Influences: Special Request

The paintings of Francis Bacon have made such an impression on me over the years, it’s hard to put into words the emotions they evoke. The large triptychs he did in particularly have this extremely haunting & visceral thing going on – he managed to get an hyper-intense version of reality down and through his own errors on occasion he brought them to life by throwing paint at them. Taking such a chance, when you have perhaps 95% of a painting done, is absolutely insane – but when it worked, it truly opened things up. How many artists take such risks?

The way he lived his life was without compromise – it took it’s toll on his health over the years, and yet he lived to the age of 83 constantly drinking Krug and gambling his way across London, the South of France, and Tangiers. He was a masochist, and this is apparent in his work which I think is a catalogue of one man’s unblinking view of life. Disturbingly beautiful. He was without parallel. You can see and feel his influence everywhere across culture, from the studies of Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger for the Alien in the film series (they took huge influence from ‘Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion’ from 1945) to Damien Hirst’s work in vitrines where he actually remade a series of Bacon’s most disturbing images. To confront these things in person is quite unnerving. “If you have a very strong feeling for life, then it’s shadow death is just around the corner”- this quote sums it up. David Sylvester did a series of interviews with Bacon that opened up his thought process, the book of them should be required reading for anyone involved in artistic endeavour. This clip is one from one such interview and you start to get a feel for what’s going on under the surface. The final sentence should stick with anyone “the artist must deepen the game to be any good at all”.

This was like blasting into another galaxy when I stumbled across it all, completely by accident, one friday night. I had gone into the kitchen at my parents’ house to retune the radio and I heard something that sounded unreal. That was a broadcast by PCR which was based in Bradford – from that moment on I was absolutely glued to it. That was about 1990 and you would hear such a cross section of music, way wider than anything on commercial radio which was why it held such an attraction, besides the obvious illicit nature of it all. This particular recording is from the Von Trapp Family. Some of the tracks on this sound like they came out last week, which is either testament to them or could be seen as an indictment of modern techno, either way, it’s filled with brain-scrambling business. Check the adverts at 39.00 minutes in for maximum buzzage – up to the 50 minute mark it’s pretty mental techno, before the speed kicks in and somebody starts smashing out dodgy Euro-trance – but up to that point it’s a killer. I still quite like how spannered it goes, for the pure fuck-off of it all. Pirate radio is community service in so many ways, it feeds a need that traditional channels don’t fulfill, which I’ve always found quite ironic – so many of the people involved have actually been given community service when the raids happened, and yet that’s exactly what they were doing. Absurd.

Ballard’s intensity and open-minded curiosity drove him to push his ideas into radical new locations. My first point of contact with his work was through the David Cronenberg adaptation of Crash, the story of the sexual festishism of car crashes. Once I began to explore his work properly, I was struck by how he sets conditions or limitations and then pushes everything within these to absolute extremity, with absolute ambiguity. The clinical and almost-sterile analysis that he applied to a situation was particularly inspiring and I always felt direct correlations between certain styles of music and his style of writing. Ballard had an acute sense of where society was heading, and there is a great example of this in an interview with Vogue magazine, where he predicted a medium “in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on videotape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day.” One of his most innocuous predictions. This is the entire South Bank Show episode on him, devour it all:

I’ve followed his work since I bought the 12″ of ‘Angel’ that was released on Synthetic Hardcore Phonography in 1993. That record was so artful, so fresh and so different to so much of the other rough stuff that I had that it fascinated me. Obviously ‘Terminator’ smashed the walls down and innovated, but this record really gave us more of an insight into what was to follow from Clifford Price. I knew barely anything about him at the time but I made it my mission to find out as much as possible. It always inspired me to see how direct forthright, confident and honest he was about what he was doing. He did not let any technological limitation stop him in his tracks – rampant experimentalism with the Reinforced crew led to the creation of the ‘Expo DATs’ – a resource he would mine to trademark his sound. In effect, he sonically tagged his music the way he had done with his graf work. A true artist in the classical sense, the entire dance music scene would look completely different without his influence. Bold, innovative and at the cutting edge, the work he has been involved in ever since has galvanised and given me decades of inspiration.

This is the documentary ‘Talking Headz’ about the Metalheadz label – vital viewing:

It’s hard for me to put into words how much Carl Craig has influenced me. I first heard his track ‘Elements’ on the Techno 2 compilation that Neil Rushton put together for Virgin Records. Both that and the first compilation were like alien artefacts beamed in from the future. Such stark music, but so soulful, so delicate in places. I would not be the person I am today without those records, and may not even be sitting here typing this. ‘Elements’ pointed to an inquiring mind, clearly a thinker, and as I followed Carl’s progress with the aide of articles in UK magazines like The Face and i-D, and collected more of his work as Paperclip People and then the Planet E releases, I saw a radical method with sound become more and more nuanced. I bided my time before I sent him any music – in fact, from the first year I heard his work to the year I signed to Planet E, it was 26 years! Nearly A lifetime ambition. When I first connected with Carl it was from sending him a track that he took for Planet E within about 6 hours – it then took me another 12 months to find something correct for the other side of that record, which lead to massive soul-searching. I was determined to make it happen and Carl’s way with A&R meant that with some careful words he left the ball in my court to crack it over that year. It was Carl that first took me to Detroit and gave me a DJ spot with himself, Derrick May and Niko Marks from UR during the 20 Years Of Planet E tour. It was Carl that took me to Submerge to meet Mad Mike Banks. It was Carl that opened the door so that I could play at DEMF twice, first of all in an opening slot filling in for an absent DJ Harvey, and then subsequently last year on the Planet E stage. A true inspiration and mentor.

This is his evergreen classic ‘No More Words’

Richard Prince emerged in about 1980 and right from the start used appropriation rampantly. His work makes us question the age of images that we are living in, and I think he was ahead of the curve in doing this. Prince is a great example of an artist that has been able to exploit his work enough to create a life where he has unlimited resources (pretty much) to create whatever he wants 24-7-365. Most artists will never really have that in their lifetimes. To be able to convert what you do in artistic endeavour into this kind of situation is something that is a dream. Most artists actually mainly aspire to make a living from what they do. Keeping the wheels turning is demanding and forces an artist to constantly push themselves into different areas, engaging with new audiences, finding fresh terrain to explore, whilst all the time dealing with the usual stresses of modern life. People like Richard Prince have found ways to start in one place and take these questions out of the equation.
I always feel that there are smarter ways in which the music industry can operate – many of it’s systems are archaic, and we can, with careful thought and application, change these systems by operating just close enough to be influential, yet far enough away not to become beholden to them.

In this interview you really get a sense for how lost in his work Prince gets – a feeling most artists will know well: