Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

by Wendy Jones

  For my second year at college Veronica, Jen and I rented a tiny two-bedroom flat in the centre of Portsmouth. The day we moved in I sat down on the bed and was overwhelmed by a wave of relief at the security of having, what seemed like for the first time in my life, my own front door. The moment I landed in our flat, where I felt I had permission to be fully myself, I flowered. Until that moment I had been suppressed; now elements of myself – my anger, my creativity, my transvestism – were erupting.

  A craze for fancy dress parties spread through college. Veronica and Jen were experimenting with body painting, so when we were invited to a gold party we decided ‘Let’s go painted gold’. We smeared baby oil on our bodies, then rubbed on gold powder, gilded ourselves all over, shrouded ourselves in cloaks, then sauntered to the party. I got very drunk and very rude. I went up to people and said what I thought of them, which was mainly negative. I was being horrible to everybody. I was naked and swinging from the banisters like an ape, yelling, ‘You’re all wankers! You’re all wankers!’ Eventually I became unbearable and they threw me out of the house. I had to scurry home in the nude, stained gold, cowering from shop doorway to shop doorway all the way to the flat. Fortunately Veronica was in when I got back.

  To a white party I wore white: polyester hot pants, tight and sexy, a frilly see-through blouse, opaque tights and teetering PVC shoes with my hair in a beehive hairdo: I was inspired by Divine. A Hell’s Angel was at the bash and when I glimpsed his bike – a Harley-Davidson, rare in 1981 – I blurted, ‘Oh my God, my dream possession.’

  At the end of the night I was tottering out of the party, inebriated, in my monochrome outfit when he asked, ‘D’you wanna lift?’

  I thought, ‘Fucking hell! This is something!’ as I sat on the back of his Harley, speeding down the street in my white hot pants.

  For our Hallowe’en party we placed the bed in the middle of the sitting room, turned it into a rack and Veronica, in an all-in-one rubber bodysuit, tethered guests on to it. We had decided to re-create our own version of what we had experienced in London so every party had a theme: Robin Hood, Hollywood, Lurex. We had so many parties people became bored of coming to them. We had a party once where absolutely nobody turned up because we’d had three in the preceding fortnight. I’ve met people since who were scared of us, who said, ‘You were so frightening at college.’ I don’t remember being alarming, but I suppose I was.

  Seventy art students shared the college studio, which was an open space with a zigzag of chipboard partitions and a Dancette record player that churned out a scratched collection of corny pop classics. Lou Reed and Nico featured. Each Friday we had to attend a Theoretical Studies tutorial. The lecturer, Sylvia Pringle, was blonde and bird-like, her skin was almost translucent and her hands were small and bony. She was a forty-three-year-old feminist in an olive-green boiler suit – twice my age exactly. I took to her, visiting her study for heart-to-hearts, finding her good to talk to because of her sympathetic ear: part of my general releasing was my need to communicate about my family and my past. She obviously read between the lines and realised I was a bit shop-soiled. Sylvia took me under her wing, encouraging me to read, write poetry and lent me books by modern poets: Craig Raine, Thom Gunn and rough blokes who wrote about this and that. In the spring of 1981 I was leaving her study after our chat when suddenly she grabbed me. I was utterly taken aback because she was my tutor. I wasn’t accomplished at reading the signs from women nor do I remember thinking, ‘I really fancy Sylvia,’ but I was very keen nonetheless.

  Jen had an inkling of what was happening, so I told her candidly, but I wasn’t going to let Jen knowing stop me. I was also having sex every so often with the flatmate, Veronica. I was opening up. I was like a satellite landing on a foreign planet; all my solar panels opened, all my instruments went into operation and I started interacting with the local wildlife. I was naïve. I had let down my solar panels and I was fucking around; I was taking soil samples from Planet Earth.

  Despite this I was very happy with Jen. We had a shared sense of fun and style but love wasn’t part of my lexicon. I had a temper; if I was unhappy about something I could certainly let rip and shout, and Jen and I had a few settos. During long walks with her I began to see what I wanted from my life when we spoke about our hopes and dreams for our futures. We were both serious about becoming artists.

