AUTHORIZED Banksy Bits

Let me quote lonelyfarmer when he explained me something when i wrote a piece on the Trolley Hunters and all the editions it was printed in....


"You got your anorak?"

Mostly
ETTGS, USA, Teaser Style A, 1 sheet
ETTGS, USA, Teaser Style B, 1 sheet
ETTGS, USA, 1 sheet
ETTGS, UK, Teaser Style A, British Quad
ETTGS, UK, Teaser Style B, British Quad
ETTGS, UK, British Quad
ETTGS, France, French Petite
ETTGS, France, French Grande
and various (amongst them German, Swiss, Russian, Japanese B2, etc.)

There was also the Clown skateboards (100 No.) plus Clown stickers, t-shirts and I think a CD (?)

Save or Delete stickers and postcard
The cover for Nick Caves 'And The Ass Saw The Angel' book.
More Seating Upstairs postcard from POW

found a couple more bits on the shelf...

Flaunt Magazine with rat stencil template
Village Voice covers w/. Os Gemeos (2 versions)

The ETTGS original film promo posters are still available from Panic Posters HERE . Not bad for £12.49 inc UK P&P. These are blue back (i.e. external usage / water resistant), one sided and I suppose would originally been for printed for bus stops and the like. Due to their massive size (100 x 152cm) they are next to impossible to flatten without taking over your house. For framing you may have sell a kidney or a much loved pet / child to cover the cost.

Hi , which cover or the Nick cave ?
Old one from 2009 ( wih kids ) or the one from 2013 with the horse  ?
Harbakc ?
Can you help me , cheers !

There is also the cover and interview from Shepard Fairey's Swindle Magazine:


Here's Fairey's interview with Banksy courtesy of the ITRPF blog for anyone who hasn't read it before and has some spare time on a Sunday morning:

One of the most inappropriate nicknames of all time, at least in my opinion, belonged to Ronald Reagan: “The Great Communicator,” who we’ve come to learn did a pretty shitty job of communicating the government’s problems and indiscretions. A nickname like that deserves a more righteous, honest owner—someone like BANKSY.

"Most people think of art as a way of conveying emotions, as opposed to language, the means by which we express ideas. Whatever line there is distinguishing art and language, BANKSY paints over it to make it disappear, then stealthily repaints it in the unlikeliness of places. His works, whether he puts them on the streets, sells them in galleries, or hangs them in museums on the sly, are filled with imagery tweaked into metaphors that cross all language barriers. The images are brilliant and funny, yet so simple and accessible that even children can find the meaning in them: even if six-year-olds don’t know the first thing about culture wars, they have no trouble recognizing that something is amiss when they see a picture of the Mona Lisa holding a rocket launcher. A lot of artists can be neurotic, self-indulgent snobs using art for their own catharsis, but BANKSY distances himself from his work, using art to plant the feelings of discontent and distrust of authority that anyone can experience when he prompts them to ask themselves one gigantic question: Why is this wrong? If it makes people feel and think, he’s accomplished his goal.

BANKSY’s work embodies everything I like about art and nothing I dislike about it. His art is accessible rather than elitist, since he does it on the street; it has a powerful political message that’s conveyed with a sense of humor, which certainly makes the bitter pill easier to swallow; it’s pleasing to look at, because it’s technically very strong but not overly complex and intimidating; and he pulls it off in such a way that its presence in its context communicates not only his message but his dedication to effecting the change he promotes in that message, whether he’s defying Israeli hegemony by painting the separation wall in Palestine or bypassing the elitist review board of a museum by hanging his work himself. He definitely has his share of critics, who say that he burns too many bridges by rejecting countless opportunities to gain money or fame, but he simply has no interest in doing anything that falls outside his goal of making provocative, powerful artwork. He’s a good friend and a tremendous source of inspiration; he’s The Great Communicator of our time, and the most important living artist in the world.

How long are you going to remain anonymous, working through the medium itself and through your agent as a voice for you?

B: I have no interest in ever coming out. I figure there are enough self-opinionated assholes trying to get their ugly little faces in front of you as it is. You ask a lot of kids today what they want to be when they grow up, and they say, “I want to be famous.” You ask them for what reason and they don’t know or care. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future, so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for 15 minutes. I’m just trying to make the pictures look good; I’m not into trying to make myself look good. I’m not into fashion. The pictures generally look better than I do when we’re out on the street together. Plus, I obviously have issues with the cops. And besides, it’s a pretty safe bet that the reality of me would be a crushing disappointment to a couple of 15-year-old kids out there.

What got you into graffiti? I know that you did more traditional graffiti at one point.

B: I come from a relatively small city in southern England. When I was about 10 years old, a kid called 3D was painting the streets hard. I think he’d been to New York and was the first to bring spray painting back to Bristol. I grew up seeing spray paint on the streets way before I ever saw it in a magazine or on a computer. 3D quit painting and formed the band Massive Attack, which may have been good for him but was a big loss for the city. 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.

What’s your definition of the word “graffiti”?

B: I love graffiti. I love the word. Some people get hung up over it, but I think they’re fighting a losing battle. Graffiti equals amazing to me. Every other type of art compared to graffiti is a step down—no two ways about it. If you operate outside of graffiti, you operate at a lower level. Other art has less to offer people, it means less, and it’s weaker. I make normal paintings if I have ideas that are too complex or offensive to go out on the street, but if I ever stopped being a graffiti writer I would be gutted. It would feel like being a basket weaver rather than being a proper artist.

Who are some of your favorite graffiti artists?

B: My favorite graffiti is done by people that aren’t in books. I’m really into the amateurs, the people who just come out of nowhere with a marker pen and write one funny thing for one night and then disappear.

“Street art” has been the cool buzzword, and artists have obtained instant credibility from these new fly-by-night galleries, skate companies wanting to do a new street art t-shirt series, whatever. All these people are picking artists that deserve to be picked and have really done work on the streets for 10 to 15 years, but then they also pick a lot of artists that have been doing something for four to six months and built themselves a nice little website. Where do you see yourself fit into that? If the pedestrians at these companies don’t really know who’s done what, how do you separate yourself from that?

B: Most graffiti writers arrive at a style by the need to work fast and quiet. If you arrived at a style by painstakingly drawing in your bedroom and touching up on Photoshop, then people can smell the difference from about five miles away.

How do you decide what commercial projects to work on?

B: I’ve done a few things to pay the bills, and I did the Blur album. It was a good record and it was quite a lot of money. I think that’s a really important distinction to make. If it’s something you actually believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial. Otherwise you’ve got to be a socialist rejecting capitalism altogether, because the idea that you can marry a quality product with a quality visual and be a part of that even though it’s capitalistic is sometimes a contradiction you can’t live with. But sometimes it’s perfectly symbiotic, like the Blur situation.

I’m sure you get offered jobs left and right. Are there things that you think about doing that you don’t do, or things that you wish you would’ve done?

B: I don’t do anything for anybody anymore, and I will never do a commercial job again. In some ways it’s a shame, cuz I’m sure I’d have had a good time doing posters for that frozen yogurt company in Hawaii and now I’d have friends I could go visit on the other side of the world. But it’s part of the job to shut the fuck up and not meet people. I never go to the openings of my shows, and I don’t read chat rooms or go on MySpace. All I know about what people think of my gear is what a couple of my friends tell me, and one of them always wants to borrow money, so I’m not sure how reliable he is.

I think there’s a lot to be said for the fine line between secondguessing yourself and respecting a dialogue with people whose opinions you trust, or even people that are great because they don’t know shit about art and you get the most honest reaction from them. Because so many artists, they worry about what trends are happening in art and design and street art, they read too many magazines, and they are too wrapped up in everything; they’re paralyzed.

What’s the most perfect non-traditional piece of art that you’ve seen that’s not currently hanging in a museum?

B: The most perfect piece of art I saw in recent times was during an anarchist demonstration in London a couple of years ago. Someone cut a strip of turf from the grass in front of Big Ben and put it on the head of the statue of Winston Churchill. Later, the demo turned into a riot, and photos of Winston with a grass Mohican were on the cover of every single British newspaper the next day. It was the most amazing bit of vandalism, because it was the perfect logo for this eco-punk movement that was trying to reclaim the streets, bring an end to global capitalism, and defend the right to sit in a park all day getting wasted on discount lager.

Your art is still free on the streets but costly in the galleries. What dictates that?

B: What I find is I don’t have much say in what things cost. Every time I sell things at a discount rate, most people put them on eBay and make more money than I charged them in the first place. The novelty with that soon wears off.

You were talking about how you want your books to be cheap because they show the work in the context of the street, as well as the installations in museums and other pranks, which are actually honest representations of your work. But then people want objects, so they’re going to want the canvases and things like that, and you’re just kind of accepting that people fetishize objects and are willing to pay a lot for the status of owning something that they can hang up.

B: I stenciled the door of an electrical block in south London and recently someone sawed it off and sold it at a famous auction house for £24,000, but in that same week Islington council power sprayed off eight of my new stencils on one road. What I’m finding is art is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it, or willing to pay to not have to look at it.

The redistribution of the wealth then allows you to have that freedom to put work on the street without the pressure of having to sell a thousand cheap canvases – work that’s free and accessible. It really means that the art objects, the canvases, only really play into the people that think in an elitist way and have the money. So really, it kind of balances out. That’s an issue that a lot of artists have. They believe that their work should be accessible to a lot of people, and that actually is the opposite of the way the art world works.

B: The art world is the biggest joke going. It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace – never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little. Still, the plus side is it’s probably the easiest business in the world to walk into with no talent and make a few bucks.

The murals you did in Palestine, I would assume, involved personal risk. You’re there, and you could definitely get some people pissed off and put yourself in jeopardy.

B: Every graffiti writer should go there. They’re building the biggest wall in the world. I painted on the Palestinian side, and a lot of them weren’t sure about what I was doing. They didn’t understand why I wasn’t just writing “down with Israel” in big letters and painting pictures of the Israeli prime minister hanging from a rope. And maybe they had a point. The guy that I stayed with got five days with the “dirty bag” for waving a Palestinian flag out a window. The dirty bag is when Israeli security services get a sack, wipe their shit on it, and put the bag over your head while your hands are tied behind your back. I spat out my falafel as he was explaining that to me, but he just goes, “That’s nothing. My cousin got it for two weeks without a break.” It’s difficult to come home and hear people complaining about reruns on TV after that. It’s very hard for the locals to paint illegally over there. We certainly weren’t doing it under the cloak of darkness; you’d get shot. We were out in the middle of the day, making it very clear we were tourists. Twice, we had serious trouble with the army, but one time the Palestinian border patrol pulled up in an armored truck. The Israeli government makes a big fuss about how they own the wall, despite building it right through the farmland of Palestinians who have been there for generations, so the Palestinian border police don’t give a shit if you paint it or not. They parked between the road and us, gave us water, and just watched. It’s probably the only time I’m ever going to paint whilst being covered by a cop from a roof-mounted submachine gun.

Did they realize that it favored the Palestinian perspective?

B: I have sympathy for both sides in that conflict, and I did receive quite a bit of support from regular Israelis, but if the Israeli government had known we were going over there to do a sustained painting attack on their wall, there’s no way that we’d have been tolerated. They’re very paranoid. They don’t want the wall to be an issue in the West. On the Israeli side of the wall they bank it up with soil and plant flowers so you don’t even know its there. On the Palestinian side it’s just a fucking huge mass of concrete.

You’ve never really been busted to the point of potentially not being able to do street art, but that’s always a possibility. I could be wrong – you could be incredible and never get caught, but everybody gets caught at some point. What would you do if you were put in that position? Would you rent walls? Would you try to find legal walls? Would you still try to find ways to have work on the street and still maintain your anonymity to a degree, but keep it out there through more legal means? Would you move to another country? What would you do?

B: I’m always trying to move on. You’re not supposed to get dumber as you get older. You’re not supposed to just do the same old thing. You’re supposed to find a new way through and carry on. I invest back into the street bombing from selling shit. Recently, I’ve been pretending to be a construction manager and paying cash to get scaffolding put up against buildings, then I cover the scaffolding with plastic sheeting and stand behind it making large paintings in the middle of the city. I could never have done that a few years ago. Plus, I’m always interested in finding new places to hit up; it’s easier to break into zoos and museums than train lay-ups, because they haven’t had so much of a graffiti problem in the past. Ultimately, I just want to make the right piece at the right time in the right place. Anything that stands in the way of achieving that piece is the enemy, whether it’s your mum, the cops, someone telling you that you sold out, or someone saying, “Let’s just stay in tonight and get pizza.” "

Most Shepherds I know are Fairies, including myself.

Coincidence city.

There were a load of flyers for club nights in Bristol with varying levels of authorisation and the Poetry Works postcard which had the Meals On Wheels painting on one side.  There was also the One Cut 'Grand Theft Audio' LP, CD, sampler and poster and the art work for their 'Hombrémix' and 'Cut Commander' 12"s.  Also, there was the album artwork, postcard and poster for Monk & Canatella's 'Do Community Service' album and Roots Manuva's 'Yellow Submarine' single used the same artwork as his Badmeaninggood release (aside from the artwork, the BMG compilations are definitely worth picking up for the mixes, especially the Skitz version).  There was also the album artwork for 'We Love You...So Love Us Japan'.  He also did the Busta Rhymes cover for Sleazenation and the 'Why The Attack on Esso?' poster for Don't Panic

As well as The Guardian interview which most people have probably seen there was also this interview with Shok1 which was published in issue 7 of Big Daddy magazine back in 2001; Shok1 did the cover not Banksy but it was still a legit interview.  The Big Daddy interview also mentioned an interview with The Face magazine but I don't remember an interview ever being printed and there may have been an interview with Banksy in the January 2004 edition of Athena but I don't remember it at the time so someone will have to trawl through the pile of magazines under their beds to check   Anyway, I'll shut up now - here's the Big Daddy interview:

"I should count myself lucky I wasn’t blindfolded like the reporter from The Face magazine on the way to the secret HQ of Banksy [apparently he enjoyed it. Each
to his own!]

Not easily categorised, the man is an unusual blend of aerosol attitude and fine art.  Some narrow-minded purists have found his stencil based work hard to swallow,
but the establishment can’t seem to get enough.

Sitting amongst huge piles of street level photo’s and crisp canvases alike we caned caffeine and talked shop. This is not an interview but just a conversation with a normal bloke with big dreams…

Shok: [Looking at a photo of a plastic Mickey Mouse face full of bullet holes]  Ha ha ha! You got a gun off someone to shoot holes in Mickey?

Banksy: Yeah, it’s that gun there.

S: Poor Mickey!  Ha ha ha! I like these lumps of wall too.  I saw a couple of your canvases up in a shop [Ed. - I think he's referring to Atelier which was Dicy's shop on Park Street where he had a show in 2000 that never seems to get mentioned for some reason.  The line up for shows at Atelier was crazy - Paris TCF, Xenz, China Mike, Dale Marshall, Duncan Jago, Will Barras, Dicy and Banksy - anyway, I digress, back to the interview...] in Bristol last year but I haven’t seen
all that many really. You think they transfer well to canvas?

B: I just did a show in Glasgow that taught me a lot. I had a lot of these canvases up.  What I realised is, these are just like your tea towels and mugs really, of what I do.  The art is the stuff in the street, and then if there are canvases, people who have a bit of money who want a souvenir, they can take one home and put them on their wall!  I’m lucky that I can rattle these off, they don’t take long, and I can sell them for £500.

S: It’s good, because your stuff is about repetition being that it’s a stencil thing anyway so it’s not counterproductive to use the same image on a canvas as well.

B: I mean it’s part printing, part screen-printing, innit? Even if you do twenty of an image, no two are going to look the same. So it’s an original piece of artwork whichever way
you look at it.

S: The last thing I sold in Germany were laser jet prints and I’m much happier selling things like that. One-offs, I’m loathe to part with them at all to be honest.

B: I’ve got over that bit now.

S: Obviously if people keep crossing your palm with silver that helps too!

B: I sold a canvas in Bristol and I wanted to get it back to put it up in Glasgow.  I asked the geezer and he said, “Nah, it’s staying where it is” and I realised, it’s like
selling a car – you can’t sell someone a car and then ask to borrow it back.

S: [Looking at the canvas] That’s not a stencil is it, you painted that with a brush right?

B: Yeah.

S: I was looking through some of your older photos there. They were much more like, normal graffiti. [i.e. colourful New York graffiti]… I like to see an artist’s progression, one of the things that appeals to me about what you’ve been doing is that we’re on the same kind of wavelength in that I’m becoming more and more minimal as well. I’ve never been greatly into using millions of colours anyway. I like the fact your canvases are really plain, I can imagine people must really get into that.

B: You do it in a different way when you do stuff to put in people’s houses, you have to think about things like colours and making pictures that will fit through the door… [getting out a matching set of canvases] also how you space them out is interesting. You have one on one wall…then you have the other on another wall next to it [the second canvas shows that they have been bowling bombs].

S: Ha ha ha, I like it! So looking back at when you were doing the big walls with lots of colours, how did you progress onto the stenciling and leaving out the extra colours and detail?

B: I got into this mindset that using colours is a sign of weakness, if you’ve got the fucking idea and you can lay it down, you don’t need lots of colours……

S: It’s funny, because I think what we do is really different, but in a lot of ways we’re heading in the same direction. The reason why I started doing really stripped down characters with just one colour and an outline was to make the same point. You see these kids with these incredible multi-coloured 3D shading techniques, but you strip away all the flashy stuff and the drawing is wack.

B: There’s a beauty in simplicity. I think it’s a bit like maths, in that you have a right answer and every other answer is wrong. If you’ve got an idea about a picture you want to make there is a perfect picture for it and every other picture is wrong. I haven’t got there yet, but I want all my pictures to be like, bang on. No unnecessary colour, not a single unnecessary line on the whole thing. Just perfect. Like with this cop thing here, [Ed. - He's referring to 'Avon and Somerset Constabulary' seen here.] I was trying to say, “I got away with it" in as few lines as possible, even if you think you’re being really obvious, it doesn’t always work out like that. The funny thing is I sold one of these to this bird, I had a couple of drinks with her afterwards and she said, “I’m really pleased with that picture, because you don’t see policemen getting drunk do you?” She thought it was two people drinking beer.  But I already had the cash in my pocket, like, so I just went “Yeah, yeah sure”. I thought, is someone going to tell her that they’re looking through binoculars not drinking beer?

S: When we were on the phone a while back and I was trying to guess the symbolism in your images and I got them all completely different to what you meant them to mean.

B: But then I am fond of changing them halfway through myself!

S: I think it’s quite nice in a way if art is a little bit open-ended. That way the onlooker can have more of a personal involvement. If it’s too regimented and directed in its meaning then it almost excludes the onlooker, like you’re just showing your idea at them. Maybe it’s good to let them come to their own conclusions…especially if the art is at street level. When did you do that Mona Lisa near Poland Street?  [Ed. - there's a photo of the piece in 'Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall']

B: Oh that’s new. I’ve still got to go and put the lyrics on that.

S: That’s a big fucking stencil man!

