Seven Years with Banksy (4 page)

What caught my curiosity was that Robin was genuinely excited at the prospect of seeing this
enfant terrible
’s collection. I hadn’t seen this kind of interest shown by him for
any other established artist that I could think of; in fact we rarely even spoke
of any contemporary art scene at all outside of graffiti. It was revealing because Robin was
motivated enough to get in to the opening by hook or by crook and as the days passed you could tell he was anxious about the prospect of not being able to get in – it being invitation only
(and none of us having invitations!).

As things transpired I couldn’t go: it was a working night I hadn’t counted on. So I had to make do with him telling me about it later. The night of the opening Robin stopped by the
office before leaving and he was almost glowing with expectancy and suppressed excitement. I was surprised because I hadn’t seen that reaction from him before. ‘Shit, he’s really
into this bloke,’ I remember thinking, and as he left I wished him luck on getting in.

The next day I was again surprised to hear how impressed he was by the show, and he described the atmosphere, the people who were there (like David Bowie) in glowing terms. He was so tuned into
the whole thing.
To be as good, in his own way, as Hirst, to be so well known, to have a certain type of person expressing interest in your art, this was a turn-on for Robin
that I wouldn’t have envisaged up to that point. Now I see it clearly. In his mind already he had vague ideas of where he was going, where he wanted to be; he had his motivation
click-clacking like a whirring machine in some part of him. ‘He wants to go places,’ I remember thinking. And with hindsight it is noteworthy that Mr Hirst, another West Country boy,
could be said to have taken Robin under his wing a little.

I went down to the show the following night, it was interesting, but it showed me more about Robin than anything else. I began to see that I was lucky to be spending some time with a genuine,
talented, singular maverick that had a bright future ahead of him. This period in New York was a formative one, a beginning of sorts and an education of how to move on to the next step –
there was a certain calculation on his part, but basically
it was an organic process of growing, of branching out, of bearing fruit.

I would have liked to have left the hotel before they fired me but all was not fluffy bunnies in the job. Something was up, I could smell it, so I decided to make a move. I think Robin felt I
was going to be moving on and he started to be more forthright in conversation when we were together. He seemed to be forging ideas around me, sounding them out and maybe he was trying those ideas
out on others too, but I was listening.

At this point I could feel he was gaining in confidence and self-assurance. One afternoon he came into the office and started going on about his name. His first name is Robin, as he was saying,
and he was thinking of changing his last name to Banks; that’s right, ‘Robin’ Banks’ (later abbreviated to the tag ‘Banksy’). He brought up the idea of this
name-change at least three times on separate occasions and just ran it by me, looking for affirmation. The idea was that
anything he did would be attributed to this moniker
– Robin’ Banks – a deliberate pun. However, I knew the name was too long to use as a graffiti tag so thought he must have other ideas for his art and other projects in mind. Over
time the pseudonym ‘Banksy’ just came into common parlance, despite his original intentions, and I can’t say I have ever heard anything he’s done credited to a ‘Mr
Robin’ Banks’, but for those who wonder why he calls himself ‘Banksy’, now you have your answer. Eventually, after being at the hotel for a year or so I was out and back on
the bike as a courier. I wasn’t fussed because I had never planned on staying in New York for too long. Even that town can get boring after a couple of years of living the life.

As a result I didn’t see Robin as frequently but when we did hang out, most often at certain bars in the East Village, our talking increased a little in urgency. I began to ask him a few
things about who he knew in Bristol. ‘Have you heard of The Pop Group, Mark
Stewart and The Maffia?’ ‘No.’ These were critically acclaimed bands from
Bristol that came out of the punk era. They had a serious political edge, preceding virtually all other acts internationally at that time. No, that was too early, it wasn’t his generation. He
knew of Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead but it didn’t seem that he knew them personally in any way. I went on to talk about the ‘Dug-Out’ club in Bristol where everyone used
to hang out back in the day and where the Wild Bunch, later to form Massive Attack among others, had their roots.

He wasn’t really aware of that. Then we started talking politics: ‘Have you ever heard of these secret covert groups – the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the
Masons, these fuckers that try to control the world from behind closed doors?’ I asked. Robin said he wasn’t really up on these things. So I got into it a little to see how deep his
knowledge might be, to see if I could inform him of some stuff. I thought
he’d be interested about the backstage of our so-called democracy and the machinations of the
faceless elites. This all came up as an extension of the conversation around Mark Stewart and The Maffia as this was that group’s prime territory. I didn’t want to berate, I just got
some facts out in a sentence. Full stop. He looked at me from behind those eyes in the darkness of the back wall of the bar and just kept on looking. He didn’t say nothing.

On one of the last times we hung out together in New York, Robin recommended I listen to Mobb Deep, a rap crew from some projects up on the West Side. They were seriously lyrical and serially
tough. It was unlike him to recommend anything. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I do listen to them – all the time.’ He looked at me straight and nodded. The conversation moved on. I
didn’t ask why he thought they were worth listening to. They were the sound of New York, the sound of the oppressed and the dispossessed and the sound of intelligence rising against the odds.
It stuck with me that he’d recommended them. He cared enough somehow to get me to tune into what he was digging and that felt good.

A final moment between us intrigued and affected me. He just told me he really liked Johanna and thought, ‘She’s a really nice girl’. It was lovely to hear him say this –
just a subtle comment, but it seemed like he’d been thinking about it, waiting for the right moment to say it. Coming from him and his singular honesty about all things it gave confirmation
to my own feelings for her and it perhaps made me all the more determined to be with her again, and for that I’m still grateful.

I was gone, down Bolivia way and in the jungles of the Amazon for a while, flying over the Nazca lines in Peru and stopping off in Chile. I was interested to
find out more about the jungle vine psychedelic Ayahuasca but all of that is another story. I was free in mind, body and spirit but I missed Johanna terribly. She was waiting for me in
Stockholm. I also came to an odd realization. I had started a lot to see Robin in my dreams, he had penetrated my mind so subtly and he was really there night after night, strong, determined,
psychic, delivering up endless antics. That guy sure is real, I thought, over morning coca-leaf tea. He’s super-fucking real.

One dream of many: I’m in a darkened room with Robin and a paranoid feeling resounds. The light is low. There is a large book between us. He has created a complete
dictionary, full of pictures and reams of text, to replace
our conventional ones. This new dictionary transforms our language and perceptions, it’s intended to seep into
our conscious minds. It’s aesthetic is revolutionary, to replace our common interpretations. I hold this book and flip through its pages in a fervour, the text flies off the pages, along with
the images, floating transparently in the gloom around us. A fire burns in a grate, I can hear it crackling and feel its warmth. A desk holds the weight of this tome, a modern Book of Kells and its
meanings absorb my mind’s eye.

Yet, we are being pursued by shadows. Dark forces are approaching while the wind whistles up. We move off, this way and that, I’m swiftly following him. We both board a small aircraft
which Robin knows how to fly and we glide up and out, north, above the West Country, over Cotswold valleys, with villages of honey-stone and ancient steeples. The people peacefully sleep in their
beds. ‘Ah, my beloved valleys,’ I murmur. It’s darkening and the landscape looms up at us, the hills
rise to meet our aircraft as we fly low, Robin’s
presence cocooned safely in the cockpit. Alighting next to an ancient Saxon church lying deep in the fold of hills we step out into a dust of frost that lies all about us. Stars glint in a moonless
heaven, pulsing from above. We carry the book into the sacred building, uplifting a central flagstone near the altar and place the book in its hiding place for now, it being wrapped in patterned
azure silk. I feel old England protecting its own.

I had been back in Europe for a time, stopping in England before spending several months in Stockholm with Johanna. The New York period was over and I had a longing to be in
England as it was some years since I’d been there for any length of time. So I left Scandinavia to re-establish myself in Bristol and be closer to my family and to reacquaint myself with
friends up and down the country.