  Simultaneously, my transvestism was flourishing; I had come out at college, had collated a woman’s wardrobe and was occasionally togging up. After seeing a trick photograph of a Victorian drag queen marrying himself in Peter Ackroyd’s Dressing Up, I bought a wedding dress and, with the assistance of the photography department, took a wedding photograph of me marrying myself. I was becoming more confident at going out dressed up as a woman until late one night when Jen, Veronica and I were ambling home from the Students Union disco. Normally when strangers were close by I was vigilant about not speaking because my voice would expose me. I can’t have noticed that a gang of skinheads were trooping past. They bellowed, ‘Thatsafella!’ Six skinheads, teenagers, began following us; I thought being with two girls when I was dressed up would protect me. For half a mile they were ten yards behind us chucking beer cans, baying, ‘Cant! Cant!’

  We panicked: ‘What are we going to do? Where are we going to go? We don’t want them following us back to our flat and knowing where we live.’ Just then a bigger, beefier skinhead joined them so we thought, ‘Oh, fuck, here we go …’

  He strode up to us and interrogated us, but in an intrigued, curious way: ‘What’s all this about then? Why are you dressed up?’

  I was honest: ‘We’ve been to the Students Union disco. This is my flatmate. This is my girlfriend.’

  He commented, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ then steered the other skinheads away. So we were rescued.

  A couple of months later I walked along the high street in a lilac bridesmaid dress holding hands with a boy at college called John Potts. It was a balmy summer’s evening and the football ground opened up as we passed; thousands of supporters swarmed around us but no one troubled us because they didn’t realise. John Potts was gay, posh and poor, which was a funny combination, and wrestling with his homosexuality. He was very friendly with Veronica – Jen and I often wondered, ‘Are they boyfriend and girlfriend?’ I liked John Potts a lot, we were friends, he was quirky and a fine painter, sometimes we even slept together in the same bed. We didn’t have sex but he used to ask me for a hug. I would think ‘he is such a sweet chap’ and he was very vulnerable too, so I’d let him cuddle me in bed.

  I composed the ditty ‘Captain Potts, Captain Potts, Wot is it wot you’ve got? You’ve got a lot’ for my first attempt at film-making. John Potts and Veronica in their New Romantic costumes were star-crossed lovers and Jen, in my wedding dress, was an evil fairy who tears them asunder. I had a Standard-8 camera I’d bought from a jumble sale for one pound; Standard-8 was the 1950s pre-runner of Super-8. I had showed my camera to the film tutor who offered, ‘I’ve got a reel of film to fit that. You can have it. It’s been in my fridge for ten years.’ I sent the reel to be developed and the company wrote back, ‘This is an exceptionally old film that we no longer handle in England. It has been sent to Kodak in America to be processed.’ When it returned the film was in an orange-blue hue with a blurred ghostly atmosphere that appealed to me and I wanted to do more film-making. I made another one when I visited my mum and stepfather in the New Year of 1983. My brothers were cast as two soldiers who were travelling up a river on a boat when they fell foul of a tribal woman who overpowers them and stings them into submission by blowing them kisses. It was based on Apocalypse Now and I called it A Pucker-lipped Cow.

  20

  ‘WE’VE GOT TO GO SOMEWHERE NICE WHILE WE’RE ON ACID’

  THE SOLE REASON I was allowed to move into the squat was because I had a cooker. There wasn’t a bedroom for me so I was put in the sitting room, which everybody went through to get to the kitchen, but I had a cooker and the
y didn’t. The squatters didn’t want a cooker to cook on but to do Hot Knives, which was when they put a blob of cannabis resin between two knives that they’d heated on my cooker and inhaled the smoke through a bottomless milk bottle. It gave them an instant high, far stronger and more hallucinatory than if they had smoked the dope. While they did Hot Knives, I would watch telly, waiting for them to go to bed eventually before I could go to sleep on the sofa. All evening there were endless cries of ‘Where’s the dope? Lost the dope!’ followed by hysterical scrabbling about on the greasy carpet. I had the lowest tolerance of chaos so was constantly tidying the kitchen and sitting room, and couldn’t keep any food – even a box of cornflakes – in the kitchen because the next morning it would be eaten. It used to drive me up the wall. One night I was on the sofa eating my beans on toast when a boy came in and jacked up in front of me. I thought, ‘Do you have to do that while I am having my tea? It’s not very nice.’

  Going from the security of living with Jen and Veronica to, within a year, being back in an unstable environment was a low point, but I wasn’t good at helping myself. Jen and Veronica were a year older than me, so by my third year they had graduated. Besides, I’d realised squatting had its advantages because I saved money on the rent.

  I didn’t know anything about drugs at all; I hadn’t even smoked a joint when I moved into this seedy squat where everybody took everything on offer. I thought people who took drugs were boring because they just sat there having their own experience until my friend Danny took LSD and enthused about it. When I told this to Sylvia she just said, ‘He’s a fool,’ because she had been young in the sixties and remembered it. She gave me Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about the original Merry Pranksters – the first people to take LSD as a leisure activity – in the hope I would think them all utterly stupid, but instead I thought, ‘This is interesting.’

  That Sunday afternoon Danny and I took half a tab. I was an acid virgin, so I didn’t know what to expect. He said, ‘We’ve got to go somewhere nice while we are on acid.’ Two hours later I complained, ‘Nothing’s happening. It’s got lost in my stomach. I can’t see how a minuscule piece of paper can have any effect whatsoever.’

  I was eating a cake in the café at the top of Butts Hill looking at the panoramic view of Portsmouth, when Danny asked, ‘You sure that acid isn’t working?’

  ‘No,’ I insisted.

  He said, ‘Well, you’re taking a bloody long time to eat that Eccles cake.’

  Suddenly my mouth was crammed with broken seashells. I was extraordinarily aware of the shape and texture of every morsel of food on my tongue. I got a surge of paranoia because a child in the café was reading my mind, telepathically telling me, ‘You’re a DRUGGIE.’

  ‘Listen to this,’ Danny suggested. I put on his Walkman headphones and listened to Joy Division – one of those miserable doom bands – and it was the best music I had ever heard. I was transfixed. The trees began to sway in time with the music, the clouds started to flow in time with the music. Previously I hadn’t been enthusiastic about music, now I instantaneously adored it. The trip didn’t last long but it opened my eyes to drugs. I decided, ‘That was intensely exciting. Brilliant-looking too.’

  Danny and I went to the Headless Woman, a grim pub on the top floor of a multi-storey car park, to get some more acid. For two pounds we bought microdots; lentil-sized pillules adhered between two strips of Sellotape, like caps in a row. There was no bar code; the drugs could have been anything.

  I took acid ten times, the most memorable being on May Bank Holiday in 1982. Twelve of us, including Jen, Veronica and Fiona – which added to the emotional frisson of the day – took the ferry to the Isle of Wight. We dropped the acid as soon as we arrived, then strolled along the seafront in the scorching heat, encountering the initial tingles. When we came to a private road with a toll-gate Raymond, a beautiful black boy from the squat in London, lifted up the toll-gate shouting, ‘We’re going in. Here we go!’ then dropped the barrier down behind us, stating, ‘You’re all in it now.’ At the pinnacle of the trip I didn’t know who I was, where I was, which way was up, which way was down, even whether I was human. I had no sense of time: ten minutes seemed like three hours, three hours seemed like ten minutes, time stretched elastically or evaporated. It was as scary as hell.

  Jen was gripping on to a bush, convinced she was a leaf. She had a blank stare and wide, unblinking eyes. When we came to a gateway she was like a stubborn horse, she would not go through it so we had to push her urging, ‘Come on, Jen! Come on!’ My fear about Jen gave my paranoia something to focus on: I was screaming, ‘Oh God! We’ve made Jen go mad!’ The acid was far stronger than any of us had taken before. I had a silky halter-neck on, flowing hippy clothes and a handbag over my shoulder – I couldn’t work out if I was a man or a woman. Raymond got sunburn blisters on the back of his neck and I asked him, ‘Do black people get sunburn?’ One girl from the year below me in college was lolling along with her skirt lifted up, rubbing her fanny. I kept wondering, ‘Do people normally do that when they are walking along a country lane?’