B: Did it look right? I painted it and fucked off so I haven’t even looked at it yet. I put, “Boom or bust” on it but then I scrubbed it off because it didn’t read very well. I did another one in Leicester Square on the same day. You know, after a while you think, fuck it, I’m in London, let’s take it to the fucking art of London. Doing Leicester Square was satisfying, you can’t get much more central than that.

S: My other favourite hit I saw of yours was the Centrepoint one. I tell you what I like about when you use the lettering on its own is that it almost slips past you. Because you get bombarded with so much typography in adverts and stuff….I saw that hit from the car and I had to double-take because it almost looks like it’s meant to be there, like some official thing.  Do people say that to you? Do people think the logo’s like… well I guess branding in a way.

B: It’s funny because sometimes it goes up so quick and so nice that it’s almost too close to regular signwriting. I did one on the side of this building in Bristol, their sign was really shitty and it was on one end of the wall and my name was right across the middle looking crisp. It was only there for five days, I assume because the owner was like, “Why is someone else’s name across my building better than my own name?!”  You could just tell by the way that it was painted over someone had got really pissy about it and that’s an ironic thing – people always complain graffiti is untidy, but if you do something very tight, it pisses them off even more.

S: We noticed when we were in Ireland that sign writing is still like an art form there.  Everywhere you go, you see this beautiful hand painted lettering. We got approached by this sign-writer in Limerick while we were painting, he told us that laser-cut lettering had only just started to come over there in the last year…and they paint the pubs. Every English writer must look at the side of pubs; they nearly always have great white walls. Well over there they paint these murals on them or they cut the painting out of wood and put it up there, these incredible handpainted pieces of artwork. You don’t see that over here. It’s like all those walls that writers are doing in Germany.

You don’t get public art jobs like that being given to graffiti people over here, because the country is just too conservative and not open to it. That’s one thing that disappoints me about a lot of graffiti.  I mean, there’s all this meaning attached to the fact of where things get placed and the political and sociological meanings, but I kind of get to the point where I wonder if we’re creating all this dialogue to cover up the fact that a lot of it really isn’t saying very much, I mean it does, in fact there’s a story behind every hit, but beyond that…

B: It’s like the Fume piece over at Royal Oak, [25 foot high dub at Paddington mainline]. It’s got to the point now where if you’re going to just write your name, you’re going to have to do it like that to give it a meaning. The funny thing about that piece is that it says loads because it’s huge and the audaciousness of it. Although it says, “Fume” it also says, “Fuck you, I can do what I want, where I want, I run this part of London…”  purely because of the size. If it was 5 foot high, it would mean nothing.

S: Another thing I’ve been wondering about your work is that it obviously has this dissident element to it but at the same time it’s also very tongue-in-cheek, so where does it fit? I suppose if someone very conservative saw it then they would think you’re a total anarchist. I don’t know how it’s been received by the graffiti community over here?

B: I try very hard not to wonder what the graffiti community makes of it. You know the scene, if you want to have a productive life; you’re best off not listening to the average kid with a spraycan in his bag. I think not listening to people is one of the main things you need to make good pictures.

S: I can think of one or two people who’ve had their heads a bit fucked up from listening too much.

B: I’m aware that I’m your non-graffiti writer’s writer. When I was in Bristol people would say to me, “You’re the only bloke doing graffiti in this town” and I would tell them, no, I can name 25 other people who are up, but because they tag, people just don’t see it.

S: So many people are street bombing now and it’s been going around for so long that the public are desensitised to it I think. It’s like constant background noise, it doesn’t get their attention like it used to. I was really into street bombing for around six years. Then I thought, OK, I’ve been up for years, who gives a shit about seeing my name? So what? I thought, what am I doing now that I haven’t already done? I mean, obviously you do it for other writers to see, but I want more people to pay attention to it than that.