It was a little odd to be back in Bristol, so much had happened there in the past, but I hooked up with some old faces and got some work in nightclubs doing doors and had a
few daytime gigs around and about. I sorted out a nice place to live up in Kingsdown, looking over the city and Johanna flew in regularly to keep me company.

It so happened that I ended up in the Bristol Royal Infirmary in the summertime for a spell after swimming in the River Avon near Bath. Every chance I got I was out into the countryside on the
Harley I had shipped over from the US and we had been out for a dip when I must have swallowed some water polluted with rat piss and I succumbed to Weil’s Disease and was laid up in hospital
recovering.

The day I finally felt better Johanna was visiting and she was anxious to get me out of the hospital. It was a glorious summer’s day, and it just happened to be the weekend of the Ashton
Court Festival. Ashton Court
Festival had been a free festival since the hippy days and took place annually up in the grounds of an old stately manor on the south side of the
River Avon. I had been going there for years – it was a guaranteed good time, with a lot of great music being performed. Half of the city would be up there, so you were bound to run into
friend and foe alike.

Johanna and I held hands and made a beeline for the place. It was quite a walk and when we got there I remember being sick and heaving up the hospital breakfast. Nevertheless, we continued into
the main stage and got caught up in the infectious buzz of happy people and good music. I was pretty pale according to Johanna so I didn’t think of heading for the beer tent, although a
refreshing cider would have gone down well, perhaps.

The sun was blazing, the music blaring, we were just milling about and I was crowd-spotting, recognizing faces and saying hello
to some. Then I saw Robin standing on his own,
the crowd moving around him. He was sort of looking at the ground, motionless. It was slightly odd to catch sight of him again in such a different environment to New York. I was really pleased to
see him and I tugged Johanna’s sleeve and said, ‘Look, there’s Robin!’ ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘let’s go and say hello.’ We were twenty or thirty
yards away and we moved towards him through the crowd. I actually stopped to observe him a little more closely as we approached. He was still just looking at the ground, occasionally glancing
about. I was imagining some great reunion. I had been wondering about him, but seeing him, I began to get slightly nervous. Something was amiss. ‘He looks kind of fucked-up, somehow,’ I
said to Johanna. ‘Let’s go up and say hi anyway.’

So we did. ‘Hey, Robin, how’re you doing?’ I said as we approached him. He looked up as he was rolling a cigarette: ‘Fucking hell!’ he said. ‘Are you all
right?’ I asked. ‘Yeah,
yeah,’ he said. I took a good long look at him. I could smell the cider. I figured he’d been on the apple juice pretty heavily.
We said a few words but he was non-committal and swaying ever so slightly. I was beaming at him; I was so happy to see him again after all these months but he didn’t seem to give much of a
damn about seeing me. So, I said: ‘How is it, being back in Bristol?’ And he replied: ‘The only thing wrong with this town is you and your fucking family.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and Johanna stepped back a little. I wasn’t in the mood for this and could see he’d been on the scrumpy so gave him a wide berth. If
you’ve been brought up in the West Country you would know very well what it’s like to be trashed on rough cider, or ‘scrumpy’, and it can turn you pretty psycho –
especially in the hot sun.

But his comment was out of order, deliberately so. It was a challenge: Stand up to me or fuck off. I wasn’t about to creep
off anywhere so I looked at him with some
sympathy for his state and said: ‘What the fuck are you on about? You’ve never even met my family.’ I continued looking at him and he looked up at me. I said, ‘It’s
only three o’clock and you’re fucking trashed.’ ‘Yeah?’ he said; ‘Fucking right,’ I replied. Something happened then: that invisible click and we were
right as rain again.

I asked Johanna to give me a moment alone with him and she moved off, quite puzzled by this ‘English’ episode, and we started to talk. He was arseholed on the rough cider.

When I look back at it now this exchange tells me two things. It was classic Banksy ‘fuck off’ humour – like, if you can’t get beyond my razor blades, then fuck off. And
secondly it was a classic risible West Country welcome. And that was it, we were back in cider country and you may as well behave like it! So, now, instead of wanting to punch his lights out when I
remember it
I laugh my socks off. It couldn’t have been a better meeting.