest it was of my own making and I paid for it by losing my job.’ His fall is a long, sad story, for in the unlikely setting of Barton Hill he provided the inspiration and the enthusiasm for many. The roll call of Bristol graffiti artists is a long one, starting with 3D – otherwise known as Robert Del Naja from the band Massive Attack – then Z-Boys, and going on through Inkie, FLX, Nick Walker, Jody, Cheo, SP27, Shab, Soker, Chaos, Turo, Xens, Sickboy, Mr Jago, Banksy, of course, and many, many more. They did not all paint at Barton Hill, but the great majority did and they were all heavily influenced by what was going on there. Some of course took it nowhere but others became model makers, TV editors, illustrators, animators, graphic designers, successful artists and mega-successful artists.
As Nation says, Barton Hill was an amazing mixture of graffiti writers. ‘You had a lot of ragtag working-class kids from the big housing estates. Then you had an influx of middle class. But there was none of that class divide amongst them.’ So where did Banksy fit in?
To answer that you have to decide who Banksy really is. And since at this point he is at the very start of his career, this is a good time to confront the issue. In 2010, when he was doing interviews by email to promote his new film Exit Through the Gift Shop, his publicist promised the Sunday Times magazine ‘faithfully’ that he was ‘very working class’. She was thus having the best of both worlds, retaining his anonymity while moulding his image slightly, making him sound like the working-class vandal made good.
It is a tribute to Banksy that he has built around him a very loyal group of friends, people who might not have seen him for years but who still feel they are life members of Club Banksy and are nervous about letting slip the most innocuous of details. So throughout the research for this book I always told people who know him that I was not asking them to identify him.
In 2008 the Mail on Sunday produced a long investigative story by Claudia Joseph which did name him and detailed some of his family background. Three years later they named his wife. Banksy fans dismissed these stories as the Mail up to its usual tricks, but actually the paper’s first story was a detailed, thorough investigation complete with photographs. There was one of him in his schoolboy days and another – taken in Jamaica, which Banksy had once visited – of an ordinary-looking bloke ‘believed to be Banksy’, with various bits of street art paraphernalia around him. Armed with his birth certificate, the Mail found neighbours who remembered him, a flatmate who tried his hardest not to remember him and parents who loyally denied any connection with the man the Mail thought was Banksy. The name does not appear here simply because I am honouring the commitment to people whom I asked for interviews that I would not identify him.
And besides that, as Adam Clark Estes wrote on Salon.com, ‘Banksy’s knack for anonymity intrigues us. Even if he stepped forward or another exposé were published, we probably wouldn’t stop wondering because wondering is fun.’ Certainly the reaction on the Mail’s website proved his point, for most people seemed to resent being told who Banksy was. Rather like Father Christmas, the legend was better than the real thing. One Mail reader wrote: ‘Why have you done this? I don’t understand. You have ruined something special.’ When they named his wife the reaction was much the same: ‘The vast majority of people don’t want to know who Banksy is. We enjoy his anonymity just as he does. Leave them be and leave his wife’s family alone! Spoilsports!’
Despite his PR’s assurances, he is not ‘very working class’. One of his friends says: ‘This image of him as a lovable rogue, it’s an image. He’s public school educated and he’s a very intelligent man.’ Another says the idea that he is ‘very working class’ is ‘a load of bollocks. I am not going to put anyone down for where they come from, but anyone who goes to Bristol Cathedral School is not “very working class”.’
To survive in the rough and tumble of the macho graffiti world Banksy, like others, had to blur his background a little. ‘Dare I say it, I think he made out he’s a little bit less switched on than he is,’ says another graffiti artist from those days. ‘With the whole street culture thing you have to play it all down a bit, you can’t go into it being all highbrow and intellectual. A lot of the places he painted are not the nicest places in the world and you can’t go there all “Oh hi, hello” sort of thing. There’s two sides to him and I think he kept the one side, the side that he went to one of the poshest schools in Bristol, very quiet. I think you will find quite a lot of his story is embellished. It sounds good but there’s a lot of mystique about it all.’
Banksy was brought up in a leafy suburb on the edge of the city. It was not the most fashionable part of town – there was none of the buzz of Clifton – but still it was totally different from Barton Hill and it is easy to see how he would have been a bit nervous as he ventured into
the high-rise council estate for the first time. In addition the school he went to was – at the time – no state school but the fee-paying Bristol Cathedral School (it became a free Academy school in 2008). Some years ago he told Swindle magazine: ‘Graffiti was the thing we all loved at school – we all did it on the bus on the way home from school. Everyone was doing it.’ It’s a lovely picture of all these public school boys busy at being vandals, even if Banksy is mistaking everyone else for himself.
Quite how easy a childhood he had is unclear. In his first self-published book, Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, produced in 2001, Banksy himself tells one story from his childhood which is surely just too heartbreaking for him to have made up. ‘When I was nine years old I was expelled from school,’ he wrote, ‘it was punishment for swinging one of my classmates round and round before dropping him onto a concrete floor.’ The child was taken away by an ambulance that had to pull in to the playground to pick him up. He sustained a fractured skull and did not regain consciousness for a week.
‘The next day I was made to stand in front of the whole school at assembly while the headmaster gave a speech about good and evil before I was sent home in disgrace. The unfortunate part of this story is that I never actually touched the kid . . .’ It was his best friend who had ‘put him into casualty’. Banksy and another boy just watched – startled – as Banksy’s friend swung the boy round and round until he was too dizzy to stand up. When the friend, who was a big lad, saw that things were serious he persuaded the other boy to lie: they both said that Banksy was the culprit.
‘I tried many times to explain that I hadn’t done it, but the boys stuck to their story. Eventually my mum turned to me and said bitterly that I should have the guts to admit when I was wrong and that it was even more disgusting when I refused to accept what I’d done. So I shut up after that.’ He tells the story to illustrate that ‘there’s no such thing as justice’ and ‘there’s no point in behaving yourself’, but it might also suggest that something was not quite right at home.
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