B: If you want to get up in a major way today, you need to be original rather than prolific, like most things it’s quality over quantity. This 'Graffiti Area' stencil [Ed. - also half way through 'Banging Your Head...'] is without a doubt the best thing I’ve done, because it’s introducing the X-Factor – a load of shit you have no control over. I put the stencil up and a week later kids have written everywhere all over the wall. I spoke to this lawyer and he reckoned in his experience that it would be enough of a defence if you were a kid and got picked up by the old bill writing on one of these walls. That would give you enough, ‘reasonable doubt’ to beat the case. The National Highways Agency doesn’t exist and the official crest on it is off a packet of Benson & Hedges. It’s a complete Mickey Mouse thing.

S: But it’s enough for them to say they didn’t think they were doing anything wrong.

B: And the amazing thing is, if one kid gets off like that, it sets a precedent. That’s what I’m up for now. I’m going to put up 500 of those fuckers and then wait until it ends up in court and see what happens. It’s quite political, because it means you have the right to go out into your community and say how you think it should look, and that you can potentially bypass parliament and change laws.  I mean, you could sit there and say that you think it would be better if we allowed more public art in this country. Then you could complain about it. Then you could try and get the council involved. Or you could just put up notices in the middle of the night saying, “You are allowed to paint this wall” and bypass the system. Get a test case and you can potentially get into the statute books.

S: I just read an interview with Dean from Brighton. He’s been using standard graffiti format, just straight letter “Dean” pieces but the difference is that he has really well thought out ideas about where to put them and why. He’s using it to oppose the gentrification going on in Brighton by preventing them from making it into a sanitised, untouched environment.  I’ve got a copy of Big Daddy #6 for you here…

B: Who did this cover?

S: I did.

B: Bit different for you isn’t it?

S: Well what’s the point of just doing things you know you can do? You have to keep moving on… What’s this stencil made out of card?

B: Yeah, it was funny the other day, I was putting up that Mona Lisa and this guy keeping lookout was in hysterics because it was really papery card and part of the bazooka kept falling off.  He thought I would have cut them out of resin and all kinds of things. A big part of the thing for me is the fact that I’ve only ever used card that was free. I can get a can for 60p, that’s good for 30 stencils and then the cost of a couple of disposable blades and that’s it. It’s really important to me that you can have a huge street campaign that could get you famous in a month if you went nuts, and it would cost you about a tenner, the money factor is what turns me off the gallery circuit, that it costs so much to mount a show. Still, you can have a show that costs you next to nothing, like London, under the bridge. [Ed. - this is the 'Speak Softly' tunnel; there's a little bit more about it and some photos towards the end of 'Handing Your Head...'] Our deal with that was that we nicked all the materials except for about £4 worth of black paint.

S: How many people showed up?

B: On the opening night, about 500 people. We let people know in advance when it was going to happen, told them that they would have to email this address to find out where it was going to be at the last minute because it was all illegal. Six months later Cargo opened their club next to it and the artwork is still up. People have written on it, but the people from the club took a brush and carefully whited all the tags and left the stencils.

S: I see quite a lot of commercially orientated stencils around London. Was that here when you moved in?

B: Nah. Have you seen the [name removed to avoid undue promotion] ones? They’re everywhere.  I saw them in Glasgow and I was lining them out, because they approached me when I first came to London and asked me to do stuff for them for free, even though they’ve got backing.

S: You seem quite solitary in the way you do things…

B: If there was someone on the same wavelength I would maybe join up and do some things. When I used to do big pieces, I would always do them on my own. One time I went out, I had a friend who was looking out for me. I just started painting a big piece and he goes, “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this”. That ruined the whole mission from the word go. I have a project planned with Dane, but I’m going to carry on doing this mostly by myself."

delloy Its true that the first edition cover is more in Nick cave 's style and songs ( dark and sensitive poetry ) ... Birtdhay Party was great too.. What happens to PJ Harvey ? I liked his duos too...

PJ Harvey is still going strong dodcoquelicot She has recently been involved in this project at Somerset House where she recorded her new album in front of fans behind a enclosed glass box.

www.somersethouse.org.uk/visual-arts/pj-harvey-recording-in-progress