  The acid had made us thirsty and our mouths were parched. When we arrived at the seafront Fiona, being functional – or more functional than the rest of us – said, ‘I’m going to get drinks.’ She disappeared into a pub, emerging with twelve orange juices – she’d heard vitamin C in orange juice counteracts the effects of LSD. By now Jen was catatonic on the beach, so Fiona began pouring juice into her mouth when, out of the blue, Jen gasped ‘Oh!’ in a ‘Where am I?’ way. Relief flooded through my body, like the drug itself: ‘Jen hasn’t gone mad!’ From that moment on it was the funniest, weirdest, most brilliant day. Everything was unexpectedly exquisite, especially the reflections of the water on the sand.

  That day is burned into my memory. It was one of the most disturbing things I have ever done: frightening, powerful and dangerous. My sanity and sense of being disintegrated, I didn’t even know if I was alive or not. There were places I went into that were like dream states. I don’t know if I’m glad or not that I had the experience.

  Acid heightens everything including emotion. If I was in a dark mood I interpreted everything as an attack; if I was in a good state of mind everything was hilarious. If I was glum, everything became tragic. It wiped out my hard memories, leaving me with a soft, spongy memory: it was like taking a warm bath in all my recollections and feelings. The paranoia, the waves of paranoia, were incredible. When I look back on it, it was probably dangerous for me to take drugs with my emotional history. It’s damaging, too. Psychotherapists used to prescribe patients LSD because they believed it would unlock repressed feelings, which it does, but in an exceptionally uncontrolled way. Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead replied, when he was asked if he still took LSD, ‘It’s like visiting Cleveland – if you’ve been there ten times you don’t really need to go there again.’ I visited Cleveland ten times and that was enough, it was kind of the same.

  In my final year, artistically, LSD polluted my imagination. If my imagination and memory were a Rolodex, one of those spinning wheels that sit on a desk with addresses in it, acid was a Day-Glo highlighter so when I was flicking though the Rolodex my eye was caught by the Day-Glo highlighted ideas and I didn’t notice anything else. It forced certain images and styles to present themselves over and over again, and distracted me from the natural flow of ideas arising in my imagination. I embarked upon making objects cast in bronze that were twee, olde-worldy, fiddly-diddly kitsch – acid-inspired art tends to be sword and sorcery with a multitude of fluorescent pattern. I think of it as my Bilbo Baggins phase.

  Celtic Crash Helmet, 1982. Celtic archaeology, motorbikes and LSD – a heady brew

  21

  SOMETIMES WE WERE A BIT MORE ROBUST THAN THEY EXPECTED

  THE DEATH OF MACHO was the piece for my degree show that took the longest, was the least successful and marked me down. It was a figure of a classical god with a great big hard-on being crucified on
a Harley-Davidson. Although it took many weeks of work to cast it in bronze, it was nevertheless twee. After it had come out of the mould I had this cast on my bench because I was working on it for my degree show and I was chiselling off all the flash – the extraneous bits – when we had a visit from the Arts Minister, Paul Channon. We were instructed to look very industrious while the Arts Minister was walking around the studio. As soon as he arrived I tore off a strip of emery paper and started polishing the knob furiously, shh-shsh, shh-shsh, shh-shsh, so when he came and looked over my shoulder I was wanking off this little sculpture as fast as I could with sparks flying.

  I made The Death of Macho with the help of Derek, the foundry man who worked in the art department. I enjoyed working with the Derek and Derek liked working with me because I took the casting process seriously, doing it in the traditional way. Derek was a squat troll of a man with one eye because once metal had spat out of a cast into his other eye. The foundry was littered with snuffins because he constantly took snuff – I always knew where he’d been because there was a smelly, brown, powdery trail behind him. He said he was ex-SAS; he spoke about hitch-hiking on military aeroplanes across Europe to get home in time for Christmas.

  For the degree show the chipboard jungle went up dividing the studio into spaces where students could put their exhibitions. I wanted a way of exhibiting my cast aluminium work that was self-contained. I constructed a giant’s table, twelve feet long and six feet wide, from four massive charred railway sleepers that were lying in a pile by the railway line next to my squat. I nailed them together with eight-inch nails and displayed my degree show work on it. I got a 2:1, which was a representative mark because I had potential but, in the end, I didn’t show it. I blame taking LSD.